Okay, to start off with, I've had a kinda bizarre life. I suppose most people have (at least, interesting people have), so it shouldn't surprise you. Anyway, I'll start at the beginning...
Well, let's see... First the earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came. But they got too big and fat, so they all died an turned into oil. And then the Arabs came, and they bought Mercedes-Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it, he took her best summer dress out of the closet and.... oh, never mind. (bonus points for anyone who recognizes what I'm quoting from!)
I spent the first 4 years of my life in Cedar Springs, which is near Chattham, Ontario, Canada. It was a small place (population of maybe fifty? I don't remember...), and I remember pretty much nothing about it. Except those made-up memories you get when someone tells you you've done something so many times that you can see it happening in your head, and then you start to think it's a memory, but then you realize that you can see yourself in the picture in your head, so it's obviously made up.
Anyway, I was born on August 20, 1976. My full name is Terrence Charles Stewart (but, please, it's Terry). My mom (Lynn) loves telling me stories about my dad (Al)'s state at the time: it seems that saying "I'm going into labour" is the fastest way to sober someone up. Anyway, both of my parents were (and are) smart liberal hippie heath-food nuts with teaching degrees, and I was the first born, so they got to do all sorts of bizarre things with my upbringing. I survived most of it. Three and a half years later, we adopted my brother, Robin. Then, that summer, my dad got an offer to teach at a school in Moosonee, and off we went.
For those of you who don't know where Moosonee is (although I'm amazed at how any people I meet that have been there at one time or another), it's a small town at the very southern tip of James Bay. Hmm, that probably doesn't help a lot of you. Okay, picture Canada. There's this huge bay near the centre (well, a bit right of centre) of Canada, called Hudson Bay. There's another bay right below it, called James Bay. It kinda looks like a hand with a single index finger pointing downwards (or so they say). Anyway, Moosonee is at the very southern tip of James Bay. In other words, it's really isolated and really north.
Well, we were there for four more years, and then mom decided she wanted to go to medical school. So, off we went to Strathroy (near London, Ontario) for her to finish off a few university courses. Then, after two years of that, we were off to Halifax, Nova Scotia (east coast of Canada), where mom got her degree at Dalhousie. That took another four years. Then, we moved to Kingston, Ontario for my mom to do two years of internship. For those of you who have lost track, we moved to Kingston in the summer of 1990, and I was just starting grade 10. After grade 10 and 11, we moved back up to Moosonee, since that was where my parents felt was 'home'. I went to a total of two weeks of school in Moosonee, and found that there was no way I could do school in that environment (for the first time in my life, I was not enjoying school), and so the decision was made for me to leave home and go back to Kingston. The reasons and arguments for and against that decision were pretty complicated, and I'll probably talk about them later.
Anyway, I moved in with the family that we lived next door to in Kingston. Two years went by, and I eventually had to choose where to go next. Actually, it wasn't much of a choice. In the summer of '93, I attended the Shad Valley month-long summer program at the University of Waterloo campus. That was great, and I decided that Waterloo was the place for me. So, I applied, and in September of 1994 I started into Systems Design Engineering.
If you ask me what Systems Design is, I'll scream. It's kind of a running joke that none of us know exactly what it is, but the idea is to be a generalist engineering degree. You get a strong background in everything for the first two years, and then you specialize into whatever you want. Anyway, I'll talk more about that later (maybe). Because it's Engineering at Waterloo, it's co-op, so we do 4 months of school, then 4 months of work (that didn't sound right... 4 months working at school, then 4 months of working as a member of the workforce. So that'll keep me busy until '99, and I'll worry about what's next later.
I think I owe the majority of my personality to my parents. I won't argue the nature vs. nurture thing here, but I will say that I was raised in a rather stimulating environment. My mom says that she had dreams about me before I was born, in which I would look up from the bassenet, wearing glasses and a beard, and speak to her in big long words. Then she says that she'd talk to me about the kenetic-molecular theory of matter when I was four months old. [Note: my mom just corrected me on this one: I was three months old. Mind you, I guess it was a mostly one-way conversation.] I don't remember any of this, of course, but that was pretty much the style of upbringing I had. Suffice it to say that I'm a fairly analytical person. Sometimes over-analytical, but I'm working on that.
Anyway, I was a fairly typical computer-nerd for most of my life. In grade school, I was the class clown a lot of the time -- mostly using my penchant for puns which got out of hand for a while. Needless to say, I got that from my parents, too. I'm also (thanks to my mom) colour-blind, and possibly due to that, or some other reason, I started wearing flourescent and/or mis-matching socks pretty much all of the time. I think the only non-weird pair of socks I have are a pair of black ones that are reserved for stage and performance purposes.
Hm. I guess that deserves some mention. The last year of high-school was when I really discovered the artistic side of my personality. I've always had a very broad range of interests (pretty much everything besides sports), but most of the stuff I did involved maths and sciences. In the last year of highschool, I took a Writer's Craft course, and then a Drama course, and they were the most fun I'd had in a long time. I wrote lots of neat stuff, was in some neat plays, and wrote, co-directed, and stage-managed my own play Miscarriage of Justice, which was entered into the Sears South-Eastern Ontario Drama Festival. Very fun time. Anyway, artistic expression is one of the ways that I try to keep a balanced personality. Balance is very, very important to me, and this web page is (hopefully) going to be an important part of it.
Currently, I'm a little bit off-balance. School has put me in a situation where I don't spend a lot of my time in artistic expression. I'm finding myself stagnating a bit. Yes, school is going well and all, but other than in academics, I don't see myself growing much right now. It was mentioned to me recently that perhaps my current circle of friends needs to grow a bit. I haven't made many new close friends in a while, and that's sad 'cause there's lots of really interesting people that I know just in passing, and have never gotten to know better.
And I think that's the crux of my current problem. You see, most of the people that I know as aquaintances don't know me at all. They come to me for school help, and that's about it. Not that I don't like helping people in that way (actually, it's one of the things I enjoy most about school), it's just that making the transition from that to something more is really difficult. Especially since everyone around me is so busy with school anyway. Anyway, I find it really difficult to break that mould, and hopefully my Open Journal Project will help that. There are a lot of people that I know a little bit and really want to spend time with. In some ways, this web site is forcing me to begin that opening up process, and hopefully show people who I 'really' am. Doing that in person is something that I feel really awkward about, and I'll try to convince myself not to. This way, I'm forcing myself to start the process. I don't know how many people understand this, but I'm putting myself in a situation where it's too late for me to go back to hiding behind my many masks. Here's hoping it works.