I was born the day after Valentine’s Day, the year the Beatles broke up in New London, Connecticut. Though most people wonder why, I love my hometown, usually. It could be a really cool place to live, between the beaches and the bars. But it’s a shell of it’s former self, which led to a very disgruntled adolescence. Nothing to do but look forward to escaping to college...

Dad had always encouraged me to gravitate around Boston, rather than New York. So when I decided on a school, Boston University's location in the "Hub of the Universe" was very appealing. Finally, I was able to become the cosmopolitan I longed to be. Shortly after I started, I decided to major in international relations.  And I've been fortunate enought to visit a few places...  and come back to New London. I managed to make it to Paris on an internship program. The City of Lights ended up changing my life. From the time I got on the plane to come home, I knew I had to get back to Europe. But I still had two years left ahead of me. Needless to say, those two years flew by.  Graduation brought so much promise -- and uncertainty -- about the future. The plans I had laid for myself were set aside so that I could return home and be with my family though a very difficult time.

Things were not easy after losing my grandfather, and I eventually left without any real enthusiasm for Washington, DC. 

When I got there, I searched for any job I could find. Finally, through that great 90s invention -- the temp agency -- I was placed at the World Bank. Though I was finally using the degree my family and I paid so much money for, the city just drove me crazy. Washington was simply horrible. Too many pretentious and superficial jerks and too few true, genuine people to call friends. But I managed to find a couple of the latter. It was in Washington though, that I started to  come out of the closet. And I have to admit, the town was a great place for that. But unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to keep me there, and I left at the first opportunity.

And that opportunity was a teaching assignment in The Czech Republic. Though I didn’t have any teaching experience and spoke no Czech, I threw myself into the middle of Eastern Europe. It was fascinating living in a society going through so much change all at once, not to mention having access to so much beer for so little money! 

But the Czech Republic was merely an introduction to what I hoped to discover. So when I got back a nice fat income tax return from the difference in pay scales, I decided to go to Italy for a month and a half. It was an opportunity I would have been foolish to miss. I had the time, the money, and the location to do it. I bought myself a bike, a tent, a map and a plane ticket and took off. The road home lay through the land of my ancestors. Seeing the town my great-grandfather came from in Sicily was part of the unfinished business I had to resolve. And resolve it I did.

The wubbies, Big Joe and Ollie

That was four years ago. Since then, I came back home, happy as a clam, and found myself a job as a computer operator. Not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, but hey, it’s money right now. It let me afford a cute apartment in a house right by the water and a new Jetta. I came home to explore the continents of my soul.  Yoga helped. So did working out and biking my butt off. Not to mention all the lounge music and acid jazz. All that was in the first year.  In the second, I met a man who would give me the strength to came out to most of my family. Though we're no longer together, he taught me a lot about life and love... and taking care of dogs (Ollie's the golden one and his, Joe's got the big nose and mine) including sumpthin' 'bout birthin' puppies!

So that’s my life to date. I'm also trying to get started as a free-lance web site/graphic designer. You can always contact me for more information on that. Take a look around and send me a line if you want.

Take it easy.