Hi! My name is Debby. I'm 30 dreadful years old. I was born in April, the beginning of spring. I rather like that. I've spent most of my life in Indiana, with a short junket in upstate New York when I was in fifth grade. Herkimer seemed a very exotic place at the time, but now I recognize that it was just another small town. For about 8 years I've lived in Indianapolis. This is kind of crucial for me because when I was a kid, we moved around a lot.

For about five years, I was an only child. Then I became the oldest child. I recognize that leaves me with a hell of a lot of annoying personality traits. Spoiled, tempermental, domineering; shall I go on?

I am not a practical person. I have never been a practical person; I've always been one of those wacky creative types. I've always loved to draw. My first masterpiece was a little pencil and wallpaper piece I'll call Little Guy in Big Hat. It was met with a less than enthusiastic reception, but that didn't deter me. With diligence and inspiration, I was soon commanding prime space on the fridge.

The most idyllic time I can remember is spending summers with my grandparents. The city pool was right across the street from their house, so I always got a pool patch and spent most of the day in the water. My grandparents could sit out in the front yard and I'd wave to them before going off the diving board. And at four o' clock, I'd head home to watch Popeye and Janie in the cool basement while grandma cooked dinner. The grass was the greenest green, the sky was the bluest blue, the sun was hot and all was right with the world. It was like something out of The Wonder Years.

On the other hand, my worst time growing up would have to be moving to a small river town in southern Indiana, Cannelton. Major culture shock. I left my best friend, the girl with whom I played Barbie Dolls and toasted s'mores and dreamed about the Bay City Rollers. And I left the cutest boy-next-door, the guy who I waited for the bus with, the guy who was on the verge of asking me to go to the first junior high dance. I ended up in a school where most of the twelve-year-olds were having sex, where it was far too easy to get into a fist fight on the way home from school and where a case of beer was just across the river. I moved from Milan, a wholesome mid-America farm town (this is the place featured in the movie Hoosiers) to Gomorrah on the Ohio. But I learned to adapt. And we moved again in a few years, anyway.

If I had to sum up growing up, (and you will thank me for summing up, believe me) I was a total spacey little nerd without a clue as to what was going on. But I was happy because I always had a great dog, a good book and no clue. So there.

I thought high school was fun. Is that weird or what? I wasn't in with the super-popular crowd (if you ever saw Heathers, or if you've ever been to a ten-year high school reunion, you know they didn't really have all that much fun anyway) but I wasn't floating with the dregs either. I was one of those middlin' kids, still clueless and so fine with all that. I excelled in my college-bound courses, but my favorite class was art. Or Spanish. So I wasn't on student council (still sounds boring) but I was Spanish club president. I did drama club, pep club, tried flag corp for about two weeks (too fussy), had exactly five best friends, won ribbons in local art shows and never missed a basketball game. It wasn't so bad.

On my way to being a real person, I gave a speech at my high school graduation, listened to a lot of really bad music (Air Supply leaps to mind), had a decadent and ultimately unrememberable first semester of college, moved about five more times, read a lot, learned to solder, saw my first bit of performance art and ate my Grape-Nuts with chocolate milk.

College was a big turning point for me. It was my first time away from home and I started making some of my own decisions (witness the aforementioned semester). And also, I made some friends that I still have today. If you sift through the archaeology of my life, there are no friends around from the earlier periods. My family always moved too much, best friends became pen pals and then just people I used to know. So overall, I'd have to give a big plus to higher education.

I moved in three orbits while I was at school. The first one I got pulled into was the ISU Sycamore yearbook. I applied to work on staff while I was visiting during the summer and ended up as a section editor for Entertainment. This was the coolest possible position for me. I got press passes to all the concerts in town, covered the student theatre productions and went to all the special events on campus. I did such a good job that the next year our editor moved me to the biggest section, Student Life. This wasn't an advancement in my opinion, though I did win a state collegiate press award for one of my stories. But it just wasn't fun anymore. Towards the end of the year, the staff collapsed into bickering, most everyone mutinied against the editor and everything fell apart. It was fun while it lasted.

After my Lost Semester, I decided to go with my roommate to meet the gang at St. Joe's Campus Center, the Catholic student center on campus. In contrast to my present state of heathendom, my early years were quite religious. I happily received all those blessed sacraments, had a big party at home for my First Communion. Hanging out at St. Joe's was a natural extension of that and I fell into my second orbit. There was great volleyball every Tuesday night and lots of cute guys. After Saturday night mass, we'd all go out to parties. And isn't that really the basis of religion: community? I spent a couple really active years there before slacking off. I was public relations coordinator on the student council there (boring) and I got my own office (cool) where I published the newsletter. The building was haunted. It was fun while it lasted. And I met my husband there.

So after I exhausted all other avenues of diversion, I finally started paying attention to my major. My last big influence, then, was the gang at in the Fine Arts Building. Or maybe the building itself. Seems like I spent a lot of time there, alone, late at night, working on projects. I'd stumble out and head back to the dorm for a shower when the cleaning staff came in the morning. That was the first place I heard of a Macintosh; a friend there introduced me to the Violent Femmes; Jolt and whiskey highballs in the senior studio; the field trip to Chicago to hear Wolfgang Weingardt speak. It was fun until they made me graduate.

So I left Terre Haute with a beau and a piece of paper. I bluffed my way into that first job with claims of superior computer experience. Well, in my final semester, we had a computer graphics class given by a visiting professor from RIT. It was taught on Apple IICis and my first job was all Mac-based. I started in June and in a couple weeks, I was in the swing of things. We designed and produced annual reports. By the end of December, I had to quit and it took about a year for the nightmares to go away.

So, that April, I got married and finally moved out of my parent's house. That was a real good thing, as I was sleeping on the sofa in the family room. I still don't know why I didn't move in with Jeff straight-away out of school, but there was something about my mother never forgiving me and how happy I would be to wear white at my wedding or some such nonsense. Yea, right. The oldest kid never gets away with ANYTHING!

I finally got another real job in June. It was part-time nights and I thought I would hate it. As it turns out, I made lots of good friends and learned lots of good stuff and stayed there for six years until I couldn't stand it anymore. Of course a lot of stuff happened in between. I started out doing grunge work on those nights - camera work, hand-separating art on films. It was a real education. Fairly soon, I went full-time days. I started doing more catalog and advertising work and got into studio photography. Finally, the place got wired and we had some real fun. That's when I got introduced to Photoshop. Someone claims I once said that Photoshop is better than sex. I don't know, I may have been misquoted or something. Of course, if you have the RAM . . .

Professional considerations aside, Jeff and I eventually moved out of our first 1-bedroom apartment. Don't ask me why, but I cried the night we left there. It was tiny and in one of those lake complexes with the ever-present aroma of duck shit. The oven needed cleaning. But still I hated leaving. Now, we're in our own place. Old stone ranch with a big yard and (neglected) fruit trees. I accumulate things too easily. I'm a pack rat and that is the one thing that drives me crazy about this place. Too much stuff. But the wood floors are groovy.

And that's about it. This is where I am in life. And I think that's about enough about me for now. But if you come back in the future, you'll get treated to other fascinating trivia about:


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