About Me

Current as of January 1st, 2011

My name is Melissa. I am single and adventurous. I have a four-year-old daughter named Emily Grace (or Emmy, Ems or Monster). We are proud fish owners. Goose was our most recent fish and unfortunately, after three long years of life, he has left us. We're going fish-shopping soon. I live in a sleepy little town that has unspeakable beauty and unbridled ignorance, both in abundance. (To be fair, there are plenty of open-minded people here too, of course. However, as a town, a place with an identity, the ignorance is overwhelming to those of us from Elsewhere.)

One thing you'll learn after any length of time spent on this website is that I am incredibly long-winded. It is both a strength and a weakness. If you want the short version of this bio, here it is and it is the only short version of anything you'll read from me again.

Short Version: I am a Mom, student, daughter, friend, liberal, life-loving woman, born in Chicago and currently living in a sleepy Arizona town. My Mom has cancer, I am single, and I love writing, language, laughter and love. Ok. Now, on to the meat of it all.

I am an aspiring educator and scientist. I want, with all my heart, to teach in inner-city high schools and to study language and children's communication disorders. I love language, how we talk, why we talk, and I want to be on the team of people who look at linguistics from a neurological perspective. I want to help figure out why children can't speak, and how to help them learn to communicate.

I was born and raised in inner-city Chicago. Meaning none of that suburb shit. I'm a total snob about Chicago. All Chicagoans are. It's an amazing city. I graduated from one of the largest high schools ever, and did not graduate with honors or anything spectacular. I got held back my sophomore year of high school and spent the next year getting back with my class. I graduated in 2004, at the age of seventeen.

I enrolled in Columbia College in Chicago and quickly dropped out after learning that there were better things to do with my time. Meaning, I became an alcoholic. I lived in various places, took a couple ill-advised road trips, partied in bad neighborhoods with the people that the news channels are constantly demonizing, and worked at an amazing diner. Then, I met Emily's Dad.

I moved in and found out about thirteen weeks later that, oops! I was pregnant. I was eighteen. I was about two months along and had been drinking the entire time. To make a long story short, when I sobered up and decided to keep my child, I realized that I could not be around and would not let my child be around the people and the lifestyle that I had been living. I left when her father couldn't change, moved to Arizona when I was seven months pregnant, and had Emily in Scottsdale on February 4th, 2006. Her father and I don't talk. He has never met her.

I moved north because I hate Phoenix and all surrounding areas and though I love my mother dearly, we seem to get along better when we don't live in the same space. I have my AA and am about a year out from my Bachelor's degree. I'm going to brag: I have a perfect GPA. I'm bragging because I'm proud. I'm bragging because I am shattering statistics.

I'm pretty passionate. A side effect of that is that I am usually bothered.

I love language, in every way. I love to talk and I love finding grammatical errors and I hate editing my own things. I also love run-on sentences. And fragmented ones. And split infinitives. A lot.I have an unhealthy obsession with shoes, purses, CNN and The Backstreet Boys. I also love really bad movies.

I started this website because I wanted a more public outlet. I want to facilitate discussion and document my life in a less emotional way than the online journal I've had since I was thirteen.

And, I'm a rambler.