DU3 Reintroduce yourself thread

[Xithras]

72. Hello again DU!

Thanks for the thread Lynn!

My name is Xithras, and my nickname is taken from an old Babylon 5 joke about Zathrus' illiterate cousin. I actually want to change the name after all these years, and am planning on retiring the moniker when the next name change opportunity arises.

I was born and raised in the California Central Valley, moving between several small towns in the northern San Joaquin Valley before settling in the Modesto area as a child. When I was 17, while attending a party, a half drunk me met a beautiful half-drunk young woman, we hit it off that night, and I was a teen parent by the next morning (though I obviously didn't know this at the time). Refusing to let that stop me, I later attended UC Berkeley, where I obtained my first computer science degree, and went to work at various startups as the 1990's dotcom boom started to hit its stride. Those were exciting times, and during those years I lived in various parts of the SF Bay area, spent a brief stint living in Los Angeles, and did a bit of travelling for some consulting gigs.

As I matured a bit, I began to realize that I'd done something terrible to my daughter. I really didn't know her mother when she became pregnant, and I went away to college soon after she was born, so I'd never really had much of a relationship with her. I sent her mother child support checks, and saw her every few months, but that was about it. I decided to change that.

I'd already decided to flee the rat race and start a consulting company to go to work for myself, and chose to move back to the Central Valley to do it because that would put me closer to my daughter. As I developed that relationship, something unexpected and amazing happened. Her mother and I hit it off, fell in love, and were eventually married.

Financially, I quickly discovered that I made a LOT less money in the Valley than I did in the Bay Area, so I began to augment my income by teaching computer science classes as an adjunct at several different educational institutions in the northern valley. I've now taught at private colleges, at public community colleges, and even as an emergency fill-in at a local university (I don't have a PhD, so no perm university positions). Over the near-decade that I've been teaching, I've found it to be far more fulfilling than any other job I've had. That's a good thing too, as the crashed economy forced me to shutter my software consulting company a few years ago, and I now rely on my teaching income for my entire livelihood!

The nature of my work does mean that I never personally identify myself by name on DU, and that I occasionally fudge details when discussing things that could be linked to me personally. People have identified these a few times and got the wrong impression, but the intent of these "detail alterations" has never been dishonesty. I work as an adjunct, so my job is only guaranteed on a semester-by-semester basis. As I live in one of the most conservative parts of the state, I do have to worry about a student stumbling across my postings and raising a stink about my liberal positions on this or that. I've also discussed things on DU (including childhood abuse I experienced), that I simply don't want my students or others to know about. Because of that, I prefer to keep my identity as anonymous as possible.

The rest of personal life is all about downscaling nowadays. The money was good at the beginning of the decade, which allowed me to buy a lot of "things". I'm realizing (or rather, a declining income has helped me to realize) that "things" are unimportant. People are important. I've sold most of the things I once considered valuable, and am actually in the process of moving from my beautiful riverside home into a much smaller place in Modesto, as a way to cut our expenses even further. While I will miss country living, I simply can't justify the expense any longer. With my oldest daughter preparing to enter the UC system this fall with plans on becoming a med student, and two other children who will be doing the same, it's time to be practical.

As for politics and the rest...

Politically, I am a green-first activist. Environmentalism has always been my primary political motivator, and I'm quite proud of the fact that I've been protesting since I was a teenager, even taking part in Redwood Summer once upon a time. Yes, I did actually chain myself across a road while some VERY angry loggers threatened to cut us up with their chainsaws and hide our bodies in the forest. I occasionally took my activism a bit too far when I was young and stupid, but am a bit more grounded nowadays. Honestly, most of my modern perspective on protesting stems from those days. I learned that all protesting makes you feel good, but that there's a difference between protesting to make noise, and protesting to actually accomplish something. There's a difference between goal-based civil disobedience, and civil disobedience that is simply done to gain attention. I am highly supportive of protesting, when there is a clear goal and a path by which protesting can achieve it, but generally eschew protesting for protesting’s sake.

I'm also a strong civil libertarian, believe that the United States needs to GTFO of the world’s business, and believe that we haven't fought a legitimate war since 1945.

One thing that's got me into a bit of trouble at DU over the years is my sexuality. Though I'm married, I am very much a bisexual man, and have had periods in my life where I have been exclusively sexual with other men. One of the interesting aspects of bisexuality, of course, is that we can be attracted to both sexes, and in my case this eventually led me to fall in love with a woman. She and I frequently joke that our relationship was kismet, and was preordained by the universe, because she is ALSO bisexual. Our combined bisexual relationship has led to us leading a rather unconventional lifestyle, which includes everything from nudism to permissive openness (though, to be clear, we're not swingers or anything). Some people have been offended by this, while others have a problem with the fact that we're married at all, and one or two people have accused me of making the whole thing up (I'm not). To them I simply say: Live and let live. We're not recruiting, and she's all out of toasters anyway.

One last subject that I should mention, that I rarely discuss here on DU, is the fact that I have been diagnosed with a mild form of Aspergers. My wife had seen signs of it for years and had been unrelenting in her push to get me tested, so it wasn't much of a surprise when the doctors finally confirmed it for us. My form is relatively mild and I don't suffer from the social anxiety problems that many Aspergers patients experience, but I do have speech issues and my interests can often be intensely focused. These problems tend to surface on DU occasionally, and are most recognizable when the speech in my posts gets overly formal, pedantic, or even incoherent. Or overly VERBOSE, like this post. Sometimes I just don't know when to stop typing! It can also cause me to get hyper-focused on a subject when I'm debating it with someone, to the point where I've literally spent DAYS doing back-research on a post I disagreed with so that I could come back and refute its poster. It's silly, but it's something I can't help, and I rarely realize it's happening while I'm doing it. Unfortunately, I know for a fact that some of my more memorable aspergers-inspired postings have permanently earned me a position on more than one Ignore list. I also have a bit of a reputation as a know-it-all, because when faced with a subject I'm unfamiliar with, my first instinct is to go read the hell out of it, instead of simply moving on to the next thread. That's one of my fixations, and it's something I do both on DU and in the physical world. Trust me, it drives my wife insane too. Not much I can do about that but apologize, and ask people to try and be tolerant when I get wierd

So, to wrap this massive missive up: I've been a member of DU since early 2001, and though I can sometimes be bizarre, grumpy, hyper-opinionated, and standoffish, I too love meeting new DU'ers