My Background

TLDR: I'm a woman in a man's world with a strong academic background who seems to stand out from the crowd wherever I go, yet I have yet to actually establish a real career that adequately pays my bills. My interest in trying to figure out why I can't seem to succeed goes way back and has fostered more than one blog.

I started kindergarten already knowing how to read. I remember already knowing how to read but I don't remember learning how to read.

According to my older sister, who used to read Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew to me at bedtime until she was hoarse -- because I would badger her into reading me one more chapter, sometimes two or three times -- I badgered her into reading me the same book five zillion times one week at age four until she was going "I'll read you a book. ANY book EXCEPT this one." and I was adamant it had to be this one because I was trying to understand it. 

I don't remember this book. Three decades later, she could quote whole pages from it, so I believe she's telling the truth.

I was in gifted programs as early as first or second grade. I took algebra in eighth grade and had more college level math by eleventh grade than most people with non STEM bachelor's degrees and I tutored math in eleventh grade as a member of Mu Alpha Theta, a college level math honor society. 

As a senior in high school, I was one of three people invited to a zero hour math class not normally offered because we were the only three who had already completed all normally offered math classes. I declined to attend because of my undiagnosed medical situation. I was already missing the maximum number of days per year I could miss without automatically being failed and dragging myself to school sick much of the time. I simply didn't have the stamina to go in extra early and have an extra long school day.

At age fifteen, I was State Alternate in Journalism for the Governor's Honors Program. That's a summer residential gifted enrichment program and probably a sausage fest. Everyone from my high school gifted and AP classes who actually went that I knew personally was male.

State Alternate means I ranked third out of the entire state for Journalism. They send two people per subject and if someone fails to attend, the Alternate takes their place.

Even though I was chronically ill with an undiagnosed genetic disorder and being treated like a hypochondriac and suicidal as a consequence of years of sexual molestation, I was STAR Student of my graduating high school class. This means I had the highest SAT score of my high school class and managed to be in the top ten percent of GPA in spite of periodically making a D or an F.

This made me the third highest person in my graduating high school class. The first and second were the other two people invited to the zero hour math class I had declined, one of whom was my best friend and the other was a guy who attended the Governor's Honors Program. 

Based on that, I won a National Merit Scholarship to UGA, a world class university and one of the top two universities in my home state of Georgia. I ultimately declined it, in part because of my health. 

Prior to declining it, UGA offered me the opportunity to apply for a merit-based stipend of some sort, I forget the spiffy title. Because of my health situation, I mailed it in too late and missed the deadline. 

I spent two years attending the local college in my home town. It was called Columbus College at that time before it took on airs and became known as Columbus State University. 

Prior to that, I spent ages fourteen to eighteen desperately looking for a way out of my situation. The summer I turned fourteen, about four months after my older brother stopped molesting me, I convinced my parents to allow me to visit my older sister at UGA for a week or two during the summer.

I talked to her about my desire to take college part time my freshman year in high school to prove I could handle the work and skip to college at age fifteen. She said she could pursue a master's to extend her time at UGA to serve as my chaperone. 

She introduced me to my first love, a guy I write about under the alias Alex, and then things went terribly sideways. At the end of the summer, there was a family meeting without me where the decision was made that he was a pervert with an unhealthy interest in an underaged girl and I was forbidden to see him ever again with a threat of police involvement if he and I contacted each other.

I was not privy to that meeting. I don't know who said what. I was all of fourteen. My brother recently stopped molesting me. For more than forty years, I assumed my brother was the person arguing hard to end the relationship. 

I recently concluded that this is probably not how it went down. Most likely, my sister threw me under a bus to separate her abused boyfriend from his best friend. 

So from age fourteen, I was plotting to leave home prior to my eighteenth birthday due to my brother's abuse and then was dealing with additional trauma due to being denied the right to date whom I wanted to date, seemingly on the word of my abuser, which was all kinds of head fuckery.

I looked into moving to California and becoming legally emancipated because they changed the age of emancipation to fifteen when I was fourteen and a half. I looked into skipping my senior year in high school and pursuing some technical training to have adult wages prior to age eighteen. 

I looked into getting therapy secretly and had arranged transportation and payment but couldn't go because a legal minor requires parental permission to speak with a therapist. As a legal minor, I had no legal right to make such decisions for myself. 

I considered joining the military but knew I simply didn't have the stamina. So by the time I started college, I had made every effort to find a way out and support myself and couldn't pull it off.

I went to college because my parents were willing to pay my bills and put me through college and I couldn't figure out the job thing or the leaving home thing. I didn't declare a major my freshman year and just took whatever interested me and my family said nothing because I had attempted suicide my senior year in high school following a confrontation with my brother. 

My sophomore year, the college pressured me to declare a major. I was emotionally fragile and in frail health. I had taken mostly history classes and language classes and coincidentally my advisor was in the history department. 

So I declared a history major so I could keep the same advisor and mostly continued pursuing my dilettante lifestyle of taking whatever interested me. This resulted in me getting some award for being something like one of three sophomores with the highest GPA in the history department at the school and I have absolutely no idea what the award was called because I absolutely didn't care or pay attention. 

And then I dropped out because I had gotten secretly married and my loser husband was failing to promptly get into the military and my options were drop out, admit to my parents I was married or commit fraud on college financial aid paperwork. 

In my twenties, after my husband finally bothered to join the military, I found myself with a baby born seven years ahead of schedule and a 1950s style marriage. I could afford a hobby of reading library books, so I spent years reading feminist literature to try to figure out what went wrong with my life that after such a stellar academic background I was now a housewife with no prospects, plus I again returned to therapy and read everything I could find that was research based about human sexuality and how things go wrong.

I have roughly six years of college, including an Associate of Arts in Humanities, an incomplete Bachelor's of Science in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing, a Certificate in Geographic Information Systems from UC-Riverside -- which should make you gasp in awe if you are a GIS insider and go "Who? What?" if you aren't -- and a technical Certificate in insurance stuff from my post-divorce day job at a Fortune 200 company for part of the time I worked there, the insurance giant Aflac.

I grew up in the Deep South and I get mistaken for being Christian in part because the Deep South is the most religious part of the US and it's strongly Christian. Saying things like "God bless you." is just part of the culture there and it means something like "Thanks. That was very kind. May your good deed come back to you." not "I'm a Believer and will see you in church on Sunday."

Two of my college classes were Classical Greek, which was essentially Bible study in a dead language. My ex grew up in an extremely religious family and he read the Bible cover to cover three times prior to age twelve when he quit Christianity, so he knew the Bible far better than most Christians. 

When my sister was going through her faux Christian phase and attending church at Easter and Christmas and coming up with "sciency" explanations for biblical events, my husband cocked an eyebrow at me when I repeated this SHIT to him. I said "What?" He said "That theory (of meditative state) works right up until they stuck a spear in him to make sure he was dead."

I seem to know a lot about the Bible. It's not really due to specifically trying to learn the Bible. Among other things, I was married for two decades to a walking Biblical encyclopedia in spite of neither of us being religious. 

I've had two Environmental Law classes and substantial exposure to legal stuff while working in insurance because when your product is a check, everyone wants some and there's a lot of fraud and policy abuse in the industry. So some of my letters had to be approved by the legal department and decisions to pay or deny that I made 60 or more times a day had to meet certain defensible legal standards in case they went to court for some reason. 

I did that for exactly five years from January 1st of some year or other to January 1st five years later, following three months of intensive training for an entry level job. I was one of six new hires in a class of maybe twenty people. Some were rehires or internal promotions. One of the new hires washed out.

They have trouble filling these jobs and after three months of training, you start at half speed. Your quota for production is half the ultimate goal with an expectation that you increase your productivity every week until you are meeting the expected standard.

I was slow but had a track record of cleaning up other people's messes. Shortly before I quit, I was transferred to a new team intended to handle claims gone wrong with a goal of developing better processes for improving the practices for how claims were handled department wide. 

I quit for personal reasons rooted in my health, a tale told elsewhere. 

My ex was an avid reader and went through the entire school library at every school he attended while changing schools every year for most of his childhood because of his father's military career. When he was in second grade, the school asked his parents to authorize a grade skip and they said no.

This is unheard of. Typically, parents have to fight for a grade skip.

On the SAT, I scored 1350 out of 1600 points:  670 math, 680 verbal. His verbal was over 700, though his math score was dramatically lower. He ran rings around me in arguments. 

He had hobbies like learning Roman history, history of war and Latin. We were pulling history books off our shelves and looking up the battles in question to fact check movies like The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc while we watched it.

I've been involved with a number of best in class or oldest or whatever geeky online social spaces. I volunteered to be a moderator for a homeschooling list and was soon asked to be a member of the board and lead moderator for all their gifted lists at The TAG Project at a time when they were trying to become a bonafide charity, an effort later abandoned. 

I accidentally founded a sub on Cyburbia, the only urban planning discussion forum on the planet at the time and was appointed moderator when I asked the owner, Dan Tasman, to read my college paper and give me feedback on a fictional proposal and his feedback was something like "I'm not sure if/when I can add that..." 

It was a weird conversation and I think it went that way because he knew I was not really making a proposal, yet he wanted this to be real and on top of that I was extremely ill and he had mixed feelings about giving me administrative powers where I might break his baby in my impaired state. So I was given limited mod powers over just my little sub so my ability to break things was limited in scope. 

I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the leaderboard of Hacker News. I've done it twice under two different handles.

That's kind of the tip of the iceberg. You may also wish to read:

My Bio.

Academic and professional stuff on a piece called Warning and additional expansion on those credentials on a piece called Online Endeavors. 

I also write periodically about Metafilter, Tagmax and Hacker News in various places, chiefly Feminine Character Works and Witness to Destruction.