About the Author: Non-Fiction · 7:02am Jul 5th, 2012
Nobody is going to read this.
To get the demographics out of the way, I am a middle-aged white male of average height and am somewhat overweight. I have black hair and brown eyes. I live in the greater metropolitan area of Sacramento, California.
I live in an apartment with my sister and her pets. She is a self-employed craftswoman and webmistress. They are a conure (which is one of the smaller types of parrot), a snake, and several tarantulas. Only the bird ever comes out of her cage, and she’s spoiled rotten.
On my mother’s side I am Italian--Sicilian, to be specific. On my father’s side I am Scotch-Irish, English, German, French and Cherokee.
My real name is James, although I usually go by “Jim”. I am named after my eldest uncle on my father’s side. He lied about his age to get into the army and died a hero in World War II. I am nothing like him.
My life history has nothing particular to note. I overcame no hurdles to get where I am, nor did I have a family fortune to coast on. My parents were middle class, and I am slightly better off than they were at my age.
I have this neat trick where I remember anything I read--it allowed me to coast through school before I got into college. I have this other trick where I utterly fail to remember anything I hear. This one has not worked out as well.
I was a pre-med student at the University of California at Davis (class of 2000) with hopes of getting into medical research, but a lack of drive to get better grades, coupled with a lack of willpower to get past my social inhibitions and actually approach a professor for a recommendation, kept me from getting accepted anywhere after graduation, so I drifted into the IT field. I had taught myself BASIC and Assembly programming on a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, so this wasn’t as unexpected a career change as you might think.
I currently write reports for a living, but in my heart I’ll always be what I started as: a software tester. The way I think of that job is like this: A programmer treats his or her programs like they were children. My job is to go up to the baby carriage, take a peek, and tell the proud parent how ugly their infant is. It was low pay and even lower respect, and eventually I caved and got into the data side of things instead. I was really good at spotting ugly babies, though.
At my job, I’m the guy that people forget to invite to meetings. I’m the guy that people talk about right in front of me. I am invisible.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to become invisible, and I’m rather proud of the fact that I’ve finally achieved it.
This journal begins with a fallacy...
...
We all believe that we are invisible, that we somehow are not important. That is the second fallacy. We all have the capacity to go beyond ourselves, and I'd like to suggest that if you feel un-needed then volunteerism could truly show you how important you really are in the larger scheme of things. I'm sure that there are plenty of things in Sacramento that could use another hand in being worked towards...
Anywho, please consider it. Also, please consider posting The Invisible Hairless Ape at your earliest convenience... I'll Watch you if you do!
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...I'll consider it. My social skills in the real world are non-existent, and everything I touch has a habit of turning into garbage, but I will consider it.
As for The Invisible Hairless Ape, I plan to post that first. It is the best FIMfic I've written so far. But I plan to post comments on all of the stories I was inspired by as I wrote first. That list is 300+ stories long, so don't hold your breath.