Moogwai

I was born in San Diego, CA, with a computer-programmer father and a mother whose family owned and ran a bridal centre. Although I will forever have the sea in my blood, being a coastal child, when I was two we left California and moved to Montana - escaping the smog, the crime, the heat. At first it was just my parents, maternal grandparents, and my brother, five years older than me. Eventually, my aunts and uncles migrated north as well, so that my mother's entire side of the family lives in the northwest now. When I was about five, my dad decided to follow a religious calling, and entered the United Methodist ministry, followed a few years later by my maternal grandmother, so I grew up surrounded by a very strong spiritual influence, and a desire to follow that call in my own way.
Being in the ministry meant that we moved every few years; over the course of my childhood, we lived all across the state: Gallatin Gateway, Troy, Chinook, Plentywood, Chester, and even Salmon, ID. Currently, my parents are serving in Valier, where my grandmother recently retired from.
My education was a mix of home and public schooling, and pretty eccentric; at home I read books like "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and "How the Irish Saved Civilisation", and in public school I went to the State Spelling Bee and later lobbied for a Speech and Drama team. I was never very interested in most sports; particularly in high school, where I was the artsy hippie kid who always had her nose in a book.
When I was twelve, my sisters came to live with us. My parents had done foster-care for most of my life, but these three girls ended up being a lot longer situation, and eventually a permanent addition to the family, with the adoption finalised the summer before my junior year.
My junior year of high school, I went to India on exchange, where I lived in Moradabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh for approximately ten months, with the remaining month of my trip split equally at beginning and end in the Netherlands, staying with some wonderful people. India changed my views on life in a lot of ways; it certainly changed me. I was sixteen when I went; it would be impossible to truly explain what it's like to go from American culture to Indian as a young teenaged girl.
On coming home, I spent most of that summer building my parents' cabin on the family property up in Eureka, MT, and then went to visit my brother at college in Missoula, where I ended up staying and enrolling, and thereby skipping my senior year of high school. At university, I spent two years pursuing the Acting BFA, until a cutthroat program told me I wasn't good enough. My fifth semester I focused on the costuming that had until then been a secondary pursuit, but eventually I decided that I was spending far too much money on school when I didn't have a clear direction academically, and did have plenty of goals outside of the university that I wished to pursue.
School was good for me in a networking sense; I made a lot of wonderful friends, and I ended up with a beautiful girlfriend, who is currently studying to be a neo-Pagan priestess, in a tradition where I have found a supportive and lovely spiritual community. So, I'm taking a siesta from school. I worked for awhile as a shop-girl, and now we're living together with our snake, Arun, and our puppy, Kyrie, and a bunch of fishes and plants and far too many books, and I'd say we're both happier for it. I've lately started making stoles for clergy, and apparently have been billed as the "Yellowstone Conference Artist-in-Residence", which is flattering; if I'm lucky, I'll be able to make my living being artistic instead of getting a "real job". I would also like to expand my clientele, so to speak, and appeal to the pagan community as well as the Christian one. Feel free to message me if you're interested in any sort of ritual wear, particularly the decorative sort.
Somewhere along the way in all this, I discovered the beauty of Chaos Magic, and initiated myself into Discordian society. Hail Eris! In my free time, I read too much; write everything from drabbles (very-short vignettes) to a novel-in-progress; work on our comic with my girlfriend; draw constantly (both more traditional comic-esque drawings and what my friends fondly refer to as my "stoner drawings", which are simply stream-of-consciousness doodles); sew - not just stoles, but personal fashion and historical garb for the SCA, where I am the lady Margot of Caiethland, march-lords of Artemisia and An-Tir; do photography; and generally try to have a good time and live as fully as possible. I would like to learn to play both guitar and piano, and brush up on my flute skills again; I have determined that by the time I am 23, I will speak both French and Spanish. Madeline and I have also set a goal of returning to India together in the fall of '09, and in the meantime, who knows where we'll end up?