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Who am I? I am . Paint a picture of me in your mind... It won't be me You'll be using your own colors based on your own life to paint me But anyway Who is Darkoshi? Darkoshi is my name in the land of cyberspace Darkoshi Sunchaser for more syllables... My first name in the land of realspace is French in origin and signifies something like 'archer' Which could seem meaningful. In my childhood, I liked bows and arrows. Twang! Zoooshhh... Thud! Precision Skill Power Don't mess with me - I've got you in my sights Native Americans (Indians i called them then)... In my mind, I aspired to be one, living in harmony with the natural world Understanding the languages of the animals Understanding the spirits of the trees Spirituality, magic, and wisdom The mysteries of the deep forest The wind across the plains The sun throwing light across the vast deserts of the southwest Robin Hood, living in the deep forest Arrow within arrow precision Artemis Diana the Hunter - don't mess with me! Diana and the Moon The Moon! Adulthood, bows and arrows mean death, killing. Something which I am not into even in a romantic sense anymore. What's the point? (not of the arrow) Killing does not solve anything My last name in the land of realspace is Scottish... or Irish... in origin The clans! The bagpipes! The wind across the highlands! When was I born? I was born in the Chinese Year of the Rat. And under the Zodiak sign of either Pisces or Aquarius, something with water surely - I liked the ocean and swimming and floating back then... Now, it's just so Wet... Let's see, if you want to calculate it, I was in the 3rd grade when President Reagan was shot. I was in the 8th grade when the Challenger Shuttle exploded in the sky. I was born in California. My family moved away (with me) not long after I was born, so the only real memories i have of California are from visiting relatives there. My dad was in the Army, and so we moved. Here and there. South Carolina is the place I keep coming back to. So we moved. We flew over the Atlantic and touched down in Germany. U.S. Military family housing areas with Big White Apartment Buildings. These buildings had real walls - solid ones. Not like the drywall used a lot here in the states, where if you push your thumb against the wall you can feel it ready to cave in like cardboard. The fun, dark, and spooky basement. A hallway in the basement went from one end of the building to the other. You could run the whole way. The rooms with washing machines and dryers were down there, too, always making machine noises and keeping it warm. Elementary school. An Elephant Statue in the front that the high school kids painted different colors each year. Friends (I had a few back then. I wasn't quite as much a loner as I am now.) One classmate was my good friend/playmate. But then a friend of hers that she had known from the U.S. transferred in and they started hanging out together all the time. I felt sort of left out... So I started hanging out with a couple of other friends. We liked dolphins. There was a playground in back of our building. The Housing Areas were good like that - lots of playgrounds. And a small area of woods where I could climb trees and play hide-and-seek and pretend to be an Indian... Behind this small woods was the Autobahn and beyond that was Perlacher Forst, the Big Woods, where the trees were tall and the ambience was dark and deep and a small kid could be afraid of what was hiding in there... My mom took me there sometimes to hunt for mushrooms. I didn't like eating mushrooms, but hunting for them was fun. What else impressed me during this part of my life? Superman (I want to fly!) Wonder Woman (I am strong!) the Muppets (what can I say?) Animals (I liked animals, especially cats) There was that song 'My Bonnie lies over the Ocean', and I thought that they were singing about a bunny rabbit. 'My bunny lies over the ocean, My bunny lies over the sea... Oh bring back my bunny to me!' Escape to Witch Mountain (I want to be telekinetic and telepathic!) magic in general (I am magic!) Fantasy. Dragons. Wizards. the movie Dragonslayer. (Magic!) Greek mythology. (oh, those gods and goddesses with their god-like powers!) Star Wars!!!!! Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader!!! Light sabers!!! Laser-fire!!! ObiWan and The Force! Good and Evil! I was attracted to the dark side of the Force... Power, mystery, danger... One of the first 'big' books I read was about an Indian who lived somewhere in the southwest. Partly about going off somewhere on one's own to seek a Vision or a Sign, to let the spirits speak to you. I like going off on my own into the forest or other places outside where i can be alone and just watch and listen to the world... Well, my parents split up, and I moved with my dad and brother to South Carolina for a year. After living in Germany, SC was like paradise. Gentle warm moist air. Even when it was raining, it was warm. You could go out and run around and play in the rain. (In Germany, when it rains, it is Cold Rain, and you get Cold and Wet.) And the beautiful pine trees with the good-smelling pine needles. They have pine trees in germany too, but a different kind. Something about all things American just spoke to my soul in a way that things German did not. Mundane things even. The heat radiating from the asphalt in the parking lots. The fast-food restaurants. All the tv channels. Hey - I even enjoyed the commercials. (Needless to say, I've gotten over that by now.) In Germany, on AFN, which was the Armed Forces Network, and was the only English language TV station that you could get, in fact the ONLY station you could get on an American television set, they did not have commercials. They did have good Public Service Announcements, though. There is a different atmosphere, a different culture in America than in Germany. It is hard to explain what is different, but people are somehow friendlier, life is more relaxed. On one trip while visiting relatives in California, my Very Cool Uncle took me to see the Empire Strikes Back at the movies! Darth, Darth Vader! Light sabers! R2 and C3PO! Well, guess how HAPPY I was (sarcasm intended here) when my dad got stationed over to Germany again and I had to leave this American paradise. So that was another 3 years over there. By that time, my brother (who is 8 years older than I am) had moved away and gotten his own place. I haven't seen very him much since then. Just a few days here and a few days there. He seems to always be in a different country than me so it's hard to get to see him. It made me sad in the beginning - I used to like hanging out with him, and then I didn't have a big brother around anymore. He has always been into mysticism and super-natural phenomena and stuff like that. Anyway, he was fun to be around. He's still around, just not around here. Round and about and over the moon. And he doesn't like folk music. :-) Since my family moved around so often, I've lived in 5 different states in the U.S. and 3 different cities in Germany. Including preschool, I attended 11 different schools. In the 7th grade I went on a really fun and interesting trip to Egypt and Israel with my schoolmates. Also, from a very young age onward, my German aunt often took me on vacations to other countries - Austria, Spain, Bulgaria. I would also hear about and see home movies of her trips to other places like Africa and Thailand. I was interested in other cultures and languages, especially Spanish. After many years of having waited for it, the movie Return of the Jedi was released! And after another year or so, it finally made its way over to the U.S. military movie theaters in Germany. Those theaters were nice, with just one BIG screen, instead of the multiple smaller screens that theaters have nowadays. Before the movie, everyone would always stand up while the national anthem was played. And the whole audience got really into the movie. My skin tingled when that familiar music came on. The audience cheered when the Rebels shot and blew up those Imperial ships! I was Luke Skywalker. I was Darth Vader. In my mind. I went to the movie three times. I wanted the poster. I bought the book. I bought the records. I recorded it on cassette when they aired the radio-drama. What else was there going on? Video games! Laser fire Asteroids. Pac Man... chompa chompa chompa. Michael Jackson - Thriller! My last Halloween of going out to trick-or-treat. Mean adults already making comments that I looked too old for trick-or-treating. Cyndi Lauper with her rad hair. Music - i didn't pay much attention to who was playing what, but some songs I remember All we hear is Radio Ga-Ga, Radio Goo-Goo. Ethiopia and We are the World and people starving. Karma Chameleon and my dad's little convertible car (and he liked listening to Diamonds on the Sole of Her Shoes...) Amadeus, Amadeus... and Vienna Calling. War, war is Stupid... It really is! Don't make fun of this song! Maybe in europe you could just feel the cold war more tangibly with east germany and poland and russia and The Communist Block right over there. Remember nuclear missiles and the threat of world destruction? Red Dawn? The other Star Wars strategic defense initiative thing? People getting shot to death trying to cross the Berlin Wall? War is stupid, and people are stupid because they keep having wars... and love SHOULD mean something... too many songs to actually mention. I was always really into reading. I read a lot of books. At first, i liked mysteries. I read all the mystery books I could find. All of the Nancy Drew books but also some Hardy Boys ones and those ??? mysteries and my favorites - Trixie Belden! and then there was Meg with the Siamese cat... and the books by Phyllis Whitney... and John Bellairs, remember those books? I also liked books about anything magical. Alexander Key - he wrote Escape to Witch Mountain but also lots of others like Sprockets - A Little Robot, Rivets and Sprockets, and The Forgotten Door... I also read about the life of Jews during Nazi-ism, the life of blacks in America during slavery and the pre-Civil Rights era, and the life of American Indians during U.S. expansionism. I suppose this is where my views on Human Rights and Civil Rights and Free Speech and Freedom in general were being shaped. Later on, I became more interested in Science-Fiction (star wars technology and space flight) and Fantasy (wizards and magic) books. Some of my favorite authors have been - J.R.R. Tolkien (it's been a long, long time since I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but that's where all my Fantasy-book reading started) Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising series) Madeleine L'Engle Ursula K. LeGuin Sylvia Louise Engdahl Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (the DragonLance series, etc) C.J. Cherryh (all the books, especially the Chanur ones) Barbara Hambly (the Silicon Mage, etc) Patricia McKillip (Fool's Run, The Cygnet and the Firebird, etc) Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc - really funny books) Robert Asprin (the MYTH books - also really funny) Mercedes Lackey (I found The Last Herald-Mage trilogy really moving but I haven't liked her other books quite as much.) Jo Clayton Doris Egan, AKA Jane Emerson (Gates of Ivory trilogy, City of Diamond) All this book-reading was a side-effect of not being very interested in making or having friends - you have to do something to pass the time when you don't have friends to hang out with (and when there's only one channel on the television) It sounds sad, not having friends, but it wasn't, most of the time. It just never was something I was into. Sure, I wouldn't have minded having a really good friend, but that never happened. I swear, I have never met anyone as much of a loner as I am. Of course, one doesn't meet people like me, that's why we are such loners... But I wonder if there are really more people like me out there or not. So, eventually I moved back to the good old U.S. of A. To Georgia for one year and then South Carolina again for another year. This was when I started learning Tae Kwon Do. I always wanted to be like the guy in Kung Fu. I made it up to a brown belt before the increased responsibilities of being expected to teach lessons to the lower belts and occasionally lead the whole class became too much for me. I'm shy and soft-spoken (even when I'm yelling, apparently), and it was just too much pressure - it took the fun out of the classes. So I quit the classes and instead practiced on my own. This was also when I became a vegetarian. It was a very sudden transformation. One day I was of the mindset 'Me, become a vegetarian? Like my eccentric brother? Yeah, right! Like I'm going to give up eating hamburgers.'. But then I had this dream one night. I won't explain it because it was a dreamy thing which you can't really explain... but I woke up and just saw the connection between live animals and dead meat so much more clearly than ever before. So I decided to become a vegetarian and did. Half a year later I became a vegan (a vegetarian who doesn't consume dairy products or eggs either) because most animals being used for food production, even dairy cows and egg-laying hens, are treated badly. People tend to have this picture of dairy cows eating green grass on some sunny pasture and chickens outside in the sunshine pecking around but that's just not how it is for so many cows and chickens. They are locked up and crowded in buildings and cages... It's called factory farming... Farmers trying to get the most money out of these animals... So then we moved to Massachusetts. Yuck, winters are way too long up there. I read more books. I watched tv. Doctor Who. This show seemed so corny at first, but the Doctor's personality was so much fun... and the TARDIS was cool... and the music... Robin, the Hooded One... Star Trek, the Next Generation I went on bike rides. A depression which I had felt somewhat of before, came back strongly for a while and never really left... just eventually diminished. it sort of lurks there in the background now... like, sure, life sucks, big deal... I discovered techno music. Thank God for College Radio Stations, WJUL and WUSC in particular. Otherwise you might never get to hear a real variety of music on the radio. No, I am not a believer of God... I'm a damned atheist or something like that... Agnostic, I suppose. I graduated from high school. I moved back to South Carolina and went to university. Now I'm a computer programmer. With my very own web page. Wowee. There. Now you probably know more about me than almost anyone else on the planet. Even if I didn't spell out my real name. |