In Which My Readers Get to Know Me

So, as a lot of you who have followed my blog for a while know, I spent a good portion of the time I've worked on it blogging under a male alias. There were various reasons for this, which can be found in this post for those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about. I feel that, because of this, I haven't been able to be totally open and fully introduce myself to the people who read this blog. So, with that in mind, today I'm going to take the time to do just that.

So...who is this Gabe person anyway?

My real name is Jennifer (an all-too-common name in the book blogging world, which is part of why I decided to keep the pen name once I had come clean about being a woman) and I was born in May of 1986 in Pennsylvania with hemangioma over one eye. (I'm linking to the Wikipedia article because the pictures are much less drastic than some of the other sites I found.) It went away as the years went on, but it made me self-conscious for quite a while. Here's me when I was a youngster. You can see the hemangioma over the eye on the left side of the picture.

If you look at this picture at a higher resolution, you can see
that my teeth look terrifying. Do all children have
pirana mouth or was I just unlucky?

Anywho, my mom and my younger sister and I left Pennsylvania (and my abusive father) and moved to a small town in Western New York right before kindergarten. I spent the next 13 years going to school in a conservative backwoods town, which would prove to be really difficult for liberal, bisexual me. When I was finally able to escape graduate, I fled went to college in Rochester, where I still live to this day, almost ten years later. 

I majored in history in college, graduating cum laude and moving into a Master's program that was, for all intents and purposes, a backup plan that I would end up really not liking. While in grad school, I started blogging under the name Gabriel James. I liked that much better. :D

I left my Master's program after two years and continued to work at my college library. During that time, I met my now husband, Don, and we quickly moved in together. As Tuesday's post said, we got married in February of 2013 and I left my library job only to find myself floundering for a while before I found safer footing as a tutor. I'm still looking to find my life's calling, which may be library work for all I know, but I love reading and writing, so book blogging is something that I could never leave behind.

Don and I at a Fringe Festival event this past year.

I hate writing about myself, which has always been the case, especially because I never know what to include and what to leave out. If you guys have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them (within reason). 

Here are some other tidbits about me:

*I am just under 5'0" tall...and yes it sucks.

*My favorite color is silver.

*I have named every single one of my pets after fictional characters: Webbigal the cat (Duck Tales), Bartok the hamster (Anastasia), Sydney and Vaughn the fish (Alias), Severus Snape the fish (Harry Potter), Selmak the cat (Stargate SG-1), Teyla the cat (Stargate Atlantis), and Loki the bunny (Norse god and Avenger-botherer).  

*I was engaged once before, right out of high school. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

*I have an undying love of M*A*S*H.

*I did the monologue "Reclaiming Cunt" for a production of The Vagina Monologues in college and faked an orgasm on stage in front of hundreds of strangers for three nights in a row. It was amazing.

*My sister's half-birthday is the day after my birthday and my half-birthday is the day before her birthday.

*I miss the 90s so much it hurts.

*I'm a board game addict, especially Dominion.

*One time I went hiking in a new place all by myself and got so lost that I had to call a friend to come pick me up. I had ended up on the complete opposite side of the park from where I'd started.

*I'm an atheist with pagan tendencies.

*I once played a version of live-action Clue with some friends in college. We probably should have used a smaller building.

*I am the real Slim Shady.

-Gabe