Where to start

Hello, earthlings! this is my first shot at writing one of these online diaries. I hope you can bear with me as i take my first tentative steps into this new frontier.

First, let me tell you some things about myself. I am a 31 year old guy living in Groningen, that's a student city in the north of The Netherlands. For everyone who doesn't know where that is (probably more than 99% of the world population) try mapquest or a good old fashioned atlas.

I came to live here with my boyfriend, but as I am now single again I'm sticking around for the great atmosphere and the wonderful job possibilities. At the moment I work as a shop assistant in a cd/dvd/book/toys discount store called BRAVO. I used to work for an international chain of entertainment reatailers, but at some point got transferred to my current job, which is part of that same company. All in all I've been in their service now for over 5 years, and although I enjoy it a great deal and get along very well with my co-workers, I think it might be time for me to find shelter elsewhere.

You might well think what a smart, funny and creative guy is doing working as a lowly shop assistant? Well, let me tell you it wasn't my boyhood dream by a long measure. When I was still a smiling happy-go-lucky kid I dreamt of being a biologist and working with plants. A dream that was quickly squashed in highschool. I don't know who they did it exactly, but i managed to become horrified by the subject very quickly. So instead my dreams now became of erecting huge buildings and cities. My megalomaniac schemes ranged from re-arranging entire countries to designing intercontinental infrastructures. Even terraforming new planets was a task I saw myself doing. (If any government or private investor is interested: I still have the plans somewhere). Sadly also this dream was unceremoniously crushed during my short stay in highschool and I fled into the world of writing. I wrote like a man posessed, short stories, longer stories, epic stories, trilogies and finally (with the help of my best friend) even a Fantasy Novel so epic in scope it resembled life itself. Unfortunately there's no such thing as an education in writing (in the Netherlands at least, oh to have been born in America!) So I chose a career as an artist, and by some cosmic misunderstanding was accepted into a world renowned art school, the Rietveld Academy. I foresaw a bright future as a designer, blending disciplines into new art forms with the freedom to be as crazy or different as I wanted to be. I actually saw myself living in an appartment in Copenhagen surrounded by minimalist furniture and being held tight by my amazing Danish boyfriend Erik.

Sadly, art school turned out to be quite different from what I had imagined. Being of latin-american origin (I was born in the north of Argentina) all my teachers expected my work to be infused by a kind of latin american fiery passion, when all I wanted was to make ice cold conceptual monstrosities. They would complement my colour use one day and tell my drawing style was disgusting the next. Slowly it dawned on me that all they wanted was a blank canvas on which they could project their own ideas on art and beauty, and weren't interested at all in a new and different voice. After two years of resisting this brainwashing and trying desperately to 'do my own thing' the school and I went our seperate ways.

My take on the Holy Trinity, a painting representing 'power'

My head spinning and my heart thoroughly broken at saying goodbye to yet another dream, I turned back to my old love of writing and enrolled into a course for commercial writing. I seemed to have found my place at last. Here was an educative institition that cared nothing for the content of my work, but only for it's effectiveness. I found that my two years at art school had given me at least something of value: the abiltity to conceptualise. Brimming with enthousiasm I forged ahead. I learned a lot about language, writing for an audiencem how to edit someone else's writing as well as my own and even some graphic design. Still, fate couldn't have been more unkind. After some disastrous entanglements with love in art school, I was glad to be in a class where noone had caught my eye... untill a few days into the new school year. Looking lost and confused, the most beautiful guy I had ever seen walked into my classroom and introduced himself. From that moment on i experienced a crush, an infatuation and finally a love unrivaled by any since. We seemed to have a lot in common and during the year we became fast friends. The school year ended and i decided that teh time had come for me to confess my feelings for him, feelings that I knew would never be returned as he was of the 'straight' variety.
Yet i needed to get it off my chest, so I wrote a hauntingly beautiful story that made my feelings all too clear. He took it really well, and we said goodbye for summer break.

After the summer, everything was different. Our friendship seemed to have vanished like a patch of fog in the sun. He rarely came to school and after a while just left completely. I suffered. I was lost and confused. My schoolwork suffered too. My motivation, or my muse if you will, seemed to have left with him and I didn't care about anything anymore. I went through the motions for a few years after that, but I wasn't kidding anyone. I've not written anything even close to the things I wrote that year. Finally I gave in and dropped out. I needed a job fast, and looking around I saw that a record store was searching for staff. Music being my biggest hobby and having a storehouse of knowledge in that department, I decided to give it a try. The crazy bastard that ran the place at that time hired me (mostly because of my language skills) and I've been in their service ever since. So this is me, an amateur writer, designer, photographer, architect, editor, artist, with a love for megalomaniac projects and unfinished dreams. A shop-assistant in a minor city.