Tornadoes and adverse weather were my first passions growing up.
“Twister" came out when I was 6 years old, and I watched it just about every other day (if not every day).
I wanted a yellow Jeep Honcho and a red Dodge pickup. But most of all, I wanted to be a storm chaser.
This dream stuck around well after high school. I took basics at community college with the intent of transferring into a meteorology program.
Me and my brother, Joe, in the backyard of our house in Rhome, Texas. 2000.
As a young student I always tested well. Studying for classes like English, geography or social studies wasn’t really an issue. However, I was never particularly good at math.
I still blame my third grade math teacher for this. I’ll call her Mrs. B. After first grade, my family moved from Houston to Rhome — a small town about an hour northwest of Fort Worth. We moved back halfway through third grade, when we were about to learn multiplication. When classes started in Houston, Mrs. B's class was well past multiplication and starting long division.
This was also the first time I had ever been given a textbook for a class.
Once, while the class was reading from the textbook, Mrs. B called on me to read the next section.
“Mrs. B, I don’t understand this at all,” I said.
I was confused. I was embarrassed. I felt stupid.
“Well, READ,” she boomed loud as fuck.
The person next to me showed me where we were on the page, and I just read the next section.
In every math class I took since — except geometry in 10th grade or whenever I took that — I truly had no earthly idea what was going on.
All that to say, when it came down to taking classes for meteorology, I was scared shitless by the amount of math, and types of math, I would have to learn.
I have no idea what a differential equation is, and I’ll be damned if I ever even try to figure one out.
In 2012, I was still taking basics but decided that I wanted to go to Texas A&M University, so I moved from Houston to College Station and started classes at Blinn College.
I enrolled in a photography class to fill an art credit.
That’s when dreams changed, and everything since has led me to where I am today — sitting at a park table in Yoakum, Texas, writing this blog post.
Up next, I’ll write about how a Serbian, a train and an obsession with glitch art inspired by Rob Sheridan’s photography led me to a classroom with a professor standing on a desk and playing the guitar.