Then when our 2 weeks was up, the guys wanted us to stay. You know, just rip up our return tickets and *stay*. The guy I was with said I could live on his boat and help him with the business, and when the season was over I could go back to Texas with him. I was usually up for adventure, but this was way too weird — the “ripping up my ticket and staying” part I could sort of handle, but staying with someone I hardly knew, then going to some other strange place with that person… mayday! mayday! If all this had happened 5 years later, I might have stayed, but I was just too young and paranoid. So, I returned to Toronto, but… one of my friends stayed! She ended up marrying the guy she was with, and living in Texas.

When I was going overseas for the first time, I saw my buddies saying goodbye to their families and girlfriends and I was determined to never go through that greif and stress. Both because i didn’t think it was fair to put someone else through that and I didn’t want to be doing my job all the while worrying about a Wife and kids back home. So I never let myself get attached to anything I couldn’t leave in a second. it never bothered me then, but looking back there were a lot of missed opportunities.

Then there were the deployments. Croatia, Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda. The experiences left me disilussioned, pessimistic and angry at the world. Spent a good chunk of my thirties self-medicating myself looking through the bottom of a scotch bottle. I still loved the job though.

The skills I developed there, turned me into the person i am now, disiplined, analytical, responsible, organized, and unshakable. Which has helped make me a success in my current career. Those qualities and my scars are what originally attracted my wife to me. Chicks dig scars I guess. I’m not going to argue. She’s way out of my league and she has made me an incredibly happy man.

Looking back, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I think I would have been much happier if i had just stuck with cooking. I would have been an incredible chef.

A real turning point since it was the first relatively significant thing I did solely for myself. I had a sudden realization that I had spent most of my life outside of the picture, admiring it, treasuring it, but as something for other people. That little act made me go into the picture, and I got it. I understood how “alive” feels. The difference of observing life and being engaged in it. And that doing things for ourselves is also important.

Nice topic!

It was a great environment in which to spend my 20s, but that lifestyle and career really enabled me to understand what I didn’t want to do with my life in the long term. And it really made me appreciate Canada in a way I hadn’t before.

And my kids do not listen to their parents just as we paid little mind to ours when we supposely grew up.

Here are 2, one (possibly) minor, one notsomuch.

Minor: Deciding to return to Canada for Grade 12 – my father was being transferred to Indonesia and there was no western school available other than correspondence, so my choices were boarding school in Switzerland or Singapore (unfortunately, Australia wasn’t an option or I’d have likely gone for that). I couldn’t see trying to break into what would likely have been a very clique-y situation for the final year of school in either country and was unilingual so Switzerland, the ‘coolest’ choice, didn’t make a lot of sense when I discovered there isn’t really an English-speaking (1st language) part of the country. Remaining in Baton Rouge wasn’t an option from an immigration standpoint (I was in the country on Dad’s visa, not a student visa), so returning to Canada and living with extended family for Gr 12 made the most sense to me at the time. This resulted in me meeting the guy that leads to the major one.

My road not taken that would have had a major impact? Listening to my mother when, 3 days before my wedding (at the absurd and should-be-illegal age of 19) she told me it wasn’t too late to back out, and I said no, things will all work out. Of course, the marriage ended 3 years later for pretty much the same reasons my mom & I were discussing options at that late date, but who can tell a 19-yr-old anything? On the upside of that bad decision, I had to grow up pretty fast when deciding to leave the marriage. I had to put myself and my needs ahead of anyone else (something I still find hard to do, even with practice over the years), buck my family (i.e. the only person in my family that thought I was right was my brother, a paranoid schizophrenic!) and figure out how to live by myself and figure out who, exactly, I was and what I stood for (at least at the time, as that keeps changing). I don’t think I’d have made similar choices for myself had I listened to Mom and canceled the wedding (although I guess I’ll never know now).

Upon reading my answer, I’m thinking the first one may have had a bigger, longer-term impact on my left than the 2nd…

To this day, I can’t figure out what I would do without my boy.

Back in 1989, my father — who worked for the Ontario civil service — went back to work after a two week vacation and, two hours later, returned home to say that he had abruptly quit his job. Truthfully, the job itself and the office politics involved, had been wearing on him for ages, and he had the last straw placed on his back upon his return from his vacation. So, that was it.

For me, this came as a shock. I had not seen it coming. And it set into motion considerable changes to my life, which had been pretty comfortable in the home we owned in downtown Toronto. Now we were going to sell it and take up residence in cheaper Kitchener. I was going to study to be an urban planner, but my school would now be the University of Waterloo rather than U of T or Ryerson. But most of all, I was going to give up my city. I consider that point to be the exact moment when my childhood basically ended.

Well, it wasn’t so bad. That was probably my angsty teenage self speaking. But this feeling, coupled with the natural worries of going through university and facing graduation in the midst of a recession all coalesced into a story that I ended up writing for the Doctor Who fan fiction magazine I was editing at the time. After listening to way too much Enya and Clannad, I wrote a tale about the sadness of days gone by, Celtic twilight and the innocence of youth. It was called “Smaointe (Reflections)” and you can find it online here. It’s not bad, even if I do say so myself, but you should just be warned that my writing then was a lot younger than my writing now.

Well, it was 1994, and I happened to post the story to the Usenet group alt.drwho.creative, where it was read by a young woman doing a work term at the particle accelerator facility at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Impressed by the quality of the fan fiction, and my willingness to use Gaelic in my dialogue, she dropped me an e-mail to thank me for the story, and we got to talking about Doctor Who, and why she was writing me from Switzerland of all places, and we became instant pen pals.

Her name, of course, was Erin Noteboom.

The rest, as the say, is history.

Fate only happens in fairytales.