As I finish up the last of my mini-vacation after finishing my latest semester of schooling (4.0 for the semester!) and just before heading off to work tonight as the summer movie season kicks off, I've been sitting back enjoying pots of Jasmine White and reflecting on the last five years of my life and how change has come good and bad in my life and the changes I've seen seen here on XMarks.

Five years ago when I first joined ( #99!), I remember the joy at discovering a place I could go and learn more about kilts. I was running a little restaurant, working like a fiend and writing murder mysteries and acting in melodramas while I did my best to impede my liver in its ambitions to control my internal organs.

A couple of years go by, the forum grows and expands as does my kilt collection. 2006 rolls around and I'm feeling the effects of massive burnout related to my work and the owner of the place I ran brought his son in to take over and I could see reality staring me in the face. I had to leave. I started out heading up to Oregon and staying with my brother, had several job interviews lined up, was one of three finalists for two of them and when I was up there everything I had been ignoring finally caught up with me. Health issues came to the fore, my years of abuse of various meds (better living through chemistry) came a knocking as well as my depression( due to a chemical imbalance in my body) kicked in with a ferocity I hadn't experienced since I first was diagnosed.

I dropped everything, pulled out of the final interviews, ended my culinary career for good, and after a lot of frustrating phone calls, took up my parents on their invitation to stay with them and go back to school. This was probably the hardest thing for me to do because I've had a rocky relationship with my family for years, from my father unable to grasp the inherited nature of my depression (from his side of the family) to his issues with kilts (his mom is a Douglas ) as well as religious and political disagreements I ended back in New Mexico a half hour from where I had started from and frustrated as hell.

January 2007 and I am commuting to Las Cruces having been readmitted to New Mexico State University pursuing a Secondary Education: Language Arts degree. I walked in 1999 with an Associates of Arts and the only memory I have of that ceremony was not falling off the stage how times have change. I've started to respond to my treatment for depression, thank goddess for my doctor, who has always gone above and beyond when I've had to do my treatments, I've cut back to two drinks a week, my weight is still dropping and to my surprise, my fellow students all believe I've been attending school all along and am not a just returning after years out in the real world.

Now, I'm one year from graduating, I'm writing again, with plans to finish and submit a story at the end of the summer as well as finishing my current story and write a first draft of a screenplay, I'll try and fit a little bit of work in there somewhere as well as a summer session of school.

Through all of this, the support of good people, my girls who use to work for me and now attend school with me! O_O, some of my family, friends from my old stomping grounds, and people I met here on XMarks such as, Glen (GMan), Eunice, David(Freelander), P1M, Mike1, Todd, Hamish, and others (Panache, Dee, McMurdo, Jock, Puffer, ForresterModern, Alan H, etc ) who have made this place a meeting grounds over the years.

We may share an interest in the kilt but in the end it is the people that make this place what it is and no matter what labels we or others apply to our selves, it is what we as people bring to the table that makes this such an enjoyable place. (Yes, even Grant )

Rob :ootd:

Who needs to stop procrastinating and finish two more pages before he heads off to work