How did I get here?

The main reason why I decided to start this blog was to publicly explore the events in my life which have lead up to my participation in what I call my "hobby."  Most of the "good" blogs I've read over the years have included a good but high-level description of major events in the authors' lives.  Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I will attempt to imitate the form, if not the content, of those "good" blogs.

Early Years

I ended up being the eldest and only son produced from the union of my parents, who remained a loving couple until the death of my father (from cancer) when I was 21.  My father and I were the only males in the household, while I had five younger sisters, my mother and her mother, filling out the roster on the female side of the ledger.  The house in which I was raised was the same one in which my mother had lived as a child -- that home has only known our family since it was built just prior to World War II.  This house was in a very blue-collar community just outside the city of Chicago, and our family was similar in size to those in our neighborhood; in that others around us also had around 4-6 kids in a typical "nuclear" family.  While we didn't have a lot of money while growing up, we at least had a wealth of friends and family nearby.

I experienced what, on the face of things, was a normal male upbringing -- pick-up baseball/softball games throughout the spring and summer, pick-up football games during the fall and winter, with cars and trucks to play with during the time inside.  Riding bikes with friends and assisting my father in the multiple and myriad household repairs/improvements rounded out where most of my time as a youth was spent.  Sports was a major form of recreation most of the time, and I was one of the best players in the neighborhood.  One of the other better athletes in the neighborhood was the girl across the street (whom I will call "Anne" but was not her real name), who I had originally befriended at school several years prior to her family moving there.

While I believe that being raised with nearly only females in the house (even the pets) explains my deeply-ingrained respect for women in general, I feel that my friendship with "Anne" was the beginning of the emergence of Arianwen.  "Anne" and I would spend Saturday afternoons together watching her younger siblings while her parents were out for the afternoon (work, errands, etc.).  Every once in a while, there would be short periods of time where we would be at her home while everyone else was away, and it was at these points in time where we explored another dimension of our friendship (only in a very PG-13 kind of way).  Multiple times when we were leaving her house, we would have to check to make sure that none of her other girl friends would see us together (the time frame here is roughly 10 years-old).  More than once, "Anne" would comment along the lines that, "we wouldn't have to sneak out like this if you were a girl."

Several years afterwards, another formative event in Arianwen's development was a typical event in a teenage boys life.  During an unstructured gym class period, I was whispered in by one of my classmates to the boys' locker room to check out something, "you have to see."  The spectacle in question was a skin magazine someone had smuggled in, and prominently displayed in this magazine were nude pictures of a woman who had the external genitalia of both male and female.  This event was probably the first of countless others since then where my internal response was atypical from the male stereotype -- while most of the other boys who viewed those pictures thought about mating with her, I was thinking more along the lines of being like her.  Even to this day, I will often see a good-looking woman and want to "be" her more than "do" her.