My trip down Literacy Lane

There have been times in a person’s life where they were dead set on doing one thing for the rest of their life, but then they push it aside to do something completely different. Have you ever felt like that? Well in the case of Literacy, that’s how I felt. When I was younger, my whole life was set on becoming a great musician, or a storywriter. Then I was introduced to the intricate world of technology, and I haven’t turned back.

My road down Literacy Lane, as was everyone else’s, started when I was a toddler. The mother figures in my life, my grandmother especially, figured from birth that I was destined for great things. It was evident to them when I started reading my first children’s book at around four years old. In kindergarten, I was always the first person to raise my hand to answer a question. It impressed a lot of teachers that had me as a student. I would write some scribbles on paper and show them to my mom saying, “Look, mommy! I wrote a book!” At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but people kept telling my mom I was very literate at a young age. A lot of women in my life think they know these things about me.

Turns out they were right, just not in the way they thought. When I got a little older, I was introduced to what was known as Super Mario Bros., the video game that probably did a 180^o on my life. At the time I was so interested in the game I almost couldn’t put it down. Then I went to my Uncle Richard’s house and he let me play some games on his computer. It was then that I was inspired to get a computer of my own. Unfortunately for my mother I took it apart one time and she hasn’t been able to put it back together since.

During my middle school years I decided I wanted to get into music for a while. I looked around through different instruments before I found the drums as my favorite instrument. I still remember going through a music store one day. The store had a drums set display put up for people to play on. I went up and played something I had in my head. I must’ve been good because I was so into it, the next thing I knew I had a crowd around me who were listening to me playing. When I was done, I had an applause waiting for me. I played along and bowed to them. I’ll never forget that day. Though I didn’t really go into music for a long time, I’m still playing the drums every time I play Rock Band or Guitar Hero. ^_^

Then when I got to high school I was so interested in computers it almost got me expelled from school. I won’t go into details as it is too embarrassing to talk about, and because of it I stayed away from computers for a while. I wanted to figure out how the people who made computers were able to design it to make it so addictive to kids. Then I found a book about designing and repairing computers. I thought I could go into something like that since I was good with computers, but I realized it was a whole bunch of stuff I couldn’t understand at the time to worry about it then.

Then I figured I could get a job being a video game designer. I was already really good at playing video games all my life, so I thought “Why not make a living out of playing video games?” My parents didn’t really approve of my decision after all the things that happened in my life to just drop it all to do this. However, they did accept the fact that this was what I wanted to do, and they said they would help me any way they could.

Now, in the present time. I am still reading books and writing stuff; just instead of history books and English papers, it’s more manga/graphic novels and video game plots. As I was going into video games, I got most of my inspiration from different anime and manga that I watch and read. That’s why I have a huge collection of Shonen Jump^© and GameInformer^© Magazines in my room.