So, let me get most of the basics out of the way before I forget and take off on an inescapable tangent. I'm a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, majoring in Arts & Technology. My previous major was Astronomy, but when I failed calculus because of a physical inability to read the book I decided to cave into peer and family pressure and embraced my artistic side. That physical inability lead to two eye surgeries over the following year...giving me a life total of seven eye surgeries. After a bit of shuffling, I now have college credit from four separate universities as well as my high school transcript and AP credit...and I'm only just starting my fourth year of college.
A major motivator for me in recent years is the fact that I'm bisexual and transgendered. Meaning I'm attracted to people regardless of their gender or lack thereof (bisexual) and I will eventually undergo a sex change operation. Yes, you read that right, I'm going to transition from male to female. It took me until college to come out of the closet, even to my (now ex) fiancee, so allowing it to motivate me much before the last few years was very difficult.
I view all humans as implicitly and explicitly equal. While I might have had these views regardless of my upbringing (because I'm transgendered), they were greatly compounded by the fact that I was raised by a single mother - my parents divorced when I was two - and from watching Star Trek. I've watched Star Trek for as long as I can remember. I play the Star Trek Online MMORPG** computer game, I've seen every one of the 720-odd episodes across 6 series at least a few times, and I own every movie. I've even spoken face-to-face with George Takei (who portrayed one of the main characters in the original series) about LGBTQIA rights, as he is coincidentally a human rights activist, being both gay and a Japan-American that was held in a US internment camp during World War II as a child. Star Trek prime message, above all else, has always been that of equality, the sanctity of culture and knowledge, and the pursuit of peace.Through all of my life I have been a proud nerd. If that's not made obvious by my majors or uber-Trekkie status, or fact that I'm typing this on my top-of-the-line computer that I custom-built myself then I don't know what proves it. You could also prove it from looking around my room - there are Academic Decathlon awards from high school, my UTD Pep Band uniform, spare computers, a glow-in-the-dark solar system suspended across the ceiling, framed SAT scores...I could go on forever. Heck, I even won a scholarship to a computer programming summer camp in fourth grade for writing an essay about how I'd invent robots and accompanying software to help my (not yet remarried) mom around the house.
As it stands now, my mother did eventually re-marry, and I have three little siblings that are honestly the most precious souls in my life. Joseph, Libby and Caroline are 10, 9, and 8-years-old and while I'm 21 and have a totally different father (who is also now remarried) I love them and cherish them all the same, perhaps even more.
*LGBTQIA = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer/Questioning, Intersexed, and Allies. This is often written as LGBT, GLBT, or simply "the gay community"
**MMORPG = Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game
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Those seven eye surgeries have done a lot to affect the way I look at the world, both literally and metaphorically. My first surgeries were shortly after I turned 3. They had found cataracts in my eyes and cut my eyes open to remove my natural lenses. After those surgeries were done, I had another to fix my left eye after it started going lazy. For the next several years I had 20/2000 vision when I wasn't wearing my super-thick new glasses. Then, in fourth grade, I received artificial lens implants that greatly improved my vision and my my glasses (once I finally conceded to start wearing them again in 7th grade) "normal people" sized. What happened to my eyes in college was that my by-then 10-year-old implants had slowly slipped down to the point that I was seeing through them almost sideways. Once they were replaced I could see like new again. I see things very different from most people in a physical sense now because of my struggles with vision, but my eyes aside I feel that the experiences have been greatly beneficial to myself as a person. I don't get freaked out about the little things or even the big things. If I'm late for class, c'est la vie...if my car is totaled, well there's no escaping it now, so why worry? It may be too laid back for some, but this attitude in life has done me well and pulled me into positions like peer mediator in elementary school, ski instructor when still in middle school, and so on.
