Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Harem, pt 1

I think I'm going to abandon all pretense of secrecy. I find it confusing to keep using pronouns; and I don't want to start using alternate names. That would only serve to confuse me more. I don't think anyone besides those who already know me will actually read this journal. So I will just resume using people's names. I will, however, do them the courtesy of withholding their last names. If however, you wish me to keep your name secret, drop me a line and I will do so.

My family teases me that I have my own harem. It seems that everytime I have a friend over, it turns out to be a girl. That isn't really the case. I have had guy friends over in the past. But those are mostly my gaming buddies, and we usually head straight downstairs to play our games, and they don't stick around to meet my folks.

I've always gotten along better with girls than with guys. I just feel more comforable around them. So I would end up bringing more girls home with me. Why? You may end up saying that I'm a player. But I believe it stems from my personal insecurities.

In my experience, in a group of guys, there is always a level of competition. It is never spoken of, but it is always felt. It's a competition to determine who is the most masculine. Who is the smartest. The funniest. The strongest. And of course the one with the most sexual prowess or experience. I don't know if this unspoken competition happens in girls' circles, but it definitely is there whenever there is a group of guys.

Many times I feel that I come up short. My chosen event for the contest that occurs at our Game Night is the humor category. And it's a stiff competition because those guys are hysterical. Throughout the evening, you can hear frequent explosions of uproarious laughter. Many nights on the drive home I feel as though I lost because they told funnier jokes than I did. Many times during the night I'll say something that I think is funny, but everyone else looks at me like I'm the stupidest person. One or two guys will politely smile, but that's hardly a consolation prize. Other times I will just not be heard. That's equally humiliating.

It's not that I'm unfunny. I've told some major doozies that have floored the competition. But most of the time the victory goes to someone else, and I am reminded of my inadequacies.

When I'm with a girl or girls, I don't feel the competition. There is no pressure because I am not competing with them. I feel that I can be myself around them. And if they don't like who I am, well then, I'll just go talk to someone else.

The first girl that I can remember that really made me appreciate girls was Wendy. I'm sure my sister will bring up Missy, but it was Wendy who was more influential. We were in first grade together. She sat a couple rows behind me and to the left. She had red hair. (Yes, Charlie Brown, the Little Red Haired Girl.) I remember I had drawn something, and for some reason I turned to her and showed it to her. She said she liked it and then she smiled at me. It was the brightest smile. That smile has stayed with me my entire life. I don't remember having much contact with her during the year, but every once in a while I would turn and show her a drawing I had done or a good grade I received. She would smile at me.

It's hard to tell how I felt at the time, but Wendy left a lasting impression. The kind that influences what I would look for in a girlfriend when the time came that I actually cared about that.

I didn't have many crushes growing up. I remember being a huge fan of Aileen Quinn, the girl who played Annie in the Annie movie. I absolutely adored her and would listen to the LP soundtrack all the time. When Debbie Gibson entered the music scene, I developed a huge crush on her. It was so bad that I would go into newsstands and pharmacies to buy magazines like Tiger Beat and Teen Beat because they were the only ones that had pictures of her. I always felt completely embarrassed and never made eye contact with the clerk.

There were some girls that lived around here, but I was never attracted to any of them. We were playmates and friends, but nothing else. When I went to private school in junior high, there was only one girl who I was attracted to. Her name was Oriana and she was beautiful, but I was never that invested in her. I met her occasionally after junior high when our different youth groups would meet for weekend retreats.

Megan was my first real crush. I say real because she was a real person I knew, not some celebrity I saw in a music video or a magazine clipping. She went to my youth group and later to the same high school. She was the definition of the word "sweet". From her smile to her eyes to her voice to her personality. I just always found myself drawn to her. Many times my head would feel like it was spinning and my heart would be in my throat.

We were really good friends and got to spend a lot of time together because we were both heavily involved in the youth group. But I was always delegated to the "friend territory". Not that I had any clue that that was a bad thing. My strategy was to use patience. Seeing as how I didn't know the first thing about asking a girl out, I decided that I would become really close friends with her. Then after she had gone through several broken relationships with guys who turned out to be assholes, she would decide to go out with me and then we would live happily ever after, or something to that effect. You know, that age-old story.

While I was a senior and she was a junior, we would pass each other in the hallway between classes. As we were passing, she would hand me a hand-written, carefully folded note. She never wrote anything deep. Just stuff like "I'm tired because I didn't get much sleep last night. I'm taking a test next period. My foot is killing me today." Mundane stuff. She never poured her heart out to me. But you know what? I didn't care. I saved each and every one of those notes.

We went to the same prom, but not together. I had already graduated, and it was her senior prom, but not at our own high school. My sister had set me up with her friend's cousin, Amy. Megan was there with another guy from our youth group, someone I found hyperactively annoying. I never went to my own prom. I wound up going to Amy's because I wanted to get some experience with a girl in a romantic setting, but mostly due to pressure from my sister and mother. Poor Amy. I hardly spent any time with her. We danced a few times, but I was a complete lump, for lack of a better term. I had never been in that type of setting before, and I didn't know how to talk to girls. I don't think we really liked each other. There was no animosity, but I would've been fine not to go, and she would've been fine to have gone stag. We never saw each other after that night.

The entire night I was thinking about Megan. I was hoping that I could have a dance with her. I talked to her quite a bit, but never got up the nerve to ask for a dance. Besides, I was already there with a "date". I knew that it would have been a completely stupid thing to do, to dance with someone else, regardless of whether or not there was any attraction between my Amy and me. When the final dance came, I knew I had missed my shot. I knew that the nice thing to do would be to dance with Amy one last time.

I barely saw Megan at all after high school. She ended up dating Simon, a kid who would bully me in Boys Brigade, the church equivalent of the Boy Scouts. She married someone else. I was going to go to her wedding, but I missed it. I though it was at 11am (Aren't they all?). Turned out to be at 10am. As I got to the church, everyone was filing out, so I ended up not going.

I see Megan every once in a while. She comes into the store and says hi. We strike up a casual conversation. Let me tell you, whenever that happens my old crush for her come right back! My head starts spinning and my heart jumps up into my throat.

Megan was a crush. Melissa is the one I would say I fell in love with. We worked together at the store. It started on Halloween of all times. I was wearing my "Floor of a Movie Theatre" costume, and she was wearing some kind of faux-Medeival dress, like a lady of the court. It looked kind of like a Snow White dress. When I saw her in that outfit, that's when I fell. Up till that point I just thought she was kinda pretty, nice to look at with a pleasant personality. But right then and there, she looked absolutely beautiful. It's weird how that happens.

After that I definitely spent more time around her. Struck up more conversations. I would make up excuses just to talk to her. She worked at the front of the store while I worked in the back. I would walk up and tell her that I was going to lunch, or that I was back from lunch. She didn't need to know that and would always give me a quizzical look. But I just wanted to spend a little bit of time with her. And everytime I saw her, she somehow became more and more beautiful.

Even if she wasn't already seeing someone, I probably wouldn't have developed the nerve to ask her out. Up to that point, my confidence was high enough that I was able to ask out two other girls, both of whom said no. But with Melissa, I would have been too nervous.

She ended up leaving the store to get married. And I actually went to her wedding. That's not the sad part. The sad part is that the man that she married shared the same name as me. It was bad enough seeing her up at the altar, but to hear her say her vows was absolute torture.

"I, Melissa, take you, Justin..."

It felt like I had just been shot in the chest.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Pew Sitting

I am extremely grateful to my parents that they brought me up in the church. Christianity has been so deeply ingrained in me that it has become part of who I am. I grew up going to Sunday School and Children's Church and then to youth group. I was taught about Adam & Eve, Noah, Moses, Jonah and Jesus and His disciples from such an early age that I can't remember a time that I didn't believe.

I've lived in the same town all my life. So it's only natural that my family brought me to the same church every Sunday. I remember when it was just a small brick building situated behind the Howard Johnson's hotel next to the highway. I was there when it grew an extension, complete with a great huge sanctuary with comfortable pews and a new parking lot to accomodate all the cars. Back then it was so modern. Now the church seems so small. The equipment outdated and the parking lot old and cracked.

I grew up in that church. It was such an important part of my youth. But I can never go back there again.

Sure, I can walk through the doors. I go to every Easter and Christmas Eve service. But as far as attending, I can't do it. I have a hard time just sitting through one service. I have a hard time pinpointing why I can no longer go there. There seems to be multiple reasons, but I can't decide if one reason outweighs the others.

One reason I don't want to go back is because of the church itself. I don't really like the atmosphere. It isn't very warm and friendly. I'm talking about the congregation. I grew up there, but there're very few people that I actually remember. And I only show up twice a year. You'd think people would come up to me and shake my hand and ask me if this was my first time attending this church. It's only happened once or twice.

I'm also not a fan of the pastor's style of preaching. Don't get me wrong, I've spoken to him on numerous occasions, and he's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. He's someone I would trust. However, I find his sermons completely boring. I find sermons hard to listen to in the first place, but his tend to put me to sleep. (Not really. I'm polite enough to stay awake. Besides, my snoring would cause a problem.) His style totally reminds me of a children's Sunday School class. His speech is very soft. Very.....nice. No passion behind what he's preaching. I don't know about you, but I like some fire in the sermons. I love it when the preacher occasionally yells, when he comes down into the congregation. I want some passion and excitement.

Another reason was due to personal shame. This was the biggest reason for a while, but isn't so much of a problem anymore. I'm thirty-five years old, single and still live at home with my parents. And I work in retail. Whenever I attended a service, I would always dread one question. "Where do you work now?" I cannot decribe the shame I felt when I answered that evil question. It was always a painful reminder that I did not have a career, I did not have a family, and I was not living on my own. When the service was over, I always tried to duck out the door as quickly as possible. It didn't always work.

Thankfully, now I can tell them that I am a manager now, at least.

Several years ago the church organized a Men's Retreat where the men in the church would go and spend a weekend at a nearby Christian center. This was after I had stopped attending that church. But my mother insisted that I go. I didn't have to pay for it. She wanted me to get out of the basement where I usually spent my weekends. Sometimes I think she thought I had turned my back on God, and this was going to help me get back on track. I didn't want to go, but I thought at least they have volleyball games there and a really nice indoor swimming pool. So reluctantly I went with my father.

That was a mistake. When I got there, I really didn't want to be there. Everyone there was older than me and married. Most had kids, some had grandkids. As soon as I got there, my personal barriers came right up. Remember that scene in the movie Wargames when that huge door locked up? That's what I was like the entire weekend. And everyone knew it. I barely spoke to anyone. Every once in a while someone would try to engage me in conversation in an effort to bring me out of my shell. But it never worked. I wasn't using a shell. I had titanium armor. My language skills had degenerated into sentence that consisted of up to two words. The room that I slept in had enough beds for three people. I was by myself in there.

I was completely alone for the entire weekend. At one point I found a phone and called long-distance, at the expense of the center, to my girlfriend. I couldn't get a hold of her. There was no volleyball and no pool games. By the end I felt terribly guilty because it had been a complete waste of money for me to be there. And I could tell that my father was upset and embarrassed because of me. After we got home, I gave him the money for the weekend. He tried to refuse, but I insisted. If it was going to be a waste of money, it was going to be my own. It was my way of apologizing for being such a sourpuss.

Another reason I can never go back to that church is because it's in the past. It is no longer a part of me, so I can't be a part of it. To go back it feels like I would be taking a step back. Like I would be insulting myself.

I used to work at a pizza restaurant that is right next door to the store where I work now. I worked there for over four years. One year when I was working at the store, I decided that it would be a good idea to re-apply at the pizza place. I had plenty of experience so they wouldn't have to do any real training. I could work maybe ten, fifteen hours a week and get a little extra cash for the Christmas season. They probably would've hired me right on the spot.

But the second I picked up that application, I realized I couldn't do it. All the memories of working there came flooding back. Not bad memories, per se. It had to do with what they meant. I knew I would have to wear the black pants and green polo shirt. I would have to come home smelling like pizza sauce. I would have to pull pizzas from the oven and box them up to be delivered. I would have to go out back to the walk-in to get more lettuce for the salads. I couldn't do it. For me to go back to working there again, it would have been the greatest insult I could do to myself.

It's for this same reason that I can't go back to my family's church. I have moved on. It is no longer a part of me.

After high school, my two best friends and I started going to a Pentecostal church right around the corner from where I live. I'd never been in there before. But I was completely blown away by the passion in the pastor's sermons. Here was someone who loved God and wasn't afraid to show it, to let it out. We started attending regularly and ended up meeting some powerful Christians who became very influential in each of our lives. I learned more in that church than I had ever learned in my parents' church.

However, I was never completely comfortable in that church. While I found a spiritual vigor that I had never before experienced, I did not like their worship style. You see, I grew up in a baptist church where the most passion that was ever displayed was the occasional exclamations of "Amen!" or "Hallelujah!" Then to be in the midst of a Pentecostal worship service was a jarring experience, what with all the clapping, moaning, dancing and speaking in tongues. There were times that it got so intense that I had to leave the service altogether. While I will probably never go back to that church (for reasons that will be given at another time), I have great respect for it and for the preaching that went on in there.

Every once in a while I would try other churches around town, just to see what they had to offer. I tried a congregational church just down the road from our house. It was too dull for me. I tried another baptist church about half a mile away. That was interesting. It turned out to be a liberal church, very non-offensive. The reverend was a woman (a first for me) and her sermon was about recycling. My brother brought me to a mega-church about thirty minutes to the south a couple times. During one of the small groups (which wasn't that small), we watched a couple clips from The Truman Show.

There was one baptist church near the town line that I attended for about a month. It was nice. It reminded me of a smaller version of my parents' church. The pastor showed a sense of humor in his sermons. I liked it. Until they started reciting the Lord's Prayer every week. That is a definite turn-off for me. I can't stand it. I've got nothing against the Prayer itself. It came from Jesus Himself. It acts as a guide for how we should pray. It is a very powerful passage of Scripture. But when it is recited in church every week, it sounds extremely monotonous and robotic, and it loses its power.

After leaving for college, I all but stopped attending any churches. There was a congregational church on the corner, one that dated back before the Declaration of Independence. But I had the same problem that I had with the previous congregational church. Too dull. I no longer had any contact with my best friends, so I couldn't lean on them for support.

After college, I rarely attended church. My mother tried to get me back into going to her church, but to no avail. I wanted to go back to church. My spiritual life was in the dumps and I knew I had to get it back on track. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. I made numerous attempts. I prayed about it. But I no longer cared enough.

It wasn't until one of my best friends returned home after his marriage crumbled that I found the means to return to church. He needed a new church for him and his children to attend in an effort to rebuild their lives. It turned out to be the same baptist church on the town line that I had tried all those years earlier. He invited me to come along, and I readily agreed. It was a different place from when I first attended. There was a new pastor and they no longer ecited the Lord's Prayer. It was old-fashioned, but trying to update itself with new technologies and current worship styles.

I was hesitant at first until I had an epiphany. Over the years of not attending church, I had put up defenses to protect myself from socializing, especially from answering he dreaded question, "Where do you work?" But I realized that I needed to take the next step. A lot of the church members had come up to me, shook my hand and welcomed me, but I was on the defensive. The solution was incredibly simple: Learn people's names. If I was going to attend this church, I was going to have to get to know these people, and it started with learning their names.

I like this church. While I do have some only-wishes, phrases that start with "I only wish", I like the people and the style of worship. Plus, it fits into my work schedule. And as an added bonus, they are planning a missions trip to Morocco, which I am absolutely thrilled about! Last Sunday, I gave my first tithe ever. I got my stimulus check in the mail, and I was so grateful to God for it, that I gave Him ten percent of it.

I'm still undecided if I want to become a full-fledged member of the church, mainly due to the only-wishes I have. But I see myself staying there for a long time.

Komodo Jazz

Friday, August 8, 2008

About "Komodo Jazz"

Every once in a while, when someone sees my screen name, he/she asks me what "Komodo Jazz" means. I usually give them the short version of where I came up with that name.But in order to fully explain it, I'm going to have to start at the beginning.

I'm a visually-oriented person. Always have been. While some people are musically- or intellectually-inclined, I like to look at things. I appreciate things that are visually interesting. Not just beautiful things, but also grotesque or even ugly things. After all, I found the movie Silent Hill to be visually beautiful, even though the imagery was disturbing. One of my favorite places to visit is The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The fact that I can get in for free helps, too.

I've been drawing as long as I can remember. Sure, every little child draws, but I never stopped. I think the earliest memory of me drawing is of me bringing a crayon round and round in a circle for about a minute. I didn't set out to draw anything specific, but when I was done, it looked like the top view of a bird's nest, and I proudly told my grandmother that was what it was. I started drawing people. I don't really recall drawing objects like houses or cars or the like. But I did draw people quite a bit. They consisted of just a circle with a face, maybe some hair, and a pair of stick legs and arms.

My biggest achievement around that time still hangs on the wall to this day. We were sitting in church one Sunday, and my sister and I were both doing what young children do best during a service, not paying an ounce of attention to what the preacher was saying. Instead, we were drawing. She ended up drawing two little girls, one taller than the other and wearing a wreath of flowers on her head. I think she said they were characters from Little House on the Prairie. I could be wrong; she'll probably correct me later on. It was actually really good, and I'm still impressed by it.

I drew a king. He was wearing a simple crown and a green suit. What's impressive is that he had a full body with arms, legs, hands and feet. I had given him mass. Up till then, I had only been drawing heads with stick arms and legs. Then to do something like that is amazing, especially for a four-year-old. (I think I was four. I could be wrong.) Our mother was so impressed by our drawings that she saved them and hung them on the living room wall.

I remember drawing a lot back then. I would draw dragons that were just creatures with fins on their heads. I created a superhero named Zoom Man. I don't remember what his superpower was, just that he could defeat anything that my brother drew. "Zoom Man can kill your dinosaur!"

Sometime between 1984 and 1987, I stopped drawing. I think it was because I was always hanging out with my friend Kevin. We were obsessed with the movie Red Dawn, and we would always pretend that we were part of the Wolverines and would go around killing Russians. After elementary school I went to a private Christian school and he continued in a public junior high school. We didn't hang around as much. I became a super-religious young teenager (not a good combination) and ended up condemning him for his sinful ways.

In 1987, while in attending junior high school, I rediscovered drawing and tackled it with a vengeance. I drew all the time. Mostly I drew in various themes. I started out drawing dragons. One particular dragon stands out in my memory. I drew it out of anger at my mother. She was the dragon burning the landscape with her fire, and I was a little knight trying to fight her. I still have that drawing. Another theme I used was dragonized versions of actual animals such as turtles, octopi and T-rexes.

My next theme was probably the most important. It happened when Rambo was a big craze. I would make parodies such as Rambo Brite, Bambo and Hambo. They would be decked out in machine guns, grenades, knives and rocket lauchers. Then I drew a dinosaur that similarly equipped. He had helmet sorta like a triceratops, a tattoo of an anchor on his shoulder and a throwing star dangling from his helmet. I named him Dragonfire. I thought he was so cool that I made more like him, all with a different helmet, a different function (arctic, mountain, heavy-weapons, etc.) and bearing a name that started with "Dragon-". Dragonsnow. Dragonstone. Dragonshot. Over the years, Dragonfire has gone through many makeovers. The picture above is what he looks like today.

Before I knew it, I was creating a backstory for these creatures. They were aliens come to Earth two fight an evil army of aliens called SLASH. I had to draw what the villains looked like. They came in different sizes, but mainly the same shape: dragon-like. There was Cicada, R.I.P., Empirian, Gom, Icon and Blade to name a few. But there was one that really stuck out, really struck a chord with me. He was inspired by the book Into the Out Of by Alan Dean Foster. He was a gargoyle-like creature with dark blue skin, a V-shaped head and enormous black spikes on his elbows on his elbows and knees. When I finished drawing him, I needed a name. "Komodo" was the first that came to mind.

I began drawing him as much as I drew Dragonfire. It wasn't until years later that I came to the realization that Dragonfire and Komodo were actually self-portraits. They didn't look anything like me, but they represented two sides of me. Dragonfire was the noble side that strove to fight for good and just wanted to be a good person. Komodo represented all my anger that I felt inside. Not the kind that would kill people; Komodo had actually become a good guy. His was the kind of anger that could lash out at people who were trying to hurt me.

Because he was so cool looking and I liked him so much, I started using him as screen names. Unfortunately, "Komodo" is a pretty common screen name, so I would have to settle for Komodo284. I couldn't do that, so I used his alien birth name, K'Mroda. That became my e-mail address for a long time: kmroda@-------.com. But I was never completely satisfied with that. I wanted to use "Komodo" as a screen name, but I didn't want a number at the end. I needed something original.

My initials are J. A. S. When I was little, I remember wishing that my last name started with a Z because "JAZ" sounds a lot cooler than "JAS". I decided to do something about it. When I restarted my drawing abilities in 1987, I would sign my artwork JAZ '87 (or whatever year it happened to be). My parents started calling me Jaz. It lasted all the way through high school. I stopped using it as much in college. I still use it occasionally, mostly in video games and when carving my signature into rubber stamps. Every once in a while I will hear one of my parents or a friend call me Jaz, but mainly I've let it die down.

But when coming up with my screen name, I decided to use Jaz, another part of my identity. So I tacked it on to the end and gave it that extra z, because Komodo Jaz just looks odd. Komodo Jazz gives it a certain level of coolness.

So that's the story of how I came up with my screen name. I also have others I will sometimes use. Roedt Beist. Stinju. K-Jazz. But generally I stick with Komodo Jazz.

Komodo Jazz

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

In the Beginning...

I find blogs to be curious things. They seem to be contradictory. They are diaries. Yet the writer wants other people to read them. They want to reavel their innermost thoughts, but they only go so far because there is always something or other that the writer doesn't want the reader to know about him/her. So you never get to know what is really going on in the writer's mind. Not through blogs, anyway. I suppose it also depends on the level of the blogger's honesty. How much he really cares about what people of him.
Why do they call it a blog, anyway? I guess it's short for web log. But blogs are just journals. Or memoirs. Or diaries. Why don't they just call it an on-line journal? A letter sent over the internet is called e-mail. Why don't they call it an e-journal or e-memoir? Maybe because he word diary sounds a little girly. Maybe because journal sounds like a requirement in English class. And a memoir is what a stuffy British author writes. Does blog sound cooler? More hip? I dunno. Whatever.
On that note, I decided to start my own e-journal. Just to see where it takes me. I've tried keeping journals before. Once in book form, once on-line. They didn't last very long. I turn introspective once in a while, and I feel the need to write down my thoughts. Then once I get that out of my system, I no longer feel introspective and stop writing. So we'll see how long this lasts.
But maybe this one will last longer. My sister and a friend of mine from Game Night keep journals through blogspot.com, and they are what inspired me to start my own journal.
However, I have an internal dilemma going on about this because of what I said before in the first paragraph. Because this is an on-line journal, one which many people can freely read, namely my family, I can't reveal everything that is going on in my head. Some of the things that I am thinking can't be posted here due to their immoral nature. And yet, I desperately want to express these thoughts. Therein lies the dilemma and why I find blogs to be strange things.

I don't consider myself to be a very good writer. I don't think I'm bad. Just not that good. I wrote a few short stories in high school and college that earned A grades. But those were short stories. I could never write a novel.
One of my problems is that I'm not very verbose. I don't speak a lot. Neither do I write a lot. And I'm talking about length-wise. Whereas many people I know can monologue for ten minutes about something such as how to talk to your boss, I will say the exact same thing in one minute. I get to the point and say it. It carries over into my writing-style, as well. I read books in which the author goes into all this glorious detail and beautiful dialogue. But when I try to write, it ends up being bone-dry. No meat to make what I write enjoyable to read. Which is why I'm better at writing short stories, not actual novels.
I believe it stems from the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don't like it when someone talks for more than five minutes. It's terrible in church. After a while I start zoning out. In order to keep from falling asleep I'll start thumbing through the Bible or fiddling with my fingers or doodling in the church bulletin. After about five minutes I start to drift or get bored with the person. I don't ever want to do that to someone else. I don't want to talk for so long that I lose their interest in what I'm saying. So I just get to the point and say what it is I have to say.
I'll admit that I'm not always okay with this. There are times I wish I could talk more. My girlfriends have always been big talkers. They could talk for extended periods of time. And I would just sit there listening patiently, and sometimes inwardly impatiently, occasionally offering one or two sentence contribution to a rather one-sided conversation. And when I finally did have something substantial to add to a subject, she would always interrupt with her thoughts on what I decided to finally speak up about. And I, being the quiet gentleman that I am, would always let her continue with her interruption.
I think a major contributing factor to my short conversational skills comes from my early childhood. Just ask my mother how much of a talker I was. Which was not at all. I hardly ever spoke. In fact, I vehemently refused to utter a word. It didn't get much better as I grew up.
When my sister, four years my elder, was in junior high school, her yearbook named her the Quietest. She hardly ever spoke up in school. But when she was at home it was a different story. She would cut loose and talk our ears off. She was infamous at the dinner table, hardly letting the rest of us get a word in edge-wise.
But you know what? I didn't mind one bit. I never complained. Unless my parents started to, then I would join in just to razz on my sister because that's what little brothers do. I never complained because the more she talked, the less I had to.

I know, I seem to be contradicting myself here. I say that I don't talk a lot or write a lot. And yet this turned out to be a lengthy journal entry. But this always happens. My first entry in all my journals have been long. It happens whenever I become introspective and have a lot on my mind. So future entries will probably be not as long. We'll see.