Easing into the bathtub of Prosebox in Not-So-Hum-Dingers

Hello again.

I'm still adjusting to having this space to let the words that bounce around in my head out for a little play-time. I feel like it will take some time to let my "fingers-do-the-talking" like they used to do back in the early days of my babbling on the internet. I haven't been the best word-sharing/thought-get-out-of-head-dude for a while now, and let's try and make this new place something of a fresh start.

Let's just get some introductions out of the way. My name is Jake. I am thirty-years-old (I'll be thirty-one on May 22nd), I am married to a beautiful Aussie named Sarah (who I'll most probably refer to as "Sezzie" in these entries) and we have the world's most beautiful and awesome very-nearly-two-year-old daughter named Ashley.

I earn my living as a dishwasher at a restaurant in the town that I grew up in, and the people that I work for and with are like family to me.

Before I was born, some skin cells decided to make their home in the third ventricle of my brain. Those cells formed a big, cottage-cheese-wrapped-in-tissue-paper-like mass right there in pretty-much-the-center-of-my-brain. It grew and grew, a lot like Clark will do in the children's house in the Dr Seuss book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. I can tell you with certainty that my mother did not like my situation one little bit.

Anyway, after twenty years of growing that big ol' lump of garbage it reached critical mass and gave me a very hard time back in the summer of 2003. I had been withdrawn from the University of Connecticut for a few months then and was spending my days working a relatively cushy gig at a Nestle facility (thanks to my dad having worked there since 1974) and I had also been accepted into the Danbury Hospital School of Surgical Technology program.

All of that comfort and a seemingly certain future was ground to a halt when the gigantic malignant-acting-but-technically-benign ball of doom had me projectile vomiting right in the dining area of the restaurant that currently employs me, I went through a whole bunch of brain-related surgery and brain-injury-recovery-therapy starting in July of 2003. My last brain-injuring operation was on December 3rd, 2003. It was a long, terrifying, and obviously life-changing ordeal, but I made it through to become what I call Jake 2.0.

So yeah. Let this be the first "real" entry in my nifty little Prosebox.