I was talking with my high school girlfriend about future career ideas and she mentioned one that made me think, “Huh, I never thought about that.” So I decided to read about it at the school library during lunch one day.

I can directly tie my college degree, all the places I’ve lived, most of my friends, half the countries I’ve traveled to, and meeting my spouse all back to that one moment.

I ended up drinking down by the river spot with some friends one sunny summer afternoon. Completely randomly, I remembered I had the number of a boy. He had long blonde hair, was skinny as a rail, and was very into heavy metal, I wasn’t as much. He was also adorable, but I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was unsure of my own feelings at the time of whether I was gay or not, I was only like 21 and he was 19.

I honestly have no idea why it dawned on me to text him. I just thought he was a cool guy and maybe fun to hang out with. We didn’t exactly run in the same social circles, we had a few of the same friends but had actually really never interacted much irl. A few times on last.fm and tumblr.

My friends started leaving and splitting off, and before it got dark, we had drank most of the bottle of fireball he brought and we were kissing and holding each other in the weird pallet / tree house thing above the river.

What’s extra crazy is he was sort of floating between living at a few places and was currently crashing at a mansion of all places, but it was like 20 miles north of the city and he didn’t have a car. He just happened to be in town on that one day, at the right time, that when I texted him, he was able to walk over.

That was 10 years ago. We’re planning on getting married after I finish some home renovations in the next year or so on our beautiful 1890s home (which coincidentally is by that same river).

I had to register for a physical fitness class in college. There were several options, but a friend of mine suggested we take a Tae Kwon Do class. I registered, and he didn’t. He went with ultimate frisbee or something.

In Tae Kwon Do class, another friend introduced me to my now wife. That other friend also dropped the class, and my future wife didn’t have a sparring partner.

If I hadn’t registered for the class…

If my friend had taken it with me and we had been sparring partners…

If the other friend hadn’t dropped the class and had been my wife’s sparring partner…

We ended up hanging out a lot, bonding and talking while also kicking each other.

We also lived in the same off-campus housing. My roommates had wanted to get on-campus housing, but there were no rooms with kitchens left, only dorms by the time we picked. We voted, and I chose the place with the kitchen. If I had picked the dorms…

There were hundreds of other small decisions and weird coincidences, but ultimately we fell in love and have been together for 20 years.

A friend of mine offered me a yoga lessons.

At the time, my body was in a real bad way from decades of skateboard and snowboard injuries. I had just accepted that this was how things were going to be.

I figured what the hell, it can’t make things worse.

Over the course of about six months, I was able to walk, move, and sleep almost like normal. While it couldn’t fix much of the actual damage, my range of motion greatly increased, I have a lot less headaches and neck pain, and the pain in my joints has greatly diminished.

Now at almost 50, I am back on the boards, though since my landing gear is fucked it’s a much more mellow style of riding.

I turned down a job.

It was 2003. I had been working as a programmer in legacy language on an ancient AS/400 system for a year and a half. I had interviewed with another company, working in VB6 which wasn’t great but at least it had some growth. But the pay was only slightly above what I was already making, and I wasn’t keen on VB6 when the web was taking off. I thought I could do better. Fast forward to the bust of 2004, and I’m being laid off from that legacy programming job.

I spend a year applying to every development job I can find, but it’s difficult with a glut of programmers all looking for work. I finally take a tech support job just to get by as I continue looking for a dev job. Little did I know that dev job would never come. I bounced from a few different jobs after that, most being some form of tech support and usually ending in layoffs. I spent 16 years trying to get another dev job before I finally gave up and left IT work altogether. I had to eventually face the fact that my development career died in 2004, all because I turned down a job.

Horse Armor.

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Half the thread is about getting married, so let me balance it out. I used my wife’s laptop because I was too lazy to get mine, and it opened up to her chatlog with her “friend” from work. We’ve been divorced for 5 years!

This took place in the mid-90s.

I had just had a major loss of confidence after finding out my then-GF (also my first… so double whammy) was only with me because I was her “security blanket” while she waited for her childhood friend from three provinces over to get his metaphorical shit together. Found the two of them naked in bed together the very morning after he arrived. So yeah, not in my right mind.

A few weeks later my cousin came visiting from Germany, and had never been in a North American nightclub. So my mom kicked me out of the house to show her the local dives. We had left early, like 2130hrs, because my mom didn’t understand that it was a Wednesday and things didn’t start thumping until at least 2230hrs or even 2330hrs.

We get there, and only two other people were there, a pair of girls celebrating a birthday. They were there completely by accident, they nearly didn’t go because of how early it was. And because I was with a smoking hot girl (objectively yes, even though I had no interest), the two of them felt safe enough to join us for some conversation.

One of them was this homely but absolutely adorkably cute and awkward Chinese girl. We exchanged numbers, me honestly thinking nothing was going to come of it. Decided to do a seven-day wait before I called her, but she beat me to the punch by asking me out for coffee on day four. I didn’t even like coffee! Even now, the stuff tastes like industrial waste unless I add it to my cream and sugar. Of course I said yes.

Nearly three decades later, we are still together. Now granted, my mind was still fucked for a while after. Hell, it took me nearly a decade before I felt safe enough to pop the question. But even in my fucked-up state, she still saw something of worth in me. What it was I cannot imagine, but I thank the absolutely random and statistically extreme series of events that brought us together. She and I would have normally never met, we were in completely different social circles.

TL;DR: met my wife in the most clichéd place imaginable: in a nightclub.

I went left instead of right as a sperm and now my existence is agony.

I went to the doctor because I was having panic attacks. I already knew I had an anxiety disorder, I have since I was a kid, so I assumed I was only going to resume treatment. The doctor just started me back on some meds like usual, but sent me off for some blood tests out of routine.

I don’t want to get specific but, as it turns out, there was a lot more going on. I’d been feeling sick for a long time. It seems ridiculous looking back just how sick I let myself become but never even considered seeing a doctor about it. I had a thousand excuses for why it might be happening but not a big deal, and a thousand more lying to myself that it was normal and I wasn’t sick at all.

I spent the next two years with medical appointments at least twice a week and referred to various specialists. My inner elbow looks like a junkie’s from all the tests. I am still not close to where I used to be, but I’m feeling a lot better these days.

My friend and I decided to learn how to swing dance. We lived kinda far from each other so he chose a dance studio that was more or less in the middle. That dance studio is where I met my husband. We’ve been together 23 years. Still dancing too. :)

At the last minute I decided to go to my 10 year high school reunion with a couple buddies I had stayed in touch with. Ended up running into a lady I’d obviously gone to high school with but never knew super well, some shared classes and band and stuff. Hit it off and here we are now, married for five years.

My older sister’s conception. Led to all our births.

I got myself an old itouch and wanted to run emulators to play mario64. I had no real understanding on how computers worked or anything, but the process of jailbreaking and everything else i had to learn and getting a PC to do it & then installing Linux because Windows would be $60 basically made sure from that age i’d be working IT & computing for the next dacade plus