Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Current mood: amused

Last year a family friend asked me for my bio. They didn’t know I was into bondage so I had to come up with a bio that completely omits the main thread of my life. I also had to pretend that I don’t have two life partners instead of one. I came across the “expurgated” bio again this morning and thought I’d show y’all a copy of it:

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I was born in Michigan in 1963. I was the daughter of two teachers (Philosophy, English). Growing up I was heavily into the arts, spending a lot of time in orchestra, chorus, sculpture, etc. I went to college and majored in Music Composition for two years. (My primary instrument was violin.) I decided I didn’t have enough talent to be a composer so I abandoned that major. I finished up a different university with an interdisciplinary humanities Bachelor’s.

Michigan had a depressed economy at the time. I held various jobs such as carnival barker, wedding reception quartet, factory assembly worker, rental agent, bookkeeper. I got a chance to go to California to do magazine editing and video production, so I moved. After the internet became popular, I taught myself HTML (website building) and began designing and running websites.

Here in California I met and married my husband Eric. He used to be a history teacher.

Recent years were mostly taken up with my family’s crisis when my niece was kidnapped. She was gone for nine months before we located her, went to Greece and recovered her. Most of the Lilac Lane website grew up out of those events, and in a lot of ways LilacLane.com serves as an organic biography of my experiences:

http://www.lilaclane.com
Emotional Abuse: I put this site together because my sister was terrorized by her ex-husband.
The Left-Behind Parent: I made this site to help other people deal with it when their children are kidnapped.
Missing Child Tessie: While Tessie was missing, this was a very large website, but after we got her back I changed the site to just one page.
Stalking site: I was a victim of stalking when I was in college, and my sister was later stalked too, so I made this site.
Alex’s Funny Bone: We’re childless, so I made a website about my dog. :)

I guess my most important work is the Emotional Abuse website, which had 330,000 visitors last year. Sadly, many of the people visiting the site are teenagers who are being verbally abused by their parents.

Currently my husband and I live in the San Fernando Valley. We’re both self-employed so we work 7 days a week. We have two little dogs that we take to the park for walkies whenever we can. I’m now 42.