Hi. My name is Sarah, and this is my website. It means monkeypig in Spanish. I am the pig. You don't want to run into me in a dark alley.

This chronicle of the quotidian was born in 2002 with the help of a soul-draining post-college temp job and a half-assed desire to learn HTML. If I were granted the ability to go back in time and change one thing, it probably wouldn't be anything noble like saving a puppy from the oncoming traffic or not getting all those perms in the late eighties; it would be to install some goddamned publishing software at the beginning so I wouldn't be stuck manually updating every page each time I want to make a change. I have design issues.

At first this website didn't mean much more to me than an extended lunch break and a monthly payment to Tripod (I KNOW), but over the years it has become a surprisingly meaningful part of my life, in that it has given me a creative outlet while also providing me with a medium to connect with many smart, talented and otherwise amazing people whom I now consider my friends. If it sounds like I've been drinking, I haven't; I'm just really happy about the Internet right now.

Now that you're embarrassed for me, let me tell you a little about myself. I grew up in Elyria, Ohio, just west of Cleveland, turn right at the conservative voters and stop before the lake. I found this picture on the city website, and I think it pretty much sums up everything you need to know about my hometown:



I also lived in Avon Lake, Ohio, where there were numerous in-home tanning beds and plenty of Jeep Grand Cherokees in the student parking lot. Avon Lake's town postcard would not look like it stepped out of a circus tent and then did a bunch of acid.

As an undergrad, I studied French at Bowling Green State University, which provided me the opportunity to spend a year in Tours, France. It also provided me the opportunity to spend one of the most traumatizing semesters of my life student teaching in a junior high school, where I was once forced to dance at a "hoe-down" with one of my students. I pretty much cried non-stop during that period of my life.

In the summer of 2001, my partner in crime, Jason, and I moved to Chicago, where we both enrolled in graduate school because even though this is America, some of us prefer to be over-educated and underemployed. Despite the nine month winters and abusive wind, I love this city and its many wonderful bars. We continue to live in the Lakeview neighborhood with one flat-faced kitty, two plants and no parking. If you'd like to meet me for a drink, I'll be at the Nisei.

(ABOUT V1.0 can be found here.)