General Information

[Or, Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Me, a Complete and Utter Stranger]

Who am I?

Image copyright Brian Froud (?)

I can't imagine that anyone is really going to gain a complete idea of who I am and what I'm like simply from browsing these pages. Despite how much I've revealed here, the full depth of my being could take volumes to describe. (At least, I like to think it could.)

Where I've Come From

• I am a child of the 70's. I came of age in the 80's.
• My birthdate fell on the third anniversary of the first moon landing.
• Nixon was still president when I was born.
• I played with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs when I was a kid -- the real wooden ones -- none of this plastic crap.
• Sesame Street taught me how to count.
• Wonder Woman and Princess Leia were my early role models. So was Jean Enerson, a local TV anchorwoman (who is still anchoring on the local news).
• The first news event I really remember was the Iranian hostage situation. I watched it on CNN.
• School House Rock played in the airtime between Bugs Bunny and The Banana Splits on Saturday mornings.
• I was five when Star Wars first came out. I saw it something like six times in the first release. Star Wars is my mythology.
• I remember when John Lennon was shot. President Reagan was shot not long afterwards.
• When I hit puberty, I wore pegged jeans and stirrup pants. New Wave music dominated the airwaves. MTV came on the TV during my lifetime.
• Sometime in the 80's, Star Wars stopped being an awesome movie, and became a military defense program which Reagan used to bankrupt the USSR.
• AIDS killed Rock Hudson, and became the plague my generation would watch for.
• Where were you when the space shuttle Challenger exploded? Do you still weep when you see the footage?
• The Berlin Wall fell when I was in highschool. So did the Soviet Union. I went to New York, and saw fourteen new flags flying on the UN building. Most of them were former Soviet Republics.
• The Chinese government brutally massacred its citizens in Tiananmen Square. I remember the lone rebel standing before the line of tanks. What happened to him?
• Princess Diana married Prince Charles when I was eight. Princess Diana is now dead, and Prince Charles has moved on.
• I have now lived long enough to have seen the second Presidential impeachment trial in US history. Will I live long enough to see a woman in the Oval Office?
• I now live in an age where Microsoft dominates the local economy (and the software world), where the Hubble telescope probes deep space, and Gene Roddenberry is dead (Long Live Gene Roddenberry!).

Changes: What I've Been up to Lately

I'm still a child of the 70's; my history hasn't changed much. My life circumstances have, however. For one thing, I'm no longer married. (No, I'm not going into the details. It just didn't work out.) For another, I'm heading off to art school in the not-too-distant future, in order to get the degree I always wanted in the first place. Heading to school is the big project in my life right now.

I probably needn't add, however, the impact of the events of September 11th, 2001. I can't imagine anyone in this country who wasn't somehow affected by that, regardless of whether they were at any of the Ground Zeroes. My own thoughts of that day are here.

Cool Local Stuff

Okay, I'm not going to post my address on this site; but I'll confess that I'm one of about a dozen Seattle natives still left in the area. The following links are some of the reasons why I love this place, and why I hope to stay here all my life.

• A Knight's Tour: a local historical education group which I help support
• The Space Needle: one of the world's coolest (and most earthquake-sound) landmarks
• The Pike Place Market: the very heart and soul of Seattle, loved by tourists and locals alike (and yes, they really do throw fish there)
• The Seattle Aquarium: come see lots of fishies (they don't throw these ones)
• Woodland Park Zoo: come see lots of animals other than fishies
• Mount Rainier National Park: living in the shadow of the Great Tahoma
• Wanna Know How Bad the Local Traffic Is?
• The University of Washington

Other Assorted Details

My username is maia. It was given to me during my freshman year of highschool by my Latin teacher, who used to give people Latin names (from mythology and Roman history, mostly) so she could remember who was who in her class. She named me after Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades (the Pleiades being the daughters of Atlas, the guy who held up the sky). Maia was apparently a fairly quiet nymph who ended up becoming one of Zeus' many conquests (heck, in Greek and Roman mythology, who wasn't?); their union produced Hermes, the god of thieves, trade, and travel. She and her sisters were later immortalized when they had a group of stars named after them.

The rest of these pages can give you some more details. But if you really are the kind of person who does better looking at a list of accomplishments and historical details, check out my resume. I've also got a series of Personal Experience Narratives here. Why anybody would be interested in them, I don't know; but they're there to look at, if you like. (And of course, they're all copyrighted to/by Megan Dew, 1999.)