Time for a little reflection on the occasion of my recent 25th birthday, on the places I've been, the ideas I've held, and the wonderful friends I've made along the way.

January 29, 1984
I was born in Bloomington, Indiana, the first child of Ralph and Renee who had met at Indiana University in, I believe, 1980.

My father was working on his Ph.D. in psychology and my mother was pursuing her master's in Social Work. She would later change her master's to Library Science. I have only vague, foggy memories of my early childhood in Bloomington that I suspect are likely more influenced by my parents' stories of what we did there than what I actually remember myself.

January 29, 1989
At 5, I was a happy child playing in the California sun in pre-school at Bing Nursery School.

In 1987 we moved to Sunnyvale, California, a town just South of San Francisco. My father had gotten the opportunity to work with someone in his field whose work he respected. I remember being an imaginative child who enjoyed coming up with elaborate fantasies and who staged epic stories with his collection of action figures. A year and a half later my brother Jeremy would be born.

We lived on Chetamon court and I remember the relative safety of the court -- instead of being on a street with cars regularly passing by -- allowed for a sense of security and a great environment for games. There were other kids my age who lived across the street who I befriended and teenage girls next door and across the street who would babysit me. We would often ride bikes, scooters, and later roller blades around the court. One of our neighbors also had a pool that we would enjoy in the summer.

January 29, 1994
At 10 I would have been in fourth grade at West Valley Elementary School.

My sister Natalie had been born just a few months ago in September. This was one of the best times of my life. I had a strong core group of friends -- Will, Nick, Danny, and Scott. The five of us would regularly get together for events and sleep overs. We bonded over video games and comic books, collecting X-Men and Marvel comics trading cards.

I was also doing well in school. Each year I participated enthusiastically in the science fair, usually doing informative projects instead of experiments. The previous year I had done a project about snakes which won an award allowing me to present it at a pharmaceutical company as a reward. West Valley also had a strong reading program and I developed a passion for books. I particularly enjoyed such childhood staples as Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl. This pastime gave birth to my own creative endeavors. I started writing short stories, often illustrated or co-written with Nick, that usually featured children getting into adventures or developing super powers, obviously influenced by our X-Men cards. These pursuits, which were met with the strong encouragement of my parents and peers, were the origins of my writing career.

The good times were not to last, though. That fall we moved back to Indiana, this time to Carmel, an affluent suburb on the North side of Indianapolis. I was unaccustomed to being the "new kid" and found few friends but many tormentors at College Wood Elementary. When we moved into a new house on the other side of town the following spring my parents decided to switch me to the new school, Mohawk Trails Elementary, right away instead of just letting me finish out the year in misery at College Wood as had been initially planned. This was a smart decision and I had a much better experience at Mohawk, making many new friends. One friend I made was a quiet girl named Alissa. She would disappear from my life for about ten years at the end of fifth grade but would re-appear in my sophomore year English class at Ball State. I would later have the opportunity to rekindle the friendship, develop a friendship with her fiancee Tim, witness them get married, and share the joy in the recent birth of their son Sam.

January 29, 1999
At 15 I was a freshman at Carmel High School and at the peak of my Jesus Freak period. In 1996, as a seventh grader, I'd begun attending the St. Mark's United Methodist Church youth group. I made such important friends as Jacob and Jon. I became a Christian and gradually developed a radical and intense understanding of the reality of the evangelical Christian idea of salvation. My identity was primarily that of passionate Christian on a mission to save the world. I wanted to become a minister and live a life of poverty, emulating the example of Jesus as closely as possible.

My interest in journalism was also being nourished. At the time I was in Newspaper 1, the lead-in class to being on staff for the Carmel High School HiLite. In this class I would continue my friendship with Joanna, a friend I'd first made in the previous years in the "young Christian subculture." Joanna was also a passionate Christian though far more grounded and sensible than I -- traits she maintains to this day.

I would join the HiLite staff the following year and serve in such roles as copy editor, entertainment editor, review writer, and columnist. I still continued writing fiction, though, keeping notebooks of stories, often featuring my classmates.

My period of radical Christianity would begin to end a year and a half later when I'd begin to doubt, question and study. But the image and the idea of Christ would remain embedded within me, even though I no longer believed as I once did.

January 29, 2004
At 20 I was a sophomore at Ball State, double-majoring in English (creative writing) and Political Science. The new identity I was cultivating was not that of Christian evangelist but leftist polemicist. In January of that year I decided to take my Swimming In Broken Glass column for the Ball State Daily News in a political direction, unleashing regular broadsides against the Bush administration and the Conservative Movement. I envisioned a career as a political writer, pundit, and Democratic Party operative. I gradually abandoned this path as I grew weary of the nastiness of modern political culture and the approach of certainty that such work demanded. I doubted my way out of evangelical Christian and I gradually doubted my way out of the Left.

My fiction writing at the time was put on hold while I explored poetic experiments. I emulated Allen Ginsberg first and later T.S. Eliot. Under the influence of one of my favorite professors, Pat Collier, I developed a fondness for British Modernism, embracing Virginia Woolf and James Joyce especially.

My roommate the previous year and in the two remaining years of college that would follow was Josh. He was also a Christian and his quiet, gentle sensibility and set of hobbies seemed to make him the perfect match for Joanna in the summer of 2003. They would begin dating and their marriage was the second I'd get to witness after Tim and Alissa's.

It wasn't long after Josh and Joanna would tie the knot that a third set of friends would move on to the next stage of life. At Vincennes University Jon had met Lauren, a girl who had been in Joanna and my graduating class ('02) at Carmel High School. They too would marry -- an ideal match -- and I had the honor of serving as Jon's best man.

January 29, 2009
And now here I am at 25, preparing to follow my friends before me and marry my soul mate. I'm engaged to be married in May to April Bey, the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world.

April and I first met during my senior year of college when she was a freshman. I had been asked by one of my English professors to present to his class about my website. They were making their own sites and he wanted to use mine as an example. April contacted me after the class and we started dating shortly thereafter. Our initial relationship was too brief. Other guys pursued April and miscellaneous bits of drama provoked me to foolishly end the relationship too soon.

We wouldn't get back together for a year and a half or so. It was the fall of 2006 and I had just graduated that summer from Ball State and was living in Broad Ripple with my friends Luke Harris and Bob Jones. April was now a sophomore at Ball State and still pursuing her drawing major with hopes of one day teaching art at the college level. She invited me up for a double date that ended up never happening. I continued to pursue, though. I insisted we go out on a date, I believe it was to see "Saw III," and our passion for one another was set ablaze again, like a camp fire that had died down to smoking embers and then suddenly reignited by a squirt of lighter fluid.

Over the course of 2007 my infatuation with April gradually matured into true love, and I discovered that she too felt the same way about me as I did with her. By December of 2007 I proposed to her and moved back to Muncie to live with her.

It's difficult to say why April and I ended up together and why I love her. What makes us compatible? I think what it comes down to is that in some important ways we're similar. When I look at Tim and Alissa, Jon and Lauren, and Josh and Joanna I see couples where the husband and wife are each almost startling mirror images of one another. It's not that they're the same -- each individual has important differences from their spouse -- so much as they share a similar spirit. It's the same with April and me.

She's an artist and I'm a writer. We both have the urge to create and interpret the world. We're both deeply driven people, vowing to make our passions our livelihoods. We both have a childlike side, still both having affections for the artifacts and habits of fifteen and twenty years ago. (She DVRs her "Little Mermaid" cartoons and I have all four "Thunder Cats" DVD box sets.) We both also have an aggressive, confrontational tendency, neither of us hesitating to challenge other people whether it be on a political position or an unacceptable action. This last point, of course, is the most dangerous for our relationship because frequently we end up in the other's cross-hairs. In every argument, though, when we come out on the other side our relationship grows stronger, and we renew our commitment to support one another and build this family.

To begin to lay the financial foundations for the family we will create I juggle two occupations. Since moving up to Muncie in December of 2007 I've worked at Sallie Mae as a collector. It's been a transformative experience for me, educating me about freedom, capitalism, corporations, and human nature. I've also applied the skills I developed as an English/Poli Sci major and a writer toward my job, allowing me to earn a promotion last month to the level of senior collector, a management position with new challenges and responsibilities that allow me to continue to learn about our world.

When I'm not working or spending time with April I'm usually writing. Every week I write a film review for WTHR. I also free lance for Front Page Magazine, a publication that five years ago I could have never imagined myself writing for and supporting. Recently I've mainly been doing political, ideological readings of films, though I have other ideas for pieces as well.

I'm also at work on two non-fiction books. The first is a memoir focused on my attempt to work out a truce between Peace Studies Professor George Wolfe and conservative writer/activist David Horowitz -- two men who would profoundly influence me. The dialogue I coordinated between the two of them on my blog is the central narrative but I include discussion of other related subjects that will likely be familiar to regular readers of my blogs and the friends with whom I often debate. I'm still working out the ideas of this book and readers will have an opportunity to contribute to my shaping of the themes as I post about them here.

I'm also working on a book devoted to explaining and analyzing Horowitz's books and ideas. Writing and research for this book appears on my Books In Depth blog.

During 2007 I wrote the first draft of a young adult fantasy novel, tentatively titled The Adventures of Virginia Valadore, Book One: A Voyage Out, the first of a planned series. This project is on hold while I focus on my nonfiction projects but I have every intention of getting back to it.

So what does the future hold? What entries might I have for January 29, 2014 when I'm 30 and January 29, 2019 when I'm 35? May will be a big month for April and me. She'll graduate, we'll get married, and then we'll take our week-long honeymoon in the Bahamas. After that she'll begin working again -- perhaps in her old job as a collector at Sallie Mae, or, if we're lucky, in a position in her field. We plan to stay in Muncie and build up our savings as she applies for graduate schools. When she's accepted somewhere she wants to go we'll move.

I don't have firm graduate school plans yet. I'm not sure where I'd want to go and what I'd want to study -- I have many passions and career possibilities. Right now I'm content to just continue writing articles, reviews, blog posts, and the early drafts of my books as April and I start our marriage.

The future ahead looks very exciting and I hope to continue it with the friends I have, to maybe rekindle friendships with those I haven't seen in awhile, and to pick up a few more as life continues.