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Hi, I’m dolphin, the author of this blog. This will be the longest of the cast introductions and will serve as a bit of an “About me” page for those interested as well as a brief history of my life in the blogosphere.
I’m a fairly liberal, gay, male, 20-something who lives in the middle of the Bible-belt. I’ve got two Bachelor’s degrees, one in Music and one in Art. At some point I may go back to get my MFA, but after a consecutive 22 years (counting preschool) of formal schooling, I decided that I need a break. I work as a graphic artist and am fortunate enough to love my job to be point of often being excited to get up and go to work. Everyone should find a job where they can get paid for doing what they love. I do a little freelancing on the side as time allows.
I’m a pretty avid movie watcher, though I see almost nothing in the theaters. I have Blockbuster Total Access (which I think blows Netflix out of the water, and I’ve used both services) so I see everything after it’s out on DVD. I began taking Jiu-Jitsu about 6 months ago in March of 07 and am currently a yellow orange green belt. I live with my wonderful boyfriend and our three cats (you’ll meet them later).
Oh, and the pseudonym. There are those who feel that people who “hide behind” a pseudonym are cowards with something to hide. No doubt they will feel that way about me. That is their prerogative. I go by a pseudonym for a couple of reasons. The first is that I enjoy being referred to and referring to myself as dolphin. I’ve always felt some sort of kinship with that particular sea-faring mammal for reasons I don’t begin to understand. In life, we are generally given a name without being able to give any input ourselves. A few people change this in the course of their lives but most of us just take whatever we are given. The blogosphere, and the internet in general, gives us a chance to choose for ourselves how we’d like to be identified without anybody thinking twice about it (even in such cases where the identification may seem out of place were it used in “the real world.” I think it’s a shame to waste that opportunity. Secondly, while I’m under no illusions of anonymity while on the internet, a pseudonym does provide at least the slightest degree of anonymity. While I stand by that which I say online as assuredly as I do off, no man is an island unto himself, and I’ve not asked permission to blog from every person I interact with. Respect for others in my life is what leads me to seek at least some basic level of privacy with regards to identity.
I first got started in blogging with an old LiveJournal account back in 2003. After a year of blogging on LiveJournal, the graphic artist in me decided I needed more control over the look and feel of my blog. At that time LiveJournal allowed little more in the way of customization than simply changing color schemes, though I hear it’s much more customizable now. Around that same time, I was also looking to establish a professional presence on the web as a means to gain some freelance work to give me some pocket change while finishing-up school. Killing two birds with one stone, I purchased my own domain name and hosting package and set up a professional site at dolphinsdock.com and a blog called “Where the Dolphins Play” at dolphinsdock.com/blog/. A little too timid about the major coding languages, I opted for the program Thingamablog, which allowed me to write my blog locally on my hard-drive and then it would automatically upload it to my server. In addition to the location and platform switch, “Where the Dolphins Play” quickly became a political blog.
I kept “Where the Dolphins Play” active for about 2 and a half years, over which time I had a lot of fun, good discussion and developed a fair-sized readership. I also began to find myself becoming a bit cynical (delving too deep into politics will do that to ya nowadays). The database for “Where the Dolphins Play” got corrupted in May of 2006, wiping out (almost exactly) two years of posts, which could only be restored manually. Finally, I found myself working two jobs and taking my final few classes and posting more out of a sense of duty than just for fun. I already had two jobs, I didn’t need blogging to become a third. At this point, I took it as a sign that I needed a break, so on September 12, 2006, I put “Where the Dolphins Play” on what would end up being a permanent hiatus.
Now with degree number 2 in hand, I was able to move to a full-time position with my main job and drop the second one. Anyone who managed to run a blog for over three years (as I had) is likely to have the blogging bug and trouble staying away, which brings us to this point. My professional website has long since switched identities and moved to another server, yet I’d hung on to this one anyways. After looking around, I downloaded a free copy of WordPress, installed it, and created an original template. Thus “Dolphin’s Dock,” the blog you are reading now, was born.
TheBoyfriend™ is my boyfriend (you’d never guess that from such a cryptic pseudonym, huh?). I don’t particularly like the term “boyfriend,” because I’m not sure it sounds mature enough to describe a 6 year relationship. At the same time I don’t like the word “partner,” because it sounds far too formal and business-like. “Lover” has taken on an almost exclusively sexual (and usually negative) connotation, which really is a shame when you think about it. Love is a word that describes such a beautiful thing. Why does simply adding a “r” to the end suddenly make it dirty? Seems to me by limiting “lovers” to partners in elicit sex, we are taking a word that could describe something beautiful and tarnishing it unnecessarily. Still, the exclusively sexual connotation of the term is ingrained too deeply in even my own head, so that one is out too. With legal marriage increasingly becoming a possibility in our lifetimes, I hesitate to use the word “husband” until it has the force of law behind it. So, boyfriend it is for now.
TheBoyfriend™ and I met in 2000, but only rarely spent any time together that first year. For some reason, after school closed for the summer and we were a good distance apart, we began to chat with each other online. It was through this online interaction that we became good friends. When the new school year started we were inseparable and soon out friendship escalated to something more. TheBoyfriend™ is an English teacher at a school a therapist for delinquent children, and quite a talented poet. We’ve lived together for the last 3 years in a townhouse but are planning on building a house together soon.
Hobbes was the first cat I ever owned. When I graduated and moved out on my own for the first time, I had a strong desire to get a pet. I like all animals but would have probably called myself more of a dog person than a cat person at the time. A dog was really out of the question as, at that time my schedule was such that I was out of the house for as much as 12 hours a day at least two days a week. The Boyfriend™, who had grown up with cats his whole life, convinced me that a cat would be an excellent choice. I headed out to a local population of feral cats (I knew the person who owned the land) and was able to pick from a new litter of kittens. Thus Hobbes was rescued out of the snow and quickly turned into a fine house cat. Oh, and I’m equally a cat and dog person now ;-).
Gryphon was cat #2 who moved in shortly after The Boyfriend™ did. He’s nowhere near as laid back as Hobbes and demands constant attention. He meows constantly and loves to play. He’s a few months younger than Hobbes, both of them are a bit over two now.
First let me say that we never intended to own more than two cats. Unfortunately, fate had other ideas. I got a call at work one day from The Boyfriend™ who had confiscated a kitten from his students (they are not allowed to have a pet nor do they have the resources to care for one). He had taken her to the vet at lunch and she was healthy, if very young, and so we were going to have to take care of her until we could find her a home. Well, to make a long story short, if you’ve ever had to bottle feed and animal, you know that there’s no way to give them up after that experience.
My younger sister. She’s only three years younger than me, but for some reason it’s still hard for me to think of her as a grown woman, out on her own. We fought like cats and dogs growing up but have gotten closer in recent years. I don’t know if she’ll be a major player or not here on this blog, but she might be moving to my city for a job, and if so I suspect she may appear more often.
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If you’ve made it this far, please note that more cast members maybe added as life goes on…