What came before this diary? Where did i come from? What do i do with my life?

I guess some of you have asked yourself these or similar questions, so here's a try to add some background (bear with me, i'm writing this at 1am, so it might be a bit confused, not to mention the spelling).

I was born 25 years ago, on the 17th of august, right here in Geneva where i now live again. Apparently it was a real sunny hot summer day, and that's still one of my favorite types of weather. It also makes me a leo, there's a whole lot of planets clustered right on top of each other there, to mark mercury just four seconds of from the sun, but also the moon with only a few hours to go to the new moon, the whole bunch centered on the zenith. Uranus is a sixth of balance, but a very exact sixth, only two seconds of from the sun (oh, in case anybody here understands any astrology, it might be minutes, i've never been one to remember these things all to exactly). I guess that's where my (perhaps overly great) intellectual powers come from. Oh, and venus is also in leo. Other bits of note are ascendant scorpio, and hung above scorpio in a great triangle jupiter and saturn, the second in cancer, the first in pisces. I guess that's about the most obviously important bits of my nativity. By the way, i worked it all out and did the interpretations on my own.

They tell me that there were about a dozen or so members of the "family" present at my birth (i was born at home, a rare occurence allready back then in switzerland), the family being the "children of god", a religious community/sect. I don't really know much about what life was like in there, exept that it was quite comparable to other sects in it's influence upon members. Anyway, we soon left geneva, to act as missionaries in asia. For 1 1/2 years we travelled through Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, usualy on a shoestring budget, with very few belongings (mum and dad says that we had one big suitcase when we came back, with all our worldy possesions in it). I got a sister on the way, Shahanah, who is one of the most suportive people in my life. I also got my first passport stamped full to the last page by the age of 2. The date we left india is also the date we left the sect, and i'm glad that their influence on my life didn't last a whole lot longer.

I think the only thing that i retain from that stage of my life is the smell of the perfect mango. I've had some really good mangoes since, mostly from my aunt who runs a high-class fruit and veg shop, but i *know* that i haven't tasted the real thing since.

Back in switzerland we moved to dad's home-town, a scattering of villages in the alps, and settled there for the next 20 years or so. It's a really beautiful place, specialy the countryside is wondrous (if somewhat overrun by tourists), and it also provided for a sheltered upbringing for us kids . We got another sister then, Lisa, and for a while i think our live was as perfect as it could be.

Around this time i remember telling my mum that i wanted what my sister had between her legs (i had no idea about sex yet, but i didn't want what i had, and hoped one could change that). I think my words were "i want to pee like a girl", and mum said in that case to sit down to pee, but that wasn't what i'd meant, not at all. That's also when my OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) started, and seeing how it has disapeared now i'm quite sure that it stems in some way from that experience.

Anyway, life moved on smoothly, school started and i excelled (only to be beaten very thoroughly by my sister when she started school). Lisa died when i was 7, i think, but i prefer not to dwell on this too much. I think that i still haven't really worked out everything that went on in my heart at the time, and i know from what my parents and Shani tell me that there's a lot about that time that i've forgotten, or at least repressed.

I turned out a very bookish child, reading anything that i could get my hands on, going to the library several times a week (on my own), and of course we allways have had loads of books (remember that suitcase with all our belongings mentioned above? half of it was filled with books). I also spent quite some time living in my imagination, making up little private worlds that i never told anybody about, and generaly daydreaming. Prefered subjects for study were geography, extrasensory perception, astronomy, the development of life on earth, anything to do with ghosts and other weird experiences, anything to do with nature (what as a grown-up i call biology). I was also very good at maths and hard science, usualy at least a year ahead of my classmates (i don't think i ever really learned anything in maths at school, just got to practice what i allready knew, my sister was still coming to me when she didn't understand maths-problems when she was 2 years further then i had gone in school, and i was still able to help her, and my sister is a mathematical prodigy herself), but even though it never was more then an interesting exercise for me, not ever something i considered applying myself to with any seriousness. I much preferred writing, and have always written things in private for myself. Even now you can see how much i enjoy writing, why else would i be writing this huge long diary? The only subjects i ever really hated where phys-ed (because it just wasn't my thing) and french (because of the teacher, it was an honest hate-hate relationship. The best thing i can say about her was that she was fair, but i didn't care to work, so i got a continual stream of bad results there. However, i think of the whole class i was the one who spoke it best). My parents sent me to scouts, i guess because they had both been themselves and had fond memories, and i went for 17 years, until i was leader of our local group. I also got my first experience with puter back then, it must have been '81 or '82, and we had a sinclair or so, with 16 kilobites of memory, expanded to 32. You had to programm everything yourself, when you wanted software you bought it printed out in a magazine, and then had to retype it manually, all the while watching out for errors in the printout and in your input. So at age eight i was relativly fluent in Basic, and if i'd cared for it i might have become one of those whiz-kid hackers. I also spent quiet some time on the farm, and generally outside. And in winter Shani and i would play with our Lego, we had loads of it, and would build whole worlds in which the lego-men could experience adventures. We had a huge room in the basement that was ours, where we could do whatever we wanted to and never ever had to clean up.

Oh well, it's almost 3am now, and i've got to go to work in a couple of hours. I'll continue this page when i find the time.

Love, Ruby