Hmmmm….well, lesseee… My name is Matthias Thorn, though perhaps it has not always been so. I was born on a naval base in North Carolina in late fall of 1971. Moved around a lot as a wee laddie, as my father was an officer in the USMC. After he abandoned that madness, we (my mother, my father, and me) settled down for a few years in a subdivision (”The Knolls”) in Ferguson, MO, a suburb north of St. Louis. In 1978, a few months before my seventh birthday, we moved again to Webster Groves, a suburb west of St. Louis, and there we stayed until I was about fifteen. Those were some of the happiest days of my life, with my dog Bluie, a clean, beautiful neighborhood and lots of kids my age. While growing up, I attended private schools, first a Montessori school, and then Thomas Jefferson School from 7th to 10th grades. Best. School. Ever. I’m still in touch with the administration and try to visit with them when I can.

In the middle of high school, my dad got a job in Lexington, Kentucky, and so we had to move. I was uprooted, and it took about ten years to get over the loss of those friends and the sense of place that I had begun to form. Around this time relations with my parents started to deteriorate, I started my first serious relationship, and, in short, my life became that of a confused, and extremely disoriented adolescent. Although I’ve since come to miss it and appreciate its numerous charms, at the time, I was only in a hurry to get away from Kentucky… and my overprotective, emotionally troubled mother. Away I flew to Hanover, NH in the fall of 1989, where I matriculated as a student of Dartmouth College.

I didn’t really fit in. Dartmouth is and always has been a place for the more outdoorsy and/or alcoholic graduates of the New England rash of prep schools that stretches from Connecticut up through New Hampshire. It took me a long time to figure out that I wasn’t the crazy one there. It took me even longer to figure out that none of us were really crazy, but we were all pretty fucking stupid. That’s college, though, I guess. Anyway, I did meet some of the best friends of my whole life there, and I did get to spend a lot of time in clean air and learning more about my own affinity for nature.

But a young man’s a young man only once and after spending about eight years in Hanover, NH (I helped run a children’s book department after graduating with a BA in Uselessness), I realized I better go somewhere, and quick, where my prospects for actually living a life were a hell of a lot better. So in 1999 I made the decision to head to Boston where I had some friends who kept help me get established in the beginning stages of my quest to seek my fortune. Before I could escape though, I of course fell in love (for the third time in my life). I proposed marriage, was rejected, and fled, with good riddance to small-town life.

I temped for a while before finally landing a job using some of the computer skills I’d garnered at the then-largely-macintosh campus of Dartmouth. It was a fine job, the best I’d ever had really, one that actually made at least some use of my more-than-adequate brain. Better: I met the woman of my dreams here. Gwen was taking a year off from school to think about what she wanted to do with her life and had happened to land a job similar to my own in a different office in the same building as me, in Inman Square in Cambridge. I’d seen her around and thought she was pretty hot, but never had the nerve to talk to her until I saw her sitting under a tree one day, with her wrist in a cast. The day was bright and clear, I felt cocky, and I had a conversation in, so I approached her and asked her what happened. A month later, September 11 happened, and and six months after that, on her 22nd birthday, I proposed to her.

Two and a half long long years after that, we were wed on September 7, 2004, a little over three years after we first met. A month after the wedding I left my Inman Square job in the hopes of finding something better, and did. Now I work for the MIT Informations Services & Technology division, helping people get along with their computers better, and learning a lot, every day, about stuff that really interests me. Soon, Gwen and I hope to move to Cambridge (we live in Somerville now, in the same apartment we moved into together a few months after I proposed to her), maybe even have a honeymoon before our marriage is a year old.

That’s my story. My interests include photography, web development (duh), learning perl, learning unix and linux, networking, lots more geeky stuff like that, video games, reading, writing, cooking, baking, design, politics, and laughing. I’m trying to re-develop the long lost habit of physical exercise. I’m a bit of a neat freak, my wife is not. Sometimes I’m very patient, sometimes I’m very impatient. I like gizmos and gadgets and I like to keep abreast of cutting edge technologies. I have a hard time balancing social needs against every other need. I don’t have enough free time, but nowadays I’m more resigned to it than I used to be. I’m one of only like six people I know whom I would truly call liberal, and I don’t know anyone who agrees with ALL of my politics. I do not drive a car, and I’m a poor swimmer. I’m a Scorpio, both Sun and Moon. I’m kind of a cross between Marge Simpson, Frylock, Sparks (from Sealab!), Andrew Dice Clay, Animal, Beaker, Kermit, Frasier, and William F. Buckley. I can recite the Greek alphabet faster than anyone you know. I recently went through a phase where I used the word “stymie” way too much. I’m desperate for new forms of music that I can listen to more than twelve times without getting bored with it. A few weeks ago, I started gaining weight for the first time in my life. I’m an agnostic who desperately wants to be a believer. I’ve been accused of thinking too much, often correctly.