Hullo!
My alias is Darius Chan Sheep.
I was born July 15, 1993, making me a Cancerous individual (badum tsh). I live in a relatively quiet part of suburbia fittingly called Pleasanton.
For a guy, I like to consider myself relatively sensitive, but I might just be fooling myself. Wouldn’t be the first time.
This blog contains random bits and pieces that I believe reflect my state of mind, or random photos that I find pleasing.
There isn’t much original content, but what’s there is my own, and I’m proud of that.
I am recently regaining my ability to enjoy life simply for the fact that I am living, though I am slowly losing connections with people as I am losing my ability to relate to them.
Or, as the stereotypical teenager would put it: “No one understands me, dude.”
I think people think that I’m fun to be around when they’re getting to know me, and I really don’t see how they can possibly think that to be the case.
I find joy in those individuals who I can be silly with, and those that I can talk to about a lot of things with minimal fear of being told to shut up.
I have a burning respect for all things living, and refuse to voluntarily take any life, no matter how small.
I will willingly admit that I am afraid of death (reasons given below in the autobiography section), and mildly ill at ease in the dark and around llamas.
I dislike music boxes. If you need a reason, private message me.
If you need my email, ask my friends, as I’m not putting my email on a public internet site. Or ask me, and I’ll put it in your ask box, but if you publish it, I swear, I will hunt you down and gut you like a fish. Maybe.

This is the space that I’m going to use to describe the life I have led.
I’m not writing this for your entertainment, or even necessarily for mine. I’m writing this so I don’t forget what I still remember.
This is a space made by me, for me.

Korea:
I was born in Seoul, Korea, on July 15, 1993. I’m told I was an obedient child, but I wouldn’t know. The things that I’ve heard from my parents about me from this time contradict the statement that I was an obedient child.
Since my infancy, I apparently had a great love for a feeling of weightlessness. And what better way to feel weightless than to go swimming — or, in my case, jumping into large bodies of water slash nearly drowning. I’m told that whenever the family would go to a pool, I wouldn’t wait for any type of floating device to be attached to me in any way. I would simply run to the pool - the deepest end, mind you - and jump in. My father and mother would have to fish me out every single time, and I’d constantly jump back in until my parents dragged me away and took me home.
Not gonna lie, that doesn’t sound very obedient.

I don’t have any clear memories of this time. The only vague one that I can actually claim to have is when I was left alone at home for some amount of time. I woke up, I was in my crib, and no one else was home. I don’t know where anyone was at this time. My older brother might have been at school. Quite possibly. I sat at the edge of the crib, gripping the small bars, and kept calling out “Mommy? Mommy?” until my parents came home. And then I started crying.
That’s all I remember from my infancy.
Not particularly interesting, but there you go.

California:
I’ve lived in California for the majority of my life. Tri-Valley, namely. Let’s see, 18 years… subtract 3 1/2… I’ve lived in the Tri-Valley area for 14 1/2 years.

I’ve moved a grand total of six times in my life, five times of which fall in my time spent in California.

When I first moved to the U.S., my family lived in a small apartment building in Livermore. Don’t ask me anything about it, because I don’t remember anything from it.

Soon afterward, we moved to another apartment complex in Pleasanton. If you live here, it’s the one right next to Safeway, close to Harvest Park, down the road from Rite Aid slash Little Caesar’s.
I spent… what… 6 1/2 years there?

I then moved to a house on Corte de Flores. Nice house. Clean. Big. Neat. There wasn’t a pool, though, and that made me sad. I complained to my parents about that, but I think that’s what made us move after this, and that makes me feel spoiled in retrospect.

The next house we moved to was a house on Paseo Granada. It’s close to where Acorn lives now. It was a nice house. Big. Clean. Neat. It had a pool, too, and that was great. I remember my little brother accidentally fell in once while wearing his clothes. Luckily he didn’t have anything particularly valuable on him.

After a while, we moved to a house on Mohr Avenue. This was also a nice house, though it lacked a pool. But it was close to a few of my middle school friends, and I hung out with them relatively often.

A bit later, we moved to the apartment complex that I’m living in now. Springhouse Apartments. It feels a lot smaller than the apartments I used to live in, but that might just be because I’ve grown a lot bigger since then.

Preschool/Elementary school:
I started Preschool when I lived in the apartment complex, and moved shortly before the end of my Elementary School career. I went to the same school as my older brother for… 3 years? It was probably during this 3 year period that I managed to irritate him as a younger brother. I think it had something to do with embarrassing him in front of his friends. I don’t remember. I have very few tangible memories from my childhood.

I met my first friends during my Elementary School career at Alisal Elementary School. My first female friend, a girl named Lydia (don’t remember her last name. Shame on me.), went to the same church as I did and kept calling when I didn’t show up. Looking back, it was kind of cute, but also really annoying. My first group of friends was relatively large while my group of close friends was relatively small. The larger group was a group of diverse boys — Caucasian, German, Japanese, Mexican, Korean — while the close group consisted of me, my first best friend Kent Higa (Japanese), a half-Caucasian-half-Japanese guy Jake Howarth, a guy named Luis Castillo (three guesses as to what nationality he is), a fellow Korean guy named Ickson who moved away in first grade, and then, in third grade, a friend that I still have now and still consider decently close, TJ Park (five guesses as to HIS nationality).

I don’t remember anything about Preschool. I just know that I went to Gingerbread Preschool.

I remember two things from Kindergarten. One was that some girl kept chasing me every break, and I kept running from her. Same girl, every time. Don’t remember her name, don’t remember her face. I just remember that I kept running. Second was that there was one day when they brought in baby chicks into the class. It was probably around this time that I started to love animals. Seriously, they were adorable. …though I think the one I picked up pooped on my hand… oh well. It was still really cute.

First grade was when my first best friend, Ickson, moved away, and when my older brother started nagging me about how Lydia was supposedly my “girlfriend”. I distinctly remember at least one occasion as we were walking home when I kept saying, “She’s a girl, and she’s my friend, bu-,” and then my older bro kept interrupting saying, “So, she’s your girlfriend!” It was either that he was teasing me (which is likely) or I was more mature than he was (which is strange).

I’m also pretty sure that this was the year when my little brother was born. Let’s see… age 4 in Preschool… Yeah, I was 6 when my little brother was born, so he was born when I was in First Grade. Fun stuff. He’s been an annoying little brat for most of his life, but hey, he’s my little brother. There are times when I want to drop-kick him across a room, but hey, he’s my skin and blood, and I love him. …to some degree… enough…

Sometime between First and Second grade, the church we were going to apparently stopped letting our group of people gather there. So we started attending one in Castro Valley. I remember a lot about the church, but little about what happened that year. I know that I had another group of friends there where I was the oldest kid and we’d keep harassing the girls and then running away. Ahh, little kids. I remember leading people around the church after the little kids’ bible study was over and playing hide and seek EVERYWHERE. It was pretty darn awesome. Later on, I remember having Summer Activities, in later years with TJ as he became one of my closest friends, which was pretty fun. I also remember that one of my friends in the church group lost his mom as she died in childbirth as she gave birth to his second brother… I didn’t really understand it. It was all just really very sad. I remember having to entertain my younger brother’s little friends, too, and breaking up whatever small kerfuffles there were in that group of toddlers. This eventually led to my just being the general babysitter of all my little brother’s friends when their parents came over, but I managed well enough.

I don’t remember many eventful things in Elementary School except for meeting Tae Joo in Third Grade. …I don’t think he’ll ever let me forget that, actually… So, I was called on that day to be a lunch-line helper, and I was passing out stuff, and then I see this guy, who I think seems pretty lost, and also looks Korean. So I ask him, “Hey, are you Korean?” and he responds with, “Yeah,” and I completely overreact, start jumping around saying “OH MY GOD, ME TOO!” and then I started eating lunch with him and playing with him during recess. So TJ joined our group, and then our parents met, and now he’s a family friend. I don’t talk much with him anymore, but ehh, it’s nice to know that he’s here for me if I need him.

I remember, sometime in either third or fourth grade, my grandfather died. I remember playing with toys with my little brother, when my dad, holding the phone, rushed to the master bedroom, looking shaken. He handed the phone to my mom, after quietly saying something — I didn’t really hear it — and my mom went into the restroom in the master bedroom, phone pressed to her ear. I checked on her later, and she was crying. I think I went up to her and gave her a hug. We went to Korea soon after the call — though my little bro had to be left with a friend for a few days. I don’t remember much of the funeral. It was raining. It was quiet. I was confused, in a sad, quiet kind of way. The silence was heavy. I didn’t really want to make any type of noise. It didn’t really feel all that real to me. I still sometimes wonder if it happened at all. When we came back home, I asked my mom and dad what dying was like. I don’t remember how they answered my question. But I do remember that I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about what it would be like if I couldn’t breathe anymore, if I couldn’t see anymore, if I couldn’t smell, taste, touch, feel… if I couldn’t live anymore. I cried. I ran to my mom and dad’s room and fell asleep between my parents.

As if to reinforce the emotions behind that, shortly afterward, I saw a dead bird on the street while I was walking back from the park. It was newly dead, the body was still whole, but ants were covering the thing. What struck me was how fragile life was and how chained every creature is to the ground. I went back home, shaken. I saw the carcass the next day, and the flesh was mostly gone. It was mostly bone. Ants were still swarming it, though. Strange how every life is linked to another life in some way.

I started band in fifth grade. I had wanted to play the trumpet, but started band with the flute as my older brother had gotten a new one. Band was uber fun. I was one of two guy flutes in the band. Still, it was fun.

Sometime during the fifth grade, maybe about halfway in, our family moved from the apartment complex to a house on Corte de Flores. A nice place, big, clean, right next to a creek. My window had a view of the freeway, and the tree in front of our house. The backyard was nice, but there was no pool, and I was kind of sad about that. But a nice house. We once found a snake in the house when people were over. I think my dad put it in a plastic bag, took it outside, and killed it… that made me sad…

During fifth grade, Kent invited those of us in the closer group of friends to go frog-catching with him at a creek. He told us to bring some type of container, so I brought, cleverly enough, a glass jar. Big mistake. So we’re having fun, catching frogs, submerging our containers so we can catch the tadpoles that are all stuck in the current and fighting desperately against it, when I try jumping to another part of the creek. While holding my glass jar. that contains dozens of tadpoles at this point. And what happens? I land on the most slippery part of that concrete drainage thing. I slipped, fell forward, landed on the ground — and the jar seemed to explode. Literally explode. No fire, no awesome explosion noises, just an unnaturally loud tinkling of glass as it shatters while everything else sounds muted. A glass shard cut my ring finger on my left hand — I still have the scar — but at that point, all I could think about was the little tadpole, directly in front of my face on the ground, that was dying. It was suffocating. I saw it trying to breathe, saw its body expanding and contracting repeatedly - and, gradually, the expanding slowed down… and stopped altogether. I started crying then. And then the wall of pain hit.

I’ll always respect Kent’s dad for doing what he did at this point. He lifted me up with one arm, tore off part of his shirt, tied the strip onto the bleeding finger, and drove me home. He explained what happened to my parents, they cleaned up the wound, treated me, and I fell asleep on the couch, still crying. Later on, I heard the doorbell ring, I heard Kent at the door with his dad. Apparently, he had brought me a small container with tadpoles in it. My parents put it in the backyard, and I fell back asleep.

I remember, during fifth grade, there was sex education or whatever it was called then, and how me and one other student (a female girl, fancy that) didn’t take it. I learned, later on, that my parents meant to let me take it but checked the wrong thing on the permission slip. I also remember the DARE program, and that was pretty interesting. I’m also pretty sure that it was during fifth grade when we had that Constitution Play. I have no idea how this is relevant. I just remember this happening.

Outdoor Ed was probably one of the best things that happened during my elementary school career. I can’t describe it in words. Spending a week without parents with my best friends? No wonder I love camping. No wonder I love the outdoors. But I don’t have anything in depth to say about it. I just know that I loved it.

The end of Elementary school was kind of weird because the group of close friends that I had was going to be broken up. Kent and I were going to Harvest Park, Jake and TJ were going to Hart, and Luis was going to Pleasanton Middle School (unfortunately called PMS. I think there was some thought to change the name to Pleasanton Intermediate School, but PIS isn’t much better than PMS). I was fairly acquainted with PMS as I went there for a summer school thing (Elementary school summer school, very different from summer school in later years). I took a science class and a computer class. I met Ben Zhang there, and we both messed around in computer class by playing Reckless Driving. so much fun.

But that was the end of Elementary School. Some friends moved away, some friends drifted, and, all in all, it was kind of sad, but mostly confusing. I continued to babysit my little brother’s friends, but lost time to spend with some of my own. But what can you do about that.
(To be continued at some point in the future.)