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Biographical Synopsis
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Originally when I thought about this portion of the site I wanted to have
separate sub-sections for what my life was like during certain age ranges, but
I’ve streamlined that down to just a basic summary of my life thus far. Some of
the facts about my past may be slightly inaccurate as I don’t have specific
knowledge of certain dates or events. When you’re growing up you usually only
have a basic understanding of what goes on around you when seeing through the
eyes of a child.
My name is Michael Alan Timineri, I was born on July 11th sometime between 1975
and 1985…. I’m keeping that a secret for online security reasons. I was born
very premature at the UC Davis Medical center in Sacramento California to
Beverly Jean Timineri and Joseph Samuel Timineri Sr. I have an older brother and
an older half sister that I don’t associate with.
My mother bore my brother and I while she was a paraplegic. She had lost the use
of her legs when she was about 18 years old as the result of a car accident.
Afterward she met my father and they courted for a few years prior to getting
married.
The first four years of my life I lived with both parents prior to their divorce
after about twelve years of marriage. After the divorce my brother and I spent
several years going back and forth between homes during custody battles, but
mainly lived with my mother. Those were difficult years since my mother was
trying to raise two boys with only welfare, social security, disability, and
child support as income. I’m unsure as to all of the details, but regardless, I
had a fairly normal childhood. I liked the teenage mutant ninja turtles, GI Joe,
and all of those fun kid things. The trips to the food closets and thrift stores
were just a part of life and didn’t stand out as anything unusual for me at the
time.
Grammar school for me was an interesting experience. I wasn’t the coolest kid
but I did manage to have a friend here or there that joined me for bike rides
and adventures into mysterious areas behind the apartment buildings in which I
lived. Many of those adventures could turn into short stories by themselves… oh
the imagination of a child.
I remember when I was about 7 or 8 years old… I don’t know for sure, but I had
asked my mother not to come to the parent/teacher day at the school. My father
was there and asked me why I didn’t want her to come. I said that I didn’t want
her to come because she was in a wheel chair. I was a kid, and I was scared that
people would make fun of me because my mother was different…. Boy, did my father
teach me a lesson that day, a valuable lesson. He took away the use of my legs
and made me get around the apartment with the sole use of my arms to pull me
along the ground. I’m unsure of all the details, but he made me realize how
difficult life would be if I didn’t have the use of my legs. It was a “creative”
way of getting the point across, but I feel now that it certainly was the most
effective way.
When I was eleven years old my mother made a difficult decision to have me live
with my father while she took care of my older brother, who was going through
some difficult times with depression, drugs, gangs, and other items that would
plague him for many years after. When I moved in with my father I was also
moving in with a quasi-step family. My father was dating a woman who had several
other children and they lived together for the remainder of my junior high and
high school life.
The years living with my father and the quasi-step family were not the best
years. My father and quasi-step mother’s income did not exactly give us a great
lifestyle, but he always ensured I had the basic components for success...
School supplies, discipline, and shoes. However, home life was still filled with
domestic disputes, drugs, and hard times. I’m not going to get into detail, but
I will say that the moment I was given the chance to leave the household (when I
was about 17) I took the opportunity.
When I was in Junior high I was not popular at all and once got “in school”
suspension for getting into a “fight” with a girl. D’oah!. In the latter years
of Junior High I would be beaten up every day walking home from school by a guy
named Ronald. I didn’t have the back bone to stand up to him. The irony was that
I had been studying Kyokushin Kai karate and Judo for several years and knew
very well how to defend myself. I had always done well in tournaments, but just
didn’t have the real-world balls to do anything about Ronald’s abuse.
Eventually, prior to moving to a new home and changing Junior High schools, I
did get so angry when he was picking on me during physical education class one
day that I blocked one of his punches and gave him a swift kick to the side of
his head. He then fell backwards and rolled down a hill. His cronies were
stunned and never again did they mess with me. Afterward I never lost a fight.
(Side comment: “OH, to be young and flexible again….”)
When high school rolled around and puberty started to kick in my little child
world radically opened up. Each high school year can be defined by any one of
the fads I went through. One year I was a Mexican “Vato” wanna-be, another year
I was a part of the Dungeons and Dragons gothic scene, another year I tried to
be a jock, and the last year I was a hyper-Christian “Christian club” kinda guy.
I suppose each year I tried to find a group that I would fit into.
My academic life in high school was primarily dominated by an “Academy” I was a
member of. The Business Education and Technology (BET) academy. This academy
focused on providing a certain group of students the same core teachers for the
last three years of school and everything about the curriculum was based around
learning everything from Business Finance to the “high technology” of the times.
Little did I know then but the mentors and people I would come to meet by the
academy affiliation would greatly help me in later years of my life.
In addition to the BET academy I was an Academic Decathlon gold medalist in
essay writing and a silver medalist in speech. I also was a member of the
varsity swim team (even though I wasn’t any good). There are so many stories and
much detail that I could write about high school, but I’ve decided to make this
only a synopsis.
When I was about 15 years old I began to realize that I truly was different from
all the rest of the kids in school. I would soon identify that feeling as being
a homosexual. Luckily one of my BET academy friends also turned out to be gay,
and we became close friends. Those were the times prior to when high schools had
gay social groups and parents had organizations like
PFLAG
. In fact, when the school staff found out about our orientation we were pulled
out of class for undercover “support group” meetings held by some of the school
counselors.
When my friend JJ told his father of his orientation the proverbial “shit” hit
the fan. His father was not supportive at all and was forced to run away from
home and drop out of school. It was only after many many years and after much
hardship did he eventually get his GED and overcome the trauma that his “coming
out” process caused him. Living the life of an underage gay runaway in the
Sacramento area can be harder than you might think. There are many well known
meeting places established now, but back then there were only a few. Many times
JJ attempted suicide. One of my school’s other gay students (who lived about
three houses away from me) successfully committed suicide later that year. It
was not a good time. When JJ went missing, after he had ran away from home, my
father did give me some good advice. You can read the advice in the second
paragraph of my February 1st 2009 “My Thoughts” post located here:
Read Advice
Through all of this I did not tell my parents that I had liked other guys, my
home life was too difficult as it was, and I certainly wasn’t going to add that
to the mix of problems. Shortly thereafter my life took another drastic turn; I
was brought to a local evangelical church by a friend and eventually found the
youth group ministry environment to be fulfilling. I became a hyper-evangelical
born-again homosexually closeted teenager. I even had pipe dreams of becoming a
minister myself and considered taking classes at Capitol Christian Center,
however, to make a long story short… the ministers found out that I was dealing
with homosexual thoughts and made me seek counseling by another church’s
Christian psychologists. I went several times and we worked together to try and
“cure me” of my homosexuality, but eventually it became problematic and I was
asked to leave the church. So, I left.
Making it through those high school years were certainly difficult; dealing with
relative poverty, homosexuality, excommunication, and a broken home made things
very difficult. If it weren’t for the Influences in my life that kept me on a
healthy path I doubt I would have made it.
Nearing the end of my high school years I moved in with a girl friend of mine
and her family. That didn’t last long after they found out about my troubles
with the church, but they were there for me in the difficult year that would
follow. The year I graduated high school my mother had gotten severely ill. The
doctors thought that her illness was a result of some complications due to her
various problems related to her paralysis, but it was eventually found out that
she had inoperable terminal cancer. I don’t want to get too detailed about this
topic, but it was a difficult time for my brother and I. She eventually passed
away at 10am on December 25th - Christmas day.
In the years that followed I was trying to make a path for myself in the world.
I had obtained a job working as a computer technician for the Elk Grove Unified
School district and was renting a room with two other straight guys near Sac
State (I was in the closet of course). One of the straight guys, Blair, would
eventually continue on in my life as my Best Straight friend. I would even be
the best man at his wedding years and years later. Let me interject a quick
comment: A gay guy doesn’t exactly know how to plan a straight guy’s bachelor
party! Although, commenting on the wonderful shoes the strippers wore was fun.
Ha jk.
A few years later I was lucky enough to receive a job for the University of
California, Davis as a Systems Administrator (Programmer III), and I would
eventually spend about 5 years working there in different roles. Eventually I
left the University as a Programmer V, Senior Unix and NT Systems Engineer. More
details about my professional life can be found in the
Profession
section of this site. I also continued my higher educational training and
obtained specializations in many technology related areas.
When I was hired at UCD I also was in my first homosexual relationship with a
wonderful man named John. More about this relationship, and the others, can be
found in the “Relationships” section of this site, but the reason I bring him up
here is because his companionship allowed me to finally open up to myself, my
close friends, and family members that needed to know. Ironically it was much
easier for me to come out because my older brother had come out several years
earlier and he faced the parental wrath that I was so luckily spared. So, but
the time I came out it really was a non-issue with my only remaining parent.
Many years later I met what I thought would have been my partner for life, a
human molecular geneticist from UCD that was working on his PhD. He and I had a
wonderful relationship, albeit a bit dysfunctional in retrospect, and eventually
he asked me if I would move with him to Houston Texas as he pursued his
doctorate. Being young and sprung I said yes. Life was going wonderfully well, I
had a house in Sacramento I owned and rented it out, I had $40,000 in cash in
the bank and no debts to speak of. I was working on several large projects
within an IT consultancy organization I had started a few years earlier, and I
thought this would be a good thing to do. Woah, how naive I was. One downfall of
the relationship that I will mention here is that I was not allowed to have a
motorcycle in this relationship. I had obtained my motorcycle license a year
earlier, but was not able to exercise its privileges because he disapproved. :-(
I eventually bought a house in Houston and moved my partner, Rodney, and I
there. Without getting into a lot of detail, I will just say that 3+ years later
the relationship had dissolved along with the good majority of my financial
assets. I had a consulting company that was fairly successful at the time, but
my personal assets were gone. After I sold the house in Houston at a loss and
prepared myself for a strategic financial and emotional retreat back to
Sacramento I was able to clear my mind with a weeklong trip to Costa Rica and
Beijing China with costs offset by some work at those location. Little did I
know that those trips would be the last time I’d be able to afford any
quasi-vacations for years and years.
When I moved back to Sacramento I had the opportunity to sell the house I was
renting out to a family for about $10,000 in profit, but made the stupid choice
of keeping the property. I moved back into the property and re-structured my
consultancy. I had laid off the staff in Houston and was working with only a few
employees in Sacramento. Eventually the economy started to tank and so did my
ability to retain those employees. Two years later I foreclosed on the
Sacramento house and moved to where I’m currently living in downtown Sacramento.
A location I thought I’d be at for only one year has been my residence for much
longer than expected.
In recent years I merged my consulting firm with another company, but several
issues arose that lead to that business relationship falling apart. Where I once
was debtless and had $40,000 in the bank, I’m now broke and have more than
$40,000 in debts. Oh, how the world has turned upside down. Alas, things come in
cycles in life and this is only a down cycle… things will get better….. I’ll
make sure of that.
During this down portion of my life I was lucky enough to enter into a
relationship with someone who I thought truly loved me for who I was, and I fell
deeply for that person, but after about three years we eventually separated
(specifically, he dumped me, stating: “I’m just not in love with you any
more…”). Regardless, life must move on and the emotional ramifications of that
separation are meant for the “My Thoughts” blog section, not this brief bio
page.
In the last four years I’ve been able to more fully indulge my fascination with
aviation. I was able to scrape together enough money to enroll myself in a
Flight Training Academy and have been spending the last two years working on my
Pilot’s license. Things have gone well and I have an entire
section
of this site devoted to that passion, however the down economic times have
really limited that growth.
So, that completes my extremely brief autobiographical page. There are so many
stories I could share, but why don’t you send me an email or leave me a comment
and perhaps I’ll share them with you.
-Michael
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