Welcome to My Third Life!

Hello, as a newbie to Steemit, I owe you a great deal of gratitude for reading my first post. Since I have called this post “Welcome to My Third Life!”, the reader is obviously wondering what happened in the first two lives. Did I die twice?

No, I did not die physically. However, I am highly unusual, even unique, because I have had 2 distinct lives so far. The first life was from my birth to August 22, 1992. The second life was from August 22, 1992, to August 26, 2017.
During my first life, I grew up in the American Southwest. I had unique parents: singers who were also hippies (this was the late 1970s). If you know anything about the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, you know that there were three parallel social movements: the civil right movement, the anti-war movement, and the equal rights movement, all involving Baby Boomers who protested for and against great causes. In my case, my mother was involved in the anti-war movement and the equal rights movement. My father served in the United States Air Force for 20 years. I grew up in the environment they created with their fellow singers and hippie friends. I was on stage with my parents from almost the moment I was born. I traveled with my parents to different performance venues for the first 6 or 7 years of my life until they had my sister and settled in Tucson, Arizona, which was a haven for hippies at the time. I sought stability and order after spending my early years on the road, so I entered public school when I was 7 years old and did my best to succeed in this environment. When I was 16 I decided to focus on school, so I gave up most of the things that made me happy, including watching movies, watching TV sitcoms, playing video games on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, and reading comic books.

Through lots of luck and hard work, including a great deal of pain, suffering, and social isolation, I turned into an over-achiever in my last 2 years of high school and got into Harvard University for college. Then, 5 years later, after even more hard work mixed with pain, suffering, and social isolation, I graduated from Harvard and got married. Over the course of the next 15 years I had two special-needs kids, earned a Ph.D. while I helped my ex-wife graduate from medical school, taught numerous college classes, wrote over 10,000 pages of unpublished essays, wrote over 35,000 Tweets, interviewed over 200 people in over 450 3-hour shows in an online radio program, self-published 4 books, and got 4 hours of sleep per night while doing all of this simultaneously. Again, this involved hard work, pain, and suffering, but less social isolation. As you can probably tell from this paragraph alone, my second life involved working obsessively and compulsively. I planned to get back the TV shows, movies, video games, and comic books after I did all this focused work.

My third life started in September last year after I moved to China to start teaching at China Foreign Affairs University as an Associate Professor of International Relations.

In the last 18 months I used the Internet to buy all the games I used to play on the Nintendo and the Atari system. I also bought American TV series from the 1950s to the 2000s. In the past 6 months, I have used the Internet to build up a movie collection of almost 8,000 movies. I also got back all the comic books I gave up. Next week I should have a paper accepted for publication. In two weeks I will go to Boston to attend an academic conference, attend my 20-year college reunion, reunite with my wife, and visit my kids who live with my ex-wife.

I have been living in China for 11 months. I first visited to run a special summer camp with my wife for Chinese kids to give them an American summer camp experience. I lived in a greenhouse that contained a classical Chinese village and was next to an organic farm.

My wife and I wanted to stay in China, so I was lucky enough to get my current job. When I am on Winter and Summer Break, I return to my hometown, Tucson, Arizona. I live in a wonderful house.

Whenever I am in Tucson, I take pictures of the sunsets if the cloud cover is sufficient.

I have accumulated a huge archive of essays, papers, and Tweets over the past 20 years, and only 1% is published in book form. I plan to share a lot of my writings here before the writings go into a final book form. I will seek comments and criticism to improve what I have written. Please be both kind and generous with your constructive comments. I am very excited to interact with everyone here!