Hello to all my friends who I’ve coerced into reading this and those unfortunate enough to have accidentally stumbled across my little piece of internet real estate. I feel like I owe you an explanation as to why I’m wasting your precious bathroom reading time, so bear with me on this tale of laughter, pain, and a little rap music.

I have been an athletic trainer for the last four years. I love training athletes and the science behind how the body works. Unfortunately, it’s a one sided love affair. I started noticing numbness and a dull ache that never seemed to go away in my lower back and glutes. At first I thought it was just something minor and my in house chiropractor told me it was nothing to worry about, but with every passing month it seemed to be getting worse to the point where some days I couldn’t stand up straight after long bouts of sitting. A trip to the physiotherapist showed me that I had developed some sciatic nerve damage after years of compounded injuries from olympic lifting. In non-sciencey talk that means I have chronic pain in my butt, not my butt butt, but my butt muscle. It takes a great deal of physio to fix (which I am doing now) but it never really fully goes away. Now, during this entire process, I realized that as much as I love exercise and training, I did not love it enough to continue down this career path where demonstrating lifts like this

and thisand a lot of this

was maybe not the best for my back. And so, I have been forced to find an alternative means to keep my vinyl habit afloat (seriously, someone help me, I don’t even own a record player).

So… why development and coding?

Because I’ve been waiting two damn years for Kendrick Lamar to drop the follow up to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and I’m going to be frank, I don’t know how much longer I can wait. I can either start practicing how to lucid dream and conjure up a world where this album exists and he and I are listening to it together while sipping on virgin Mai Tais to a sunset backdrop (I’m deathly allergic to alcohol, hence the virgin, though I also have no idea what a Mat Tai is), or learn how to hack into his laptop and steal the goods myself. As someone who struggles deeply with the ending of Inception (is he dreaming? why does the top keep spinning?!?) I am going with the latter.

I kid. But not really.

The other reason is because I spent a majority of my life preparing to go into law without understanding what a career in law entailed. Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendous respect for lawyers and what they had to go through to get where they are, but having spoken to some lawyers who’ve broken down their daily routine, I got cold feet and am hoping to try a few other things first. I am interested in creating something new, and in a world of tech and the internet, web development seemed like the right thing to do. Plus there’s only so much you can do with a Bachelor of Arts (or as a friend of mine calls it, an Arts & Crafts degree). So here I am, throwing caution to the wind starting with Bitmaker Labs, preparing for a wild ride of coffee, code, and hopefully some self discovery.