2023: What’s below is basically unreadable, what with all the strikethroughs and changes. All you really need to know is that now I’m a rural cheesemonger, in a lovely relationship (finally!), who lives in an adorable house next to a creek and a vineyard!

Cheers,
mush

Hi. My name’s Michelle, but everybody calls me Mush (rhymes with lush, not bush). Unless they’re relatives, that is, in which case they call me Shelly, because families are fucking weird like that.

I am a network administrator at an ISP.

No, now I mostly do tech support and have only limited opportunity to learn new stuff because my company is very small and outsources a lot. I do have root on several internet-facing Linux servers, though, so that’s nice. My company is about to transition into a non-ISP field, so maybe I’ll get to learn something new.

Scratch all that. Now I’m a copy editor and paginator at the newspaper!

No, actually now I live in Minneapolis with my true love, whom I met in IRC, and work retail while looking for a real job. There are no real jobs.

No! Now I work from home. I’m a contractor for Comcast. It’s a poor job (in the sense that the pay is too low to live on, and the company’s desire is slantwise to what customers want), but there’s no commute and I don’t have to wear a bra.

No, now (2018) I work in a cheese shop. Inside a liquor store. I sell hundreds of European and domestic cheeses, and do dishes and make sandwiches.

Now (2019-2023) I live in Oregon and I work in for an artisan cheesemaker in an adorable little shop on Main street across from the Elks.

Welcome to goblinbox.com, my beloved work-in-progress. I’ve been maintaining this site for a a very long time. It’s lasted longer than any relationship or living situation or automobile I’ve ever had. This domain was registered on March 9, 2001 and contains thousands of entries and millions of words on the only topic I know anything about, which is nothing.

I have lived in Washington, Oregon, Iowa, New Mexico, California, and Minnesota. I have attended Sam Barlow High School, Mt. Hood Community College, Maharishi International University, the University of New Mexico, and Walla Walla Community College.

I was born in 1968 in Kennewick, Washington. I was raised by agnostics but I converted to Hinduism in my early 20’s. My spiritual name – which I received from my satguru, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi – is Tanusri, and it means “embodiment of beauty.”

Let me save you a bunch of time in your spiritual journey: 1. there’s only a single consciousness in the manifest universe and that’s what we call God, 2. you truly were born for that Great Love you seek, and 3. you’re not your mind. Identify with the Witness.

In college, I majored in classical voice, and later literature, and then history, so you can tell I never gave a shit about money. Now I’m a divorcee who lives in her grandmother’s attic and was recently enrolled full-time at the local community college taking a bunch of courses geared at technical certifications in networking, like the CCNA and some other crap that may or may not have increased my hireability in this wonky economy. Three days before my unemployment benefits ran out I got a job offer from a previous employer, so I’ll never know if taking those classes would have helped or not.

Now I live in Uptown. In Minneapolis. Fuck Midwestern weather.

I’ve been a blues and R&B singer. I was pretty good at it, I guess, and I enjoyed the heck out of it, but I’ve always had a day job.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over twenty years. Well, a lacto-ovo pescatarian, to be more exact, because sometimes I do eat sushi. I’m left-handed, extroverted, aloof, and I adore reading and taking naps and sci-fi and gigging and drinking giant mugs of tea with milk. I hate TV (commercials are evil and make people feel inadequate and miserable) but I watch a lot of stuff on Netflix and Amazon.

I have no kids and no pets, and everything I own in the whole entire world would fit into the bed of a small pickup. I don’t happen to actually own a pickup, but I do have an old bicycle. It’s red. My current bike is a teal Schwinn curry red Electra.

My hobbies are studying Vedanta, collecting small electronic devices, reading, maintaining this web site, travel, vintage film cameras, knitting, writing, cooking, and bento. I do not like alarm clocks, being flat broke, foods with weird textures, human suffering, yard work, car crashes, or incisions (even though I had a really good time getting my wisdom teeth extracted, what with the intravenous Valium and all).

In other words, my talent is swimsuit and I want to be a veterinarian because I love children. Duh.