The beginning of the bad...

So I started Piano lessons with "Heather" from down the road.
She had a son, Mitchell, who would insist on sitting in the room and watch us. He would bring his cars and trucks in and race them on the floor making "brrrrmmm brrrrmmm" noises. He was actually known around the street as Dennis (the menace).
Heather's piano was always out of tune. I realised that the annoying thing about having absolute pitch was noticing poor tonal quality left, right and centre. Heather charged $30 per half hour (that's a lot) and there'd be many weeks where this would be $30.40 - the 40 cents being extra because she photocopied a piece of music that took up two sheets of paper. Sometimes it was $40.20, sometimes it was only $30.20.

Music

From an early age, I was always banging around on my mother's piano. I'd listen to my father play it and I would go and replicate what I had heard (without written music). It was years later that it was realised that this was a product of me having "Absolute Pitch". My parents were ecstatic and my music teachers envious. I didn't really understand what it meant, but for a while it got me a lot of attention.

See this website for a definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch

My parents decided that I was "gifted" and started paying for piano lessons.
Each time anybody came to our house, I was asked to play piano for them. And then my father would make me stand with my back to the piano while he struck notes for me to identify.


I started to feel like a guinea pig...

Lettering books

What is the point of lettering books anyway? They're only for people who are bored (myself being exibit A, your honour) because no matter how lovely your handwriting it, it all goes to crap once you hit high school and can't be bothered writing full stop, let alone in a "lovely" way. Furthermore, you go to university and develop a scrawl. So I'm left to think now that people with lovely handwriting are simply bored.
So there I was. Day in, day out, writing in my little calligraphy/lettering book. Soon I finished the book and Mum bought me another. And another.
Meanwhile, my sister was coming back every day talking about amazing things she had done while at school. They have PLAYGROUNDS at school?! Holy cow! And you can play on them WHILE you eat your lunch? I simply had to go to school...

Spidey

Spider-man, Spider-man...
Does whatever a Spider can...

The Beginning...

So I'm the son of two Primary school teachers.
Not many people get what it's like to live with two parents who are both teachers. The best way to describe it I think, would be Ben Lee's parents in "Rage in Placid Lake". I'm not saying that my parents are hippies or anything, but lets just say they're "strange".
My sister is a year older than me, so my first few years on Earth were spent playing/pulling hair/flushing dolls down the toilet/pinching/kicking, that sort of thing. Once she went to school, I had nothing to do. So what did my teacher mother do, you ask? Gave me a lettering book for me to do "my own school work" while my sister was at school. FANtastic.