New comment: If you are very brave and can handle it, read Chaim Potok's "My Name is Asher Lev". It's about a Lubavitch Hassid guy who is cursed by discovering he's an artist and follows that bent until it destroys his family and isolates him. I discovered it from a strange expat old woman now living in relative anonymity in the Dominican Republic (reformed alcoholic, former CIA agent, and one-time art gallery owner). She told me about this book. I pass on the curse. Yes, that's a dare.

Me? I'm just a male human living in America, 5' 9" tall, about 178 pounds, born in a hospital in New Jersey. (I don't remember that day.) Other days come back in a jumbled mass of mental pictures, mostly out of order. I've lived in Thailand, England, Spain, and have family links to Japan and Spain. (Yes, I speak Spanish. My Japanese sucks.) By far the strangest place I've ever lived is where I now reside: coastal Texas. I was pulled into Flickr (again) by a friend. She didn't ask. I was seduced and now am here, very happily. It's very strange how sometimes people sense things about you that you didn't -- or that you took for granted. For those interested, I'm currently running Firestorm 6.2.4 on a Dell XPS 8700 (Windows 10) -- upgraded to 16GB of RAM and to a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce 1050Ti graphics card. I still use my ancient version of Paint Shop Pro (7) for post-production including smudge, clone, lighten, darken, change contrast, etc. I hate upgrades. I often push the envelope. It's part of my operating system. Yes, my brain crashes more than my computer does... My images are mostly from Second Life (which in most ways is really my first life). A few are drawings I've done. I have a real life, but my mind travels faster and further than my body.