This is the third or fourth or fifth one of these I've done, and I'm afraid I'm not getting better with time or practice. You've been warned.

Vital Statistics

Elizabeth was born December 19, 1971, in Washington, DC. (Yes, this makes her thirty years old. She is perfectly okay with this. No, really.) She generally likes being a Christmas-season baby, and is thankful that her birthday is before the holiday rather than after, when everyone is tired of cake and presents and parties.

Elizabeth's immediate family consists of her parents, who will be married 42 years this fall, and her brother Derek, who is four years older than she is. Last January (2002), Derek married a lovely woman named Elena, who is from Venezuela. Everyone in the family absolutely adores her.

The Early Years
When she was less than a year old, the family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut; when she was almost four, they moved to an idyllic suburb of Kansas City. Twelve years later, the summer before her senior year in high school, they moved back to Washington, DC. Elizabeth's parents were very understanding about this, and they told her that if she really wanted to stay in Kansas City so she could finish high school with the people she had been going to school with her whole life, she could. But due to a somewhat erratic period in her father's career, her parents had been living apart for some time, and she felt badly for them, so she agreed to move.

Although she missed her hometown, the experience of attending a progressive private school in the nation's capital is one she has never regretted -- particularly because she clicked her heels and returned to the Land of Oz to attend the University of Kansas with most of her friends.

City of Angels
After four and a half years, Elizabeth flew the coop of KU and moved to Los Angeles, California, because that's what she thought you were supposed to do when you graduated college, and L.A. was the only other city in the U.S. where she really wanted to try living. She quickly got a job with a smallish production company as a floater secretary and messenger. This production company had its heydey in the 1980's and was pretty much washed up by the time she got there; after a year, it was swallowed up by a mediumish production company, and Elizabeth took a job with the smallish company's head of business and legal affairs (who was offered a contract at the new company) as his assistant.

Now, for a deep dark secret: When Elizabeth left KU in December of 1993, she hadn't actually, technically graduated. She was three credits short. She would probably still be three credits short to this day if she hadn't decided that she wanted to go to law school.

Elizabeth, Esq.
So, in the summer of 1997, Elizabeth packed her car and her cat and headed east to Pennsylvania, stopping in at KU along the way to take the final exam of her correspondence course, which finally provided her with a college degree. (Good thing, that, as she was starting law school a month later.)

The trials and travails of Law school itself is enough to change a person's life, but something else happened while Elizabeth was in law school that would also change her life -- she discovered the world of online journaling. Through this medium, she has met some really incredible people, people who deepened her understanding of friendship to an amazing degree.

Real Life, Part 1

Three years later, J.D. in hand, Elizabeth once again returned to Kansas City. She thought it was where she wanted to be, someplace familiar, easygoing, settled. She spent the summer of 2000 studying for the Missouri bar, and much to everyone's surprise, she passed it on the first try. She took a job as a litigation analyst with the largest firm in the city, and was content, for a while.

Then things started to change a little. During the summer of 2001, looking thirty in the eye, she started to fix some things that were wrong, and started to think about her life a little more seriously. She wondered where her career was going, and thought that she ought to be in charge of it, not just following it along.

And then there was that day in September, the day that made everyone look around for what was important, for what really mattered. Elizabeth looked around and realized she couldn't see what was most important to her, because they were all too far away.

Real Life, Part 2
So, she came back. Back east, back to the city of her birth, closer to her family, closer to her closest friends.

And now here she is, starting over, one more time.

Elizabeth is currently job-hunting from her fabulous apartment in Alexandria. In her spare time, she enjoys working on her novel, cyberstalking Eddie Izzard, and writing about herself in the third person.


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