When I was in the third grade I was in a program after school called CCC, which took care of children while their parents were still at work. This one time when we were allowed to go outside, I saw an older kid who was listening to a CD player and I asked him if I could listen, he handed it to me and I started listening. That was the first time I heard the song "Without Me" by Eminem. There was a lot of messed up lyrics, but I was paying attention more to the rhythm and flow within the song. After that I was hooked, but my parents would never let me listen to such explicit music. So years later after seeing a commercial for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 which played one of Eminem's songs "Till I Collapse". I enjoyed listening to the commercial so much, since it played constantly on the t.v. no matter what channel you turned on, so I decided to download the whole album that it featured on. This eventually led to me finding and searching for more and more hip hop artists, which I still do with all my music today. Eminem is who really influenced me to be as much as I am into music. Even though this is true and Eminem is one of my favorite rappers of all time, as he got older he began to rap more as himself instead of his alter-ego Slim Shady which I mainly liked listening to. So I started to grow apart from Eminem's music, but I still have those experiences to thank Eminem for shaping how I go about my daily life because I'm pretty music oriented.
This picture relates to basically every part of my childhood and has shaped me as a person because of this. I always had a weird diverse group of friends when growing up in New York. The kid in the black shirt with the gold chain was one of my first best friends who I met in kindergarden and since I'm so close with him he's essentially my brother today. He's the only person I can talk to about everything and I mean anything and I stay in his apartment for the most part, whenever I come to visit my family and friends. The kid in the dark blue towards the front, and the kid in the black shirt behind him, are both childhood friends who have always been there for me and have introduced me to several things that have shaped me as a person. They introduced me to Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 and I got addicted fast. Instead of having to get the ok from your parents to have a bunch of my friends over, you could immediately get on xbox and talk to up to 8 of your friends and play videogames with up to 18 depending on the game. This made it easier to get to know many of my friends at once, and it was an easy way to ask friends questions that I had about homework. We had a lot of good times outside of gaming because of all of this. The kid in the blue shirt on the left, pointed me in the direction of electronic music and now it's my preference today. Since we both shared an interest in electronic music we would always talk to each other about the latest tracks. The kid hovering his hands over my head was my dad's girlfriend's son. Since he was my dad's girlfriend's son I saw him very often and we always played videogames and watched movies. He was and is really into movies and wrote movie reviews that I used to read. I think he got me into the types of movies I'm into today.
When I was about 9 years old my parents decided to get a divorce. When they broke the news to my sister and I, all I had to say was "
Really, ok." and when my parents asked if I had any thing else to say, like any questions, I said "No, I knew this was coming, with all the yelling, dad sleeping in the basement and all." So eventually my mom gained the custody of my sister and I, but my sister and my moms personality's didn't mix well when they're around each other for long periods of time. So my sister eventually ended up living with my dad till she went to college. Since I only saw my dad on every Tuesday, Thursday, and every other weekend, I felt kind of distanced from my sister. So we didn't really get to know more about who each of us have grown to become till this summer when we worked at the same summer camp together.
