My name is Trish. I live in Houston, Texas, where I occasionally leave my house.

I’ve worked in the legal profession for a really long time where I worked with the best humanity has to offer: civil trial lawyers. Even though lawyers were probably the Utopia of bosses and showed me the purpose of my expensive college education by calling me at 3 a.m. to ask me where their sticky note was with their flight number on it, I now write and edit full-time and work mainly for myself. It was basically an even exchange.

I grew up in a small town in southeast Texas and graduated from high school in a class of less than 145 students (the count is questionable since a few failed just days before graduation). The name of the town rhymes with Satan. I do not think that is a coincidence. Our class song was “Looks Like We Made It” by Barry Manilow, many years after it hit the charts. It was really that boring of a town. I escaped by going to college, where I was exposed to corruption and booze. For some odd reason, I still feel guilty if I go to the grocery store before noon on a Sunday in sweatpants. Risking the disapproving glare of southern church ladies is just living too far on the edge for me.

I began blogging in March 2002 on the domain serenity-quest.com. Twenty-one months later, my original website was the center of a nasty custody trial involving my son and his father. My blog entries were used to attack my character and I was forced to read many out loud in court. Those entries are currently offline. Perhaps I will put those archives back online one day, but every time I try to tackle that project, it’s just too painful. I began writing again on the domain lonesophist.com, which I still use. However, over the years and through my experiences, I’ve grown a bit more paranoid and protective of all that personal information I used to put out there. Now, I am making a conscious effort to look forward, not back. I will probably change my mind during my next mood swing (I’m a Cancer, we do that quite frequently). Currently, I make a conscious effort to live in the moment and focus on the present through another website, Grateful for Today.

I learned many things from blogging and my battles surrounding my custody trial. Most people really don’t care that you aren’t crazy or a bad mother. It’s sexier and more exciting to dwell on the nasty and the controversial.  Therefore, I have spent a lot of time trying to move past it, ignore it, lived in denial for awhile, and then said what the hell. Hey, I’m southern and a native Texan. We don’t hide our skeletons in our closets, we pull them out and throw a party.  Welcome to my skeleton party.