Me rambling about my whole life story:
I am Ariel Meadow Stallings, and yes: I was born with that name. I'm mostly just a writer, but I'm also a comedy event organizer, media commentator, social media marketer, professional blogger, author, web community mobilizer, profanity spitter, wife, dog owner, only child, and 30-something middle-class white woman.
Oh so you want to know more? Ok, ok. I was born on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. I grew up in a log cabin my hippie parents built in the forest of Bainbridge Island. My mother was a midwife, then worked at the Seattle Midwifery School. Now she runs a little eco-retreat center. My father used to be a college professor, but left the ivory tower to work for the Seattle Metro and read books out loud to his "little grr." He's also a poet.
I was a content and relatively well-adjusted child, although a bit of a prude, constantly chiding my parents for swearing. In high school I acted in lots of regional theater and was a really good kid. My teenage years are testament to the power of the swinging pendulum theory of parenting. Nothing like liberal parents to keep a teenager from smoking, drinking, or being a fun-loving slut. No: I waited until college to do all those things.
After one semester as a musical theater major at Emerson College in Boston, I ended up at the University of Washington in Seattle, studying Sociology and Communications. In 1996, I started going to raves, and decided to take a year off between my junior and senior years to move to San Francisco and commune with my destiny as a serious scenester.
I worked at a law firm during the day and enjoyed ridiculous — although I still believe very important — hedonism and bad fashion most nights. My writing career began in the haze of my most serious raver days, first with funny articles for a San Francisco feminists' zine, then as a features writer for Lotus Magazine, a Los Angeles-based music magazine.
I moved back up to Seattle in 1997 to finish my final year of college and met the love of my life on a dance floor in a dirty warehouse.
After getting my BA in 1998, I was promoted to Editor in Chief of Lotus Magazine. I obsessively documented the West Coast's rave community for about four years. You can laugh all you want, but the magazine was a total success in its niche.
After my resignation from Lotus in early 2001, I spent a summer in New York City attending the Columbia Publishing Course. Then I bounced around a bit, first back to Seattle for a year of copywriting for The Seattle Times and writing for The Seattle Weekly. Then there was the brief encounter with Los Angeles in 2002, when Dre and I moved to Venice Beach and I worked for a dotcom and ran a hula hooping website.
Andreas and I returned to Seattle in fall of 2003, and since then lots of grown-uppy stuff has happened like getting married, buying a home, the publication of my first book, having a baby and trying to navigate the transition from young naive weirdo to older wiser weirdo.
When I'm not writing or sleeping, I'm usually visiting with friends & family, dancing, taking pictures, walking my dog, attending the very occasional hippy-raver-freakfest, or staring at the wall quietly trying to get my shit together.
