Chapter Two is my life as a serious competitive gymnast throughout my elementary and high school years, a time that prepared me for Chapter Three, a career as a professional dancer in New York City, where I lived for about twenty years. In the middle of Chapters Two and Three, I barely earned my undergraduate degree in mathematics with a minor in education.

At the end of Chapter Three, when my body was letting me know that dancing eight shows per week might result in injury, I enrolled myself in courses at the City College of New York, where I earned a masters degree in pure mathematics, followed by a doctoral degree in mathematics education at Teachers College at Columbia University. The experience of being able to both use my art, and write about it, in a dissertation, delighted my soul. I was able to write about my weakest subject of mathematics, a branch known as abstract algebra, and its connection to the art of M.C. Escher. I was also lucky to have produced enough works of art of my own at that time to use as illustrations in the final thesis that helped me earn my degree.

I am now in Chapter Four, where I chose to work as a tenured professor of mathematics at Bellevue College, a two-year college, in Seattle, WA. I dream of a Chapter Five, where I retire from work, and I can be an artist all day long.

In each chapter, I have always written in a journal, a diary, or loose leaf pages - but I have never considered myself a writer. These are activities I use to survive and to make sense of the world. I might be a writer, a painter, an illustrator, a dancer, a mathematics instructor, but I think of all of these identities as an artist. I am, more than anything, learning as I age, built from every single mistake I make, and look at the world with a sense of wonder.

I would have never done a website on my own, but with encouragement from so many friends to do such a thing, here I am, scared of what a web site means for me, but ready to try it out and see what happens. I am grateful for every person who has helped or hurt me, for every teacher that has ever worked with me, and for every opportunity I have had to develop a skill. I wonder what Chapter Five will be like.