About the Author

My name is Ryan Shirley. I live in Atlanta (technically Sandy Springs), Georgia and am currently 23 years old. I work for a sports marketing company in Norcross where I plan promotional events. I make $30,000 a year before taxes. I went to Georgia College and graduated in May of 2013 with a B.B.A. in Management and Marketing. Before that I did IT recruiting for about ten months in Alpharetta. It was the worst. My hobbies include: stand-up comedy, Braves baseball, Falcons football, Xbox 360, GameCube, N64, politics, religion, community service, Judd Apatow movies,  being outside, running, substance abuse and I went to the gym once.

I am a lifelong Georgian and grew up in west Cobb County about one hour from the city in a Catholic household. I have two parents, Gary and Karen and two siblings, Kellie and Colin. I am the oldest and both Kellie and Colin are currently enrolled at my Alma Mater.  I live with Grant Cappy, a fraternity brother and friend from college. We play too many video games. I have a girlfriend named Natalie Mason who I met my first week of college. We will have been dating for five years this August. Her hints toward marriage have gotten less and less subtle. I do love her, though. Make sure that's in writing.

I have essentially three groups of friends. One is from the neighborhood I grew up in called "The Broadlands." We all lived on the same streets and grew up in the late nineties and 2000's. Shit was crazy.

I have another group from high school. I went to high school between 2005-2009 and "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas was the most popular song when I graduated. I actually really liked that song. Note the past tense in that previous sentence.

Lastly, I have a group of folks from college. Fraternity brothers, mostly. I was a Delta Sigma Phi in school. It's a pretty terrible organization on the whole. Despite higher earning power compared to our college days we are all still broke and trying to do this whole real world thing without being evicted or permanently condemning our livers.

If anybody 1) ever reads this at all or 2) they have read this far I would be pretty amazed. I just wanted to get some of the key names and locations in my life should anyone ever be curious who or what I am talking about in future posts if I ever write future posts.

The point of choosing today, July 16th 2014 to write this stuff down is I always enjoyed the literary process. Revising, editing etc... writing always involves a lot of re-imagining and I like that. I also think I am living in an interesting world and that it's worth writing about. Especially when you are a millennial yuppie.

Here goes nothing...

Me and Natalie, my very real girlfriend

Some of my friends

My siblings and I

Me and the folks