About
About Matt
By Matt
I was born in Florida, but moved to southwest Missouri at the ripe old age of three. I went through grades K-12 at the same school district and graduated high school in 2020. As a kid, I was enrolled in karate lessons because I was considered too shy and my parents thought it would be a great way for me to make friends and get over myself. Wouldn't you know it, they were right. I made a lot of friends, gained a lot of self confidence, and they gave me my first job, which was running their summer camps. Eventually they even let me (forced me) on the regular staff. It was a pretty sweet gig, like going to work with your fun uncles.
School was a lot of the same story. I did well in classes, liked all of the teachers, they liked me well enough. I didn't have a million and one friends, but the district was small enough that everyone knew me and we were all friendly enough. I was close with the friends I did have, so it was that classic trade off: a lot of casual friends or a few close friends? I ended up in the latter category. I think that was the right call, I enjoyed the time I spent with them, but I really have only kept up with one of them after graduation and even that correspondence is petering out a little. At the time of writing, I am a graduate student pursuing a Masters of Accounting. I'm still up in northeast Missouri, and I graduate in May. During summer of 2024, I had a cushy internship that led to a full time position, so it looks like I will be staying in northeast Missouri for a bit.
I met my wonderful girlfriend Lexi in the summer of my sophomore year. I had just gotten out of a several month long relationship, which looking back on now totally wasn't going anywhere. I think that one only started going out with me because she was too polite to tell me to take a hike. We're still friendly enough, but we don't really interact outside of any classes we have together. Anyway, I had decided that if I could pick up a chick once, I could probably do it again. After I moved back to southwest Missouri for the summer, I got Tinder set up and started cruisin' for hotties. I wasn't looking for anything long-term necessarily, I understood that some people wouldn't want to do long-distance after the end of summer. I got one match and after we met at a (now defunct) sushi restaurant, I had decided that I was probably going to delete Tinder because I wouldn't need it anymore. Lexi and I have been together ever since and it's been pretty sweet. Not perfect, but so far I have only seriously upset her once, maybe twice. Hopefully I can keep that number low for a good long while. So now you're up to speed. This About section will probably get longer as more stuff happens to me.
Oh man some more stuff happened. In the spring of 2024, I graduated Truman State University with a bachelor's degree in accounting. Everyone seems to think it was a pretty big accomplishment, but I don't really think so. It was just what was expected of me. I also have to get a master's degree in order to become a CPA, so everyone thinks that is a big deal too, but again, it's just what is expected. Ah well, so it goes. Everyone gets really mad at me when I tell them it doesn't really feel like an accomplishment, so I stopped bringing it up.
After graduation, in the summer of 2024, I had an internship with KPMG up in Kansas City, so Lexi and I packed up most of our things and moved into a dinky little apartment with no air conditioning and previous tennants who were smokers. Allegedly they had moved out only a couple of days before we moved in, and the apartment owners were awful about actually doing maintenance. A lot of our fans were missing blades, not all of the electrical outlets worked and to cap it off, nothing was clean. Did I mention we moved in at the start of a heat wave and it took the owners 2 weeks to send someone around to fix the AC. Honestly though, I do kind of miss it a little, just the two of us against the world. I doubt I'll ever get the opportunity to slum it like that again. I like making the most of a bad situation, it's a constant reminder that life is what you make it and the indomitable human spirit triumphs over all challenges. Oh man, did we face a challenge.
I say miss it and am talking about the apartment in the past tense because that place burned down not even a month into us living in it. We lost pretty much everything we had brought up there. Somehow, my first laptop survived, as did the Gibson Epiphone Special guitar Dad gave me. Nothing else made it. Or so we were told, but less than a week after the fire, someone had salvaged the Xbox we had and was using Lexi's card on there to buy microtransactions in FIFA and NBA 2K. We think it was someone on the clean up crew. I lost a lot of good stuff, I had a huge book and DVD collection, some CDs and a couple vinyls, I had a fantastic suit that looked great, but most disappointing of all was that I lost the PlayStation 2 and all of the games that I had grown up with. The real kicker is that the PS2 wasn't even supposed to be there, Mom just saw it and packed it. It wasn't even technically mine, I had lost one of Dad's things. It was not mine, it was not supposed to be there, and it had a lot of good memories for more than a few people in the house, and I kick myself everytime I remember it. I didn't lose anything else that I couldn't replace. All of my good polaroids of Lexi are in my wallet. She lost all of her good photos though, as well as her laptop and her car keys. We were reset back to square zero. My parents offered us a place to stay, and we lived with them for the rest of the summer. I mostly recovered. I was able to finish the internship, and they offered me a full time job. I rebuilt my desktop computer, bought a cheap laptop, and was all set to go. It's crazy how many problems you can solve by throwing money at them.
End of the day, I'm squared away, back at good ol' T-State working towards a master's degree, a CPA certifiaction, and I decided to go for a CFE certification too because why not? First CPA exam is in November, so we'll see how that goes. I've been thinking about creating a new page to use as a blog, so I'm probably going to go ahead and do that. Any future updates will go there, so check in occasionally.
About Lexi
By Matt
I totally could write some nonsense here, but I respect the lady too much. Consider this space reserved for future use.