About me..

After the initial start-up issues that one is sure to face whenever confronting blogs, I now have a nomadlife blog. Dody says that I should do an 'about me' post so here it is in a nutshell.

My name is Ralph Panebianco, born 11:45pm on Monday the 19th of March 1984. While I was born in Sydney, Australia, I have lived in various places throughout Australia during my life including Lithgow (a small town in NSW famous for...absolutely nothing), Bundaberg (an even smaller town famous for sugar cane and rum), Brisbane and since I was 11 years old, Sydney.

I have 4 little brothers- Joshua (19), Conrad (17), Sam (13) and Alec (11). All of them are annoying, bigger then me (well not the 11 y/o...yet) and very unique. I am proud to call them brothers. I have a mother named Jenny, who is a single mother of tremendous strength and courage since my father is not a particularly nice man. I have a grandmother named Peggy who is in her 70s but still getting around like she is 40.

I study an arts degree- sorta. My study kind of gets slotted in between my AIESEC/real work. I hope to graduate one day ;)

I work 2 jobs, and both of them are a dream come true for a man of such simple pleasures like myself. You see, my main vice is video games; a hobby that I have pursued for the better part of 17 years since my father first bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System when I was 4 (one of the few good things he actually did). Since that time I have played many, many hours of games, and by some luck I manage to make a part time career of it to get me through my studies. I work in a video games store called Electronics Boutique in the Sydney CBD, a job that ensures a flow of free software and hardware. I also write for Official Australian Xbox Magazine- don't ask me how I got into that since I have absolutely NO training as a writer.

I am an AIESECer, and a pretty serious one at that. In my 4th year as an AIESECer now, I am Australian MCe, where I will be a Business Development manager for 12 months. I am currently on a CEED over here in Mainland China. Based in Beijing, my work has been centred around building a sustainable, long-term bilateral exchange partnership between Australia and China. I can say with confidence that I have accomplished this, and I will provide more detail in the future.

So yeah...that's me. It's weird seeing my life compacted into 5 paragraphs like that. So if you know me and plan to read this blog with any degree of regularity, you can expect to see three things:

1) Heaps of talk about AIESEC- I'm going to be on the MC. What else would I talk about in here?
2) Some pseudo-indulgent discourse about me, my place in the world, the direction of my life and the impact that I can/cannot make
3) Deep, layered, super-nerdy comment on video games and the industry (this is more for me to practice my writing than anything else). I'll try and put a warning at the top of these posts ;)

So if anything listed above sound remotely interesting then stick around people. Take care.

Ralph

Test..

1, 2, 3...

*sigh*- Alright, I'll move to Nomadlife...

Greetings all,
Some of you may know me, many of you do not. My name is Ralph Panebianco and I, like so many others here, am an AIESECer. Originally from Sydney, Australia, I am currently on a three month CEED in Beijing, Mainland China. I keep another weblog at www.xanga.com/jpanchia but my recent flirting with nomadlife.org has prompted me to move my discourse here.

At this point, I must remind everyone that the migration to nomadlife.org was not an easy decision. Having researched the blog phenomenon rather thoroughly, I quickly discerned that nomadlife.org was far from the most 'function-rich' means of chronicling my musings. Lately however, I began to feel two things. The first was loneliness. Xanga is good, Xanga is great in fact, but only myself, Flick and P-Boy use and the result is the feeling that there are perhaps bigger, more vibrant and responsive communities in existence that i might be able to, in some small way, contribute to. It was this loneliness that prompted my second feeling, or perhaps i should say realization;

In my time in AIESEC, particularly whilst I am abroad, I am experiencing something life changing. Everyday that goes by, I am learning new things, meeting new people, facing new challenges and discovering things about myself that I never knew. It's perhaps in these moments of self-realization that one feels most alone- that what you learnt about you at that moment was so significant, so profound, that no one else could have experienced it, and no one could ever understand it. This then is the magic of nomadlife- a collection of people who are all, to some degree or another, on a journey of self improvement and self discovery. People who are all having these moments and are sharing them with others. That's what has brought me to nomadlife. I look forward seeing where it goes.

Ralph