git ssb

title: About

layout: page.jade

<img src="/g.jpg" class="profile full" style="float:left;"/> I'm Gwen Bell. Gwen is short for Gwendolyn. I'm not sure who named me, but I think it was my mom. She died when I was younger and that shaped the way I've turned out. Which is pretty grab-the-bull-by-the-hornsy. I've had to train myself to be still with yoga, meditation, stoic & buddhist training.

Five Fast Facts

1. I ride bare metal Linux, use Git for version control and pacman Syu multiple times a week.
2. I travel with @ev.
3. I have a degree in English Lit from UNC Chapel Hill fwiw. I now work on the command line daily -- I'm a self-taught entrepreneur and technologist.
4. I've held down two full-time jobs. Teaching English in an elementary school in Japan and working as a bartender in America. Beyond that, it's been 100% entrepreneurship, 100% of the time. My first business was a yoga studio in Yokohama, Japan.
5. I was born in the States and have lived a lot of my life abroad.

Life in MX

In 2006 I landed in Puerto Vallarta, MX to co-lead a yoga retreat in Los Naranjos, Yelapa from November 11th through the 18th. The taxi driver, an eldery gentleman, suggested that the two of us might sleep together. I pointed out that I'm about two feet taller than him. While stopped at a stoplight he retrieved an index card from his pocket. He drew a short person and a long person and said that in bed, height is not an issue. Aghast, I said a tiny prayer that I'd make it to the city center, laughing and crying at the same time.

Somewhere in that week I emailed everyone I knew email addresses for in the States and Japan to let them know I intended to stay in Mexico.

As in forever. I'd found a place I belong.

I spent half of December 2006 in Ajijic, Mexico. Lake Chapala in Ajijic is a retirement village of sorts for gringos who are old(er) and more hang-out-with-other-gringos-ish. It wasn't a good fit for me so I made short work of it and got out of there. But I could have just backpacked around a bit. And in retrospect, I wish I'd stayed on in Mexico.

Why!? Well, because I belong here. My paternal grandfather was from Zacatecas, Mexico. My maternal great-grandmother was of Spanish descent.

After 2006 lots of things happened. Many of them alright, some of them just plain awful. In 2009 I was in Mexico and got an email inviting me to go to the O'Reilly sponsored Social Web Foo Camp. I taught some laptop yoga, met some tech folk, played some werewolf. In 2011 I went to Sayulita and stayed at a hotel that has since closed and re-opened under another name. It was called La Casona in November 2011 -- I lived in the hotel for a month and accidentally made some internettermies by doing writing and taking photos of the place. Incidentally, internettermies is the reason I now track issues now, so people can bring things up early and often.

I moved to Mexico for real in 2013. I rented an apartment here for the first time and began studying the language in earnest.

My life in three words: Yoga. Spanish. Tech.

On repeat.

Forever until I die.