I will second the recommendation on python for a beginner. It is my favorite language to teach to people coming from a non-technical background, as it has a very small number of syntax rules. I'm currently attempting to teach ruby to a crop of students whose backgrounds range all over the place. While I love the language, I'm constantly butting heads with the 'beauty' of ruby, which was traded away for consistency of syntax. You _can_ use explicit parentheses and return statements in ruby, but I challenge you to find any instructional text which does. Python will give you fewer headaches to start.

That said, I'm going to disagree on the recommendation of starting a university course. We have to be clear: programming is not computer science. Some of the best computer scientists often write programs with poor implementations, and some of the best programmers I know have no formal computer science education (they tend to pick it up along the way, though). You should absolutely engage in structured learning, but understand that university-level CS may be not be in line with your goals.

Don't take this as a condemnation of CS. I have a background in it and enjoyed it immensely, but after four years of it I decided I simply wanted to be a programmer instead.