[Originally written as a Facebook post, in response to a "write 25 things about yourself" meme that was going around.]
1. Happiness: I usually describe myself as the most consistently happy person I know. When I'm anxious, angry or frustrated, I have an ability to sort of decide to feel differently. Sometimes I can do it just by breathing in/out and smiling. Lately I'm not sure I would use this same description, because I've had more struggles with my mood and energy, mostly due to my less than stellar health, but also related to having lived with a lot of family stress in my life for several years. I'm still able to have fun, regularly, which tells me I'm not severely depressed. And I'm optimistic about improving things by picking the most important, accessible things I can change and working on them. But certainly this moment isn't the happiest in what has been a mostly very happy life.
2. Language: I like to joke that I'm illiterate in 5 languages. I took 3 years of French in junior and high school, 3 semesters of German while stationed there in the Army, about a year's worth of Spanish when I was trying to impress the lady who would eventually become my wife, and some basic Croatian before we made a trip there to visit her family. As seems to be my way in life, I think I have good natural language ability, but not a lot of follow-through with practice and perfection.
3. Random sports memory: I once scored a touchdown in junior high football by catching a tipped pass on defense in the backfield and running it back. But alas, it was called back due to an "inadvertent whistle", which means the ref blew his whistle for no reason, which makes the play dead even if it didn't need to be. No fair scoring when the other guys have stopped running.
4. Random embarrassing memory: One of the funniest moments of my life as a kid, and most deeply embarrassing for my mother, was when they were playing the final montage of video projects done by all the kids in the talented and gifted program at the University of New Mexico during the summer after 5th grade. For my piece of the project, I came up with nothing. No arts. No crafts. No interesting talents. But I did have a talent for belching. So I got some other dude to interview me, and my answer to every question was a belched answer. My mom said that at the time she wished nothing more than for a hole to open up in the ground so she could hide in it. I thought it was pretty funny then, but I understand the horror now. Kinda weird. My only question is: where the hell were the teachers and counselors to help guide me? Sheesh.
5. How I found love: I met my wife by writing and posting a good ad to Yahoo! Personals. She said it was a "standout ad". I liked that her response was not only spell-checked but also grammatically sound, including proper use of a semicolon. (Oh yeah, baby. You know what I like.) Sadly, Mary was not the *very* first to respond to my ad. Before her, a nice African-American lady sent me a note saying it was too bad we live in a white-dominated world. I didn't disagree with her, of course, but clearly I wasn't The One for her. So I went with Mary. That worked out better for all three of us. In the beginning of our relationship we did a lot of emailing. My friend Matt would come in and find me typing away madly on an 8-page email, and kind of joke/scoff about the wisdom of writing so much. Mary really fell in love with me because of my writing, though. And later Matt joked, "So, apparently, you can just... type some stuff into the computer... and find love."
6. o/~ In the Year Two Thousand... o/~ The year 2000 was a good year for me. Between January and March of that year, I got a job at NetApp (where I still work, and which has been very good to me), bought a beautiful new blue GMC Yukon (which I just recently sold), and found the woman of my dreams. I used to call the Yukon "Babe", like Paul Bunyan's ox, but Mary is the babe who I decided to keep around in the long run. The cost of gas doesn't impact my appreciation of her nearly as much as the Yukon.
7. Ein Prosit: While I was in the Army Band, I had the good fortune to be stationed at one of the funnest places for an Army musician to work: the Third Armored Division (3AD) Band in Frankfurt, Germany. Our duties consisted of playing music for military ceremonies, occasional formal concerts, and, mostly, a lot of "fest" gigs in tents, beer halls, and parades. I think we played something like 500 gigs in my 2.5 years there. The locals didn't have to pay for our services... the Army provided us for free to engender good will. They just required that we get a meal before and drinks during the performance. Generally Army band members in this situation were allowed to drink beer and other alcohol, as long as they could remain composed and in control. But our band was likely the most permissive in this regard. Also, the repertoire we played was aimed to entertain, and there was a fair amount of intentional comedy, which kind of grew and evolved over time as we thought of new things to try. By the time I was about to leave, I think a lot of us had almost stopped bothering trying to make the audience laugh, and were just doing things to make other band members laugh, which must have been strange for the audience. Fun, raucous times. Definitely not what I was expecting when I joined the military to be a musician, but fun and unforgettable nonetheless.
8. I have a strange fascination with two things about language: suffixes, and redundancy. I find myself constantarily suffixationalizing with madeup wordificationitudinousnesses. Furthermore, I can't help needlessfully extendifying. I also repeat myself intentionitudinously, a lot. I blame Don King. As he once said when describing a deli sandwich, "The meatumental pastramification of this pumpernickelously toastified bread was augmenticized by slatherfication in sumptuous Switzerlander cheesiness." Truer words have never been said.
9. I'm not very good at writing single-sentence random thoughts about myself.
10. After a couple of months of kindergarten I was tested and skipped up to first grade. I was really happy about this right up until my graduating year, when I wished I had one more year to do certain things better than I'd done them that year. This strange mixture of pride and regret stayed with me, powerfully, for at least the next 5 years or so, and I still have these thoughts sometimes today.
11. I have taken about 3 year's worth of college credits over 20+ years. But it has been all over the map. On just about any degree program, I'm really about at early sophomore year level. Not having a degree is another thing I've alternately been proud of (because of how well I've done without it) and sad about (because of how much better I might be doing if I had it).
12. I often cry cathartically when I watch movies and TV shows. Particularly Grey's Anatomy (usually more than once per episode), and in several places in some of my favorite movies like Short Time, Groundhog Day, Disney's The Kid, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and a host of others. I strongly prefer the joyous kind of cry. I adore "awakenings" stories. I can take a lot of excruciating hardship and struggle, if the end result is character growth and progress towards resolution and happiness.
13. I like to think that I've lived an interesting life. There were distinct phases:
a. My childhood, during which I was born and stuff, and discovered my love for dirt bikes of the motorized variety.
b. My adolescence, during which I discovered my love for music, church, and avoiding homework.
c. My teens, during which I discovered girls and sports, and continued with church and music. I got my first job as an office boy, and was fired from it. And I also spent two months doing various kinds of carpentry. And I owned my first couple of cars.
d. My Army hitch, during which I survived basic training, traveled to my second continent, lost my religion, discovered a love for science and philosophy, and played way more marches and Glenn Miller tunes than I could ever have predicted. I also exercised an awful lot.
e. My post-Army wandering time, during which I had jobs as a dishwasher, encyclopedia salesman, covert life extension vitamin shipper, and mountain lodge and restaurant manager. I also signed up for cryonics, and became familiar with the folks who called themselves Extropians.
f. My time as a staff member at the Alcor Foundation (the main cryonics company), starting as membership administrator, then working my way into public speaking, writing, layout and editing, some time as a research assistant, and as a member of the board of directors.
g. My migration to Silicon Valley, in search of fortune and happiness, starting with a job as an Internet tech support rep, then learning web programming, unix web server administration, and project and people management.
h. Finding the love of my life, starting a family, and settling down into a good job doing web work for a good company.
i. My Facebook era, during which I got back in touch with people from each of these different phases of my life, and now get updates from them all in the same place. So very weird and cool.
14. I love a lot of sports, but especially the game of basketball. I can't play it the way I could as a young'n, but I still like watching it a lot, and I follow the NBA. I decided to give the game of Fantasy NBA a try a few years back, which turned out to be good and bad. It's kind of a silly thing, and probably wastes a lot of my time, but it also managed to give a kind of focus to something I already did anyway: reading about the NBA in my free time. This way, there's a game involved, and an object to my obsession. And I'm good at it. In my fantasy life, this skill leads to some team in the NBA noticing me and hiring me to be their general manager. (Never mind the lack of any real experience, or the real pressure of the job. This is my fantasy here!)
15. I'm a hugger. If I like you, and I think you're amenable to it, we will hug at the end of our first social outing. That's just how I roll, so best get used to it.
16. Purple is my favorite color. Sometimes I think it's ridiculous to *have* a favorite color, but there's no denying that purple is it for me. Obviously Tinky Winky is my favorite Teletubby. But I'm not particularly fond of Barney. (What is *with* that voice?!)
17. Okay, time to summarize a little more. Use less words.
18. A lot less. Hi!
19. I've always been a night owl. It's a problem I'll probably always be working on.
20. I love watching children develop. I'm fascinated with all the little bits of progress, with the breaking actions down into simple parts and mastering them a piece at a time. If I were to go into the field of psychology, probably developmental psychology would be my passion.
21. I pride myself on my humility.
22. I also pride myself on my mental flexibility. I don't need to be the right one all the time. I like to find ways to better understand the other person's point of view, and seek ways to try to help them explain the points they're trying to make. It helps me be more rational, spend less time entrenched in wrong thinking, and, magically, endears people to me. I don't do this all the time. Sometimes, sure, I'll try to hammer home a point of view. But I'm aware when that's what's happening, and I can flip the "be more sympathetic" switch at any time, and often do. If I were to try to write a book with advice about how to get along with people, this is something I would include.
23. I love life, and I'd like to live a really long time. Failing that, I hope cryonics works, and I get to come back for a second try. I think one of the cruelest things about life is that when your body is young and vigorous and fun, your mind is ridiculously uneducated and filled with hormone-driven impulses, and when you finally start to figure a few things out and move in the direction of wisdom, your body starts breaking down. Scientists like Aubrey De Grey claim this needn't be the case in the future. Aging looks and acts like a lot of other diseases, and there's no more reason to think that we won't one day cure aging than there was to think we'd never cure polio or small pox. It's a harder problem, sure. But ultimately it's just biochemistry in action, and our control over biochemistry will increase with time. I don't know what I'd do with a virtually unlimited lifespan, but I'd probably start with going back to school to study music and some branch of biology.
24. If I could change just one thing about my childhood, one strong possibility would be to pick something other than trombone as my first instrument to learn in 5th grade. Drums, or piano, or best of all, guitar. You can take a guitar anywhere, including to a campfire. And if there are 20 people with voices, and just you with a guitar, you are sufficient musical accompaniment to get everyone singing. It's a magical instrument. Trombone, on the other hand, had a nice run from the 20's through the 70's. But there are no campfire trombone tunes. Chicks do not dig the trombone. It goes wah wah, and that's about it. Show's over. Thank you and good night!
25. Seriously, thank you and good night. We did it! Good job!
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