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Reality check check 1 2 1 2
Me in my mind
Me in reality
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Nailed it.
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My lock screen is my friend Nita… being Nita.
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Final Request
If I die, someone please make it look like a suicide caused by the unjust cancellation of Firefly.
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![tastefullyoffensive:
[via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3b0wg4MlP1qewacoo1_500.png)
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Dear 12-year-old Me,
When she asks you if you want to go get some ice cream, SAY YES!
Keep your promises, even when you’re lonely and you think you’ll meet a girl at that party you’d rather go to.
Treat everyone with respect and dignity, and know that you are always deserving of the same. Do not mourn the loss of anyone who treats you otherwise.
Any time you do not feel enough love in your life, love others more. It will come back to you many times over.
Don’t drink so much cola, and avoid red meat. Your intestines will thank you later.
Try running. Go for endurance, not speed.
But seriously, the ice cream. Even if you’re not hungry.
Love,
You+31 -
I am surprised so many people only bought one “first CD”. My first CD purchase was these two.
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College
I went to high school in a small town in Arizona. I was a nerd, and looking to get as far from my dysfunctional home as possible. So I applied to MIT. I got waitlisted, but a spot opened up. It was the first time in years that someone from my school had been accepted to MIT, and only the second time ever. But that year there were two of us. Deanna was a friend, sometime rival, and I worked for her father every summer. Did you catch the part about it being a small town?
She went on to have what I would call a successful college experience. I got struck down with Crohn’s ileitis from the very start. Spent two months with the med center trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally got put on prednisone, and after about five days, the debilitating pain started to ease up. I ended up salvaging a few classes from that semester. Tried again in the spring, but in the end, even with the steroid treatments, it was too much.
I spent a couple of years taking time off from school. Almost died from some kind of viral infection that made me throw up or dry heave about 40 times within an hour, including one time so hard that a stewed tomato came out through my nostril, and gave me a fever of 106ºF by the time I went to the emergency room. My “photographic memory” was never quite the same after that, so there may have been some minor brain damage.
Anyway, I somehow figured out that I could manage my Crohn’s without medication if I simply avoided all caffeine and related xanthine alkaloids (think “tea” and “chocolate”.) By then, I had been on prednisone for two solid years. One of the side effects of long-term steroid use? Depression. Not to say I wouldn’t still suffer from some form of clinical depression today, but I’d certainly have better odds if I’d never had Crohn’s.
Two years later, I went back to MIT, found some old friends, made new friends, studied for two and a half more years, struggled with undiagnosed depression, and then, sometime during that last semester, finally started getting counseling. There was talk of Prozac, but I never got connected with someone who could write a prescription.
If I had, everything probably would have been different. When I came home and I finally saw my doctor and got started on Prozac, it was like night and day. I am not exaggerating when I say that it saved my life.
Still, even without finishing my degree, MIT taught me things. And not just loads of technical knowledge, much of which is outdated now, anyway. The most important thing, which seems so obvious now after 42 years of living, is that I don’t have to know how to do something in order to do it: I only have to have some place to start. I can figure out the rest as I go along. To a know-it-all from a small town, suddenly thrust into a bigger world, that’s been a pretty valuable lesson.
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Earliest GPOY? Does it have to be just me, or does one of my son and I together count? And if so, does it have to be contemporaneously posted? Idunno, here, just have them all.
(Oh, gawd, his little “E.T.” face in the last one just gets me…)
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This is what my first car looked like, only without the white wheels. The interior was a rich burgundy leather that had not aged too well. 289 V8 engine. 3-speed manual with shifter on the steering column—confused the hell out of any of my friends that tried to drive it.
Obligatory anecdote: I was pulling through a parking lot, slowly, past a long line of people waiting for a movie. An acquaintance from high school gave the car a playful punch as it passed, expecting it to give like the thin skin of a mid-80s Japanese import. Dude, this is an American car from the 60s. SOLID STEEL. I watched in the rearview mirror as he shook his hand in pain.
(picture via secondchancegarage.com)
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“When I Grow Up”
I wanted to be an astronaut. I still wish I could. It’s heartbreaking to me that the only nation to ever put men on the moon now doesn’t even have a vehicle of its own that can take someone to low earth orbit.
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Places I’ve been.
Create your own visited map of The United States
Going back to New Hampshire soon for a week with some college friends.
Next state I’d like to visit that I haven’t? Idaho. I’ve heard it’s beautiful. Coeur D’Alene has been highly recommended to me.
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“Revolution Helmets”
Be safe. Always wear a “helmet”.
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First Concert
I have trouble remembering what came first. So it was probably either
- The second of two shows of U2 kicking off the Joshua Tree tour in Phoenix. Bono was kind of losing his voice and they cut the show a little short. The song were new, rough and unpolished. It was awesome. I saw them again at the end of the tour, in Tempe, when they filmed the shows for what would become the Rattle & Hum movie. They were polished. The music felt flat. Dead. I don’t think U2 ever sounded as good to me after that.
OR
- A four act rap concert, three of the acts being LL Cool J, Public Enemy and Run-DMC. If you think that might have been kind of epic, yeah, it was that.
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I was once told I looked like Weird Al Yankovic
But I think I just sing like him.
