I saw this “Overheard in New York” post over at Sivacracy, but I think it’s worth re-posting here.
–Balcony, Hunter College
It’s a pity the site doesn’t use a Creative-Commons license, since the site relies on the submissions of readers.
I’m a little hurt that neither of my readers have tagged me with the “five things” meme. I’ve been thinking of answers in anticipation of being tagged, but, sadly, no one has tagged me, so I guess I’ll just post five things you didn’t know about me unilaterally.
1. I lived in Norway as a young child. My family lived in Oslo for a few months for my father’s job. My dad installs and maintains early optical scanning equipment used in the financial services sector. In 1977, he was installing some cutting-edge equipment for some business in Norway. Now, he flies around the country keeping the same equipment alive for a few more quarters.
My only memories of Norway are prelinguistic. My mom says I was just beginning to speak when we left for Norway, and suddenly hearing Norwegian freaked me out. I remember intensely blue skies, a sunlit laundromat, and playing with Weeble-Wobbles in the grooves between cobblestones in the alley behind our building. I’ve never left the US since.
2. I got my Eagle Scout at 15, which is a relatively young age. Our parish church began life as a Catholic reform school in the early twentieth century and had been added on several times through the years. I took an unused courtyard between the sanctuary and the old school and turned it into a garden.
I spent a lot of time at church as a teenager. I worked as a groundskeeper during the summers, which was hard work, but I also had fun exloring the nooks and crannies of the old building. The old Vianney school had a basement and a sub-basedment, which was filled with old junk. If I smoked cigarettes then, it would have been a good place to smoke.
I also served in the religious rituals. I ran the soundboard during masses or rang the bells during the Eucharist. When the Bishop came to the parish, I had the job of holding his ceremonial crozier during mass.
3. I grew up in Tulsa, but I went to high school in a town of 5,000 people called Jenks. Jenks was pretty much what you would imagine a small town in Oklahoma to be like. (It’s since become an ugly suburb.) The world depicted in the TV series “Friday Night Lights” is much like the world of Jenks High School.
Although Jenks is a small town, Jenks High School is a pretty big school. My graduating class was just shy of five hundred people. At least half of the students came from affluent neighborhoods of Tulsa, and at 3pm the two-lane bridge to Tulsa would be backed up with students’ cars all the way to the high school parking lot. During my junior year, I went to the University of Tulsa at night, so I got out an hour early and missed the traffic. Other years I would have after-school activities or I would just hang out in the band room instead of sit in traffic.
There was quite a contrast between students from the town of Jenks and south Tulsa. I vividly remember some girl driving her new BMW convertible past an FFA kid washing his sheep in the alley.
4. I was involuntarily homeless for a few months after college. It was scary and painful.
5. I don’t have Internet access at home. Most of the time, I like it because it forces me to browse the web with some sense of purpose. It also makes me more aware of the internet as one media distribution system out of many and compartmentalizes my online life. If I think of something I want to look up when I’m at home, I write down search terms in BBEdit, and look them up when I’m at school.
Even though no one tagged me, I’ll tag Kati, Chuck, Pat, Mel, and whoever else who might be reading.
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