Beginning tomorrw I'm going to share an excerpt from the sequel to Modeling God. It deals with doctrine #2: The Meaning of Life...
There are four very public and important doctrines that "Christians" currently support with man-made tradition instead of the Word of God. Currently, Part I, Doctrine #1, Doctrine #2, and Doctrine #3 are "up".
If you are interested in reading the sequel to "Modeling God": Here is the link to the Table of Contents.
By the way, thanks to all those who sat and talked with us at the BBQ in Minneapolis on Saturday. We definitely need to make the time to do this again, but it will be three weeks before I can be back in Minneapolis.
The content on this blog for June consisted of pre-college graduation stories. Click the June 2008 link to view all of the stories. Notice also, there were posts on Saturday and Sunday...
COLLEGE GRADUATION
By the time my senior year began, my goal was to get a job and get out of school. Dow had told me they would extend an offer. I didn't have to use an interview card.
I dropped a "7" for DuPont and almost got in a fight with the interviewer. He decided to tell me the difference between Dow and DuPont...and I don't know if he said "Dow people" or "you people"...but it felt like "you people" because he described me perfectly. He asked me if I still wanted to be considered and I said "no".
Procter & Gamble scheduled their interviews and I didn't see my name on the sheet, so I dropped a "4". I had heard some horror stories about the P&G interview. One of the stories was that they would ask a question and the second it looked like you knew the answer, they would ask another question. They kept doing this until you stumbled...and then they focused on that question. I was wound up for my interview...
The interviewer seemed laid back, but I wasn't going to be fooled. He asked a question and I answered it in less than five seconds. He asked another question and I answered it quickly. After the third question, I realized I misread the interview. I calmed down and the interview went well. I ended up getting a job trip.
I flew to Cincinnati and interviewed all morning. During one of the interviews I asked what it took to get promoted. They said they were looking for good project managers. I asked what was their definition of a good project manager. They said it was someone who could get from A to B, even if it meant seeing a barrier and changing the plan by going through C and getting back to B. I smiled...
I told him that I had already done that with the hour long movie we had made. I told him how we had lost the first script and had to rewrite it. How the car had troubles. How some scenes hadn't been recorded and we had to reshoot later, etc. We had persevered through a lot of obstacles...every movie does.
After lunch, I was taken into the Associate Director's office and they made me an offer...wrote the salary on a piece of paper and slid it to me. (Later I found out I got the offer because of the movie Kirk and I had made.) They took me to a four star restaurant to celebrate. I knew I was going to work at Dow, but they were making the decision tough.
We took an express elevator to the top of a hotel restaurant with a view of Cincinnati. I ordered a souffle for desert. I ordered filet mignon. They ordered a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon...a good bottle of wine. In fact, when I tasted the filet with the Cabernet I instantly became a fan of great wines. After dinner, they took me to the airport. I flew to Syracuse and drove to Potsdam. What was a six hour trip felt like 20 minutes...I was six weeks into my senior year and I had a job offer.
I began helping others interview. Over the rest of the year, people would come over to the apartment and ask for help. I would give them the 10 minute speech on how to get the job trip. When they went on the job trip, I would give them two sheets of paper telling them how to get the job offer.
I got a call from P&G to interview. When I told them I already got an offer, they said they were with the manufacturing plant. The summer intern offer had been with manufacturing. I got the offer with product development...and now the plant couldn't interview me because of company policy.
Tim and Ed came up to Clarkson during their fall break. Tim wanted to go to Canda to buy Brador Beer. Tim was a Resident Advisor at Syracuse and he wanted to hook up all his contacts with imported beer. Tim and Ed had seen the hour long movie and wanted to make a movie too. We decided to do a mockumentary about an expedition to Canada to hunt the elusive Brador beast. The entire production was ad-libbed. All those pun competitions paid off...they were hilarious.
We taped our entry into Canada...well, until the border guards told us to park and bring the camera inside. They said it was an international felony to videotape a government installation...so we had to erase that portion of the tape...which is better than going to jail for committing an international felony.
What made the production memorable was something we didn't plan...Canada was having a strike. The government sells the alcohol, so the last shot is of the front of the store where a sign says, "Closed due to labour strike".
After Christmas break, most of the women came back engaged. That first week was entertaining and educational. Before class started, one of the seniors would find another senior in order to let her know the news...only to find out she also had gotten engaged. The disappointment was palpable.
Then the first woman would show her ring...there would be a pause as the second woman showed her ring...it was the same ring. The silence was awkward. I must have seen this scene play out over a dozen times in two weeks...and it never got old.
Dow still hadn't sent me an offer...and P&G needed an answer. P&G wanted me to come back for a revisit. The last day that I had shaved was the morning of my P&G job trip. I figured it would be my last chance to see if I could actually grow enough facial hair to resemble a beard and/or mustache. It didn't resemble either...
I visited P&G and the first question I would always get was, "Did you have that facial hair when you interviewed?" For years, the Cincinnati Reds were famous for the policy of not allowing facial hair on their players...I was getting the feeling P&G had the same policy.
They ended up setting a deadline. Dow kept telling me an offer was coming. Ray kept calling. The offer didn't arrive in time, so I accepted the P&G offer. It was really the only company I interviewed with...
I had a hard time staying motivated. I skipped a lot of classes...took a lot of road trips...sailed Ray's sunfish whenever there was even the lightest breeze.
I went to Syracuse one weekend to stay with Tim. He was the Resident Advisor of one dorm that was part of a complex that included four dorms connected by a huge commons area. In the commons area, there was a pool table. Tim and I played as partners and held the table for a couple of hours.
Tim suddenly came over to me excited...the table had to close down at 10, but a pool shark in the dorms named John wanted to play against me. Tim told me John never played on this table...he always played downtown. Word got around and the crowd grew.
It was decided that Tim and I would take on John and Mike Alpern (who was nicknamed "Alpo"). Tim and Alpo were good players and comic geniuses...especially together. John and I brought out the best in each other, while Tim and Alpo kept the crowd laughing. The crowd grew to just about sixty people...
One of the games came down to the last few balls. I planned on making the shot and pulling the cue ball back to get an angle on my last stripe before going for the eight ball. The last ball was on the rail next to the pocket, but their last ball was on the rail three inches away. I needed to keep the cue ball off the rail so I could get in between the two balls.
I made the shot and the ball pulled back into place...and it kept rolling until it rested against the rail. I stood over the three balls in a row against the rail. I was upset. Alpo came over...stood next to me and started laughing at me. He put his face inches from his ball which was in between the cue and my last ball and started laughing louder. Then with his head over the ball, he turned his head up at me and laughed at me. It was like his ball was laughing at me...and the crowd ate it up. Now I was mad...
I don't remember exactly what happened next...it was all a blur. I almost couldn't see straight...
I somehow dug at the cue in such a fashion that it jumped almost straight up and landed partially on my last stripe ball...putting it in the pocket in the process...never touching their ball. The roar was deafening. I immediately turned and banked the eight ball in the side pocket and started walking around the table...the crowd got louder.
Alpo started running backwards, yelling, "I'm blown away". I made one lap around the table and then walked halfway around until I got to the head of the table. I stopped. As the crowd was still cheering, on the inside I raised my arms up in triumph and came to my senses enough to soak in the moment. It was my greatest athletic experience.
John was an excellent competitor and we continued trading wins for the next two hours. Throughout that time, I would hear spectators tell people who were getting back from the bars: "See that guy over there...he beat John by making the most incredible shot and then banking the eight".
By spring break everyone in my group had a job offer. Now I got to see the other half of the engagement ring "dance"...
Every time someone asked someone who they were going to work for, the next question would be "What's your starting salary?" This never ended with a win-win. Each person would quote their five digit number and the lowest one would walk away dejected. From day one I refused to share my number, but there was no way to avoid hearing the starting salaries of others.
I finally got fed up when one of my roommates walked away from one of these exchanges dejected. He was the first person in his family to graduate college. His dad had done manual labor and died during his senior year. He had struggled all four years. Now he was graduating and fulfilling a life long family dream...only to feel inadequate. Something was wrong with this process...
I bought a Nissan Sentra Wagon. Another guy (Bob) bought an IROC Z-28 Camaro. We had planned on driving the group down to Vero Beach for Spring Break. One of the guys had a family condo. He wanted to go down early and knew people attending the University of Florida. A month before spring break, several people decided they were going down the Thursday before Spring Break. This date kept moving up every week. Guys were getting tests and assignments moved up.
Eventually, we had one car of guys going down the Thursday before the week before Spring Break. My car and the Camaro were leaving on the Tuesday before Spring Break...at 4 AM. We drove straight through. I drove the whole way (26 hours) and Bob let someone else drive his brand new muscle car for an hour going through Georgia. My joke was that I got more sleep than Bob did on the drive down...
We had a great time with the University of Florida students the week before spring break. Actually it was hard to tell who was on spring break...
We left early Monday morning to go to DisneyWorld and went to the condo that night. It rained on Tuesday and I ended up taking three guys to Ft Lauderdale. It was only for the afternoon and evening, but I could write a book on what happened.
The short version is that all three of the guys went three different directions, got into various forms of debauchery, while I spent four hours trying to find each of them...only to witness behavior that convinced me I would never find a wife. I found each of them quite by accident.
As I found each of them, I got them to the car so they could pass out and I could go look for another passenger. I really didn't think I was going to find the last one...
Wednesday morning, we loaded up the cars and drove back to the University of Florida. We spent the rest of spring break with a group of students who out partied our group...and attended classes.
Graduation was anti-climactic. My parents came up and we were on the road 20 minutes after the ceremony was over.
I spent the four weeks between graduation and my first day at P&G putting an average of 2000 miles a week on my car. I drove to Midland to debut the movie we had made titled "Road Company". (Dow did make me an offer, but it was months too late.) I drove to Rochester to see my high school friends. I drove to Missouri to be best man in Kirk's wedding. I drove to Long Island to attend the wedding of one of my roommates.
On Sunday I drove from Long Island to Cincinnati...and I started my professional career the next morning.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Kirk and John
I began my junior year with new roommates, out of the dorms, in a nicer section of campus, and ready to attack my classes and graduate in two years.
I was brought back to reality quickly while taking my Fluids class...one of the disciplines I had learned on the summer job. The teacher introduced the most basic fluid equation with over a dozen terms. Basically, the equation was
F = a + b+ c+ d+ e+ f + g + h + i + j + k + l.
During the summer, I had used this equation in the computer program as F = a + b + c. The rest of the terms dealt with miniscule forces in each dimensional direction...stuff that theoretically existed but amounted to less than one one-millionth of the total effect. Obviously this could be ignored...but the teacher wanted to focus on these aspects. I realized all my classes were like this...there was a complete disconnect between what I was learning and what I knew I would eventually be doing.
I was flying pretty high about the past summer. By the end of summer, I was hanging around with a University of Missouri student named Kirk. Kirk had the lead in "Ten Little Indians" and we would spend a lot of time talking about music, movies, literature, and the meaning of life.
Kirk was 18 and I was 20. Our play was the first production of the summer. When we took down our set after our last performance, the next production spent the night putting up their set. Kirk had a crush on a girl in the next production who was 18. She had a friend who kept flirting with me. Kirk convinced me to go to their production.
We went back stage after the production and the girl who had flirted with me hugged me and got lipstick on my collar. Kirk convinced me she tried to kiss me. He wanted me to ask her out so that I would get him a date with her friend.
Eventually I called her up and asked her to a movie. She hesitated and asked me if I knew how old she was. I thought she was 18, like her friend...now I was wondering if she was 16. I told her it didn't really matter because I wasn't going to do anything and I was trying to get a date for Kirk. She said she was 14.
Early on in my junior year, I told a group of guys about mistakenly asking out a 14 year old...they never let me forget it. The entire year was spent with them making fun of me. It didn't take long for me to begin to believe I had a problem...
I got involved with the campus the TV station. Our school had a fully functioning TV station in order to televise the school hockey games...Clarkson was regularly ranked in the Top Ten nationally in college hockey. Also, we were an engineering school, so we had people who were great at keeping everything functioning. The school also televised local news three times a week. We were the only television station within 100 miles...so we had a corner on the market.
The evening news had two anchors. I took one of the anchor positions and quickly learned how much bias there can be in the press. I selected the stories I wanted off the wire. I also wanted to do all the sports. I grew up a Lakers fan...and nearly every viewer was a Celtics fan. One night I did a story on the Celtics and made fun of them...the station phones lit up. The station manager was actually happy because he didn't think anyone was watching.
From that point on, I was given the freedom to do anything...and I did. I would read news stories and whenever there was a quote, I would read the quote in a different voice. I would slip "Dennis Miller" type references into stories. I would read letters from imaginary viewers asking trivia questions. People called the station. I used all of this to get them to let me just do sports and the color commentary for the hockey games.
I still played rugby. We had an away game in Rochester. I drove Ray's vehicle and stayed the weekend so I could see friends. Someone went to the hospital during every game that I played. Since I had a car and knew the area, I drove this game's casualty to the doctor. It was our captain. He had a concussion...someone told me it was his fourth concussion that they knew of.
On the ride over he kept asking me three questions: What is my name? What is today's date? Where are we?
I would answer each...he would wait five seconds...then he would ask me again like he hadn't asked me before. I stopped counting after he did this 75 times. We got to the hospital and there was another rugby player from a completely different game waiting to be seen.
I went into the examination room with the captain. He kept asking me the three questions while we waited for the doctor. The doctor came in and muttered something about banning rugby. Then he looked at the captain...and he asked the three questions! The captain missed all three. The doctor turned his head...and the captain gave me two thumbs up like he had successfully tricked the doctor. Even though I had been the leading scorer every season that I played, that was my last rugby game.
Despite hating school, I was able to get a 3.5 each semester. However, I had a hard time reconciling how I had become a mercenary student...not interested in what I was learning, but interested in doing it for the rest of my life. I wrote a short play about it and sent it to Tim. It involved three colleg students and I wanted Tim's thoughts...and I wanted him to convince Dan to play the lead.
Tim helped rewrite the script and he convinced Dan to be in the 18 minute video. I borrowed equipment from the TV station and shot it in 20 hours. Dan is very talented. He hosts a critically acclaimed podcast called "The Bitterest Pill" and has done numerous roles on TV and movies. (He's the first voice you hear in "The Girl Next Door".)
I edited the video and Midge let me show it at the high school. Dan's character fails out of college. Midge immediately turned to me and asked, "Did Dan fail out?"...he is that good of an actor. Actually, the best part of the video was an improv intro Tim and Dan taped where they did a dysfunctional Siskel and Ebert skit. There are some lines they made up that we continue to quote over 20 years later...
The morning after the shoot, the three of us ran into a fellow actress who is credited as getting Gordy's brother interested in acting...she was a knockout. She told us she was getting married and proceeded to explain to us how women don't believe they deserve love, so they find a guy who is a mess and change him in order to earn his love.
The only other event worth mentioning during the second semester was a letter I wrote to the weekly school newspaper...
A student wrote a letter to the editor putting down Christians as hypocrites and illogical. I wrote a response...
The student responded with a longer letter and I wrote a long response...
He responded with an even longer letter and the headline for the next edition was "Lenhart Responds".
It was strange because some of the people who were pleasant to me suddenly stopped talking to me. Also, people who wouldn't talk to me at all suddenly started talking to me. The newspaper created a rule that limited the number of words because of this exchange...we began taking up pages of the newspaper.
As juniors, we were focused on getting summer internships. I knew I was going back to Midland, so I didn't interview for any jobs. The one company that outdid themselves was Procter & Gamble. Every student who interviewed thought it was the best interview of their life. I started realizing P&G must have the best interviewers because everyone was able to explain their strengths.
Two weeks later I got a call at my apartment. P&G was on the phone offering me a summer job. I told them they must have made a mistake because I hadn't interviewed with them. They said they did some research and wanted me. I told them I thought it would look good if I returned to Dow because it would prove I did well. They thought it would look better if I had a job at two different places. I thanked them and asked them if they would put me on their interview list next year for a permanent job.
Interviewing during senior year was actually a game. Each student was given seven computer cards numbered 1 to 7. Each company scheduled its interviews. Two weeks before they interviewed, graduating seniors would put a card in for an interview slot. All of the 1's would get a slot...then all the 2's...then all the 3's, etc. If you didn't get the interview, you got the card back. Any openings that were left could be signed up for without a card.
The strategy was that you had to prioritize which companies you really wanted by using the higher rated cards. However, if you didn't use a high enough rated card, you didn't get an interview. You had to know which jobs were most desired, etc. There were also a lot of head games between the students...students bluffing on what card they were putting in for each company. My goal was to not have to drop a high card (or any card) for P&G because they were one of the most desired jobs.
I returned to Midland. I had two roommates and I instantly clicked with one of them. Roy and I shared a room. Roy was a great tennis player and business major. His dad died young...before he was able to realize his dream of being a black quarterback in the NFL.
During my first week in Midland, I ran into Kirk while walking back from the store. He told me about a party later in the week and we went. We picked up right where we left off. We played off each other so well that we were the life of the party. We had to go to the airport to pick up a member of last year's cast. When we headed out the door, we turned around to see that a dozen people were coming with us. Kirk told everyone we would be right back.
On the drive to the airport we tried to process what had just happened. We decided why wait?...we would immediately begin having the best summer ever.
We tried out for the play. It was two one-act plays. I got the lead in the comedy. He got the lead in the drama. We got a part in each play. In fact, the drama had three actors...Kirk, me, and a female. The female ended up being the same person who would play my fiancee in the comedy...it was the girl I had asked out the previous summer who was now 15. I felt better about myself because if the director thought we looked close enough in age to be fiancees, then I wasn't as far off as my college buddies thought. We became good friends...
Actually, I spent the summer acting like Gordy and being a guy who needed a woman to change him...and it "worked". I was dating two females at once...they both knew...they didn't care. Kirk and I were invited to everything...
Kirk and I talked about making a movie and we ended up coming up with a story. We recruited three females and we spent a couple of weeks writing the script. The movie took place on a camping trip to Traverse City. We shot the hour long movie on location over a weekend in Traverse City.
Otherwise the summer went like the first summer. I got to work an hour early. I stayed an hour later. I filled up data books. I played softball on a different team and we won the title. I didn't ever want to leave Midland...
By the end of summer, I would go to parties and the following exchange would occur:
Guy introducing me to female: Chris, this is John.
Chris: You're John?
Me: Yes.
Chris: John? You're John?
Me: Yes.
Chris: John? Like in "Kirk and John"...you are John?
Me: Yes.
Suddenly, I was treated like royalty...
I stayed an extra week for work. Kirk and I spent the last week of summer in seclusion. I was concerned because I didn't understand how I would ever end up with a woman that I respected if the only way to be with a woman was to act like a train wreck. Also, both Kirk and I were tired of the superficiality of celebrity.
It was my best summer ever...life changing in fact. Kirk went on to be an award winning author, however, neither of us ever craved the limelight again because once was enough for both of us.
Next Post
I was brought back to reality quickly while taking my Fluids class...one of the disciplines I had learned on the summer job. The teacher introduced the most basic fluid equation with over a dozen terms. Basically, the equation was
F = a + b+ c+ d+ e+ f + g + h + i + j + k + l.
During the summer, I had used this equation in the computer program as F = a + b + c. The rest of the terms dealt with miniscule forces in each dimensional direction...stuff that theoretically existed but amounted to less than one one-millionth of the total effect. Obviously this could be ignored...but the teacher wanted to focus on these aspects. I realized all my classes were like this...there was a complete disconnect between what I was learning and what I knew I would eventually be doing.
I was flying pretty high about the past summer. By the end of summer, I was hanging around with a University of Missouri student named Kirk. Kirk had the lead in "Ten Little Indians" and we would spend a lot of time talking about music, movies, literature, and the meaning of life.
Kirk was 18 and I was 20. Our play was the first production of the summer. When we took down our set after our last performance, the next production spent the night putting up their set. Kirk had a crush on a girl in the next production who was 18. She had a friend who kept flirting with me. Kirk convinced me to go to their production.
We went back stage after the production and the girl who had flirted with me hugged me and got lipstick on my collar. Kirk convinced me she tried to kiss me. He wanted me to ask her out so that I would get him a date with her friend.
Eventually I called her up and asked her to a movie. She hesitated and asked me if I knew how old she was. I thought she was 18, like her friend...now I was wondering if she was 16. I told her it didn't really matter because I wasn't going to do anything and I was trying to get a date for Kirk. She said she was 14.
Early on in my junior year, I told a group of guys about mistakenly asking out a 14 year old...they never let me forget it. The entire year was spent with them making fun of me. It didn't take long for me to begin to believe I had a problem...
I got involved with the campus the TV station. Our school had a fully functioning TV station in order to televise the school hockey games...Clarkson was regularly ranked in the Top Ten nationally in college hockey. Also, we were an engineering school, so we had people who were great at keeping everything functioning. The school also televised local news three times a week. We were the only television station within 100 miles...so we had a corner on the market.
The evening news had two anchors. I took one of the anchor positions and quickly learned how much bias there can be in the press. I selected the stories I wanted off the wire. I also wanted to do all the sports. I grew up a Lakers fan...and nearly every viewer was a Celtics fan. One night I did a story on the Celtics and made fun of them...the station phones lit up. The station manager was actually happy because he didn't think anyone was watching.
From that point on, I was given the freedom to do anything...and I did. I would read news stories and whenever there was a quote, I would read the quote in a different voice. I would slip "Dennis Miller" type references into stories. I would read letters from imaginary viewers asking trivia questions. People called the station. I used all of this to get them to let me just do sports and the color commentary for the hockey games.
I still played rugby. We had an away game in Rochester. I drove Ray's vehicle and stayed the weekend so I could see friends. Someone went to the hospital during every game that I played. Since I had a car and knew the area, I drove this game's casualty to the doctor. It was our captain. He had a concussion...someone told me it was his fourth concussion that they knew of.
On the ride over he kept asking me three questions: What is my name? What is today's date? Where are we?
I would answer each...he would wait five seconds...then he would ask me again like he hadn't asked me before. I stopped counting after he did this 75 times. We got to the hospital and there was another rugby player from a completely different game waiting to be seen.
I went into the examination room with the captain. He kept asking me the three questions while we waited for the doctor. The doctor came in and muttered something about banning rugby. Then he looked at the captain...and he asked the three questions! The captain missed all three. The doctor turned his head...and the captain gave me two thumbs up like he had successfully tricked the doctor. Even though I had been the leading scorer every season that I played, that was my last rugby game.
Despite hating school, I was able to get a 3.5 each semester. However, I had a hard time reconciling how I had become a mercenary student...not interested in what I was learning, but interested in doing it for the rest of my life. I wrote a short play about it and sent it to Tim. It involved three colleg students and I wanted Tim's thoughts...and I wanted him to convince Dan to play the lead.
Tim helped rewrite the script and he convinced Dan to be in the 18 minute video. I borrowed equipment from the TV station and shot it in 20 hours. Dan is very talented. He hosts a critically acclaimed podcast called "The Bitterest Pill" and has done numerous roles on TV and movies. (He's the first voice you hear in "The Girl Next Door".)
I edited the video and Midge let me show it at the high school. Dan's character fails out of college. Midge immediately turned to me and asked, "Did Dan fail out?"...he is that good of an actor. Actually, the best part of the video was an improv intro Tim and Dan taped where they did a dysfunctional Siskel and Ebert skit. There are some lines they made up that we continue to quote over 20 years later...
The morning after the shoot, the three of us ran into a fellow actress who is credited as getting Gordy's brother interested in acting...she was a knockout. She told us she was getting married and proceeded to explain to us how women don't believe they deserve love, so they find a guy who is a mess and change him in order to earn his love.
The only other event worth mentioning during the second semester was a letter I wrote to the weekly school newspaper...
A student wrote a letter to the editor putting down Christians as hypocrites and illogical. I wrote a response...
The student responded with a longer letter and I wrote a long response...
He responded with an even longer letter and the headline for the next edition was "Lenhart Responds".
It was strange because some of the people who were pleasant to me suddenly stopped talking to me. Also, people who wouldn't talk to me at all suddenly started talking to me. The newspaper created a rule that limited the number of words because of this exchange...we began taking up pages of the newspaper.
As juniors, we were focused on getting summer internships. I knew I was going back to Midland, so I didn't interview for any jobs. The one company that outdid themselves was Procter & Gamble. Every student who interviewed thought it was the best interview of their life. I started realizing P&G must have the best interviewers because everyone was able to explain their strengths.
Two weeks later I got a call at my apartment. P&G was on the phone offering me a summer job. I told them they must have made a mistake because I hadn't interviewed with them. They said they did some research and wanted me. I told them I thought it would look good if I returned to Dow because it would prove I did well. They thought it would look better if I had a job at two different places. I thanked them and asked them if they would put me on their interview list next year for a permanent job.
Interviewing during senior year was actually a game. Each student was given seven computer cards numbered 1 to 7. Each company scheduled its interviews. Two weeks before they interviewed, graduating seniors would put a card in for an interview slot. All of the 1's would get a slot...then all the 2's...then all the 3's, etc. If you didn't get the interview, you got the card back. Any openings that were left could be signed up for without a card.
The strategy was that you had to prioritize which companies you really wanted by using the higher rated cards. However, if you didn't use a high enough rated card, you didn't get an interview. You had to know which jobs were most desired, etc. There were also a lot of head games between the students...students bluffing on what card they were putting in for each company. My goal was to not have to drop a high card (or any card) for P&G because they were one of the most desired jobs.
I returned to Midland. I had two roommates and I instantly clicked with one of them. Roy and I shared a room. Roy was a great tennis player and business major. His dad died young...before he was able to realize his dream of being a black quarterback in the NFL.
During my first week in Midland, I ran into Kirk while walking back from the store. He told me about a party later in the week and we went. We picked up right where we left off. We played off each other so well that we were the life of the party. We had to go to the airport to pick up a member of last year's cast. When we headed out the door, we turned around to see that a dozen people were coming with us. Kirk told everyone we would be right back.
On the drive to the airport we tried to process what had just happened. We decided why wait?...we would immediately begin having the best summer ever.
We tried out for the play. It was two one-act plays. I got the lead in the comedy. He got the lead in the drama. We got a part in each play. In fact, the drama had three actors...Kirk, me, and a female. The female ended up being the same person who would play my fiancee in the comedy...it was the girl I had asked out the previous summer who was now 15. I felt better about myself because if the director thought we looked close enough in age to be fiancees, then I wasn't as far off as my college buddies thought. We became good friends...
Actually, I spent the summer acting like Gordy and being a guy who needed a woman to change him...and it "worked". I was dating two females at once...they both knew...they didn't care. Kirk and I were invited to everything...
Kirk and I talked about making a movie and we ended up coming up with a story. We recruited three females and we spent a couple of weeks writing the script. The movie took place on a camping trip to Traverse City. We shot the hour long movie on location over a weekend in Traverse City.
Otherwise the summer went like the first summer. I got to work an hour early. I stayed an hour later. I filled up data books. I played softball on a different team and we won the title. I didn't ever want to leave Midland...
By the end of summer, I would go to parties and the following exchange would occur:
Guy introducing me to female: Chris, this is John.
Chris: You're John?
Me: Yes.
Chris: John? You're John?
Me: Yes.
Chris: John? Like in "Kirk and John"...you are John?
Me: Yes.
Suddenly, I was treated like royalty...
I stayed an extra week for work. Kirk and I spent the last week of summer in seclusion. I was concerned because I didn't understand how I would ever end up with a woman that I respected if the only way to be with a woman was to act like a train wreck. Also, both Kirk and I were tired of the superficiality of celebrity.
It was my best summer ever...life changing in fact. Kirk went on to be an award winning author, however, neither of us ever craved the limelight again because once was enough for both of us.
Next Post
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The Beast
At the beginning of my sophomore year, Ray convinced me to major in chemistry as well as chemical engineering. In order to double major, I had to overload in courses every semester except for one and take the chemistry major version of classes instead of the chemical engineering version. For example, the chemical engineering department recognized Organic Chemistry for chemistry majors...the chemisty department would not recognize the chemical engineering version of Organic Chemistry.
Things had changed in the dorm...six of us bunked in two rooms so as to make a hangout room out of the third dorm room. Instead of playing basketball with Joe, I was playing raquetball with roommates and rugby on the school's club team.
Rugby quickly replaced football for me. For those who don't know rugby, it is basically "kill the guy with the ball" with two additional rules: 1) you have to throw the ball backwards to your teammates and 2) when you get tackled you have to fumble before you hit the ground.
When you do score it is either by dropkicking the ball through the uprights or touching the ball down in the end zone. The extra point is kicked from a spot perpendicular to where the ball is touched down, so the closer to the middle of the field, the better. I can punt the ball pretty far and quickly learned how to dropkick.
I played for the "B" team in my first game and scored two "tries" (touchdowns). I played on the "A" team every game after that...
We won our next game because I scored twice...our first win in two years. I thought I was pretty good until we took our first road trip...
We went to play a game against Plattsburgh. On the bus ride to the game I was sitting in the back studying the rule book when police pulled us over because someone threw an empty beer can out the window...it was 8 AM. When we got to Plattsburgh, the woman's team went to one field, while we played at another. We won our "A" team game and I scored the only try.
After the game, both the men's and women's teams met in a closed bar. There was a pool table towards the bathrooms in the back of the bar, so I played pool while everyone else socialized and drank. After two hours, everyone in the bar except me made a big circle with one of the Plattsburgh players in the middle. He would lead the group in "Singin' in the Rain".
After one or two lines he would interrupt the song and protest by saying, "No! No! No! No! That will not do!" He'd take a sip of beer...everyone would take a sip of beer. Then he would say, "Our right hands are on our heads!" and the crowd would repeat what he said and put their right hands on their heads. Then he would start "Singin' in the Rain"...only to stop again.
He would repeat the process, this time saying, "Our right hands are on our heads...our left hands are on our chest." The group would repeat each movement and act it out. Only to begin singing again, getting interrupted, and adding another movement. It was like a drunken version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas".
This went on for what seemed like more than half an hour. I really didn't pay attention because I was shooting pool. I couldn't use one side of the table because the circle butted up against it, so I shot everything as a bank going that way. Everything was fine until one of the rants ended: "...our left hand is on our stomach, our right leg is bent, our shirts are off."
Everyone in the circle had their shirts off...men and women. The energy in the room definitely changed...
Then the process began again and the rant ended with: "...our shirts are off, our pants are off." I don't remember exactly what happened after that...it wasn't very long before most everyone's clothes were back on, but I was just beginning to realize that I was taking rugby way more serious than everyone else...
We got in the bus and went to a frat house. There was a big party with lots of drinking. Now I was getting bored. I didn't drink and people were too drunk to talk to. The police got called to the house. An hour later we were warned that the police were coming again, so everyone piled unto the bus. Before we left town, the bus stopped at a liquor store to buy more alcohol for the ride home. I had long decided I was using Ray's car on all future away games...
Ed went to Syracuse University. During my sophomore year, two more drama club members (Tim and Dan) also went to Syracuse. Liz went to Cornell. I ended up writing a lot of letters...mostly to Ed. I had never considered myself a writer until recently, however, I probably ought to have recognized it long ago. Ed and I wrote 10+ page letters. By that, I'm counting one sheet (front and back) as one page. Ed's letters were insightful and hilarious. My letters were mostly philosophical and observational...
There were several topics we would write on. Looking back, a lot of what is in "Modeling God" began in those letters. However, the one topic that was hotly debated was whether we could ever have another experience like we did in high school. On the one hand, we were both realizing the freedom and resources Midge gave us to create. On the other hand, everyone had so many responsibilities, we could feel all of us losing that energy.
The first two years of college involved taking foundational courses. The last two years involved the courses specific to my major. Because I had taken so many college courses, the second semester of my sophomore year didn't require me to take a normal load. In fact, I could take the minimum...so I did. I took four courses, scheduled them in the afternoons, stayed up late, slept in, and just relaxed...
I was also beginning to get tired of Joe...and Joe was getting tired of me. It was a tough situation. Neither of us had any bad habits...nothing that would make you immediately look for another roommate. While that is great, we didn't do anything to get to know each other better...we didn't build.
Worse, we never said anything when we got annoyed with each other. After awhile, when things did annoy each of us, it was never to the level that would justify this being the first thing to complain about after a year and a half of living together...so we both just held it in. Eventually, we ended up resenting each other. We both knew why. Neither of us would say a word about it directly. We both were very passive aggressive: trying to appear like we weren't trashing the other guy, when the only reason we said anything was to trash the other guy. We spent the last semester looking for other roommates...
The other thing I learned about myself is that I function best under pressure. I had no pressure in my classes and I was close to failing by mid-terms. I didn't study...
Ray had recommended students for summer jobs at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. He hadn't recommended anyone in five years. His selections had done so well, the recruiter was always begging him for someone...and Ray didn't want to ruin his credibility.
When the recruiter came around early in the semester, Ray said he had someone but they weren't a junior...they were a sophomore. The recruiter said he would take him sight unseen because of Ray's word. Ray told me about this just before mid-terms. Ray was also my guidance counselor because after the chemical engineering department assigned me my third counselor in three semesters, Ray got concerned.
Ray saw my mid-term grades and sat me down for a talking to...he didn't want me doing a bad job in Midland.
I think the other part of the reason I was having a hard time getting motivated was that I had given up on going to Cornell. Once I double majored, I knew I couldn't do that at Cornell. Since I wanted the double major, I realized I wasn't going to Cornell...and the motivation to get all "A's" disappeared quickly. I also realized that I didn't have an objective...
I didn't know what chemical engineers did...all the major classes were next year. This was the reason Dow didn't take sophomores and freshmen...they didn't have any of the critical classes. So my short-term goal of going to Cornell was gone and my Long Term goal of having a career looked fuzzy.
I talked with my dad and he said he could always tell when I was between objectives...I had no energy. My goal became to get "B's" or above and get to Dow. I did that...
Dow put us up three people to each two bedroom apartment. I got my own room in an apartment with two older guys who knew each other from Ohio.
My job was in Central Research working for Gene Rose. He was working with visco-elastic surfactants...these are surfactants that flow easily when under pressure and set up like a gel when the pressure is removed. The goal was to use them in "district heating".
District heating is when a series of houses are heated with water. The water is heated at a station and pumped on a loop to houses in series. Each house can draw some of the heat from the water though heat exchangers. Visco-elastic surfactants were supposed to make the water easier to pump and able to hold their heat while being pumped...and more efficiently give up their heat when the water reached the house and was no longer under the same pressure.
I had a desk in the lab, but most of my work would take place in the pilot plant area on a contraption loving referred to as "The Beast". The Beast was three "loops" (pipes) containing water that were hooked up to a computer. What was being studied was the interaction between Loops #2 and #3. Loop #2 had the ability to change the visco-elastic surfactant formulations. Loop #3 was where we measured Loop #2's ability to transfer heat. However, in order to control the temperature of Loop #2, we needed Loop #1.
This contraption was huge and took up more space in the pilot plant than any other piece of equipment.
Basically, we studied the fluid flow properties in Loop #2. We studied the heat transfer properties in Loop #3. All of it was dependent on the process dynamics between the three Loops. Fluids, Heat Transfer, and Process Dynamics...three classes that I would be taking during my junior year.
Gene was great with interns, so all the previous work had been done by interns. To this point, they had about half of the fluid data and none of the heat transfer data...even though he had several interns who had worked on this.
I quickly found the reason they called it The Beast is that it would randomly generate false data during an experiment. It remidned me of the problem Brian and I had with the loss of memory in our football program. During that time, Brian had learned that computers can have memory problems when they over heat. The computer we were using was in an air-conditioned library...so we knew that wasn't it.
However, I quickly realized that the pilot area was not air-conditioned and the computer was almost melting. I had them install a fan in the computer (something all computers do now) and the random data generation ceased...however, the computer was still unable to do certain things.
I spent an entire day flow charting the computer program. I sat at my desk and drew all the squares, triangles, circles, etc. on the back of my desk calendar mat. Remember, this is 1983. Gene is a PhD who is much older than me and computers were new. Not only did Gene not know how to program a computer, he also thought I was spending the day drawing instead of working. It ended up being a hard and memorable day.
This was my first job with my first boss. Here it is the second week and every 30 minutes he is passive aggressively telling me to get to work...and I'm trying to politely explain to him that what I'm doing ought to have been done years ago. He is telling me indirectly that he knows when someone is goofing off. I'm telling him that when I solve this problem I won't say, "I told you so", but deep down I will know I was right and Gene was wrong.
In the afternoon, I found the programming problems. I reprogrammed the computer, ran an experiment that Gene had been unable to do...and we got data. For the rest of the summer, I had freedom to goof off...but I didn't. I loved working for Gene. I taught myself Fluids, Heat Transfer, and Process Dynamics. I generated enough data to finish Gene's project. My data books were works of art...I put hidden messages in them, drew 3-D effects, etc.
I played softball for our department in the Dow Central Research summer league. Midland calls itself the softball capitol of the world because the world fast pitch softball championships are held there from time to time. Everyone in Midland seems to play softball...even PhD's.
Our team had won 3 games in the previous two seasons. I coached the team, played shortstop, and we ended up winning the title.
Gene's daughter was in high school. She was active in theater. During my first month, Gene let me know there were try-outs for the summer productions. There was very little for people to do in Midland. Dow built an amazing performing arts center given the size of the town. Every summer, there were three productions for the college and high school students who are "stuck" in Midland. There was a play, a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, and a Broadway musical. I can't sing and dance, so I tried out for the play.
The play was "Twelve Little Indians". I got the part of Blore...the comic relief. We had a three hour practice every week from Monday to Thursday.
Basically, the rest of the summer involved working Monday through Friday, playing softball after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, play practice from 7 to 10 PM from Monday through Thursday, and hanging out with the cast on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Before I knew it the summer was over. I stayed an extra week to help Gene complete the project. Gene ended up presenting the research in Europe and issuing a technical paper listing me as one of the authors. I was "published".
I was excited to get back to school because I knew what chemical engineers did, I liked doing it, I had already learned three of the classes I was going to be taking, I justified Ray's faith in me, and I had proved that it is possible to have the best summer of my life after high school...
However, I soon found out all of those things ended up being a negative...
Next Post
Things had changed in the dorm...six of us bunked in two rooms so as to make a hangout room out of the third dorm room. Instead of playing basketball with Joe, I was playing raquetball with roommates and rugby on the school's club team.
Rugby quickly replaced football for me. For those who don't know rugby, it is basically "kill the guy with the ball" with two additional rules: 1) you have to throw the ball backwards to your teammates and 2) when you get tackled you have to fumble before you hit the ground.
When you do score it is either by dropkicking the ball through the uprights or touching the ball down in the end zone. The extra point is kicked from a spot perpendicular to where the ball is touched down, so the closer to the middle of the field, the better. I can punt the ball pretty far and quickly learned how to dropkick.
I played for the "B" team in my first game and scored two "tries" (touchdowns). I played on the "A" team every game after that...
We won our next game because I scored twice...our first win in two years. I thought I was pretty good until we took our first road trip...
We went to play a game against Plattsburgh. On the bus ride to the game I was sitting in the back studying the rule book when police pulled us over because someone threw an empty beer can out the window...it was 8 AM. When we got to Plattsburgh, the woman's team went to one field, while we played at another. We won our "A" team game and I scored the only try.
After the game, both the men's and women's teams met in a closed bar. There was a pool table towards the bathrooms in the back of the bar, so I played pool while everyone else socialized and drank. After two hours, everyone in the bar except me made a big circle with one of the Plattsburgh players in the middle. He would lead the group in "Singin' in the Rain".
After one or two lines he would interrupt the song and protest by saying, "No! No! No! No! That will not do!" He'd take a sip of beer...everyone would take a sip of beer. Then he would say, "Our right hands are on our heads!" and the crowd would repeat what he said and put their right hands on their heads. Then he would start "Singin' in the Rain"...only to stop again.
He would repeat the process, this time saying, "Our right hands are on our heads...our left hands are on our chest." The group would repeat each movement and act it out. Only to begin singing again, getting interrupted, and adding another movement. It was like a drunken version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas".
This went on for what seemed like more than half an hour. I really didn't pay attention because I was shooting pool. I couldn't use one side of the table because the circle butted up against it, so I shot everything as a bank going that way. Everything was fine until one of the rants ended: "...our left hand is on our stomach, our right leg is bent, our shirts are off."
Everyone in the circle had their shirts off...men and women. The energy in the room definitely changed...
Then the process began again and the rant ended with: "...our shirts are off, our pants are off." I don't remember exactly what happened after that...it wasn't very long before most everyone's clothes were back on, but I was just beginning to realize that I was taking rugby way more serious than everyone else...
We got in the bus and went to a frat house. There was a big party with lots of drinking. Now I was getting bored. I didn't drink and people were too drunk to talk to. The police got called to the house. An hour later we were warned that the police were coming again, so everyone piled unto the bus. Before we left town, the bus stopped at a liquor store to buy more alcohol for the ride home. I had long decided I was using Ray's car on all future away games...
Ed went to Syracuse University. During my sophomore year, two more drama club members (Tim and Dan) also went to Syracuse. Liz went to Cornell. I ended up writing a lot of letters...mostly to Ed. I had never considered myself a writer until recently, however, I probably ought to have recognized it long ago. Ed and I wrote 10+ page letters. By that, I'm counting one sheet (front and back) as one page. Ed's letters were insightful and hilarious. My letters were mostly philosophical and observational...
There were several topics we would write on. Looking back, a lot of what is in "Modeling God" began in those letters. However, the one topic that was hotly debated was whether we could ever have another experience like we did in high school. On the one hand, we were both realizing the freedom and resources Midge gave us to create. On the other hand, everyone had so many responsibilities, we could feel all of us losing that energy.
The first two years of college involved taking foundational courses. The last two years involved the courses specific to my major. Because I had taken so many college courses, the second semester of my sophomore year didn't require me to take a normal load. In fact, I could take the minimum...so I did. I took four courses, scheduled them in the afternoons, stayed up late, slept in, and just relaxed...
I was also beginning to get tired of Joe...and Joe was getting tired of me. It was a tough situation. Neither of us had any bad habits...nothing that would make you immediately look for another roommate. While that is great, we didn't do anything to get to know each other better...we didn't build.
Worse, we never said anything when we got annoyed with each other. After awhile, when things did annoy each of us, it was never to the level that would justify this being the first thing to complain about after a year and a half of living together...so we both just held it in. Eventually, we ended up resenting each other. We both knew why. Neither of us would say a word about it directly. We both were very passive aggressive: trying to appear like we weren't trashing the other guy, when the only reason we said anything was to trash the other guy. We spent the last semester looking for other roommates...
The other thing I learned about myself is that I function best under pressure. I had no pressure in my classes and I was close to failing by mid-terms. I didn't study...
Ray had recommended students for summer jobs at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. He hadn't recommended anyone in five years. His selections had done so well, the recruiter was always begging him for someone...and Ray didn't want to ruin his credibility.
When the recruiter came around early in the semester, Ray said he had someone but they weren't a junior...they were a sophomore. The recruiter said he would take him sight unseen because of Ray's word. Ray told me about this just before mid-terms. Ray was also my guidance counselor because after the chemical engineering department assigned me my third counselor in three semesters, Ray got concerned.
Ray saw my mid-term grades and sat me down for a talking to...he didn't want me doing a bad job in Midland.
I think the other part of the reason I was having a hard time getting motivated was that I had given up on going to Cornell. Once I double majored, I knew I couldn't do that at Cornell. Since I wanted the double major, I realized I wasn't going to Cornell...and the motivation to get all "A's" disappeared quickly. I also realized that I didn't have an objective...
I didn't know what chemical engineers did...all the major classes were next year. This was the reason Dow didn't take sophomores and freshmen...they didn't have any of the critical classes. So my short-term goal of going to Cornell was gone and my Long Term goal of having a career looked fuzzy.
I talked with my dad and he said he could always tell when I was between objectives...I had no energy. My goal became to get "B's" or above and get to Dow. I did that...
Dow put us up three people to each two bedroom apartment. I got my own room in an apartment with two older guys who knew each other from Ohio.
My job was in Central Research working for Gene Rose. He was working with visco-elastic surfactants...these are surfactants that flow easily when under pressure and set up like a gel when the pressure is removed. The goal was to use them in "district heating".
District heating is when a series of houses are heated with water. The water is heated at a station and pumped on a loop to houses in series. Each house can draw some of the heat from the water though heat exchangers. Visco-elastic surfactants were supposed to make the water easier to pump and able to hold their heat while being pumped...and more efficiently give up their heat when the water reached the house and was no longer under the same pressure.
I had a desk in the lab, but most of my work would take place in the pilot plant area on a contraption loving referred to as "The Beast". The Beast was three "loops" (pipes) containing water that were hooked up to a computer. What was being studied was the interaction between Loops #2 and #3. Loop #2 had the ability to change the visco-elastic surfactant formulations. Loop #3 was where we measured Loop #2's ability to transfer heat. However, in order to control the temperature of Loop #2, we needed Loop #1.
This contraption was huge and took up more space in the pilot plant than any other piece of equipment.
Basically, we studied the fluid flow properties in Loop #2. We studied the heat transfer properties in Loop #3. All of it was dependent on the process dynamics between the three Loops. Fluids, Heat Transfer, and Process Dynamics...three classes that I would be taking during my junior year.
Gene was great with interns, so all the previous work had been done by interns. To this point, they had about half of the fluid data and none of the heat transfer data...even though he had several interns who had worked on this.
I quickly found the reason they called it The Beast is that it would randomly generate false data during an experiment. It remidned me of the problem Brian and I had with the loss of memory in our football program. During that time, Brian had learned that computers can have memory problems when they over heat. The computer we were using was in an air-conditioned library...so we knew that wasn't it.
However, I quickly realized that the pilot area was not air-conditioned and the computer was almost melting. I had them install a fan in the computer (something all computers do now) and the random data generation ceased...however, the computer was still unable to do certain things.
I spent an entire day flow charting the computer program. I sat at my desk and drew all the squares, triangles, circles, etc. on the back of my desk calendar mat. Remember, this is 1983. Gene is a PhD who is much older than me and computers were new. Not only did Gene not know how to program a computer, he also thought I was spending the day drawing instead of working. It ended up being a hard and memorable day.
This was my first job with my first boss. Here it is the second week and every 30 minutes he is passive aggressively telling me to get to work...and I'm trying to politely explain to him that what I'm doing ought to have been done years ago. He is telling me indirectly that he knows when someone is goofing off. I'm telling him that when I solve this problem I won't say, "I told you so", but deep down I will know I was right and Gene was wrong.
In the afternoon, I found the programming problems. I reprogrammed the computer, ran an experiment that Gene had been unable to do...and we got data. For the rest of the summer, I had freedom to goof off...but I didn't. I loved working for Gene. I taught myself Fluids, Heat Transfer, and Process Dynamics. I generated enough data to finish Gene's project. My data books were works of art...I put hidden messages in them, drew 3-D effects, etc.
I played softball for our department in the Dow Central Research summer league. Midland calls itself the softball capitol of the world because the world fast pitch softball championships are held there from time to time. Everyone in Midland seems to play softball...even PhD's.
Our team had won 3 games in the previous two seasons. I coached the team, played shortstop, and we ended up winning the title.
Gene's daughter was in high school. She was active in theater. During my first month, Gene let me know there were try-outs for the summer productions. There was very little for people to do in Midland. Dow built an amazing performing arts center given the size of the town. Every summer, there were three productions for the college and high school students who are "stuck" in Midland. There was a play, a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, and a Broadway musical. I can't sing and dance, so I tried out for the play.
The play was "Twelve Little Indians". I got the part of Blore...the comic relief. We had a three hour practice every week from Monday to Thursday.
Basically, the rest of the summer involved working Monday through Friday, playing softball after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, play practice from 7 to 10 PM from Monday through Thursday, and hanging out with the cast on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Before I knew it the summer was over. I stayed an extra week to help Gene complete the project. Gene ended up presenting the research in Europe and issuing a technical paper listing me as one of the authors. I was "published".
I was excited to get back to school because I knew what chemical engineers did, I liked doing it, I had already learned three of the classes I was going to be taking, I justified Ray's faith in me, and I had proved that it is possible to have the best summer of my life after high school...
However, I soon found out all of those things ended up being a negative...
Next Post
Friday, June 27, 2008
The Role
During the Christmas break I ended up witnessing to my family and they became "born again".
I went back to school for my second semester. Ed drove me up to school and stayed over night. When he tried to start his car in the morning, nothing moved. It was cold...fifty below. I called Ray and he pulled some strings and got to the head of the line that morning with the guy from AAA.
The guy from AAA pulled the dipstick to the oil and it was like pudding. He took a couple of things off of the engine, sprayed and aerosol can all over the place, and the car started. He put the engine back together and told Ed not to turn the car off until he was back home...and Ed didn't. Ed never came back up to Potsdam, NY during the winter.
Joe's dad had made a loft for Joe. During the break, he made me one. When Joe and I assembled it, I had roughly 12 inches of clearance. The first two mornings I woke with a rush like I always did...and nearly gave my self a concussion on the cement ceiling. The third morning (and ever since), I woke up and looked around before I moved a muscle.
My second semester was relatively uneventful compared to the first semester. I took another chemistry class from Ray. We were spending more time together and I told him I wanted this to be the last class I took from him...I didn't like the added pressure I put on myself to be perfect.
Joe and I kept to ourselves until one night when the main group of guys "pennied" us in. They shoved enough pennies between our door and the door frame, that it put enough pressure on the door that the knob couldn't be turned. Joe and I were actually asleep when the group did it. They woke us up.
Joe and I got next to the door and listened to them listen for us to get mad. I told I didn't want to ask them for help...so I jumped out the window. We were on the second floor and there was snow outside. I ran back upstairs and into their room. I started yelling and they got the pennies out of the door. They ended up respecting us...by the end of the year, Joe and I made plans to share rooms with them next year.
They invited me to go downtown with them even though I didn't drink. There were two reasons. First, they wanted me to drive them...Ray loaned me his Jeep Wagoneer on weekends. Second, I could get the pool table for them.
A game of eight ball cost 50 cents and you had to play doubles. Winner kept the table. Challenger paid. I could keep the table for hours. I would always tell my partner to just make one ball every turn. I wanted to keep making progress, take the pressure off of them, and have them get the easy balls out of the way. My job was to run the table.
My dad had bought a bar sized table when we moved to New York. I personally believe it is harder to play on a bar sized table than a full length table...there's less room to move around. If I play someone good, the second person wins 95% of the time. The first player would get 6 balls off the table before they were hindered by the other player. The second player had a clear table and would run it. I completely enjoyed running a table from the break...maybe too much. Before "Color of Money" came out, I would pretty much do the Tom Cruise routine if I knew I was running the table.
I got ahead in all my classes by one week. I had 3 A's and 3 B's by mid-terms. I finished the year with 6 A's again. My plan to transfer to Cornell was still on schedule.
I spent the summer in Columbus working at The Country Club in Muirfield Village. My brother worked there and got me the job. It is the sister club to the one where The Memorial Tournament is held...Jack Nicklaus' tournament. I was a waiter/busboy. The best part was we got to play on Mondays when the course was closed to the members.
Things were tense at home that summer. First, my dad was not enjoying his job. Second, my dad and my brother loved to debate the Bible...all night...past 3 AM. It was not how I remember my dad debating Herman at the Colorado River. I participated in a couple before I realized it was pointless...there didn't seem to be any guidelines. There was no way to determine truth.
I was missing all of my friends from Rochester. By the end of summer, I organized a weekend at my grandparent's lake house on Lake Berlin near Akron, Ohio. My mom's side of the family had sailboats, jet skis, etc. It was quite a group that came: Ed, his girlfriend, Tim, Patricia, Jeff, and Brian.
There were two memories from that weekend that will always stick out...
Brian and I took the catamaran out just before a storm blew in. When the winds were gusting, we had the catamaran almost vertical, while we stood on the edge and zipped through the water. It was an amazing feeling...we were hanging out as we cruised ten feet above the water...then we'd turn the boat around and do it again.
The storm blew in and we got caught on the other side of the lake. The storm got real strong and the mast blew over. We ended up walking to a pay phone and calling the house so they could come tow us back in the hard rain. I remember Brian turning to me and saying, "I hope you aren't mad about this because I'm really enjoying this."...I was enjoying it...but that was Brian: able to vocalize his thoughts during the most stressful times.
The second memory occurred quite by accident and became my favorite role of all time...
My brother had spent a lot of time at the lake house that summer. He would take the pontoon boat out with some kids and tell them stories. He made up some stories about how the woods around the lake had Native Americans living in them.
One of the parents came over and asked if we would put on a show. Their eight year old son was one of the people who would always go on the pontoon rides...and today was his birthday. They wondered if we would act out a cowboy and Indian scene. Tim agreed to play the cowboy. I played the Indian...
They had built a tepee and a small fire on a little ledge over looking a small bank. I wore the full costume, headdress and all. I sat by the fire minding my own business when the pontoon boat came up. I stood up and fired an arrow over the boat. Then I jumped down on the bank to fire another arrow, when Tim came out on the ledge. I jumped up to the ledge, picked up a hatchet and ran at Tim. He fired a blank from a gun at me. I flew backwards, hit my chest with a ketchup packet and laid down on the bank...only the pontoon boat didn't leave.
After Tim left the scene, the dad said, "Let's go see if he's okay." There were about 7 or 8 kids screaming that they wanted to leave. When I heard the dad and his son come up the ledge, I hid the ketchup packet. The dad grabbed the headdress and said, "I think he moved". The kid ran to the boat. I stood up with the gun and fired a shot before I collapsed.
The pontoon boat got back. The birthday boy ran into the house and locked everyone out. The donor of the headdress let the boy keep it. They told him they called the hospital and the Indian was going to be okay.
It was six years before they told the boy that it had been an act. I just happen to be there with my fiancee when he found out...but that is another story.
Next Post
I went back to school for my second semester. Ed drove me up to school and stayed over night. When he tried to start his car in the morning, nothing moved. It was cold...fifty below. I called Ray and he pulled some strings and got to the head of the line that morning with the guy from AAA.
The guy from AAA pulled the dipstick to the oil and it was like pudding. He took a couple of things off of the engine, sprayed and aerosol can all over the place, and the car started. He put the engine back together and told Ed not to turn the car off until he was back home...and Ed didn't. Ed never came back up to Potsdam, NY during the winter.
Joe's dad had made a loft for Joe. During the break, he made me one. When Joe and I assembled it, I had roughly 12 inches of clearance. The first two mornings I woke with a rush like I always did...and nearly gave my self a concussion on the cement ceiling. The third morning (and ever since), I woke up and looked around before I moved a muscle.
My second semester was relatively uneventful compared to the first semester. I took another chemistry class from Ray. We were spending more time together and I told him I wanted this to be the last class I took from him...I didn't like the added pressure I put on myself to be perfect.
Joe and I kept to ourselves until one night when the main group of guys "pennied" us in. They shoved enough pennies between our door and the door frame, that it put enough pressure on the door that the knob couldn't be turned. Joe and I were actually asleep when the group did it. They woke us up.
Joe and I got next to the door and listened to them listen for us to get mad. I told I didn't want to ask them for help...so I jumped out the window. We were on the second floor and there was snow outside. I ran back upstairs and into their room. I started yelling and they got the pennies out of the door. They ended up respecting us...by the end of the year, Joe and I made plans to share rooms with them next year.
They invited me to go downtown with them even though I didn't drink. There were two reasons. First, they wanted me to drive them...Ray loaned me his Jeep Wagoneer on weekends. Second, I could get the pool table for them.
A game of eight ball cost 50 cents and you had to play doubles. Winner kept the table. Challenger paid. I could keep the table for hours. I would always tell my partner to just make one ball every turn. I wanted to keep making progress, take the pressure off of them, and have them get the easy balls out of the way. My job was to run the table.
My dad had bought a bar sized table when we moved to New York. I personally believe it is harder to play on a bar sized table than a full length table...there's less room to move around. If I play someone good, the second person wins 95% of the time. The first player would get 6 balls off the table before they were hindered by the other player. The second player had a clear table and would run it. I completely enjoyed running a table from the break...maybe too much. Before "Color of Money" came out, I would pretty much do the Tom Cruise routine if I knew I was running the table.
I got ahead in all my classes by one week. I had 3 A's and 3 B's by mid-terms. I finished the year with 6 A's again. My plan to transfer to Cornell was still on schedule.
I spent the summer in Columbus working at The Country Club in Muirfield Village. My brother worked there and got me the job. It is the sister club to the one where The Memorial Tournament is held...Jack Nicklaus' tournament. I was a waiter/busboy. The best part was we got to play on Mondays when the course was closed to the members.
Things were tense at home that summer. First, my dad was not enjoying his job. Second, my dad and my brother loved to debate the Bible...all night...past 3 AM. It was not how I remember my dad debating Herman at the Colorado River. I participated in a couple before I realized it was pointless...there didn't seem to be any guidelines. There was no way to determine truth.
I was missing all of my friends from Rochester. By the end of summer, I organized a weekend at my grandparent's lake house on Lake Berlin near Akron, Ohio. My mom's side of the family had sailboats, jet skis, etc. It was quite a group that came: Ed, his girlfriend, Tim, Patricia, Jeff, and Brian.
There were two memories from that weekend that will always stick out...
Brian and I took the catamaran out just before a storm blew in. When the winds were gusting, we had the catamaran almost vertical, while we stood on the edge and zipped through the water. It was an amazing feeling...we were hanging out as we cruised ten feet above the water...then we'd turn the boat around and do it again.
The storm blew in and we got caught on the other side of the lake. The storm got real strong and the mast blew over. We ended up walking to a pay phone and calling the house so they could come tow us back in the hard rain. I remember Brian turning to me and saying, "I hope you aren't mad about this because I'm really enjoying this."...I was enjoying it...but that was Brian: able to vocalize his thoughts during the most stressful times.
The second memory occurred quite by accident and became my favorite role of all time...
My brother had spent a lot of time at the lake house that summer. He would take the pontoon boat out with some kids and tell them stories. He made up some stories about how the woods around the lake had Native Americans living in them.
One of the parents came over and asked if we would put on a show. Their eight year old son was one of the people who would always go on the pontoon rides...and today was his birthday. They wondered if we would act out a cowboy and Indian scene. Tim agreed to play the cowboy. I played the Indian...
They had built a tepee and a small fire on a little ledge over looking a small bank. I wore the full costume, headdress and all. I sat by the fire minding my own business when the pontoon boat came up. I stood up and fired an arrow over the boat. Then I jumped down on the bank to fire another arrow, when Tim came out on the ledge. I jumped up to the ledge, picked up a hatchet and ran at Tim. He fired a blank from a gun at me. I flew backwards, hit my chest with a ketchup packet and laid down on the bank...only the pontoon boat didn't leave.
After Tim left the scene, the dad said, "Let's go see if he's okay." There were about 7 or 8 kids screaming that they wanted to leave. When I heard the dad and his son come up the ledge, I hid the ketchup packet. The dad grabbed the headdress and said, "I think he moved". The kid ran to the boat. I stood up with the gun and fired a shot before I collapsed.
The pontoon boat got back. The birthday boy ran into the house and locked everyone out. The donor of the headdress let the boy keep it. They told him they called the hospital and the Indian was going to be okay.
It was six years before they told the boy that it had been an act. I just happen to be there with my fiancee when he found out...but that is another story.
Next Post
Thursday, June 26, 2008
The Point
One of the classes I took was "Humanities". We actually read the Bible and discussed evolution! The class got heated because one of the students was a fervent evolutionist...and one was a fervent creationist...okay, I was the fervent creationist. The teacher was amazing because you couldn't tell who he sided with...he loved the debate. It was the first time in my life that I was expected to defend a belief and I felt a combination of excitement and nausea before every session.
Brian was coming up for a visit and I wanted to find a computer for us to work on. I talked to the only other person who seemed to be interested in computers: Ray Andrews. He invited me over his house for dinner. I had been eating cafeteria food for two months. He was an amazing cook. I ate until I was full...then I ate for the rest of the week...then I ate for next week...then I went into his bathroom, tried not to throw up, and thought, "What would my mom and dad say about me if they could see me now?"
The best advice I ever got about college came from Liz's brother. He told me to get one week ahead in each class. First of all, it made the lectures make more sense. Second, during mid-terms, all the teachers still teach new material while the students review the old material. When mid-terms were over, I was learning the latest material while it seemed everyone else was trying to learn two weeks worth of material...and they couldn't catch up. I had 3 A's and 3 B's after mid-terms.
However, it was after mid-terms that people on the hall began to disappear...almost two a week. The story was always the same...
"Hey, did you hear that Ted quit?"
"Really?...but he was so smart!"
I soon realized that smart had nothing to do with staying in college...it was all about hard work, because everyone seemed to be smart.
Brian came up for the weekend. We spent time working on the football game. I taught him Quantum Physics from Ray Andrew's class. We played pranks on people who were drunk. We played basketball and afterwards, we took a shower.
The bathrooms had four showers with stalls. There were pegs to hang up your towel and clothes at the entrance to the shower. Well, one of the guys we played basketball with took our clothes.
When we realized we had no clothes, no towels, and only a washcloth, Brian panicked. He wanted one of us to run down the hall with the wash cloth. I told him that's what they want us to do...we got to do the opposite. I told him we ought to walk down the hall like we are wearing clothes, put the wash cloth on our shoulder, and greet people by looking them in the eye. It took Brian five minutes to get into character because he was laughing so hard.
The guy who played the trick on us had gotten everyone to stand out in the hall. When we came out and walked down the hall, we didn't break character. We just looked people in the eye, asked how they were doing...what was happening...complimented some on the basketball game...and got to the room, only to find it was locked. We knocked politely on the door and Joe let us in. For the rest of my time in college, no one played a prank on me...
Ray was 61 and had never been married. He had proposed twice and neither went through. He had two "sons"...two students that he had considered sons from previous classes. I grew up the oldest in my family, however as the semester went on, I became the youngest of his three sons. The oldest son is an executive at Exxon Mobil. The middle child is a synthetic organic chemist. These people are the smartest people on the face of the earth. They create chemicals that never existed before. So, it was pretty typical...the oldest was an achiever, the middle child was misunderstood (or unable to be understood), and I was spoiled.
However, this just put more pressure on me to do well in Ray's class. If I didn't get an A on his test, I would avoid him out of embarrassment. So I studied hard...
Finals were coming up and Ray made the comment that no one had ever gotten a perfect score (150 points) on his final...not even his middle son. I was determined to get 150 points.
Finals came and went. I knew I did well. I went to Columbus for Chrismas vacation. Ray called with my grades....I got all A's. It wasn't because I had out ran the pack...it was because the pack slowed down after mid-terms. My plan to get all A's for two years and transfer to Cornell was right on schedule.
I asked Ray how I did on his final. He told me I got a 149. I don't remember how adversarial the conversation got...I do know I was very mad. He explained that one of the questions gave us mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance data in order to draw the chemical. The chemical had a "chiral" atom...
In organic chemistry, carbon atoms have four bonds that form a tetrahedron. When all four bonds are different, there are two types of chemicals that can be formed out of all the same ingredients. The two types are like your hands...one is left and one is right. They are essentially the same, however they can't occupy the same exact space...they are mirror images of each other. Sometimes our body considers one version (for example, the right hand version) to be healthy, while the left hand version is toxic and can kill us.
I had drawn the mirror image of the chemical that Ray had wanted...and he deducted a point for it. I think I went through four of the five stages of grief during the phone conversation. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression...only to return to anger and bargaining. It is only in the last 7 years that I finally reached acceptance on this issue...but "the point" remained a topic of discussion for 20 years.
Next Post
Brian was coming up for a visit and I wanted to find a computer for us to work on. I talked to the only other person who seemed to be interested in computers: Ray Andrews. He invited me over his house for dinner. I had been eating cafeteria food for two months. He was an amazing cook. I ate until I was full...then I ate for the rest of the week...then I ate for next week...then I went into his bathroom, tried not to throw up, and thought, "What would my mom and dad say about me if they could see me now?"
The best advice I ever got about college came from Liz's brother. He told me to get one week ahead in each class. First of all, it made the lectures make more sense. Second, during mid-terms, all the teachers still teach new material while the students review the old material. When mid-terms were over, I was learning the latest material while it seemed everyone else was trying to learn two weeks worth of material...and they couldn't catch up. I had 3 A's and 3 B's after mid-terms.
However, it was after mid-terms that people on the hall began to disappear...almost two a week. The story was always the same...
"Hey, did you hear that Ted quit?"
"Really?...but he was so smart!"
I soon realized that smart had nothing to do with staying in college...it was all about hard work, because everyone seemed to be smart.
Brian came up for the weekend. We spent time working on the football game. I taught him Quantum Physics from Ray Andrew's class. We played pranks on people who were drunk. We played basketball and afterwards, we took a shower.
The bathrooms had four showers with stalls. There were pegs to hang up your towel and clothes at the entrance to the shower. Well, one of the guys we played basketball with took our clothes.
When we realized we had no clothes, no towels, and only a washcloth, Brian panicked. He wanted one of us to run down the hall with the wash cloth. I told him that's what they want us to do...we got to do the opposite. I told him we ought to walk down the hall like we are wearing clothes, put the wash cloth on our shoulder, and greet people by looking them in the eye. It took Brian five minutes to get into character because he was laughing so hard.
The guy who played the trick on us had gotten everyone to stand out in the hall. When we came out and walked down the hall, we didn't break character. We just looked people in the eye, asked how they were doing...what was happening...complimented some on the basketball game...and got to the room, only to find it was locked. We knocked politely on the door and Joe let us in. For the rest of my time in college, no one played a prank on me...
Ray was 61 and had never been married. He had proposed twice and neither went through. He had two "sons"...two students that he had considered sons from previous classes. I grew up the oldest in my family, however as the semester went on, I became the youngest of his three sons. The oldest son is an executive at Exxon Mobil. The middle child is a synthetic organic chemist. These people are the smartest people on the face of the earth. They create chemicals that never existed before. So, it was pretty typical...the oldest was an achiever, the middle child was misunderstood (or unable to be understood), and I was spoiled.
However, this just put more pressure on me to do well in Ray's class. If I didn't get an A on his test, I would avoid him out of embarrassment. So I studied hard...
Finals were coming up and Ray made the comment that no one had ever gotten a perfect score (150 points) on his final...not even his middle son. I was determined to get 150 points.
Finals came and went. I knew I did well. I went to Columbus for Chrismas vacation. Ray called with my grades....I got all A's. It wasn't because I had out ran the pack...it was because the pack slowed down after mid-terms. My plan to get all A's for two years and transfer to Cornell was right on schedule.
I asked Ray how I did on his final. He told me I got a 149. I don't remember how adversarial the conversation got...I do know I was very mad. He explained that one of the questions gave us mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance data in order to draw the chemical. The chemical had a "chiral" atom...
In organic chemistry, carbon atoms have four bonds that form a tetrahedron. When all four bonds are different, there are two types of chemicals that can be formed out of all the same ingredients. The two types are like your hands...one is left and one is right. They are essentially the same, however they can't occupy the same exact space...they are mirror images of each other. Sometimes our body considers one version (for example, the right hand version) to be healthy, while the left hand version is toxic and can kill us.
I had drawn the mirror image of the chemical that Ray had wanted...and he deducted a point for it. I think I went through four of the five stages of grief during the phone conversation. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression...only to return to anger and bargaining. It is only in the last 7 years that I finally reached acceptance on this issue...but "the point" remained a topic of discussion for 20 years.
Next Post
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
College
God moved quickly for me that entire summer. It seemed like the entire summer that I would be told things by people and God would tell me something different...and God would be right. A quick example, Liz offered to take someone's paper route for the week. However, she was going to be gone on a Wednesday and asked me to handle it. She told me to get the papers from her house because that is where they have been delivered.
I sat at her house at 4:30 AM waiting for the papers to be delivered. I hadn't slept all night so I was exhausted. I couldn't remember if the papers were being delivered at 4:30 or 5:30. I started to get frustrated...and then decided to ask God. It wasn't an audible voice but it was pretty close...go to the other place they are being delivered now. I drove over to the person's house she was helping, just in time to see the delivery truck drive away...it was the only day all week that the papers weren't delivered to her house. The entire summer went like that...and has never been like that since.
I raved so much about sailing that Brian wanted to race. Liz's brother was in town so we had a full crew for one of the big races of the season that, like the Memorial Day Race, had its own trophy. Canandaigua Lake is one of the Finger Lakes...a lake that is 20 or so miles long and only a few miles across. The yacht club was near the north end of the lake. The race was the only race that covered the entire lake...all the way to the south and all the way back.
We had no wind. We watched everyone in the field pass us on the way south. We spit in the water constantly just to see if we were moving. No one said a word...it was brutal. Liz's dad considered running the motor and quitting because it was humiliating. We started keeping track of time because eventually they would call the race. Liz, her brother, and I prayed for wind...
When we got to the south end, we rounded the mark and could see the entire field (50 boats) ahead of us...and almost immediately, there was a strong south wind. We got the spinnaker out and Liz's brother flew it like a kite. We passed every boat in the field and won the race.
(During the next race, which was part of the season long competition, we tried to fly the spinnaker without Liz's brother. The first time we pulled it out it "hourglassed"...we hooked it up wrong. The second time we flew it, it ended up in the water. We also went over the finish line going the wrong way, which is a penalty, on our way to the final mark.)
I found out that Ed was a night owl. He loved to stay up late and watch Linda Ellerbee on "Overnight". So my summer was spent waking up at 11, rushing to work, getting off work and staying up until 4 in the morning. I was exhausted the entire summer.
Liz ended it just before school started. I was devastated, but God had told me to read Job a week before she surprised me, so once again, God was taking care of me.
I was not happy with going to Clarkson. I had told everyone that I would transfer to Cornell after two years. In my high school yearbook there are about a dozen references from people wishing me luck on my plan to put two great years into Clarkson and then transfer to Cornell.
Joe was my roommate. He was a physics major who lived in the same high school district as me, but went to Catholic school. He was the perfect roommate for me. Neither of us smoke, drank, etc. We studied, played basketball, played cards, and tested each other with trivia...he was the first person I had ever met who knew more useless facts than me.
Our typical day was to wake early, shower, eat breakfast, and go to class. Freshman classes were held from 7:30 to 1. Basically, we would hit all our classes, come back to the room, change, and play basketball. We had gone to the same basketball camps, so our styles perfectly meshed. We'd come back, take a shower, and study. Then we'd go to dinner and socialize. Then we'd come back and study. Then we'd play basketball. Then we'd take a shower and study. Then we'd go to sleep.
I called this "Work hard, play hard". When we were studying, we didn't think about goofing off. When we were playing or socializing, we weren't thinking about studying. Joe used to call them "Three shower days". We lived in the middle of the hall and the bathrooms/showers were halfway down each end of the hall. Joe hated the cold. He would take scalding hot showers. He would sleep with an electric blanket. He figured out how to override the room's radiator so that our room was always the warmest.
I had taken college math and chemistry in high school. I placed out of both. Ninety percent of the students had taken college math and most chose not to place out thinking it would be an easy A. What they failed to realize is that our college graded on a curve and since everyone else took calculus in high school, an A ended up being a 97 or above.
I was put into a "Structure and Bonding" chemistry class instead of Freshman Chemistry. All I can say is if there is an aspect of chemistry that has nothing to do with logic, it is how atoms bond. However, before I could go insane, a chemistry professor asked five of us chemical engineers who placed out of freshman chemistry if we wanted to take his class.
The teacher told the school that chemical engineers didn't know chemistry and he wanted to teach them in his sophomore chemistry major class. We all agreed because anything was better than structure and bonding. Ray Andrews taught spectroscopy...the analysis of chemicals using light...which today is constantly used on shows like "CSI".
Taking his course required taking a lab and a lecture in place of one chemistry class...so now I was overloading courses. My first moment of truth in college came during the first lab. In high school we all faked our labs. We would run the lab, but we would write it up with data we made up. The teacher was more focused on how we calculated our percent error and didn't want to see anything more accurate than 10% or anything less accurate than 20%. I would end up with something between 14 and 16%. My partners would say that I had a doctorate in doctoring.
The first lab did not involve partners. We were supposed to determine the percent iron in an unknown sample. Each of us had a different sample. We had to make standard solutions, use them to come up with a correlation on known samples...then use them to determine the unknown. So the solutions and the known samples were our source of error because we made both of these. However, this teacher had a twist...he was in to computers and he set it up that we had to put our data into the computer to determine our answer...and the computer gave us a grade on the spot.
I got my work done fast...too fast. I took my data over to the computer in hopes of entering it, getting the result, and then doctoring it so I could re-enter it. However, everytime I went towards the computer, the teacher dropped everything to see my results. I made an excuse and went back to the bench...only to make another run at the computer. After the third run, I decided it was time to grow up.
The teacher helped me enter the data into the computer and the result was a very low percentage of error...and an A. I decided right then that maybe college would be different than high school...
Next Post
I sat at her house at 4:30 AM waiting for the papers to be delivered. I hadn't slept all night so I was exhausted. I couldn't remember if the papers were being delivered at 4:30 or 5:30. I started to get frustrated...and then decided to ask God. It wasn't an audible voice but it was pretty close...go to the other place they are being delivered now. I drove over to the person's house she was helping, just in time to see the delivery truck drive away...it was the only day all week that the papers weren't delivered to her house. The entire summer went like that...and has never been like that since.
I raved so much about sailing that Brian wanted to race. Liz's brother was in town so we had a full crew for one of the big races of the season that, like the Memorial Day Race, had its own trophy. Canandaigua Lake is one of the Finger Lakes...a lake that is 20 or so miles long and only a few miles across. The yacht club was near the north end of the lake. The race was the only race that covered the entire lake...all the way to the south and all the way back.
We had no wind. We watched everyone in the field pass us on the way south. We spit in the water constantly just to see if we were moving. No one said a word...it was brutal. Liz's dad considered running the motor and quitting because it was humiliating. We started keeping track of time because eventually they would call the race. Liz, her brother, and I prayed for wind...
When we got to the south end, we rounded the mark and could see the entire field (50 boats) ahead of us...and almost immediately, there was a strong south wind. We got the spinnaker out and Liz's brother flew it like a kite. We passed every boat in the field and won the race.
(During the next race, which was part of the season long competition, we tried to fly the spinnaker without Liz's brother. The first time we pulled it out it "hourglassed"...we hooked it up wrong. The second time we flew it, it ended up in the water. We also went over the finish line going the wrong way, which is a penalty, on our way to the final mark.)
I found out that Ed was a night owl. He loved to stay up late and watch Linda Ellerbee on "Overnight". So my summer was spent waking up at 11, rushing to work, getting off work and staying up until 4 in the morning. I was exhausted the entire summer.
Liz ended it just before school started. I was devastated, but God had told me to read Job a week before she surprised me, so once again, God was taking care of me.
I was not happy with going to Clarkson. I had told everyone that I would transfer to Cornell after two years. In my high school yearbook there are about a dozen references from people wishing me luck on my plan to put two great years into Clarkson and then transfer to Cornell.
Joe was my roommate. He was a physics major who lived in the same high school district as me, but went to Catholic school. He was the perfect roommate for me. Neither of us smoke, drank, etc. We studied, played basketball, played cards, and tested each other with trivia...he was the first person I had ever met who knew more useless facts than me.
Our typical day was to wake early, shower, eat breakfast, and go to class. Freshman classes were held from 7:30 to 1. Basically, we would hit all our classes, come back to the room, change, and play basketball. We had gone to the same basketball camps, so our styles perfectly meshed. We'd come back, take a shower, and study. Then we'd go to dinner and socialize. Then we'd come back and study. Then we'd play basketball. Then we'd take a shower and study. Then we'd go to sleep.
I called this "Work hard, play hard". When we were studying, we didn't think about goofing off. When we were playing or socializing, we weren't thinking about studying. Joe used to call them "Three shower days". We lived in the middle of the hall and the bathrooms/showers were halfway down each end of the hall. Joe hated the cold. He would take scalding hot showers. He would sleep with an electric blanket. He figured out how to override the room's radiator so that our room was always the warmest.
I had taken college math and chemistry in high school. I placed out of both. Ninety percent of the students had taken college math and most chose not to place out thinking it would be an easy A. What they failed to realize is that our college graded on a curve and since everyone else took calculus in high school, an A ended up being a 97 or above.
I was put into a "Structure and Bonding" chemistry class instead of Freshman Chemistry. All I can say is if there is an aspect of chemistry that has nothing to do with logic, it is how atoms bond. However, before I could go insane, a chemistry professor asked five of us chemical engineers who placed out of freshman chemistry if we wanted to take his class.
The teacher told the school that chemical engineers didn't know chemistry and he wanted to teach them in his sophomore chemistry major class. We all agreed because anything was better than structure and bonding. Ray Andrews taught spectroscopy...the analysis of chemicals using light...which today is constantly used on shows like "CSI".
Taking his course required taking a lab and a lecture in place of one chemistry class...so now I was overloading courses. My first moment of truth in college came during the first lab. In high school we all faked our labs. We would run the lab, but we would write it up with data we made up. The teacher was more focused on how we calculated our percent error and didn't want to see anything more accurate than 10% or anything less accurate than 20%. I would end up with something between 14 and 16%. My partners would say that I had a doctorate in doctoring.
The first lab did not involve partners. We were supposed to determine the percent iron in an unknown sample. Each of us had a different sample. We had to make standard solutions, use them to come up with a correlation on known samples...then use them to determine the unknown. So the solutions and the known samples were our source of error because we made both of these. However, this teacher had a twist...he was in to computers and he set it up that we had to put our data into the computer to determine our answer...and the computer gave us a grade on the spot.
I got my work done fast...too fast. I took my data over to the computer in hopes of entering it, getting the result, and then doctoring it so I could re-enter it. However, everytime I went towards the computer, the teacher dropped everything to see my results. I made an excuse and went back to the bench...only to make another run at the computer. After the third run, I decided it was time to grow up.
The teacher helped me enter the data into the computer and the result was a very low percentage of error...and an A. I decided right then that maybe college would be different than high school...
Next Post
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Born Again
The entire process for "Three Musketeers" was completely different than any other production I've ever been involved in. Ed wrote some hilarious scenes that we practiced a lot. We barely had any rehearsals and most of the lines were made up. There wasn't any real acting until the end when the plot had to be resolved.
There were three performances scheduled and things began to unravel from the first night. The audience was enjoying the light heartedness of the performance and laughs were easy to get...too easy. At intermission, Tim came up to me and said we had to do something to make one of the scenes funnier.
Understand, Tim, Ed, Brian, and myself were "punsters". We would go to parties and have competitions. We would walk into a room, and try to come up with as many puns as possible with the objects in that room. We would declare a winner of the room and go to the next room. The goal was the big laugh and we all knew that meant taking a chance. We never put each other down for a bad joke. In fact, I can't remember any sarcasm between us...because it would kill the process. We needed everyone to know they had a safe environment to say the first thing that came into their head.
The scene Tim was talking about involved the musketeers arguing over letting a woman join the group. What we had agreed on was huddling and one at a time each of us popping our head up, looking at her, and then returning to the argument. Tim wanted to do something funnier...and we had 10 minutes to agree on what it was.
We decided to do the huddle, but quickly begin an argument between me and Tim. Then Dan (D'Artagnan) would mediate the dispute like a football referee conducting a coin toss. Tim would win and say, "We will receive her...we will receive her".
It went off perfectly and it killed. Tim told everyone we changed it at intermission. However, the real catalyst for chaos came when Midge told everyone that the superintendent loved the play...especially the coin toss. Now everyone wanted to change everything...
I couldn't begin to list the things that happened during the first half of the next performance. It was all for laughs. For example, we did a scene on one side of the stage that took place at an inn where people were drinking wine. A few scenes later, the same table was used as the cardinal's desk. Ed was the cardinal...Gordy was the messenger. Gordy told Ed to throw a glass of punch (wine) in his face, that would be left over from the inn scene, before telling Gordy to send in the next person.
Just before intermission, I was waiting in the wings when I got word that Midge had stormed out of the auditorium upset at how juvenile we had become. People were panicking...nobody wanted to make Midge look bad. She had given us a lot of freedom and now we were abusing it. I told these people to let everyone know we would meet in the band room at intermission and I would handle this.
The band room was big and tiered so that it was like a small amphitheater. I stood at the bottom and waited for everyone to show up. We had a lot of people in the cast. As I was beginning to open my mouth, Liz went off on everyone. Basically, saying everyone else was bad and she was the only one being good...and she stormed out.
I remember staring at the door and then looking at the crowd trying to get my bearings. Then my eyes landed on my brother. He looked at me as if to say, "Okay, now that that is over, can we get to the real speech." And I just relaxed...
I told the group that we had gotten out of control and there was nothing we could do about it. We couldn't undo what was already done, so let it go. All we could do was finish the play as strong as possible. I told them that each of us needs to do the best job we've ever done and show everyone what Midge taught us.
It was like out of a movie...and it worked. We put on the best performance. Midge came back for the second half and was very proud of us.
School was winding down and we had the year end awards assembly...on the same day we were supposed to leave for the Atlantic Regionals. We were over an hour late leaving because one of the other senior member (Mike) from our school wouldn't leave the awards assembly. It turned out that Mike won the "Senior Cup" for most outstanding senior.
The meet was at the University of Maryland and we stayed in the dorms. Mike and I roomed together. Teams came from states east of the Mississippi River. I have two memories from the meet.
First, the individual event took place in a huge hall. Every student had five minutes to answer the same question that was passed out to everyone. We did five or six questions. In between questions there was an emcee keeping us entertained. At one point, he would name a specific university and ask people to raise their hand if they were going to attend...MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins...I don't think there were many hands that hadn't been raised after he named 7 or 8 great schools. I remember thinking, "What am I doing with this crowd?"
Second, we got in at night. It was extremely hot and extremely humid. Mike and I went outside and found a group of people who wanted to play ultimate frisbee in the parking lot. We played until midnight...actually after because they locked the dorms. We found a way in and I immediately took a shower. The college had turned off the hot water...it was the coldest...most memorable...and best shower I have ever taken.
It is interesting to look at the math all stars from our school:
Mike ended up going to Cornell. He became the editor of the school newspaper and changed his major more than five times. I remember telling him that night in Baltimore that I wouldn't want to be him...he is good at everything. I didn't have that many choices...it had to involve math. He went from chemistry to meteorology to journalism to who knows what.
Jeff ended up winning the Senior Cup the next year and went to Princeton. He triple majored and finished with greater than a 4.0 average...I saw a copy of his grades that Ed made. Jeff became a high powered executive at a capital investment company serving as chairman to several of the companies they bought.
Randy became an engineer and is a part of the team that patented the self check out technology currently being used in super markets.
Glen became a world famous heart surgeon.
I made consumer products that 95% of Americans have in their household...oh, and I wrote a book identifying God's identity and the Meaning of Life in an objective fashion.
Speaking of God, Liz and I kept talking about her religion. I wanted answers and she seemed to be able to explain it to me well enough that when I talked to my pastor and parents, they couldn't say where she was wrong...actually they didn't say much of anything. She would go to a youth gathering every other Friday night and I asked if I could go with her.
The speaker was okay. He didn't say anything that was revelatory or memorable...except when he explained at the end how to become "born again". There were maybe forty of us in the room. When he asked who would like to be born again, two people raised their hands...I was one of them.
We went to the front and prayed. I remember a group around Liz hugging her as she cried. Then the guy asked us to step outside for a second. We went out a side door and I looked up at the sky wondering what I had just done because something hit me harder than a form tackle on solid ice. The speaker talked with both of us and encouraged us to read our Bibles, talk to God, and pray. He encouraged us to keep growing or the flame would go out. He said more, but I knew I had totally changed my life and I had a hard time coming back to reality. (Liz said later that a number of people were worried because I look like I had had a stroke.)
I remember coming home that night after everyone was asleep. I got into bed and thought, "My life is never going to be the same." I didn't tell anyone what had happened...
I was Liz's "date" at the Lilac Festival. She essentially finished second to a competitor who looked almost exactly like her with blonde hair. (Liz had dark hair.) It was creepy to cover their hair in the program pictures and try to tell them apart.
Liz and I had an interesting discussion the day of the first sailing race. I had seen "Jesus of Nazareth" weeks before and I connected with "John the Baptist". I thought Michael York was amazing. I told Liz I'd be happy if God called me to that ministry. It was so cut and dry. Live in the desert, no possessions, and just pave the way for Jesus. I have no desire to be "the show"...I love helping others be "the show".
The race was a blast. Liz's dad told me what to do...and I did everything he told me to do. Halfway through the race, Liz and her mom even began to do what they were told. We won...yes, we got time taken off, but we didn't need it...we won! It was a perfect day. There is nothing I would change about that day. I sat in the yacht club, having a meal, watching our captain learn how to handle all the attention.
Well, now I had a problem. Graduation and moving were in my immediate future...and I didn't want to leave this perfect situation. My parents said I could stay if I found someone who would let me stay. Ed told me I could spend the summer at his house. When I told my parents, they said I could stay if I got a job and paid them rent. I went to the employment office and begged for a job.
I got a minimum wage job working as a weighmaster for a food processing plant. On their way out of town, my family stopped by to say good bye (during my first week on the job).
My job was to weigh the trucks on their way in and record the amount. Then I weighed them empty on their way out and recorded the amount. Later, the lab would bring me an analysis of a five pound sample of the green beans from that load...and I would calculate how much we would pay.
The only other thing I want to officially say about the job is that they hired migrant workers and housed them across the street. I worked from 11 AM to 9 PM (or when the last truck came in). After 5 PM, I was the only person in the office.
One day, they brought the hugest person I have ever personally met into the office. (I have coached Reggie White's son in basketball and have met Reggie...this guy was much bigger.)
A person from the company told me they wanted to introduce this guy to me...for my safety. He is the person they hired to keep the peace in the barracks across the street. He didn't speak English. They wanted him to know who I was so that he didn't beat me up when he saw me on company property one night.
I have always told people that God is more responsive to newer Christians and slowly increases His response time in order to grow the believer's faith and maturity. I love being around new Christians because things happen quickly for them. A lot of things happened quickly during my first summer as a Christian, but the one thing that sticks with me the most was this first "sign"...
This huge man stuck out his hand. I looked up at him. His eyes were half open and he looked drugged up to me. I wasn't sure he even saw me. As I reached out my hand, the person from the company told him my name as if he was deaf or slow...all they said was, "John".
The second he engulfed my hand, his eyes widened, his face lit up with a smile, and he said in perfect English while nodding his head, "John the Baptist".
I never saw him again the rest of the summer...
Next Post
There were three performances scheduled and things began to unravel from the first night. The audience was enjoying the light heartedness of the performance and laughs were easy to get...too easy. At intermission, Tim came up to me and said we had to do something to make one of the scenes funnier.
Understand, Tim, Ed, Brian, and myself were "punsters". We would go to parties and have competitions. We would walk into a room, and try to come up with as many puns as possible with the objects in that room. We would declare a winner of the room and go to the next room. The goal was the big laugh and we all knew that meant taking a chance. We never put each other down for a bad joke. In fact, I can't remember any sarcasm between us...because it would kill the process. We needed everyone to know they had a safe environment to say the first thing that came into their head.
The scene Tim was talking about involved the musketeers arguing over letting a woman join the group. What we had agreed on was huddling and one at a time each of us popping our head up, looking at her, and then returning to the argument. Tim wanted to do something funnier...and we had 10 minutes to agree on what it was.
We decided to do the huddle, but quickly begin an argument between me and Tim. Then Dan (D'Artagnan) would mediate the dispute like a football referee conducting a coin toss. Tim would win and say, "We will receive her...we will receive her".
It went off perfectly and it killed. Tim told everyone we changed it at intermission. However, the real catalyst for chaos came when Midge told everyone that the superintendent loved the play...especially the coin toss. Now everyone wanted to change everything...
I couldn't begin to list the things that happened during the first half of the next performance. It was all for laughs. For example, we did a scene on one side of the stage that took place at an inn where people were drinking wine. A few scenes later, the same table was used as the cardinal's desk. Ed was the cardinal...Gordy was the messenger. Gordy told Ed to throw a glass of punch (wine) in his face, that would be left over from the inn scene, before telling Gordy to send in the next person.
Just before intermission, I was waiting in the wings when I got word that Midge had stormed out of the auditorium upset at how juvenile we had become. People were panicking...nobody wanted to make Midge look bad. She had given us a lot of freedom and now we were abusing it. I told these people to let everyone know we would meet in the band room at intermission and I would handle this.
The band room was big and tiered so that it was like a small amphitheater. I stood at the bottom and waited for everyone to show up. We had a lot of people in the cast. As I was beginning to open my mouth, Liz went off on everyone. Basically, saying everyone else was bad and she was the only one being good...and she stormed out.
I remember staring at the door and then looking at the crowd trying to get my bearings. Then my eyes landed on my brother. He looked at me as if to say, "Okay, now that that is over, can we get to the real speech." And I just relaxed...
I told the group that we had gotten out of control and there was nothing we could do about it. We couldn't undo what was already done, so let it go. All we could do was finish the play as strong as possible. I told them that each of us needs to do the best job we've ever done and show everyone what Midge taught us.
It was like out of a movie...and it worked. We put on the best performance. Midge came back for the second half and was very proud of us.
School was winding down and we had the year end awards assembly...on the same day we were supposed to leave for the Atlantic Regionals. We were over an hour late leaving because one of the other senior member (Mike) from our school wouldn't leave the awards assembly. It turned out that Mike won the "Senior Cup" for most outstanding senior.
The meet was at the University of Maryland and we stayed in the dorms. Mike and I roomed together. Teams came from states east of the Mississippi River. I have two memories from the meet.
First, the individual event took place in a huge hall. Every student had five minutes to answer the same question that was passed out to everyone. We did five or six questions. In between questions there was an emcee keeping us entertained. At one point, he would name a specific university and ask people to raise their hand if they were going to attend...MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins...I don't think there were many hands that hadn't been raised after he named 7 or 8 great schools. I remember thinking, "What am I doing with this crowd?"
Second, we got in at night. It was extremely hot and extremely humid. Mike and I went outside and found a group of people who wanted to play ultimate frisbee in the parking lot. We played until midnight...actually after because they locked the dorms. We found a way in and I immediately took a shower. The college had turned off the hot water...it was the coldest...most memorable...and best shower I have ever taken.
It is interesting to look at the math all stars from our school:
Mike ended up going to Cornell. He became the editor of the school newspaper and changed his major more than five times. I remember telling him that night in Baltimore that I wouldn't want to be him...he is good at everything. I didn't have that many choices...it had to involve math. He went from chemistry to meteorology to journalism to who knows what.
Jeff ended up winning the Senior Cup the next year and went to Princeton. He triple majored and finished with greater than a 4.0 average...I saw a copy of his grades that Ed made. Jeff became a high powered executive at a capital investment company serving as chairman to several of the companies they bought.
Randy became an engineer and is a part of the team that patented the self check out technology currently being used in super markets.
Glen became a world famous heart surgeon.
I made consumer products that 95% of Americans have in their household...oh, and I wrote a book identifying God's identity and the Meaning of Life in an objective fashion.
Speaking of God, Liz and I kept talking about her religion. I wanted answers and she seemed to be able to explain it to me well enough that when I talked to my pastor and parents, they couldn't say where she was wrong...actually they didn't say much of anything. She would go to a youth gathering every other Friday night and I asked if I could go with her.
The speaker was okay. He didn't say anything that was revelatory or memorable...except when he explained at the end how to become "born again". There were maybe forty of us in the room. When he asked who would like to be born again, two people raised their hands...I was one of them.
We went to the front and prayed. I remember a group around Liz hugging her as she cried. Then the guy asked us to step outside for a second. We went out a side door and I looked up at the sky wondering what I had just done because something hit me harder than a form tackle on solid ice. The speaker talked with both of us and encouraged us to read our Bibles, talk to God, and pray. He encouraged us to keep growing or the flame would go out. He said more, but I knew I had totally changed my life and I had a hard time coming back to reality. (Liz said later that a number of people were worried because I look like I had had a stroke.)
I remember coming home that night after everyone was asleep. I got into bed and thought, "My life is never going to be the same." I didn't tell anyone what had happened...
I was Liz's "date" at the Lilac Festival. She essentially finished second to a competitor who looked almost exactly like her with blonde hair. (Liz had dark hair.) It was creepy to cover their hair in the program pictures and try to tell them apart.
Liz and I had an interesting discussion the day of the first sailing race. I had seen "Jesus of Nazareth" weeks before and I connected with "John the Baptist". I thought Michael York was amazing. I told Liz I'd be happy if God called me to that ministry. It was so cut and dry. Live in the desert, no possessions, and just pave the way for Jesus. I have no desire to be "the show"...I love helping others be "the show".
The race was a blast. Liz's dad told me what to do...and I did everything he told me to do. Halfway through the race, Liz and her mom even began to do what they were told. We won...yes, we got time taken off, but we didn't need it...we won! It was a perfect day. There is nothing I would change about that day. I sat in the yacht club, having a meal, watching our captain learn how to handle all the attention.
Well, now I had a problem. Graduation and moving were in my immediate future...and I didn't want to leave this perfect situation. My parents said I could stay if I found someone who would let me stay. Ed told me I could spend the summer at his house. When I told my parents, they said I could stay if I got a job and paid them rent. I went to the employment office and begged for a job.
I got a minimum wage job working as a weighmaster for a food processing plant. On their way out of town, my family stopped by to say good bye (during my first week on the job).
My job was to weigh the trucks on their way in and record the amount. Then I weighed them empty on their way out and recorded the amount. Later, the lab would bring me an analysis of a five pound sample of the green beans from that load...and I would calculate how much we would pay.
The only other thing I want to officially say about the job is that they hired migrant workers and housed them across the street. I worked from 11 AM to 9 PM (or when the last truck came in). After 5 PM, I was the only person in the office.
One day, they brought the hugest person I have ever personally met into the office. (I have coached Reggie White's son in basketball and have met Reggie...this guy was much bigger.)
A person from the company told me they wanted to introduce this guy to me...for my safety. He is the person they hired to keep the peace in the barracks across the street. He didn't speak English. They wanted him to know who I was so that he didn't beat me up when he saw me on company property one night.
I have always told people that God is more responsive to newer Christians and slowly increases His response time in order to grow the believer's faith and maturity. I love being around new Christians because things happen quickly for them. A lot of things happened quickly during my first summer as a Christian, but the one thing that sticks with me the most was this first "sign"...
This huge man stuck out his hand. I looked up at him. His eyes were half open and he looked drugged up to me. I wasn't sure he even saw me. As I reached out my hand, the person from the company told him my name as if he was deaf or slow...all they said was, "John".
The second he engulfed my hand, his eyes widened, his face lit up with a smile, and he said in perfect English while nodding his head, "John the Baptist".
I never saw him again the rest of the summer...
Next Post
Monday, June 23, 2008
School Choice
Liz explained in general terms that she was a "born again" Christian. I told her I went to a Lutheran church, so it was basically the same thing. Then she gave me a look like it wasn't the same thing at all. Not only did she seem to take her beliefs more seriously than me, she gave me the impression that people would warn me against her beliefs when I told others.
I told her it wasn't going to be a problem...However, I found out she was right when I asked my pastor if he was "born again". The response I got from my pastor and parents was that "born agains" are fanatics and take religion too seriously...yet they couldn't explain to me specifically why this was bad. Actually, this made me realize that Liz might be on to something because she seemed to have answers where other people didn't.
One of the requirements for high school graduation was to write a senior thesis. It was a class that taught us how to research and write a 20 page paper. My topic was Creationism. As I mentioned earlier, I was already working on this paper before I met Liz. I had become interested in Creationism a year before purely from the scientific aspect. My dad had gotten some interesting cassettes of a lecture on Creationism and I listened to them constantly. I loved how the speaker used scientific principles to show how evolution was contradictory.
In fact, I've written in the past about how my dad and I attended a "Creation vs. Evolution" debate at a local college. It was a huge disappointment. I was looking for a debate that would leave me seeing the merits of both sides. However, by the time the tour got to Rochester, the two sides had already figured each other out.
The Evolutionist couldn't win two points: Missing Links and Thermodynamics. Basically, no missing links had been found, so debating this point was only going to result in the Evolutionist losing. The scientific Law of Thermodynamics states that every system runs down, yet evolution is based on a system going in the opposite direction. Arguing that evolution is more scientifically sound by arguing for the opposite of a law of science was contradictory...and resulted in losing this point.
Basically, the Creationist would extend the argument on either of these two points until time ran out. They would win the argument 1-0 or 2-0. So the Creationist wasn't interested in discussing anything new and they weren't interested in discussing the two flawed topics in-depth so as to extend the argument.
Meanwhile the Evolutionist wasn't interested in arguing the two flawed points because he was guaranteeing he would lose the argument. So, the Evolutionist conceded both points in his opening statement so as to get to other topics...and then spent the rest of the night complaining when the Creationist wouldn't move on to other topics...because the Creationist kept arguing two points he had already won. It was the exact opposite of what I remember from childhood when I watched people argue these topics on television.
Liz's family went on a vacation every year during spring break. Since my family had long given up family vacations (which were really just extended road trips), I was shocked to find their family flew somewhere. However, Liz had convinced her parents to skip this year's vacation and stay in Rochester. She had done this weeks before because she was afraid another female from drama club would spend the week with me and she wanted to be around. Now that we were together, she could spend the week with me. Now that her parents hadn't spent all that money, they could spend the week with me.
We went to some really nice restaurants that week and I got to know Liz's parents. Liz's brother was in college. Liz's dad was an executive who a few years later would be named one of the 50 best executives in the U.S. under 50 years old. He had graduated from Cornell with an engineering degree and actually was named "Mr. Cornell" when he graduated. Liz's mom was very attractive and very nice to me...maybe too nice to me. (My friends noticed this as well and would constantly ask me if anything was going on with her and I because she was my biggest fan. She was constantly thanking me for seeing Liz.) Neither of them attended church. They were both extremely easy to talk to and very well read.
The only hobby they seemed to have was sailing. They owned a Seidelman 25...which is a 25 foot sailboat. They raced it on Canandaigua Lake. Liz's dad gave me a great explanation using a wine glass for why the boat was not a great racing boat...however, they competed in a handicap league and their boat got a lot of time taken off its finish.
The problem was that they had never won anything...never even close. Liz's mom implied that there were several mutinies during each race. He said that he thought he could win if he had a crew that would listen to him. I said that I love to sail and I'm the best follower he'll ever meet...if I have a strong leader. Otherwise, I can be your worse nightmare...not because I will take over, but because I will ask questions until you can no longer ignore that you are contradictory. He invited me to sail with them on the first race (Memorial Day).
As for Math Team, we clinched the title during the last meet. It seemed anti-climactic to me because I was focused on the all-county team. Five of us made the fifteen member team that would go to Freeport, NY (Long Island) to compete in the New York State championships.
"The Miracle Worker" went off without a hitch. All I was focused on were the three cast parties. I spent the final cast party playing pool, listening to music, and drinking a lot of Coca Cola. Midge came down to the basement and held court in a corner chair. I was playing pool with Tim (a junior) who was one of the best card players in the cast. He and I actually were up for the role of Helen Keller's father during auditions because an extremely talented actor (Bill) decided he had had too many leads.
This is the short version of a story that has only become more legendary and dissected as time has gone on:
Tim and I read back and forth all night and kept staring each other down...both taking the part in completely different directions. However, Bill attended the auditions and throughout the evening, Midge kept passing notes to Bill. So, Tim and I had one eye on each other and one eye on Midge and Bill. Bill kept refusing to read even when Midge would pass a script down to him...until the very end.
Bill auditioned and all he did was scream the lines. To me it looked like he was purposely throwing the audition. When he finished reading, Midge immediately ended the auditions. The next day Bill got the biggest male role...and Tim and I got extremely small parts (but that was all there was for males). The number of conspiracy theories dealing with that audition are too numerous to explain, however, the one I came up with at a reunion 6-7 years ago was that Bill was purposely showing Tim and I had bad we were by saying he could get the part with the worst audition anyone has ever seen...and it took us more than 20 years to realize how he humiliated us.
The incident caused Tim and I to become close, so when we were playing pool that night (partners against all comers), we began to get each other worked up about how we were robbed. Tim got me going because he said I was graduating, while he had next year. That caused us to go to Midge and demand another play. Actually, the acting we did pleading our case may have been one of my best performances.
I have an excellent memory, however, I don't know if I was tired, over-caffeinated, or ranting like a maniac, but I can't explain the steps that led to the result...we would put on "The Three Musketeers". Word got around the party that we were going to throw together another performance and everyone wanted a part. This may be the only performance Midge ever did in her illustrious career that didn't go through an audition process. She was like a queen. She sat on a throne, heard requests, and granted them...leaving it to others to fulfill them. She ended up double casting some of the lead women roles...
Realize, this was Midge's first full year and every performance was sold out and got rave reviews. I'm assuming she had money in the budget. Looking back, there was a certain magic with that group...it was made up of extremely talented performers, very funny people who had small roles, and driven people who thought they could do anything. It would be a shame to pack up shop...Midge would direct and nothing else.
We didn't have much time and it was my job to resolve the conflicts. We got the script and realized that we needed to create 40 more parts and write scenes to explain why there were two people who were playing some of the main female characters. However, we had done it before with "The Quest"...
I worked with Ed to come up with a sub-plot and we identified the scenes that needed to be written. Then I went to Long Island while he wrote...
The Math Team had it's year end meet where the awards were given out and the all-county team competed together. Our county meets were simply based on individual questions. At the state meets, there are a lot of different "events" to compete in. For example, there are "relay questions". You line five of your teammates up in desks. Each has a different problem. The first person solves their problem and writes the number on a slip of paper which they pass to the second person. The second person's question is a word problem that goes something like this: "TNYR (the number you receive) is the sides of a regular polygon. If the circumference is 45, then what is..." And that answer is passed to the third person. When the fifth person comes up with an answer, they turn it in. Points are awarded only for a correct answer, however, more points are awarded the quicker the answer.
One of the events was the "Power Question". The teams is put into a room and given a difficult question that has many parts. During this meet, the Power Question came in a manila envelope. They started the clock and opened the envelope...out came a slab of wood, three pegs, and 6 circular disks of various sizes. Before they even began to read the question, I had assembled it into the "Towers of Hanoi". It is a game that I used to have as a kid. The disks have to be moved from one peg to another without any larger disks resting on smaller disks.
We answered every question and knew we nailed it. I gave a circular disk to each of the five members from my high school. I kept the smallest disk and one of the pegs as a souvenir. It turns out, we were the first team ever to get a perfect 30 out of 30 on the Power Question. We were feeling pretty confident about the NY State Championships.
We drove down to Freeport, NY. Local residents put us up in twos. I bunked with Jeff...the junior who kept getting perfect scores at the meets. It was a great opportunity to really get to know him.
As for the meet, all I really remember is that Stuyvesant High School was a math school and their students were geniuses. Their students each wrote an article and sold them as a kind of home made magazine. I bought one and even 15 years later I would use it to explain the "latest" math technology to people at work. There was an article on fractional dimensions that would always blow people away when I explained it.
We ended up winning the most improved team...our score was so much higher than our score the previous year. This qualified us to go to the Atlantic Regionals in Baltimore, MD.
When I got back home, our family had dinner in the formal dining room. We never had dinner in the formal dinning room. My brother's version of this story is the best...apparently, I was eating like a starving person. (I love to eat.) My dad told the family that he was relocating to a new city and the identity was on this card...at which time my dad held up a piece of paper with jumbled letters. I looked over and without breaking stride in my process of constantly shoving food in my mouth, I said matter of factly, "Oh, its Columbus."
My brother said my dad looked like I had shot his dog. My brother instantly lost his appetite because he was going to finish his last year of high school two states away...something he says my parents promised him would never happen. My dad had to begin the job immediately and we would all move once the school year ended.
My brother decided to join the cast in order to be by Kelly as much as possible. Actually, it seemed like everyone was joining the cast. There was going to be sword fighting...even guys who had had nothing to do with drama club wanted to come and sword fight. The cast was huge...and we didn't have much time to rehearse.
It was at this time that I heard from Princeton and Cornell...both rejected me. I got a call from my alumni interviewer asking me if I got accepted or rejected...his list had "NO ACTION" next to my name and he had never seen that in the 20+ years of being an alumni interviewer. I told him rejected and he said he'd make some calls. He called to say my files were incomplete...they never got my Achievement Test scores.
Three days later, I wore a new button up shirt to school. Everyone was talking about which colleges they got into. By lunch, I was scratching like crazy. When I got home, I took the shirt off and showed my mom...I had broken out in hives from my wrists to my neck to my waist. I was completely red. I went to the emergency room and they gave me a shot...but I still had the hives.
Two days later I got my acceptance into Clarkson. I called my dad.
His response: Take your shirt off and look in the mirror...
...my hives were gone.
Next Post
I told her it wasn't going to be a problem...However, I found out she was right when I asked my pastor if he was "born again". The response I got from my pastor and parents was that "born agains" are fanatics and take religion too seriously...yet they couldn't explain to me specifically why this was bad. Actually, this made me realize that Liz might be on to something because she seemed to have answers where other people didn't.
One of the requirements for high school graduation was to write a senior thesis. It was a class that taught us how to research and write a 20 page paper. My topic was Creationism. As I mentioned earlier, I was already working on this paper before I met Liz. I had become interested in Creationism a year before purely from the scientific aspect. My dad had gotten some interesting cassettes of a lecture on Creationism and I listened to them constantly. I loved how the speaker used scientific principles to show how evolution was contradictory.
In fact, I've written in the past about how my dad and I attended a "Creation vs. Evolution" debate at a local college. It was a huge disappointment. I was looking for a debate that would leave me seeing the merits of both sides. However, by the time the tour got to Rochester, the two sides had already figured each other out.
The Evolutionist couldn't win two points: Missing Links and Thermodynamics. Basically, no missing links had been found, so debating this point was only going to result in the Evolutionist losing. The scientific Law of Thermodynamics states that every system runs down, yet evolution is based on a system going in the opposite direction. Arguing that evolution is more scientifically sound by arguing for the opposite of a law of science was contradictory...and resulted in losing this point.
Basically, the Creationist would extend the argument on either of these two points until time ran out. They would win the argument 1-0 or 2-0. So the Creationist wasn't interested in discussing anything new and they weren't interested in discussing the two flawed topics in-depth so as to extend the argument.
Meanwhile the Evolutionist wasn't interested in arguing the two flawed points because he was guaranteeing he would lose the argument. So, the Evolutionist conceded both points in his opening statement so as to get to other topics...and then spent the rest of the night complaining when the Creationist wouldn't move on to other topics...because the Creationist kept arguing two points he had already won. It was the exact opposite of what I remember from childhood when I watched people argue these topics on television.
Liz's family went on a vacation every year during spring break. Since my family had long given up family vacations (which were really just extended road trips), I was shocked to find their family flew somewhere. However, Liz had convinced her parents to skip this year's vacation and stay in Rochester. She had done this weeks before because she was afraid another female from drama club would spend the week with me and she wanted to be around. Now that we were together, she could spend the week with me. Now that her parents hadn't spent all that money, they could spend the week with me.
We went to some really nice restaurants that week and I got to know Liz's parents. Liz's brother was in college. Liz's dad was an executive who a few years later would be named one of the 50 best executives in the U.S. under 50 years old. He had graduated from Cornell with an engineering degree and actually was named "Mr. Cornell" when he graduated. Liz's mom was very attractive and very nice to me...maybe too nice to me. (My friends noticed this as well and would constantly ask me if anything was going on with her and I because she was my biggest fan. She was constantly thanking me for seeing Liz.) Neither of them attended church. They were both extremely easy to talk to and very well read.
The only hobby they seemed to have was sailing. They owned a Seidelman 25...which is a 25 foot sailboat. They raced it on Canandaigua Lake. Liz's dad gave me a great explanation using a wine glass for why the boat was not a great racing boat...however, they competed in a handicap league and their boat got a lot of time taken off its finish.
The problem was that they had never won anything...never even close. Liz's mom implied that there were several mutinies during each race. He said that he thought he could win if he had a crew that would listen to him. I said that I love to sail and I'm the best follower he'll ever meet...if I have a strong leader. Otherwise, I can be your worse nightmare...not because I will take over, but because I will ask questions until you can no longer ignore that you are contradictory. He invited me to sail with them on the first race (Memorial Day).
As for Math Team, we clinched the title during the last meet. It seemed anti-climactic to me because I was focused on the all-county team. Five of us made the fifteen member team that would go to Freeport, NY (Long Island) to compete in the New York State championships.
"The Miracle Worker" went off without a hitch. All I was focused on were the three cast parties. I spent the final cast party playing pool, listening to music, and drinking a lot of Coca Cola. Midge came down to the basement and held court in a corner chair. I was playing pool with Tim (a junior) who was one of the best card players in the cast. He and I actually were up for the role of Helen Keller's father during auditions because an extremely talented actor (Bill) decided he had had too many leads.
This is the short version of a story that has only become more legendary and dissected as time has gone on:
Tim and I read back and forth all night and kept staring each other down...both taking the part in completely different directions. However, Bill attended the auditions and throughout the evening, Midge kept passing notes to Bill. So, Tim and I had one eye on each other and one eye on Midge and Bill. Bill kept refusing to read even when Midge would pass a script down to him...until the very end.
Bill auditioned and all he did was scream the lines. To me it looked like he was purposely throwing the audition. When he finished reading, Midge immediately ended the auditions. The next day Bill got the biggest male role...and Tim and I got extremely small parts (but that was all there was for males). The number of conspiracy theories dealing with that audition are too numerous to explain, however, the one I came up with at a reunion 6-7 years ago was that Bill was purposely showing Tim and I had bad we were by saying he could get the part with the worst audition anyone has ever seen...and it took us more than 20 years to realize how he humiliated us.
The incident caused Tim and I to become close, so when we were playing pool that night (partners against all comers), we began to get each other worked up about how we were robbed. Tim got me going because he said I was graduating, while he had next year. That caused us to go to Midge and demand another play. Actually, the acting we did pleading our case may have been one of my best performances.
I have an excellent memory, however, I don't know if I was tired, over-caffeinated, or ranting like a maniac, but I can't explain the steps that led to the result...we would put on "The Three Musketeers". Word got around the party that we were going to throw together another performance and everyone wanted a part. This may be the only performance Midge ever did in her illustrious career that didn't go through an audition process. She was like a queen. She sat on a throne, heard requests, and granted them...leaving it to others to fulfill them. She ended up double casting some of the lead women roles...
Realize, this was Midge's first full year and every performance was sold out and got rave reviews. I'm assuming she had money in the budget. Looking back, there was a certain magic with that group...it was made up of extremely talented performers, very funny people who had small roles, and driven people who thought they could do anything. It would be a shame to pack up shop...Midge would direct and nothing else.
We didn't have much time and it was my job to resolve the conflicts. We got the script and realized that we needed to create 40 more parts and write scenes to explain why there were two people who were playing some of the main female characters. However, we had done it before with "The Quest"...
I worked with Ed to come up with a sub-plot and we identified the scenes that needed to be written. Then I went to Long Island while he wrote...
The Math Team had it's year end meet where the awards were given out and the all-county team competed together. Our county meets were simply based on individual questions. At the state meets, there are a lot of different "events" to compete in. For example, there are "relay questions". You line five of your teammates up in desks. Each has a different problem. The first person solves their problem and writes the number on a slip of paper which they pass to the second person. The second person's question is a word problem that goes something like this: "TNYR (the number you receive) is the sides of a regular polygon. If the circumference is 45, then what is..." And that answer is passed to the third person. When the fifth person comes up with an answer, they turn it in. Points are awarded only for a correct answer, however, more points are awarded the quicker the answer.
One of the events was the "Power Question". The teams is put into a room and given a difficult question that has many parts. During this meet, the Power Question came in a manila envelope. They started the clock and opened the envelope...out came a slab of wood, three pegs, and 6 circular disks of various sizes. Before they even began to read the question, I had assembled it into the "Towers of Hanoi". It is a game that I used to have as a kid. The disks have to be moved from one peg to another without any larger disks resting on smaller disks.
We answered every question and knew we nailed it. I gave a circular disk to each of the five members from my high school. I kept the smallest disk and one of the pegs as a souvenir. It turns out, we were the first team ever to get a perfect 30 out of 30 on the Power Question. We were feeling pretty confident about the NY State Championships.
We drove down to Freeport, NY. Local residents put us up in twos. I bunked with Jeff...the junior who kept getting perfect scores at the meets. It was a great opportunity to really get to know him.
As for the meet, all I really remember is that Stuyvesant High School was a math school and their students were geniuses. Their students each wrote an article and sold them as a kind of home made magazine. I bought one and even 15 years later I would use it to explain the "latest" math technology to people at work. There was an article on fractional dimensions that would always blow people away when I explained it.
We ended up winning the most improved team...our score was so much higher than our score the previous year. This qualified us to go to the Atlantic Regionals in Baltimore, MD.
When I got back home, our family had dinner in the formal dining room. We never had dinner in the formal dinning room. My brother's version of this story is the best...apparently, I was eating like a starving person. (I love to eat.) My dad told the family that he was relocating to a new city and the identity was on this card...at which time my dad held up a piece of paper with jumbled letters. I looked over and without breaking stride in my process of constantly shoving food in my mouth, I said matter of factly, "Oh, its Columbus."
My brother said my dad looked like I had shot his dog. My brother instantly lost his appetite because he was going to finish his last year of high school two states away...something he says my parents promised him would never happen. My dad had to begin the job immediately and we would all move once the school year ended.
My brother decided to join the cast in order to be by Kelly as much as possible. Actually, it seemed like everyone was joining the cast. There was going to be sword fighting...even guys who had had nothing to do with drama club wanted to come and sword fight. The cast was huge...and we didn't have much time to rehearse.
It was at this time that I heard from Princeton and Cornell...both rejected me. I got a call from my alumni interviewer asking me if I got accepted or rejected...his list had "NO ACTION" next to my name and he had never seen that in the 20+ years of being an alumni interviewer. I told him rejected and he said he'd make some calls. He called to say my files were incomplete...they never got my Achievement Test scores.
Three days later, I wore a new button up shirt to school. Everyone was talking about which colleges they got into. By lunch, I was scratching like crazy. When I got home, I took the shirt off and showed my mom...I had broken out in hives from my wrists to my neck to my waist. I was completely red. I went to the emergency room and they gave me a shot...but I still had the hives.
Two days later I got my acceptance into Clarkson. I called my dad.
His response: Take your shirt off and look in the mirror...
...my hives were gone.
Next Post
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Miracle Worker
In order to understand the dynamics during "The Miracle Worker" production, we need to cover some loose ends...
One of the people Gordy introduced me to during the summer was Kelly...Gordy had a crush on her. As it turned out, she ended up dating my brother Ed...
At that time, my brother was a junior (same grade as Gordy and Kelly). He was by far the funniest "all-around" guy I've ever known. I say "all-around" because there wasn't one area of comedy that he couldn't pull off: impersonations, story-telling, improvisation, joke telling, pranks,...he was extremely creative. For instance, my brother began "rapping" in 1976...he would walk around the house and talk sing a made up line...and just rhyme away, somehow finishing it into a joke and then laughing hysterically because he cracked himself up.
He was a body builder and had a very dark complexion. We'd had more than one person ask, "Who's the black kid?" when viewing black and white pictures of our family. The bottomline is that my brother was very good looking and very sociable...I never stood a chance. Every girl that was interested in me suddenly lost interest when she met my brother.
My high school was so large they actually had fraternities and sororities. The "jock" fraternity that didn't ask my brother to join...but asked all his friends. When he protested, they said they didn't think he would be interested because I had turned them down the year before. My brother joined...
Kelly had a younger sister (Erin) who was a sophomore and a younger brother (Brian) who was a freshman. I ended up dating Erin...after all, she wouldn't steal her sister's boyfriend. I never really asked out a female...I would just be friends with them and somehow we would be dating. Even though Erin and I were dating, I spent all my time at her house with Brian...
Knowing what I know now, I would say that Brian and I had completely profitable ARE's. I'm very much a vision (Big Picture) person who is trying to accomplish something practical. Brian was a detail guy who was completely impractical. Every device in his bedroom (clock radio, phone, record player, tape recorder, etc.) had been taken apart and put together just enough to mostly function. He had to know how everything worked but was never interested in restoring order. He's the first person who allowed me to be completely myself...because he was handling the other half being completely himself.
Brian played in the tackle football game when I got the concussion...in fact, I was staying at his house because my parents were out of town. Brian joined the math team the same meet I did and was the person starting the skirmishes that I had to strategize around. Brian was banned from one of my friend's house because every time he came over, he broke something. He got the nickname "Master of Disaster".
Brian and I were both intrigued by computers...especially the new Apple computers that had come out in 1980. I had taken a course in computer programming (BASIC Language) and he wanted to understand it. So I taught him programming. We decided we wanted to write a football program...a program that would let you select from a list of offensive or defensive plays and tell you the outcome of playing against the computer...keep time...etc. It seemed like every other weekend one of us slept over the other one's house. We would drink Coca Cola from 2 liter bottles and stay up to 3 AM writing code....but we didn't have a computer.
Brian, in typical fashion, found a computer at the library. We could sign up for half hour blocks once a week after we registered. So we would sign up for consecutive blocks and spend the hour entering as much code in as possible. Everything was saved on a big floppy disk.
We had entered thousands of lines by the time we were ready to run it. However, one hour was not enough time to run the program, find a glitch, debug the program, and start over again...only to find another glitch. We need hours on the computer. Again, Brian to the rescue. He found out that if the person after us didn't show up, we could keep using the computer. Brian proceeded to register everyone in both our families...including our pets. Then he would find a day that we could get six straight hours, and he'd sign everyone up.
But that was Brian...he would find some fact that had escaped everyone else and then use it to break the rules. When we finally got the program working well, it would crash after 20 or so minutes...for no reason. We both knew there had to be a reason, but we kept seeing it happen at different points in the program, but always after 20 minutes.
One night, we were working how we normally did: I would write code and Brian would be reading the Basic Language reference book looking for some new fact. On this night, I said to him, "What if we are running out of memory? There must be a way to reset the memory." In those computers, the memory was made up of a "stack" of boxes. The computer had a "pointer" start from the bottom and work its way up as the data changed...using up a memory box as it went. I just wanted the computer to point at the bottom box at a regular interval so it never reached the top of the stack.
That's how we worked...Brian would find a new command and I would find a use for it. Or, I would look at the program and say, "There must be a command that would save me from writing the same set of four commands in a row"...and he would find it. That night, Brian took half an hour to find our command: XX=FRE(0)
On my 18th birthday, Brian wanted me to drive him to see a friend. I told him I'd rather stay in my room and write code. So we stayed in my room and programmed. After a couple hours, there was a knock at my bedroom door. When I opened it there was over a dozen of my friends standing in the hall way...it was a surprise birthday party. I quickly closed the door and tried to get my bearings. I looked at Brian and he was pleading with me, "You aren't mad at me are you? Tell me your not mad!" It had been his job to get me out of the house...so my mom could set everything up.
There are too many "Brian" stories for me to be able to share most of them here. There will be some that pop up later. However, just to jump all the way to the end...a documentary has just been released called "180: The Spin on Willy's Statue". It tells the behind the scenes story of the greatest prank ever played at Rice University.
In 1988, a group of about a dozen students spun the one ton, cast metal statue of the founder of Rice University 180 degrees. The identity of the crew had been kept a secret for 20 years...until now. Sure enough, Brian was one of the people who pulled off the prank. In typical fashion, one of the two scaffold's fell over, making a mess, and causing one of the people to get caught.
Around this time, I was having problems with my college admissions. I really wanted to get into Princeton, however I applied to Cornell as my back up. My mom thought I ought to apply to more colleges, but I was pretty confident I would get into Cornell if Princeton passed on me. However, she stayed on me and I applied to an engineering school in New York State called Clarkson College of Technology...just to keep her happy.
Cornell was the only school I applied to that required an alumni interview. I had to be interviewed by an alumni of the university. The interview went well and he assured me I was getting in to Cornell. He was afraid Princeton would take me and kept pushing for me to spend the weekend at Cornell through their recruitment program. All that was left was to do well on my Achievement Tests and I was in.
I had already taken the SATs. The Achievement Tests were required for the Ivy League schools. On the test, there was a place to mark the college code. They would send your scores to up to three schools free of charge. I put my three schools down.
I took the test and did well. A month later, I got a letter from Cornell saying they didn't get my Achievement Test scores. I made a photo copy and sent them. Two weeks later they said they didn't get my Achievement Test scores. Ed, the author of "The Quest", was driving down to Ithaca to look at Cornell. I rode down with him and walked over to the Chemical Engineering building and handed them my Achievement Test scores. They person who took them thanked me and said, "It is like someone took a fire hose to all our files." So now all I had to do was wait...
I began The Miracle Worker with Erin. However, I really spent more time with her brother. Brian and I actually appeared on stage together as two ghosts/memories to Anne Sullivan...so we could spend our free time causing trouble. It was a big cast and we ran a card game during rehearsals...we played euchre. I won't explain it here. Suffice to say it took just enough thought to make it interesting and there was just enough rote to be able to be social.
I started meeting everyone because I was rarely on stage. The car my parents let me drive was a 1971 Volkswagen Bus. Brian decided we should get people together and drive around. So we got 8 of us together and drove around on a Friday night. Erin passed on coming with us.
It was still cold, so we parked and talked. Some cops came by to see if we had been drinking. All we had in the car was 2 liter bottles of soda and chips. Gordy made sure the cops knew it was soda...it may have been the only time he had been out with a group of people without alcohol and he was enjoying the lack of guilt a little too much.
It went so well that we planned another excursion two weeks later. This time we had 10 people in the bus. In between the "road trips" Erin and I broke up...but there really wasn't much to break up so everyone was fine. However, on this trip there was a female that had become a regular part of our card games...
Liz was a strong woman...very smart and very opinionated. All the talented people knew her because she was a dancer, singer, actress, etc. I didn't know it at the time, but the reason I hadn't seen her in previous plays was because she was competing in the Miss Lilac competition. Rochester, NY is know as the Lilac City. Every spring there is a Lilac Festival at which they crown a high school junior "Miss Lilac". Liz had made it to the final five...but hadn't told anyone. It was a competition that took place over several months.
The plan for the second road trip was to go to a small local college and play euchre in their library...actually the atrium of the library. I had been using the library to write my senior research paper. Brian came with me one time and went exploring. The campus buildings were connected with underground tunnels. One of the tunnels ended in an elevator that came up to the atrium of the library.
Brian thought we should have a euchre tournament in the atrium at night. The library would be locked from the outside and the actual library would be locked from the atrium...so there is no reason for anyone to be there. There were plenty of seats. We could bring music and food...it sounded like a great idea when Brian explained it.
We parked the car and took the tunnel. There would be 2 games (four players each) going on and two people (one team) watching. Everything went perfect for about 20 minutes...and then campus security showed up. The group scattered in several directions in groups of 2's. I made it back to the bus with Liz and we drove around looking for the rest of the people.
Eventually we found them all and drove up to Lake Ontario. I know some of these people drank alcohol, but none of them ever did when we got together to talk about life. Somewhere during the conversation, Liz and I held hands. I didn't know if that meant we were dating or not...but I wanted to be with her.
During the next play practice, we sat in the auditorium to discuss it. I told her I wanted to go out with her. She said she wanted to go out with me but I really shouldn't commit until I understood something about her. She said she was a "born again" Christian...
Next Post
One of the people Gordy introduced me to during the summer was Kelly...Gordy had a crush on her. As it turned out, she ended up dating my brother Ed...
At that time, my brother was a junior (same grade as Gordy and Kelly). He was by far the funniest "all-around" guy I've ever known. I say "all-around" because there wasn't one area of comedy that he couldn't pull off: impersonations, story-telling, improvisation, joke telling, pranks,...he was extremely creative. For instance, my brother began "rapping" in 1976...he would walk around the house and talk sing a made up line...and just rhyme away, somehow finishing it into a joke and then laughing hysterically because he cracked himself up.
He was a body builder and had a very dark complexion. We'd had more than one person ask, "Who's the black kid?" when viewing black and white pictures of our family. The bottomline is that my brother was very good looking and very sociable...I never stood a chance. Every girl that was interested in me suddenly lost interest when she met my brother.
My high school was so large they actually had fraternities and sororities. The "jock" fraternity that didn't ask my brother to join...but asked all his friends. When he protested, they said they didn't think he would be interested because I had turned them down the year before. My brother joined...
Kelly had a younger sister (Erin) who was a sophomore and a younger brother (Brian) who was a freshman. I ended up dating Erin...after all, she wouldn't steal her sister's boyfriend. I never really asked out a female...I would just be friends with them and somehow we would be dating. Even though Erin and I were dating, I spent all my time at her house with Brian...
Knowing what I know now, I would say that Brian and I had completely profitable ARE's. I'm very much a vision (Big Picture) person who is trying to accomplish something practical. Brian was a detail guy who was completely impractical. Every device in his bedroom (clock radio, phone, record player, tape recorder, etc.) had been taken apart and put together just enough to mostly function. He had to know how everything worked but was never interested in restoring order. He's the first person who allowed me to be completely myself...because he was handling the other half being completely himself.
Brian played in the tackle football game when I got the concussion...in fact, I was staying at his house because my parents were out of town. Brian joined the math team the same meet I did and was the person starting the skirmishes that I had to strategize around. Brian was banned from one of my friend's house because every time he came over, he broke something. He got the nickname "Master of Disaster".
Brian and I were both intrigued by computers...especially the new Apple computers that had come out in 1980. I had taken a course in computer programming (BASIC Language) and he wanted to understand it. So I taught him programming. We decided we wanted to write a football program...a program that would let you select from a list of offensive or defensive plays and tell you the outcome of playing against the computer...keep time...etc. It seemed like every other weekend one of us slept over the other one's house. We would drink Coca Cola from 2 liter bottles and stay up to 3 AM writing code....but we didn't have a computer.
Brian, in typical fashion, found a computer at the library. We could sign up for half hour blocks once a week after we registered. So we would sign up for consecutive blocks and spend the hour entering as much code in as possible. Everything was saved on a big floppy disk.
We had entered thousands of lines by the time we were ready to run it. However, one hour was not enough time to run the program, find a glitch, debug the program, and start over again...only to find another glitch. We need hours on the computer. Again, Brian to the rescue. He found out that if the person after us didn't show up, we could keep using the computer. Brian proceeded to register everyone in both our families...including our pets. Then he would find a day that we could get six straight hours, and he'd sign everyone up.
But that was Brian...he would find some fact that had escaped everyone else and then use it to break the rules. When we finally got the program working well, it would crash after 20 or so minutes...for no reason. We both knew there had to be a reason, but we kept seeing it happen at different points in the program, but always after 20 minutes.
One night, we were working how we normally did: I would write code and Brian would be reading the Basic Language reference book looking for some new fact. On this night, I said to him, "What if we are running out of memory? There must be a way to reset the memory." In those computers, the memory was made up of a "stack" of boxes. The computer had a "pointer" start from the bottom and work its way up as the data changed...using up a memory box as it went. I just wanted the computer to point at the bottom box at a regular interval so it never reached the top of the stack.
That's how we worked...Brian would find a new command and I would find a use for it. Or, I would look at the program and say, "There must be a command that would save me from writing the same set of four commands in a row"...and he would find it. That night, Brian took half an hour to find our command: XX=FRE(0)
On my 18th birthday, Brian wanted me to drive him to see a friend. I told him I'd rather stay in my room and write code. So we stayed in my room and programmed. After a couple hours, there was a knock at my bedroom door. When I opened it there was over a dozen of my friends standing in the hall way...it was a surprise birthday party. I quickly closed the door and tried to get my bearings. I looked at Brian and he was pleading with me, "You aren't mad at me are you? Tell me your not mad!" It had been his job to get me out of the house...so my mom could set everything up.
There are too many "Brian" stories for me to be able to share most of them here. There will be some that pop up later. However, just to jump all the way to the end...a documentary has just been released called "180: The Spin on Willy's Statue". It tells the behind the scenes story of the greatest prank ever played at Rice University.
In 1988, a group of about a dozen students spun the one ton, cast metal statue of the founder of Rice University 180 degrees. The identity of the crew had been kept a secret for 20 years...until now. Sure enough, Brian was one of the people who pulled off the prank. In typical fashion, one of the two scaffold's fell over, making a mess, and causing one of the people to get caught.
Around this time, I was having problems with my college admissions. I really wanted to get into Princeton, however I applied to Cornell as my back up. My mom thought I ought to apply to more colleges, but I was pretty confident I would get into Cornell if Princeton passed on me. However, she stayed on me and I applied to an engineering school in New York State called Clarkson College of Technology...just to keep her happy.
Cornell was the only school I applied to that required an alumni interview. I had to be interviewed by an alumni of the university. The interview went well and he assured me I was getting in to Cornell. He was afraid Princeton would take me and kept pushing for me to spend the weekend at Cornell through their recruitment program. All that was left was to do well on my Achievement Tests and I was in.
I had already taken the SATs. The Achievement Tests were required for the Ivy League schools. On the test, there was a place to mark the college code. They would send your scores to up to three schools free of charge. I put my three schools down.
I took the test and did well. A month later, I got a letter from Cornell saying they didn't get my Achievement Test scores. I made a photo copy and sent them. Two weeks later they said they didn't get my Achievement Test scores. Ed, the author of "The Quest", was driving down to Ithaca to look at Cornell. I rode down with him and walked over to the Chemical Engineering building and handed them my Achievement Test scores. They person who took them thanked me and said, "It is like someone took a fire hose to all our files." So now all I had to do was wait...
I began The Miracle Worker with Erin. However, I really spent more time with her brother. Brian and I actually appeared on stage together as two ghosts/memories to Anne Sullivan...so we could spend our free time causing trouble. It was a big cast and we ran a card game during rehearsals...we played euchre. I won't explain it here. Suffice to say it took just enough thought to make it interesting and there was just enough rote to be able to be social.
I started meeting everyone because I was rarely on stage. The car my parents let me drive was a 1971 Volkswagen Bus. Brian decided we should get people together and drive around. So we got 8 of us together and drove around on a Friday night. Erin passed on coming with us.
It was still cold, so we parked and talked. Some cops came by to see if we had been drinking. All we had in the car was 2 liter bottles of soda and chips. Gordy made sure the cops knew it was soda...it may have been the only time he had been out with a group of people without alcohol and he was enjoying the lack of guilt a little too much.
It went so well that we planned another excursion two weeks later. This time we had 10 people in the bus. In between the "road trips" Erin and I broke up...but there really wasn't much to break up so everyone was fine. However, on this trip there was a female that had become a regular part of our card games...
Liz was a strong woman...very smart and very opinionated. All the talented people knew her because she was a dancer, singer, actress, etc. I didn't know it at the time, but the reason I hadn't seen her in previous plays was because she was competing in the Miss Lilac competition. Rochester, NY is know as the Lilac City. Every spring there is a Lilac Festival at which they crown a high school junior "Miss Lilac". Liz had made it to the final five...but hadn't told anyone. It was a competition that took place over several months.
The plan for the second road trip was to go to a small local college and play euchre in their library...actually the atrium of the library. I had been using the library to write my senior research paper. Brian came with me one time and went exploring. The campus buildings were connected with underground tunnels. One of the tunnels ended in an elevator that came up to the atrium of the library.
Brian thought we should have a euchre tournament in the atrium at night. The library would be locked from the outside and the actual library would be locked from the atrium...so there is no reason for anyone to be there. There were plenty of seats. We could bring music and food...it sounded like a great idea when Brian explained it.
We parked the car and took the tunnel. There would be 2 games (four players each) going on and two people (one team) watching. Everything went perfect for about 20 minutes...and then campus security showed up. The group scattered in several directions in groups of 2's. I made it back to the bus with Liz and we drove around looking for the rest of the people.
Eventually we found them all and drove up to Lake Ontario. I know some of these people drank alcohol, but none of them ever did when we got together to talk about life. Somewhere during the conversation, Liz and I held hands. I didn't know if that meant we were dating or not...but I wanted to be with her.
During the next play practice, we sat in the auditorium to discuss it. I told her I wanted to go out with her. She said she wanted to go out with me but I really shouldn't commit until I understood something about her. She said she was a "born again" Christian...
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