I’ve been trying to pry myself bit by bit away from political writing – obviously it was at the forefront of many of our minds until a few days ago so it is understandable. But it seems to have possessed too much of my time and my thoughts and has started to keep me from pursuing my other interests or allowing myself to be the light-hearted individual I traditionally tend to be.
So in the spirit of taking a new tack, I’m going to be self-indulgent and list 5 things about me (this may be the start of a top 5 theme that I will try to do at least periodically). Today it will be 5 things that you may not know about me – Jack-of-all-trades style (I don’t usually brag so much as I will now):
- Music – I enjoy listening to many types of music, mostly modern rock, but I used to also play. I took piano lessons from 2nd through 9th grades and in doing so played in a number of group concerts as a child playing rather complex classical pieces. In high school I let it slide when my teacher moved away, but I continued to play recreationally and even dabbled in song-writing.
- Art – though I’ve pursued a career in technology, I’ve been artistically inclined since childhood and I’ve practiced in many media including drawing, painting, clay sculpture, chip carving, photography, computer graphics and digital animation.
- Writing – besides writing code and this blog, I’ve made hobby of writing in other forms as well in my life. In high school I was published for both poetry and newspaper writing (mostly movie reviews). In college I have written short stories and TV screenplays as part of assignments. And since then I’ve had several novel ideas bouncing in my head that I haven’t taken the time to attempt to write, but still might.
- Sports – ok, this area has never been a strong point for me. The closest I came to playing sports was a one day stint on my high school golf team and a semester on the crew team in college (as a coxswain, not a rower). I’m not built for athletics. I did, however, keep active as a kid (in ways I should really get back to). I have always been a climber and as a kid I would climb lots of things including cliffs, stone walls, trees, the side of my house. I am as sure-footed as a goat and when I’m focused I can figure out the angles and the dynamics of getting up or down something pretty quickly.
- Academics – when it comes to studies, math and science were always more interesting to me than literature and history. How a cell works is fastinating, how we won the Revolutionary War is less so. Even geometry captured my interest more than the novels we were assigned to read. I’m a very spacially-minded person and history was never presented in a way that seemed interesting to picture. Though what I find a bit ironic is that this bias led me to be less ambitious with the humanities and thus less accomplished in those area, I’ve since become much more accomplished as such later in life. I often find myself having to define the words I use to colleagues and being a fount of knowledge on all sorts of information both historical and contemporary.
So to summarize, I’m not strictly an expert at anything specific (except maybe my job), but I’ve got a decent base of skill and knowledge in many area. Normally I’m much more modest than this. But part of today’s challenge for me was to try not to be. After all, part of the point of this was to tell things people may not know. And the reason they may not know these things is because I don’t really talk about myself that such. To counter-balance this post, I will try to do my next list of embarassing things.