Pilcrow

During 1997, as I continued the slog of looking at newspaper want ads and occasionally sending out resumes that resulted in no responses, I took note of the ads for professional placement and temporary help agencies and realized that was probably the route I should pursue. However, as was typical I procrastinated and put that off throughout the year. In the spring of 1998, having vowed that I would not work another Christmas-time for the Postal Service, I decided that I would give my notice and leave at the beginning of June, three years after I’d started working there. Again, I had no good reason to wait on giving my notice, or to wait to check out the agencies until after I’d quit, but that’s how I did it.

Still, I had a plan at least, which was to get experience in office work to show on my resume, as I’d realized my lack of that experience was probably one reason I was having no success with responding to want ads. I also knew that these agencies often did temp-to-hire work, so I would have opportunities to find full-time work that way. I had no clear idea how long it would take and not even any real guarantee it would succeed, but it seemed to be the best way available to get into a professional career that would use my writing and editing skills.

I should back up and mention that I was never interested in newspaper work. I think I had the idea stuck in my mind that newspaper work meant being a reporter, which meant going out to find stories, which meant seeking out and talking to strangers. I’d never liked doing that sort of thing in the years of obligatory fundraising activities for school and Scouts, and I didn’t make any distinction between that and the work of a reporter. I wasn’t opposed to working at a magazine and did respond to some ads for magazines but never had results; the closest I got was interviewing with the Boston office of Playbill, the monthly theater magazine (not to be confused with certain other magazines whose titles start with Play), in the summer of 1997. I had also interviewed with a local small-press publisher shortly after graduating from college, and I believe a few of the ads I responded to were also for book publishers, but again it wasn’t something I’d really focused on. In any case, when I started seeking out temp agencies, I didn’t actually have a specific type of company or job in mind, just a vague idea that there were marketing departments and companies other than newspaper, magazine, and book publishers where I might find work.

First though I had to sign up with some agencies and start getting temp assignments. I applied to a few agencies, at least one with a local Nashua office, but I focused my attention on agencies and jobs in the Boston area. I recognized there would be more opportunities closer to Boston, and by that point I’d become very interested in working and spending more time in the big city rather than humdrum Nashua. The agency I had the best response from was called The Choice for Staffing, based right in downtown Boston. They explained that they normally worked with companies in the financial and legal fields and didn’t have much in the way of writing or editing work, but they were still willing to have me in for an interview and see if they could find assignments for me. As I’d already been out of work for about a month, I wasn’t going to pass on them, and in any case I knew having any kind of office experience would be useful to me.

My interview with The Choice for Staffing included a typing test, which had a funny moment. The Postal Service had used a customized context-sensitive keyboard layout to enhance the speed and accuracy of the data entry, and since we were entering address fragments, rarely typing out whole words, they measured our speed in keystrokes per hour instead of words per minute. As a result, I’d done some mental calculations using five characters per word, something I’d remembered learning in junior-high typing class, and figured that my speed was somewhere around 35 words per minute. So that’s what I put down when I filled out my application, and then I took their typing test. The agent came back to me afterwards and said in a voice full of disbelief, “You think that you type 35 words per minute?” I said yes, that was about what I figured; she responded, “You type 70 words per minute.” I blinked and said, “Oh!”, laughed, and explained the odd circumstances.

I had one or two one-day assignments with Choice before they put me on a three-month job in the secretary/dictation pool at a local insurance company. I didn’t care much for the work or co-workers, but went along with it and was actually named Choice’s employee of the month early on, after only a couple months working for them. During that three-month assignment, Choice called me on short notice for a Sunday assignment, helping a small firm prepare a report by typing in the edits and changes as they made them. The firm was called Barrington Consulting and it provided legal and management services for the construction industry; I met someone from the Boston office when I arrived, but the report was mostly being done by consultants from out of town, and I didn’t really work with the Boston people that day. Although the assignment was scheduled for eight hours, I agreed to stay on until the edits were done and ended up working a total of thirteen hours that day.

Despite the fact that I hadn’t actually worked with anyone from the Boston office, the next time Barrington needed some temporary help they requested me specifically, and once my assignment with the insurance company ended, I started getting assignments regularly with Barrington, doing a variety of work to help the consultants analyze data and prepare their reports. After my first couple week-long assignments, the consultants I worked with started asking around the office as each assignment ended to see whether any of the other consultants needed to bring me back in the following week. Around December one of the consultants asked me about what sort of permanent work I was looking for, and as I recall was a bit surprised when I talked about my writing and editing interests, but we also talked about the work I was doing for Barrington and how I did like that as well.

Early in 1999, on yet another assignment, the managing partner of the Boston office gave me good news: they wanted to bring me in as a full-time employee to work as a consulting assistant, if I were interested in the position. By then I knew and liked working with everyone in the office, and I did enjoy the work, which used a variety of my skills; they even intended to make use of my desktop publishing skills to enhance the reports they produced for their clients. So I did not hesitate to accept the offer. It took a couple months for them to work out the details on their end, but in April 1999 I started my first professional office job as an “Information Specialist”. It wasn’t quite the position or the field of business I’d envisioned myself in, but then my vision had always been fuzzy at best. And that didn’t matter anyhow because I was excited and happy to be working right in the heart of downtown Boston, and thrilled that I’d finally achieved my goal of beginning my professional career.

When I graduated from high school, I stopped taking violin lessons, even though they weren’t actually connected to being in school in any way. Essentially, I had learned all I could from my teacher, who certainly could have continued coaching me on improvements, but as I had no plans to pursue being a violinist professionally, it didn’t seem necessary. However, over the years my teacher had evolved her student string ensemble into a small amateur orchestra for adults, the Nashua Chamber Orchestra, and she invited me to join. So I did, and that kept me active as a violinist for a dozen years.

The orchestra had three conductors in those dozen years: first its founder, my former teacher, and then two others we hired after my teacher decided to leave. Each of the new conductors we hired pushed the orchestra to expand its repertoire, playing both more recent and more challenging pieces. Each of them also championed new music, the first getting the orchestra to premiere a couple new pieces and the second even having us premiere a couple of his own compositions. After years of playing baroque and classical music more often than anything else, I really enjoyed the opportunities to play post-romantic and twentieth-century symphonic music; it was much more interesting than the endless running sixteenth notes of Bach and Mozart.

I had never really liked practicing my parts at home by myself. For several years I still made some effort to do some practicing at home, as there were always sections that I certainly needed to work on in between rehearsals. However, I found that usually I could get by well enough just with the work we did in our weekly rehearsals and by the time the concerts came around I’d play my parts fairly well. Once I started working in Boston, I had even less time, energy, or will to practice on my own, and I stopped doing so.

By that point, though, our newest conductor was leading the orchestra to take on even more advanced and challenging pieces. I began to feel that I wasn’t keeping up, wasn’t able to perform in concert as well as I should, not without spending more time on my own practicing, which I was still reluctant to do. I also started feeling physically uncomfortable; I may not have been keeping a decent posture while playing, and after years of doing so, my body was starting to protest. Finally, about a year after I started working in Boston, I moved close to the city, which meant I now had to make an effort each week to leave work early enough to rush through traffic in time to get to rehearsals, and I wouldn’t even have a short trip back home after that, I’d still have to drive back down to my place near Boston. This combination of factors made me decide at the end of the 2000-2001 season that I needed to take a break, and would not return as a performing member the next season. That effectively put my regular violin-playing on a long-term hiatus that has not yet ended.

However, that did not quite end my involvement with the orchestra. Back at the start of the 1994-1995 season, I happened to learn that the person who had been producing our program books would no longer be available. I really don’t remember why I even thought this, but I looked over the program from the previous year and claimed that I could do it instead. At the time, I was still using my ten-year-old Apple IIc, which certainly was not capable of the job, and I had no prior experience doing any kind of desktop page layout work. At most my exposure would have been watching my friend Jay working on a version of his zine. Still, for some reason the orchestra took me up on my offer, and fortunately my friend Doug’s dad had a relatively recent PC with Aldus (not yet Adobe) Pagemaker, so I had access to the right tools. So I sat down and figured out how Pagemaker worked, and started designing that season’s program by spending an hour and a half meticulously comparing the fonts available to choose a nice pair. Although I was a complete novice, it turned out well, looking better even than the previous year’s program, and that’s how I became the program book editor for the orchestra. (I also started writing the program notes at that time.)

Becoming the program book editor for the orchestra led to two other developments in 1995. One, I bought my first Macintosh, one of the new PowerPC models with a CD-ROM drive, despite my friend Jay’s argument that one of the older and now cheaper non-PowerPC models would be good enough and that CD-ROM drives weren’t important and I wouldn’t need one. As I used that Mac for the next six years and both PowerPC chips and CD drives became required standard hardware for Mac software, I think I made the right decision. Two, the orchestra asked me to join the board of directors. So even after I retired from performing in mid-2001, I continued as both program book editor and the board’s secretary until I moved to Seattle early in 2002. Because I already had the books set up and just needed the new information to fill in, I even produced the final program book for that season, in June 2002, after I had moved.

In the past several years, I’ve been writing about music regularly, reviewing the concerts I was attending, which is somewhat different than writing the orchestra’s concert program notes about composers and classical music pieces, but still related. I’ve been doing volunteer work with the non-profit radio station KEXP, and organizing and running the non-profit Go Play Northwest annual game convention. I joined the association board of directors after I moved into my condo. And just in the past few months, I’ve finally got back into doing page layout work, this time as a paid professional. All of these are things I first gained experience in through my involvement with the Nashua Chamber Orchestra. Along with leaving my supermarket deli job and starting my martial arts training, my increased level of involvement with the orchestra made 1995 a very significant year of changes for me.

When I returned from the Rome semester, I needed a new job. I put off looking for a week or two, and then after some nudging from my mom, I once again went out and took the first available position, this time in the deli and seafood department of the local supermarket where my parents shopped. I believe I went there because my mom saw a sign that they were hiring, or something to that effect. The starting pay for working in the deli was higher than what I had been earning at Bradlees after three and a half years, so that at least made me glad that I hadn’t been given a leave of absence there.

I had a bit of a rough start: on my second day, I was not careful enough about picking up a turkey from the meat slicer and I cut two of my fingers. Fortunately the cuts weren’t that deep, and I was left with just a couple small permanent scars and no greater damage. Besides that accident, I adjusted to the deli fairly quickly; it took about a month of working there before I had most of the product codes memorized and other employees who’d been there longer would ask me when they needed to know one. I also developed a good sense of weight and volume, and enjoyed for example being able to pull out an oddly-shaped chunk of feta cheese and with one slice accurately cut off a one-pound block.

I quickly grew to dislike working in the seafood section, as it was smellier and colder. But the biggest drawback to the seafood section was the lobsters. Lobsters were a nuisance to begin with, simply by being alive and occasionally troublesome to handle. They were nasty, turning to cannibalism if they stayed in the tanks too long. The store had a steamer, allowing us to cook lobsters on the spot for customers, which really stank and also was unpleasant to clean at the end of the day. But worst of all was when lobsters went on sale, and we’d have to deal with endless streams of customers asking us to fish out the biggest ones, to pick out just female lobsters, and of course to steam them. Plus setting up or breaking down the seafood display case was more of a nuisance than the regular deli cases.

I worked part-time at the supermarket through my last two years at TMC. And then, with no plans and no good idea what I wanted to do next, I went full-time. My manager and the assistant manager were generally easy-going, and although I didn’t always get along with all the other deli employees, for the most part I worked well with them and I had some good friends.

Meanwhile, I prepared my resume and periodically went through the want ads in the local paper and the Boston Globe; my obvious target was some kind of writing or editing position. However, the local paper rarely had ads of that sort, and while the Boston paper had them more frequently, I rarely heard back from the companies I sent my resume to. I did have a few interviews but no good results from them. This process dragged on for the next couple years. I tried using the job-hunting self-help book What Color Is Your Parachute? to focus my search and improve my results, but my heart was never in it; indeed, I quickly learned that I deeply loathed the entire process of job hunting, whether it was searching for want ads, sending out resumes, attempting to cold-call companies, or even talk on the phone about setting up an interview. That loathing made it a real effort to even try to do any of those steps.

Early in 1995, I learned that the US Postal Service would be opening a data processing center in Nashua, where data-entry clerks would deal with mail when the sorting computers were unable to recognize the addresses. By that point I was long since sick of working at the supermarket, and the longer I stayed there the unhappier I was with myself. The Postal Service job paid almost twice my supermarket wages, was easier work (not to mention cleaner and not smelly), and was a second-shift (afternoon and evening) job, so although it was still not a career path I wanted to follow, it was clearly going to be better for me than staying at the supermarket. I passed the application process and started when the processing center opened in June. Initially all shifts were only part-time, so I continued to work at the supermarket as well, changing back to part-time and working mornings. In October that year, as the Christmas mailing rush approached, more hours became available at the processing center and I decided the time had come to leave the supermarket behind.

I stayed with the Postal Service job for the next couple years, continuing to search for and respond to appropriate writing and editing want ads in the meantime. The Postal Service job was the nicest unskilled job I’d had: I didn’t have to dress up in a nice shirt, tie, and trousers; I could listen to music on headphones while I worked; the work was easy, just watching a screen and typing in the appropriate address information as each letter appeared; and as long as I kept up with the speed and accuracy requirements, which was easy to do, I had no trouble and indeed little interaction with my supervisors. However, I also had little interaction with the other employees, since most of the time we had to be just focused on the work. I usually kept to myself in any case, feeling that I didn’t have much in common with the others, but I was friendly with a few and actually succeeded in befriending one of my cute co-workers and going to see Blue Man Group with her, although that never progressed further into dating.

The main drawback to the Postal Service job was the unreliability of hours. Since we were considered temporary employees and worked hourly, during the summer months when there was less mail to process we would work fewer hours and thus earn less money. The corollary was that during the Christmas season, we would work long hours and getting time off was difficult. That came to a head for me in 1997*, when my friend Scott was getting married just a few days after Christmas in Philadelphia, and asked me to be one of his groomsmen. I let my supervisors know about this in advance, but when that season came around, even though I had sufficient paid leave saved up and the time I needed off was after Christmas itself, the Postal Service was still strictly limiting approval of requests. I was able to get a couple of the days I needed as paid leave, but had to find someone to trade shifts with to cover the rest. Fortunately I was able to do that, but the long hours in general and the specific hassle of getting that time off caused me to vow that that would be my last Christmas working at the processing center.

I carried on as I had been for several more months, but it was clear that responding to want ads in the newspaper was never going to get me anywhere. There just weren’t enough writing/editing positions offered that way, I had no previous professional experience to show for myself, and I was even seeing ads that I had responded to being repeated. I had actually realized the previous year that I should look into the professional recruitment/temporary worker agencies whose ads I was also seeing in the papers, but I had put that off for no good reason. Finally I made up my mind, gave my notice to the Postal Service, and left that job in June, three years to the week after I had started. My new plan was to sign up with some agencies and start taking temporary office jobs, so that I would have professional office experience to show on my resume, and also have opportunities to find a full-time professional job. Within six months, rather to my surprise and in an unexpected fashion, my plan succeeded.

*Edit: Great, I got my own story wrong. Scott's wedding was in 1996, so the difficulty I had in getting time off that year was not what precipitated my decision to leave the Postal Service job. I don't recall any specific incident from the following Christmas-time of 1997, but I do remember just something about the long hours that year made me decide I wouldn't do another one.

As a teenager, I duly went through the process of receiving the sacrament of Confirmation. However, I had never been particularly interested in my religion nor particularly devout, and that did not change with Confirmation. I did accept the basic tenets but I wasn’t passionate about my faith, it was just another circumstantial part of my background, like being Franco-American. Also, my parents saw no conflict between science and religion, or at least never spoke of such a thing. They encouraged us to learn about the world and were happy to let us watch science and nature programs on PBS; Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in particular had a huge influence upon me. I understood that the story of Creation in Genesis was metaphorical, and quickly saw that if God had made the universe then evolution, for example, must be one of the systems he set up.

An incident at Scout camp one summer soured me a bit about religion on this point. Scouting in America is officially non-denominational but still holds belief in God and some form of religion—not necessarily Christian, but avowed atheists and agnostics are not welcome—to be a key part of its values. As a result, there would always be a service at some point during the week, and I remember these always being led by some kind of Protestant Christian minister. I have no idea what the Jewish kids did, let alone if there were any other non-Christians attending the camp. At this particular camp, the minister made some kind of jocular remark disparaging science, saying something about how we of course didn’t believe in the “Big Bang”. I raised my hand at that and explained that I did believe that was just the means God used and I didn’t see any conflict there. The minister grinned at me and responded with something that amounted to “don’t be silly, boy,” and carried on with his simplistic, fundamentalist creationism sermon, while I stared at the ground, mortified, and thought about walking out.

At some point in my teens, possibly even before I was confirmed, I stopped saying prayers at night before going to bed. They just felt empty and meaningless to me and I didn’t see the point in saying them any more. I kept attending Mass on Sunday because that was a family thing and it never occurred to me to make a stand and refuse to go, partly because I didn’t have a strong desire to not attend, I just didn’t care much either way.

And then I started attending Thomas More College, which was explicitly Catholic in belief and outlook, and even had two semesters of Theology classes as part of the standard requirements. Mass was never required—with the exception of the midnight Easter Mass when we were in Rome, which as I recall had the dubious justification of being part of the art and architecture class, and which caused a furor among the few Protestant students—but on Holy Days of Obligation most of the school, including myself, would be there. Being around people my age who took their faith quite seriously made me pay more heed to it, and being in Rome, which was an intense experience in itself, also intensified my interest. I attended Rosary (a ritual of prayerful devotion) a few times with some of the students, and got my own set of Rosary beads. I also started saying prayers again at night before sleep. Finally, for the first time since I first had the sacrament of Penance when I was eight or so, I started going to confession on occasion.

This phase of exercising my devotion lasted mostly through the end of college, with my efforts to attend Mass regularly persisting for a while after that. An incident with confession, as it happened, was partly responsible for quelling my efforts to be more devout. I went to confession once at my parish church instead of to the school’s chaplain; our parish generally did not seem as old-fashioned conservative as Catholicism as Thomas More, but it was certainly far from being liberal-minded. However, without getting into specifics, the priest at my parish advised me that I should simply “lighten up” on an admittedly relatively minor-seeming matter that official Church doctrine and the Thomas More chaplain still treated as a sin worthy of confession (although it’s probably a venial or “minor” one; I’d have to check to be sure).

Eventually I stopped going to Mass regularly; I was an adult now, so my parents never made an issue about my attendance since it was up to me. Usually I would try to make an effort during the holy seasons of Advent before Christmas and Lent before Easter, leading to my sister Andrea dubbing me an “ent-en Catholic”. I also generally tried to observe the practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays during Lent, and of course would attend Mass with my family on Christmas and Easter. I did also continue to say prayers at night before bed, and that has remained a habit ever since.

When I moved to Seattle, two things caused me to put a little effort into devotion again. First, my friend Farida, the wife of my college friend Tony, had been going through the process of joining the Catholic Church after being raised as a Mennonite, and she had her initiation and confirmation as part of the Easter Vigil Mass just a few weeks after I had moved to Seattle. It was inspiring to attend that Mass and see Farida and the other new communicants being brought into the Church, and to think about how this was something that they had deliberately chosen to do as adults, not merely a rote part of their heritage and upbringing. Second, my new apartment was a block away from the Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle University, and they had Mass at 11 AM, which Tony and Farida also attended; I had no excuse not to get up and attend as well, even after Tony and Farida moved a little ways away into a house and started attending a parish church instead. It helped, too, that Seattle University is a Jesuit school, which meant the sermons felt more sensible, if not liberal as such.

I also adopted one other devotional practice after moving to Seattle. I had stopped giving up anything during Lent, a traditional sacrificial practice that had come to feel pointless to me because I didn’t feel I had anything significant I was willing to sacrifice and doing the typical child’s sacrifice of giving up something like candy felt superficial. At some point, I believe due to an online discussion with friends, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know the whole New Testament as well as I ought to; I certainly hadn’t read it all since college, and the cycle of readings at Mass doesn’t actually cover the entire set of books. So when Lent came around again the following year, I decided that rather than give something up, I would read through the whole New Testament, a few pages a day. (In a sense I’m sacrificing some time out of my day, so I feel that counts.) That has been my practice for Lent ever since, but after doing so for the past several years, I’m starting to feel I need something new, maybe a good analysis and commentary on the Scriptures or something else to help me better understand my religion. (But it still has to be something I can get through in 40 days spending about a half-hour to an hour at most per day reading.)

When I moved across town a few years later into a condo, I again stopped attending Mass regularly, because now I had the choice of either driving back across town to go to St. Ignatius, where I felt comfortable, or walking up the steep hill to St. Anne, which ought to be my local parish, and honestly I have just been too lazy to make either effort. I have continued to attend Easter Vigil Mass at St. Ignatius, and make occasional efforts to attend Mass at other times; I made a point of attending Mass on All Souls Day a few weeks ago, for example, because recently an aunt and an uncle of mine had passed away. Despite thinking about it, though, I haven’t been attending Mass this Advent season.

Most of what I’ve just discussed has been about practices, not about beliefs. I don’t really want to get into beliefs and faith now, because this is already quite long. In short, then, I remain very conflicted about my religion and my faith. There are issues about which I still disagree strongly with the official Church position. I still tend strongly towards agnosticism, due to my understanding of science and its discoveries. I also remain somewhat perversely fond of some non-Catholic/Christian conceptions of religion, Gnosticism holding a particular appeal—I only half-joke that the reason I’m not a Gnostic is simply because I’ve never had the experience of a divine revelation. (As an aside, I’ve always been inordinately amused that one of my essays for Sacramental Theology earned the comment, “a bit too much of the pagans”, but still got an A.) Despite all that, however, I don’t feel a compelling reason to officially abandon the Church; I still consider myself a Catholic. For all the many issues where it seems the Church is getting things wrong or is at least misguided, it also still has a sophisticated grasp of knowledge and truth and revelation—the Church understands the Bible is not always literally true, and and it has some willingness (believe it or not) to adapt and change, to deepen its understanding over time. Although it has its clashes with the practice and application of science, it is not fundamentally opposed to science and is usually willing to incorporate that into its overall understanding. Maybe some Catholic priests would disparage science and pooh-pooh the “Big Bang” theory and evolution, but that is not the official Church position, and that means something to me.

Even as a kid, I liked to stay up late. Of course for most kids, staying up late is a treat, being treated more like grownups who generally stay up later. But I remember for a long time, possibly a couple years, once I was put to bed for the night, I would then get out of bed and crouch down by the night light to read. My parents would stay up to watch the nightly news at 11 PM, and then one of them would come upstairs to check on us before they went to bed. More than once I was caught by surprise when the stairway light turned on, and I’d scramble back into bed under the covers, fooling no one. This eventually ended when they took away my night light, but not as a punishment; they just made it part of me becoming a big boy and not needing a light anymore, and incidentally also getting more sleep. That probably happened before I started first grade, since I would have to start getting up in the morning.

As I got into junior high and then high school, my bedtime crept later as I had more homework to get done before the next day, and my tendencies toward procrastination meant that big reports or projects would keep me up extra-late. If I wasn’t up late doing schoolwork, I’d probably still be up late reading, or playing computer games. By high school though, I had another reason for staying up late: I’d grown to value the late-night hours as quiet time for myself, when I could think about things without being disturbed. I could also listen to my music quietly. Somewhere during that period, my regular bedtime became later than that of my parents, and has stayed that way ever since.

Of course, since I was staying up late at night, I wasn’t getting a full night’s sleep, and this eventually meant that I developed a tendency to doze in certain classes. In particular, I was notorious for sleeping through Biology in ninth grade and later through AP American History in eleventh grade; occasionally there’d be some nodding in French class as well, maybe in senior year. Time of day had a big effect upon this; I was more likely to nod off during my first class of the day and during my first class after lunch, depending on which lunch block I had that semester. As I recall, Biology was a midday class for me, while American History was definitely first thing in the morning. Despite that, I still did well in Biology; I didn’t do as well in American History, but I did develop the ability to sense when the teacher was directing a question at me, and come out of my doze to give her the answer, which I imagine she found a little irritating.

In college, bedtimes between 1 and 2 AM during the week were fairly common, even though I had to get up by 7:30 at the latest in order to get to class on time at 8:30. (I’ve rarely been quick to get going in the morning, and my morning ritual always included eating breakfast.) However, what really put me over the edge were the Humanities papers we had to write most weekends. Like most of the students, I waited until Sunday night to start the essay due Monday morning; and also like most of the students, by “Sunday night” I mean after 1 AM Monday. In an issue of the original version of The Goliard student paper, which my friends Tony and Conrad started, they included a list of the “Top 10 reasons to start your Humanities paper at 3:17 AM Monday morning”. The reason I always recall first is, “Ghosts only come out at night; waste of time to conduct a seance in the afternoon to summon up the ghosts of Plato, Locke, and other philosophers for much-needed inspiration.” I never actually stayed up all night, with no sleep at all, to write one of the papers, but I was routinely up until dawn and caught at most two hours of sleep before having to get up and get ready for class. I think the day my senior thesis was due was the first time that I did not go to bed at all, and caught a nap at some point after going to school and turning the thesis in.

Outside of school, I still maintained late hours, as did most of my friends. To some extent this was just a practical matter: I worked evenings, so I wouldn’t be eating dinner until after 10 PM, and once I started working in the supermarket deli I’d usually shower after work instead of in the morning. It became known that if people swung by late at night and saw the light on in the den then I was up and visitors were welcome. Doug, who did his best to be fully nocturnal, worked evenings at a local video store for years, and we became regulars at Applebees, eating there at least once a week since it served food late and was decent. On the occasions a bunch of us could get together for gaming, that always meant staying up at least until 2 AM, and as the occasions became fewer and further between, the hours became later and later. By the time I was 30, any occasion of Scott returning to visit his parents in Nashua meant we’d all be up until 5 in the morning.

My night-owl nature was something of a problem when I started working professionally. For some reason, managers don’t seem to like seeing people nodding off at their desks, and don’t seem to believe that if I just zone out for five minutes, I’ll snap out of the sleepiness and be fine for a while. No matter how I’ve tried, though, I’ve never been able to manage a consistent bedtime earlier than 1 AM. You would think that if I had to consistently get up at 8 AM in order to get to work on time, then my bedtime would naturally settle back at least to midnight, but that never happened. Since I started working freelance, this hasn’t been a problem because for the most part I can set my own hours and work when I choose. However, in the winter there’s much less daylight here in Seattle than I had back in New England, so I actually do want to get up at least by 9 so I can get most of the daylight. I continue to struggle with keeping the hours I feel I ought to rather than the hours my body apparently craves.

As I’ve mentioned a couple times, in the summer between junior and senior year of high school I quit my paper route and went out to get a regular job. I don’t remember applying many places or what places I went to; as far as I can recall, I must have bicycled down to the nearby mall, walked into the first department store—Bradlees—and been hired on the spot. I know it was a little more involved than that, but as I say I can’t even recall going anywhere else, nor do I know why I went to Bradlees in the first place.

I do know that Jeff, who by that point was one of my closest friends in my grade, was already working at Bradlees, so that may have been a factor. We both worked there through senior year and had a lot of fun together. He worked in the Toys and Sporting Goods department. I started out as a cashier, but once I’d been trained I was moved to work in the Layaway department, which was next to Toys. That meant Jeff and I got to work together sometimes, hang out on breaks, and sometimes goof off. As one example, we found some open boxes of an air-powered toy line, took the toys out and set them up on my shelf in the raincheck department; his manager, generally a cool laid-back guy, screeched “are you guys trying to get me fired?!?” when he discovered that.

At first my main function in the Layaway department was managing rainchecks, not layaways, but my other main task was my favorite: I was put in charge of making signs. The store had a basic printing press, just a metal tray with bars to hold type and an integrated roller to go over the paper and type, and it was used to make signs for various needs around the store: manager’s specials, replacements for missing sales signs, or whatever else might be needed. I enjoyed working with type and the occasional creativity required to figure out how to fit all the requested information on the sign. (Heh, I initially wrote “how to fit on the sign all the information requested”—a very Franco-American phrasing, that.)

When Christmas approached, I was trained to take care of layaways as well, and a while after that they pulled me out and trained me to be a cashier supervisor and to run the help desk. By the end of the summer after senior year, Jeff was gone off to UNH, and I… was working full-time at Bradlees.

The thing was, by senior year I was finding the school workload tough, and I was just kind of tired of it, and not very interested in college. I got lots of college brochures of course, and some of them sounded cool—I remember really liking one of the ones in NYC, I don’t recall if it was NYU or CUNY, and I was interested in some of the Boston schools as well, maybe Oberlin, I don’t really remember whether anything on the west coast really caught my attention. However, I just didn’t want to go through the process of filling out the applications and writing the essays and so on. I think part of my problem too was that I wasn’t really sure why I’d be going to college; I knew I was interested in English and writing, and also in history, maybe medieval studies, but basically it was just the next expected step and I didn’t have a strong urge to take it.

I did make an effort for one school, as I mentioned: I applied to Dartmouth College, and was pretty keen on the idea of going there, although of course for the rather weak reasons that I knew it was a good school and I had fond memories of the campus due to the NHYO concerts there. Ultimately I got a nice letter from the dean of admissions, Alfred T. Quirk, saying that my qualifications were good but it was very competitive and I didn’t make the cut, though he concluded saying he was sure I’d be successful at whatever I chose to pursue. I underlined that last sentence and tacked the letter up over my computer desk at home, where it stayed for a couple years. Meanwhile I liked to tell people it was a Quirk of fate that I didn’t go to college right away.

So, I worked full-time at Bradlees for a year. Not surprisingly, I hated it. Not right away, but it was definitely a drag to be there most days and while it wasn’t a terrible job it wasn’t very interesting or fulfilling. Things came to a head the following August, when I was delaying coming back from my break and gave a manager a hard time about it; I was written up for insubordination and told to seriously consider whether I should or wanted to continue working there. I didn’t want to keep working there full-time, but I didn’t want to just quit and look for another job either, and that was when I decided it was time to apply to UNH. But before I did, there was another college I’d read about in the local paper months ago, after my mom pointed out the article, and I decided I should look into that as well… and a few weeks later I found myself starting freshman year at Thomas More College.

Since I stayed local, living at home and commuting to Thomas More, I kept my job at Bradlees and just went back to part-time hours. I worked there for another year and a half, and when they wouldn’t give me a leave of absence—holding my job for me—while I left for a semester abroad, I quit.

Bradlees was a good starting job. I got to do a variety of supervisor/manager tasks and be responsible for other employees as well as cash funds. The work load wasn’t actually onerous. Most of the people I worked with were decent, and—despite my episode of insubordination—I did learn a bit about being diplomatic and also about managing people decently even if I privately thought they were unpleasant or idiots, which was the case for a few of them. However, I still grew to really dislike the store and working there. When Bradlees eventually went out of business a decade after I’d left it, I still took satisfaction in seeing it close and the store building eventually being torn down during a remodel of the mall. It’s petty of me, and now I can think, “well people worked there, that must have sucked”… but yeah, I’m glad it’s gone.

One activity that I missed out on in ninth grade was participating in Odyssey of the Mind (then still called “Olympics of the Mind”, before the International Olympic Committee brought their legal trademark hammer down). I remember going to the information meeting about it, and I don’t quite remember why I passed it up. I have a vague idea that I was concerned I wouldn’t have time for it with school, although that seems an unlikely concern. More likely there were some Saturday meetings involved, and I was already busy on Saturdays with the New Hampshire Youth Orchestra.

I joined the NHYO when I was in eighth grade; my violin teacher let a few of her students know about it, and at least two of us auditioned for it, myself and my friend Scott. Scott was a year behind me in school, but I already knew him from string ensemble. Being in the NHYO together let us develop a close friendship that’s lasted to this day. There were a few other kids from Nashua in the orchestra, and the following year my younger sister Andrea joined, playing flute; being together in the orchestra also helped us bond. At least one other member needs to be mentioned, a cellist by the name of Eldy who moved to Nashua a couple years later; he befriended Scott, joined the NHYO too, and became another close friend.

The NHYO held rehearsals on Saturday mornings in the little town of Hopkinton, which was about as central as you could get for NH. We’d do a half-dozen or so concerts during the school year. Two of those concerts were basically for family-and-friends, as they each concluded one of the Music Weekend events, which were loads of fun. The orchestra would stay at some kind of hotel or inn for the weekend and do a lot of focused rehearsing to get that season’s repertoire in shape, but also spend time having fun hanging out. For my first few years, the fall music weekend was held at the Loon Mountain Ski Resort, as it was the off-season and the owner of the resort was a supporter of the orchestra, and I remember it fondly. Also for my first few years, the final concert of our season was held at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, which was a very cool place and was directly responsible for my decision to apply to Dartmouth in senior year. (It also, randomly, was the first place I discovered raw chocolate-chip cookie dough on sale as a dessert item.)

I enjoyed the NHYO so much that, as the October after I graduated high school rolled around, I found myself seriously longing to attend the fall music weekend one more time. The orchestra had let some kids stay on an extra year or two before, even when I was a younger member, so I got in touch and they were happy to let me return for one more year.

I didn’t get around to mentioning in topic 8, Violin Lessons, that after a few years the school system discontinued support for stringed-instrument lessons. As a result, there was no orchestra program in the schools and no place for strings. I continued taking lessons privately with my same teacher. However, there was one school-related event involving strings, the All-State Music Festival. Students from around the state would audition in the fall to be part of the orchestra, band, or chorus, and those selected would then spend the next few months practicing their parts (ostensibly in school). The festival would be hosted in the spring by one of the high schools, where the students would gather for two days of intense rehearsals followed by a concert. I did well enough to pass audition all four years in high school, although the orchestra demanded a lot of violins so the competition wasn’t as fierce as for other instruments. It was a funny thing to attend these festivals as a member of my school, with the band and chorus kids I didn’t know so well because I wasn’t in music classes; some of them I only really knew from attending All-State.

Although I passed audition all four years, I actually missed the festival in ninth grade for a funny reason: my baby brother brought home the chicken pox from daycare, and my sisters and I all came down with strong cases that kept us in bed, agonizingly itchy, for a week. We all thought we’d had the chicken pox when we were little, but apparently if so it hadn’t ever been a strong enough case to give us immunity. I believe I still have some faint scars from the pox. I also think I might still have the sheet music for that year’s All-State, since I wasn’t there to return it…

The other years I did go and they were fun events. It was interesting to contrast the schools: Nashua Senior High had the second-largest student population in New England, at around 3,000 students. In my sophomore year, All-State was held at the Fall Mountain Regional High School in the small town of Langdon in western NH; it probably had a tenth as many students at most. In junior year, All-State was at Salem, which was closer to Nashua High in size and had a television studio, which Nashua did not. I’ve forgotten where it was held my senior year, though I seem to recall it was also out toward eastern NH. I might still have the concert programs tucked away in my box o’ memories or my sheet-music folders, I’ll have to check.

I’m pretty much out of time and space, but I do want to mention that my violin playing didn’t entirely let up for the summer: I also participated in the Greater Manchester Youth Symphony Orchestra’s summer program for at least two, and I think three, summers. That was a two-week summer day camp for orchestra, again mainly focused around prepping a few pieces for a concert but with some fun time outside orchestra too. Now that I think of it, there were at least a couple other random one-time concert events I ended up playing in. It really wasn’t that unreasonable that I passed on participating in Odyssey of the Mind, because between school, orchestra, and Scouts—and a paper route as well—I was pretty busy already. I do have a little regret for missing out on OotM, because I think it would’ve helped me feel fully part of my social group in my grade, whereas instead I always felt a bit outside the group (through no fault of theirs) right through high school. But I’m glad that I stayed involved in orchestra and developed friendships I otherwise might never have had.

Getting dressed this morning, I remembered a funny quirk of my youth: for six years or so, I refused to wear jeans. When I was little, I wore Toughskins jeans a lot. I remember at one point I had Toughskins in red and in green as well as typical blue jeans. However, at some point toward the end of elementary school, I decided I didn’t like jeans anymore. I think part of the reason was that my mom would buy corduroys and trousers for me to wear to school, and as I got new ones the old ones would become playtime clothes. Another part was that as I got older, I was spending less time getting dirty when I was outside playing, and more time just riding my bike or hanging out talking with friends, so I no longer needed to change into playtime clothes; I could just get dressed in the morning for school and stay dressed that way for the rest of the day. A third part is that I may have started associating jeans with the “bad” kids. This is patently ridiculous, of course, since most kids wore jeans. However, once I started junior high, I definitely did associate denim jackets with the older and tougher kids, and so I did not like those jackets.

In any case, by the time I could start buying my own clothes, I was set against jeans. I don’t recall indicating to my mom that I didn’t want jeans, but I know I wasn’t given any as Christmas or birthday presents, either. This led to me wearing a lot of tan trousers and navy or brown corduroys. It also contributed to my overall dorkish appearance, though I never really thought about it at the time. Actually it’s kind of odd, I don’t recall feeling self-conscious about my dress style most of the time. Maybe on occasion I’d feel I looked awkward, but for the most part I don’t recall really giving it much thought; I had decent clothes that fit me and matched, so I was okay.

Toward the end of high school, my feelings about pants shifted again. I became sick of wearing tan trousers and decided they were at best bland, if not horribly ugly. Meanwhile, I had started working at a department store, which had a dress code. So now I had to wear trousers at least for work, and I switched over to shades of grey, navy, and black. To this day, I still dislike tan or khaki trousers and will not buy or wear them. I’m not strongly opposed to green trousers, in dark shades, but I’ve never seen any I really wanted to buy, either.

However, at that time I also realized that hey, jeans weren’t just blue, they also came in black, and for whatever reason I decided that black jeans were cool. So I bought my first pair of jeans since childhood, and started wearing black jeans when I was going out on Friday nights. Once I’d switched to black jeans, it was easy to get back into blue jeans as well, and so during college jeans became my everyday wear while pleated trousers were work wear.

As the years went on I liked the trousers less and less. Because I had to wear them for work, especially once I entered the professional world, I felt they looked too dressy for casual wear and I didn’t like the way I looked wearing them. (This was due in part to feeling I had to wear button-down shirts with trousers, and not caring for those either, particularly because I now associated those with having to wear a tie, which I have always strongly disliked.) I moved toward wearing only black trousers at work; I would still buy grey ones for variety but inevitably find myself dissatisfied with them, feeling the shade of grey was ugly. Then I moved to Seattle and started working in the software industry, where the dress code is still much more casual than the East Coast professional setting, and suddenly it was almost inappropriate to wear trousers to work. Trousers were promptly relegated to dress-up occasions, and I’ve worn jeans most of the time ever since.

Over the past few years I’ve had cross-impulses regarding jeans and my general fashion: I’ve felt more like dressing up nicely, “dressing like an adult,” but this has meant being more interested in upscale pricey jeans that I could get away with wearing to semi-formal occasions, rather than being interested in nice trousers again. I haven’t had much money to put toward improving my wardrobe—nor have I had much interest in rummaging through vintage/used clothing stores—but I do feel a pull toward changing my style some, indeed having more of a defined style instead of just the standard American jeans-and-a-t-shirt look, and hopefully I’ll be able to play with that in the near future.

The third organized activity I joined during elementary school was Cub Scouts. Again, I think of this as something I started in third grade, but it may have actually been second grade, I don’t recall for sure. (Apparently in my mind everything started in third grade. Maybe that’s because second grade was kind of lousy and my teacher very unsympathetic, whereas third grade was great and my teacher was very cool.) Once again, my best friend Andy joined Cub Scouts too, as did several of my other friends, but in this case the packs were definitely grouped by neighborhoods and we were in different dens, though we still were in the same overall local pack, based in our elementary school.

I don’t remember a lot about Cub Scouts. I know we had regular meetings at one of the other kids’ houses, whose mom was our den mother, and I know I didn’t always get along with that kid but overall it was okay. I know we had activities as we worked our way through the Cub Scout badges, but don’t really remember much about them. I made a couple cars for the pinewood derby, with a fair amount of help from my dad. I wanted to have cool ones but never put that much thought, and didn’t really want to put a lot of work, into the design, so I was always a little disappointed in what I’d done when I saw some of the other cars. I also remember participating in a chuckwagon derby, which involved a few of us pulling a wooden wagon around some kind of park—I think it might’ve been on the high school campus, I forget—and trying to solve challenges at different stations.

One summer I also went to day camp for Cub Scouts; I believe it was a one-week program but that I went two weeks in a row, maybe it simply was a two-week program. I had to take a bus up to Manchester to Camp Carpenter, which seemed pretty far away. My impression is that I didn’t really know anyone else, although I believe in fact a few other kids from my troop also went, just none of my real close friends. The activities I most remember are shooting BB guns and participating in the “space derby”, which involved making a wooden rocket/spaceship model that flies along a wire and is powered by a twisted rubber band driving a propellor. The other thing I remember is getting caught up with a bunch of older kids, probably regular Boy Scouts, playing some kind of game of tag or football or something. There was an older girl there, who must’ve been a counselor, and a couple of the other older kids (who, again, may also have been counselors) had taken her shirt and tossed it in a barrel. Thinking this was just fun and games, I taunted her that I knew where her shirt was, and she chased me; but when she caught me, she held me down and shook me, demanding to know where it was, so I told her and she angrily stalked off to retrieve it. At the time I was hurt, I felt she was mean to me and I hadn’t done anything; now I wonder how they could’ve taken her shirt in the first place, it’s so wildly inappropriate even for ostensibly fun roughhousing.

I liked earning badges and rewards, but lost some interest as I got older. I know I earned my Bobcat and Wolf badges, but don’t remember if I earned the Bear badge; I know that I did not earn the Arrow of Light, which is the highest badge for Cub Scouts. At my final pack meeting at the end of fifth grade, as a bunch of my friends participated in the Arrow of Light ceremony and symbolically crossed over to being Boy Scouts, I could not participate in the ceremony, I just joined the group as one of the kids who would be moving on. And I did go on to join the Scout troop with my friends… but that’s another topic.

One day in third grade a woman came to our class to tell us that she would be offering violin lessons to anyone interested, and she brought along one of her students to play a little demonstration. She had a sign-up form, but I wasn’t particularly interested so I didn’t sign up. However, when I went home I did tell my parents about the visitor, and they immediately asked “why didn’t you sign up?” “I want to play guitar!” was my response: eight years old was old enough to know that guitar was cool, and, partly inspired by the bass guitarist from the church’s folk group, partly inspired by listening to popular music in general, I liked to pretend that I could play guitar. My parents said no, that I should go back and tell my teacher I wanted to sign up for the violin lessons, and they said that if I learned violin now I could learn guitar later. Being eight, I thought of that as cause and effect—if I take violin lessons now, I will learn guitar later—and the idea of learning an instrument was still neat, so I agreed.

To this day, I don’t know what made my parents insist that I should sign up for violin lessons. As I said, I had enjoyed pretending to play guitar and was interested in music in general, but I don’t recall asking about taking guitar lessons before that point, or any other discussion with my parents about learning an instrument. I know that my older sister decided to learn piano around that time, although I don’t recall for sure who started learning an instrument first, her or me. Despite my initial indifference to signing up for lessons, I did think violin was cool for something of an odd reason: I was a fan of Thomas Jefferson, after seeing the musical 1776 and reading a children’s biography of him, and he played the violin. In any case, I still see this as a surprising development in my life, an unexpected path that appeared and I was sent down.

The violin teacher must have thought great, some kid being pushed into lessons he’s not interested in, but still she agreed to take me on. I think I started out renting a violin from a local music store, although maybe we bought it; in any case it was a cheap small violin. I remember that initially I was sharing lessons with another kid or two, although I forget exactly who that was. A couple of the students and I played a few basic songs for a school-wide talent show, which I think happened when I was in fourth grade; I remember happily asking for the microphone to announce the song titles, and then having a friend ask me afterward what I said because he couldn’t understand me. (In fairness, the titles were just the Italian names of the dances—”gavotte”, for instance—so the confusion may have had more to do with the unfamiliarity than my speech impediments.) I know I played around a lot when practicing at home, and occasionally I’d fuss about having to practice, but whenever my mom would suggest that maybe I should stop taking lessons in that case, I would grumble but keep practicing.

The key moment in my musical development came near the end of fifth grade, if I recall correctly. My teacher had judged that I’d made enough progress to start playing with the string ensemble. This was a group that included her students, some cello students and their teacher, and some other adult string players. We met after school in the gym/cafeteria/auditorium, I sat with the second violins, and we started working on some music. The most astonishing thing happened: suddenly I was inside the music. I could hear all four parts at once and understood how they fit together. I could listen for the cellos to play a bit and know that meant that my part was coming up. I could follow along in my sheet music and see where the first violins would play a particular line, or know when the violas were playing the same part that we seconds were. I remember going home and telling my mom excitedly all about this wonderful experience of hearing everything going on all at once and being part of making that happen.

That, I think, is when I truly fell in love with music. It’s certainly the experience that kept me playing the violin for years afterward, continuing with lessons right through high school and then joining the amateur orchestra she led—an evolution of that same string ensemble—after that. I don’t believe that my parents really knew or expected I would have such an experience or stay devoted to playing the violin so many years, but I’m glad that they did push me to learn.