Pilcrow

Although there isn't an "official" Sk8J writing challenge this month, there is a "time in a bottle" discussion based on this post:
"Think about yourself exactly 20 years ago today. Where were you? Who were you? What were you doing? What's different?"
Much of my response has been covered in one way or another by the 40 T/D/Y series, but I've got work to do tonight, so reposting my response gives me a quick and easy post for today's journal entry.

Twenty years ago I was 20 and a sophomore in college, having skipped a year between high school and starting college. I was still living at home with my parents in New Hampshire, as the college was just a couple miles down the road from their house. I'd never lived away from home and had no particular thoughts about doing so, aside from the vague sense that after college I would of course be moving out at some point. I was still working at my first regular job (discounting the paper route), at Bradlees department store. I wasn't really planning on what I'd do after college, but probably had vague thoughts about going to grad school and doing something academic or else working as a writer or in publishing somehow. I was playing violin regularly with a local amateur orchestra, and I was also very interested in learning bass guitar. I was getting pretty fed up with the first girl with whom I'd had any kind of close relationship—which mostly boiled down to the facts that she didn't actually want to date me and I didn't actually want to be just friends, both of which we both knew but weren't handling well. In fact, this might be about the time that I thought we'd agreed she would join me and a few of my college friends in going to a local concert, but then when I went to pick her up she claimed to have misunderstood when it was and refused to go, leading to me feeling very hurt and angry when I left without her and deciding that I'd had enough and wouldn't call her anymore to hang out. A few weeks later I made one exception, to invite her to my college's Christmas party, as I thought she might care enough to see some of our mutual friends at my college too before we (at my college) went off to Rome for a semester, but that was that. Aside from that personal and social drama, I was generally enjoying college a lot, finding the work load pretty heavy and the papers difficult at times but relishing the challenge, and i was very excitedly looking forward to the Rome semester. I'd never had an alcoholic drink, and had no interest in trying any—I didn't like the smell, and I didn't like the idea of losing, or loosening, control that I associated with getting drunk. I'd never flown on an airplane or been out of the country.

What's different: most of it. I live 3,000 miles away from my hometown and parents, and have no particular intention of ever moving back (but also no objection at least to moving back close to Boston, though not my hometown). I actually do have a professional career somewhat related to my degree (Literature), as I'm an editor, but mostly I'm working on software-related marketing, and as I'd discovered in high school that I didn't care for programming, I never thought I'd be working in the computer industry. I've barely played my violin in the past nine years, and when I do idly think about playing again, it's in a rock/pop/experimental context rather than classical orchestra. I haven't talked to that girl in at least a dozen years; we did reconcile as friends a few months after my Rome semester, and ran into each other a few times over the next few years, but that was that. I hardly ever read books anymore, after the load of reading in college crushed me, though I do still love reading and just read more stuff online than in print. I've learned to like a few alcoholic drinks and have even been out-of-control, or at least throwing-up, drunk once (totally by accident and by surprise, as it didn't seem like more alcohol than I've had at one time in the past, but apparently mostly-empty stomachs and a couple large screwdrivers don't mix well). Besides visiting Rome, I also visited my sister in Germany a few years later, so I've been out of the country and continent a couple times, and I fly on airplanes at least once a year as I go back to my parents' home for Christmas.

As far as attitudes and beliefs, I'm probably more liberal, I'm more relaxed and laid-back in general, I'm less likely to passionately dismiss something as crap, I'm more passionate about politics and some social issues. I'm still a huge geek (and just as fine with that now as I was then), but I'm kind of sort of cool even if I usually undercut that by being geekily enthusiastic. I'm not in close contact with a few of my closest friends from that time (including that girl), but I am still very close with some others including both my longest-lasting hometown friends and my closest college friend.

Quick* because March 1 is almost over, and I'd like this post to go up on March 1. (As I discovered back while doing the 40 T/D/Y posts, LiveJournal now updates the post date and time to when you actually click post, instead of keeping whatever date and time it was when you started writing a new post.)

When I wrote the "final thoughts" post for the 40 T/D/Y series, I actually meant to talk a bit about whether I'd learned anything about myself, and then forgot in my effort to wrap things up. But then, I neither intended the series to be a learning exercise, nor did I actually think it would be a self-contained thing that I would do and then put aside for good. It spontaneously became a meditation on where I've been and how I've come to be the person I am, and if I learned anything, it was just reminding myself that the habits and patterns I'm susceptible to were formed early in my life and crop up in all aspects of it. Still, the series is meant in part to be a reference point: okay, I Am Here, now where do I want to go? I do intend to come back to that.

Intentions are all well and good of course, but two full months into the year, I haven't been doing more personal writing here, and I'm still struggling with the same problems, internal and external—not that I believed or expected or even hoped that a simple writing exercise would exorcise those problems. So, yes, all February went by and I only managed to make a token post last night.

About that token post, though: when the iPad was finally announced, my initial reaction was on the indifferent side: it seemed to be simply a large iPod Touch, which while nice wasn't anything particularly exciting. And when I watched the presentation, a couple days after it happened, that continued to be my feeling through most of it. I was not swayed by Jobs's claims that the iPad would offer the best experience for all those common functions such as Web browsing, e-mail, managing photos, and so forth: although there were a couple obvious neat things one could do with the iPad interface, there wasn't anything to it obviously superior to the experience I already have using my laptop.

But, well into the presentation, when they talked about the iBookstore, I thought about how convenient it would be to have all my RPG books in digital format on the iPad, instead of carrying around a heavy stack. And they talked about third-party apps, and demonstrated some cool games, and I started to realize the true advantage of the iPad: it wasn't all the digital lifestyle stuff that Jobs had talked about in the first part of the presentation, it was the opportunity for third parties to take advantage of the larger format and other improvements the iPad offered to create some really cool apps. And I started thinking about some cool things that I'd like to see on an iPad... and realized that what I should do is learn how to program for the iPad and become a developer, myself. The more I thought about it, the more interested I was in the possibilities; the idea wouldn't be easily dismissed as a passing fancy.

So, I used a Christmas gift and had "Santa-mazon" bring me a book to teach me the basics of programming in Objective-C, the language used for the iPhone and iPad. The picture I posted is the first, very basic, exercise in the book, but it's my first step on the path to a concrete goal that I'm excited about. I don't expect to become a full-time iPad developer, I don't have the years of experience in programming, but I do believe I can at least start out making a couple simple things that might even earn a little money. And then I'll see where that might lead. At the least, it'll be something fun and cool I've done for myself, and that's enough.

*(For the record: started writing the post at 11:40 PM, finished at 11:58 PM.)

Back in November 2009, I decided to write a series of 40 posts on 40 different topics about myself, leading up to my 40th birthday at the end of the year. If you've been reading along as I wrote them, you know that already, but I'm writing this post for future reference, an index linked to all the posts so that they're easy to find again. 

1. Procrastination
2. Cleft Palate
3. Reading
4. Speech and Sociability
5. Franco-American
6. Catholic Upbringing
7. Early Musical Influences
8. Violin Lessons
9. Soccer
10. Cub Scouts
11. Paper Route
12. Pants
13. Dungeons & Dragons
14. Geek
15. "Most Likely to Succeed"
16. Student Orchestras
17. Boy Scouts
18. Retail
19. College
20. Night Owl
21. Rome
22. Religion and Faith
23. Major and Myopia
24. Floundering
25. Chung Moo!
26. Nashua Chamber Orchestra
27. Papers and Zines and Blogs
28. Professional
29. Rock, On-Air and Live
30. Moving Out
31. (Goth) Dancing
32. Seattle
33. Food
34. Cat
35. Homeowner
36. Go Play NW
37. Freelancer
38. KEXP Volunteer
39. Crush Stories
40. 40 Years Old

If you are reading this on LiveJournal, you can also find all of the above posts, plus a couple other related ones (such as this), by clicking the 40t/d/y tag.

As a kid, I had my share of secret crushes, as I’m sure most kids do. Even in first grade there was a girl I liked in particular and wanted her attention but felt nervous about getting it. I think around fourth grade is when girls and crushes became regular subjects of conversation among my friends and me, but again I never dared tell my current crush that I liked her, afraid of rejection. In junior high as other kids started dating, I continued to nurse secret crushes.

I wasn’t a complete wallflower, though. I could still talk to these girls in class as regular people, I wasn’t left stammering and blushing, unable to speak. I went to my first school dance in seventh grade, and although at the end of the evening I had to be coaxed into a dance by one of my long-time female friends, I enjoyed the whole experience enough to attend the dances regularly after that. I went to the junior high dinner dance by myself without reservation and had a good time with my friends.

I had a major crush in junior year of high school, although it took me about half the year to realize how I felt. She passed out handmade Valentines to some people, including me, and wrote on mine “U R so sweet!”, which made me very happy. I don’t recall whether I spent a lot of time thinking about asking her to the junior prom, but I do remember overhearing her talking to a friend just before French class one day and her saying something about the prom that made me realize I might already be too late. So, after class, I pulled her aside and stammeringly asked if she would like to go with me; she seemed pleased to be asked but apologetically explained that she’d already agreed to go with someone else. I was crushed but took it well, and ended up going by myself, though I did give one of my good female friends a ride to and from the prom.

In senior year I had a lesser crush on another classmate and asked her to the prom, but she also turned me down. This time though I asked another friend, a junior I knew who also took violin lessons, to be my prom date and she said yes, and we had a very enjoyable time. In the photos my parents took before we left, though, I look very painfully awkward; rather than putting an arm around her for the photos, I instead kept that arm behind my back and held my other arm with that hand. I still can’t believe no one told me to relax and hold her, it’s ridiculous.

During college I had my first halting relationship, with yet another younger friend I knew from violin lessons. Interestingly, I learned at one point that a few of my friends had thought of fixing me up with her for my senior prom date; I believe one of my friends suggested her at one point and I dismissed the idea out of hand. She and I spent a lot of time hanging out after I graduated and we became close, eventually having a few make-out sessions, but she was never really interested in being more than friends while I struggled hard to keep my feelings in check. When she started college, during my fall sophomore semester at Thomas More (she was at a different local school), we grew apart, and by the time that semester ended I knew I had to stop calling her and trying to hang out. Fortunately the Rome semester gave me some needed space and time away; I no longer sought out her company, but I did see her a few times over the next several years as just friends and it was fine.

Throughout the rest of my twenties and into my early thirties, I had occasional crushes but never tried pursuing anyone. Frequently I would only realize I’d developed a crush after knowing someone for several months or more, by which time it was clear that that person liked me as a friend but no more than that. A couple of times I developed a closer friendship with someone but still believed nothing further could come of it. On a very few occasions a woman would show some signs of possibly being interested in me, but never anyone that I found interesting in turn. I wonder though how many times I may have missed expressions of interest because I felt strongly that no one would be interested in me, or whether I could’ve had a chance with any of my crushes if I’d been more confident and less self-conscious.

For quite a while after moving to Seattle, I continued on as I had been doing, feeling lonely a lot and developing one or two crushes that I knew would go unrequited. Eventually I started to put a little more effort into actively looking to meet new people and go on dates. It’s been a long slow effort for me, gaining more confidence, losing some self-absorption, trying different possibilities, trying to be open to different opportunities, and learning to relax and focus on being out in the world rather than on finding a particular someone. I’ve had a lot of support from my friends, who’ve helped me better understand myself and better understand how to relate to others. I’ve definitely changed and grown a lot in the past few years, and though sometimes I still feel I have a very long way to go, I also believe in myself. My crushes don’t always have to be secret, my interest won’t always go unrequited, my loneliness isn’t endless. And while I’m very tired of feeling lonely, being alone isn’t always so bad; I can take joy in the things I’m free to do on my own, and continue to keep an eye out for others who may enjoy sharing some of my life with me.

Eleven months after moving to Seattle, the company that had hired me went through a restructuring and laid off a bunch of people including me. Fortunately, another college friend and one of my new Seattle friends had their own startup company and need of my services, so they picked me right up and I worked for them for the next four years. I primarily worked as a technical editor, making sure the documents they produced for projects were well-written, and also did some software testing.

Things started changing in 2006, though. As the company grew, there wasn’t as much work for my writing and editing skills as expected, and I wasn’t keeping as busy as I should’ve. Also, my position was viewed as a cost center: necessary for running the company and providing quality work, but not bringing in revenue. To alleviate some of this, they offered to appoint me to be the office manager. The added duties included a small raise, which I needed, and I did want to keep working there, so I accepted. However, I quickly found once again that I really disliked doing office administrative work, and over the course of the year became more and more unhappy with being there.

Meanwhile, my friend Tony had held out at the first company for a few more years, but decided to go freelance early in 2006. As I talked with him about it, freelancing started to sound like a much better position for me to be in. I liked the prospects of flexible work hours and location, working when and where I wanted to—and doing away with the daily commute I currently had, which was not as bad as when I worked in Boston but still could take a couple hours out of my day. Because my work was already project-based, I thought that it would make more sense to be getting work from multiple clients rather than trying to stay busy in a single full-time position. I also saw potential for substantially increasing my income based on what I could charge as an hourly rate, instead of being on a fixed salary. A job review in late 2006 and conversation with my manager about where I saw myself in five years settled my mind: I did not see myself continuing at that company, and decided I would leave in the first half of 2007.

By February 2007, I was moving forward quickly: I had already asked Tony to put me in touch with people he was doing contract work for, and yet another conversation with my manager persuaded me that ready or not, I should give my notice by the beginning of March that I would be leaving. Instead, it turned out everyone was already on the same page, as my bosses decided to lay me off at the end of February: it was clear to all of us that I no longer belonged there. That was actually a good thing, as they also gave me a small severance package and I was able to extend my insurance coverage for a few months until I picked up my own. So we parted on good terms, and I’ve continued to do occasional work for them as a contractor.

Since then I’ve been working on a freelance basis, mostly for the Microsoft vendor that Tony first put me in touch with, with some work for a couple other clients including my previous employer. Overall, I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I like being able to take my laptop around town and work in different cafes, or work at home into the wee hours of the morning. I’m glad I no longer have to deal with the commute to Redmond every day, and I’m saving a lot of money by not having to drive every day. I still believe in all of the reasons why I decided that I should become a freelancer: freedom in when and where I work, variety of projects, not beholden to any one company to keep me going, and potential for increased income.

However, I’ve also found it increasingly difficult to keep going as a freelancer. Naturally, I quickly ran into the obvious problem: I loathe searching for work, and I don’t like doing office administrative work either, so I’m ill-suited to manage my own business. I never spent any time in developing contacts and expanding my client base, I just continued to work with the few companies that Tony put me in touch with, but I need a bigger base to provide enough work for an adequate income. The obvious solution would be to work with employment agencies, and it seems like a natural fit: their job is to connect companies with service providers, my job is to provide a professional service. Regrettably, I did not start looking into that until the latter half of 2008, when the economic downturn began and even Microsoft started cutting back on projects, so the agencies have had very little work to offer me. And of course the downturn meant that the companies I was already working with had less work for me as well. The potential for greater income depended upon me finding more clients and work, and the flipside of that potential is that without a solid client base—or even with one, when the economy turns bad—I also face a potential for drastically inadequate income.

One positive change in freelancing did happen in 2009. When I started freelancing in 2007, I included page layout/desktop publishing as one of my goals for the year. I’d always enjoyed the work I did for the Nashua Chamber Orchestra’s program books and season brochures, and I wanted to find opportunities to return to that kind of work, this time as a paid professional. Again, as is typical of me, I did not immediately take any steps toward that goal. I figured that as it’d been a few years since I’d done any layout work, and since I’d never done it as a professional, I probably should take a course in design, but I was busy just getting into freelance work in general and also didn’t have money available to pay for a course. And so that goal drifted unfulfilled until this past summer. I was talking to John, who knew of my interest in returning to layout work, about my dire work and financial situation, and he offered to recommend me to his employer for a project that needed someone to do the grunt work. I’ve been working on that in stages the past several months, and his employer’s been very happy with my work, enough that after the first round of drafts and revisions, they recommended me to another company needing someone to do a small and quick turnaround layout project. That’s made me happy in turn, and hopeful that I may be able to find more such work in the near future in addition to my existing work as a freelance editor.

In 2004, I started thinking it was about time to look into buying a condo for myself, and I put that down as a goal for 2005. However, in late 2004 I also got braces for the second time in my life, to prepare for the bone graft I’d need in order to get permanent false teeth to fill in a couple gaps in my upper teeth. As I recall, shortly before getting braces, I was pretty much debt-free, besides maybe a few hundred dollars outstanding on my credit cards. In fact my finances were good enough that I decided to pay for my braces up front using a credit card, because I got a small discount for doing so, rather than paying in installments. I was confident that I would be able to clear that credit card debt within six months. But I also had some car repairs that fall, and I decided not to go home for Christmas that year specifically because of the expense of braces. So, I also expected that I would not actually attempt to buy a condo in 2005, just that I would make an effort to learn about home-buying so I’d be prepared when I had the financial resources available again.

In March 2005, I ran into some major car repairs, as first my radiator failed and then another engine part failed, costing me somewhere around $3,000. Between this unexpected expense and the braces I was still paying for, it was clear it would be a while before I could save up any money for a down payment on a condo. I also did an analysis of my finances, to see how I was spending my money and where I might be able to reduce expenses, but it didn’t look good. My biggest expenses were rent and my car (gas and maintenance), and although my rent expense would go toward a mortgage instead, it looked like the rest of my disposable income that was currently going toward my credit card debt would also be taken up by a mortgage.

But then at the end of April, I got news that pushed me to start learning about home-buying in earnest. My landlord told me that he had plans to renovate a couple of the apartments and that once he’d done so, he wanted to move into the apartment I was currently renting. So I went to a seminar for first-time home buyers, got a loan pre-approval, and got an agent. Over the next few months I looked at several places, and discovered that condos in my practical price range were all smaller and more expensive than my current apartment.

One thing I learned was that there’s a difference between what banks thought I could afford and what I thought. I might’ve expected the banks to be more conservative, but at least at that time the pre-approval process considered only gross income and outstanding debt—loans and credit cards—which resulted in a higher figure for monthly payments than I thought I could manage after taking into consideration my everyday living expenses. Condos of a size close to my apartment were at the top of my pre-approved loan range but seemed too expensive in monthly payments for my finances, and even condos that were just a little smaller and also much further out from the center of Seattle were still too pricey. However, I didn’t want to abandon my search, because I was still faced with losing my apartment within a few months and I figured the rent at a new apartment would be high enough that I might as well be paying a mortgage on my own place instead.

I made a couple offers on places that were smaller and further out than I wanted, but otherwise seemed nice enough. I was outbid for those. My search had a temporary lull in August as only one suitable place was on the market, and I didn’t like it. And then in early September my agent brought me to a place in north Queen Anne, quite close to the Fremont Bridge, which had recently dropped in price. It was roomy, fairly close to the size of my apartment, and I liked the feel of it. It was still expensive, at the top of my price range and high in monthly payments, but the seller’s agent was willing to work with me to drop the asking price a bit and roll in the closing costs instead, and my agent convinced me it would be worth the stretch in my finances. And so I became a homeowner.

Overall, I’ve been happy since then to have my own place. It’s still a comfortable size for me and I still like the location, within a short walk of Fremont and longer walks to Ballard or downtown, and also close to several bus routes downtown. However, I’ve been having doubts about my decision this year. The economic downturn has meant a serious lack of work for me, making it difficult to meet my mortgage and condo association payments each month; when I talked to my bank about assistance, they basically said that without regular income the best they can do is help me sell my place before I’m faced with foreclosure. Additionally, this past year my condo association has discovered that the buildings have a serious water intrusion problem and we will need to replace the outer walls, a very expensive process. Combined with my financial difficulties, I’m in serious danger of losing my home. On the other hand, the association might be able to cover the repairs, or a substantial portion of the cost, through insurance. And as I don’t have any good options if I lose my place, I’ll just have to find more work of some kind. I’ve already put effort, time, and money into being a homeowner and I like my home; it’s worth further effort to keep it.

I was a very fussy eater as a child. I didn’t like much to begin with, and was always reluctant to try new foods. I arbitrarily disliked whole kinds of food, such as cheese, even though I happily ate pizza. I wouldn’t eat tomatoes but would eat tomato sauce; I didn’t like peanuts but loved peanut butter; I didn’t like fish, but my mom got me to eat tuna by telling me it was “chicken of the sea”. I loved canned peas—and still do—and also liked canned corn, but absolutely hated canned green beans, string beans, and wax (yellow) beans with a passion. I would spend a good half-hour or more at the dinner table, reluctantly and very slowly finishing my green beans after everyone else was done dinner, so that I could get dessert. (My younger sister, more pragmatic, would ask what was for dessert, and if it wasn’t anything she felt like having then she’d happily abandon whatever part of dinner she didn’t like.) I also hated meatloaf, the one dinner sure to cause me to wail with dismay, such that it’s still a running joke in my family.

In elementary school for the first several years, I would only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. I didn’t like any kind of regular sandwich fixings—I might’ve eaten cold turkey or ham, but I wouldn’t eat cheese or lettuce or mustard or anything else you’d put on a sandwich. Eventually around fourth or maybe fifth grade my mom persuaded me to start trying the hot lunch at school by pointing out things on the menu that I would eat, such as the turkey dinner or pizza on Fridays, and letting me buy only the meals I wanted rather than paying for the full week.

Although my dad worked as a cook in the LaRose family restaurant, my parents never urged my siblings and I to learn how to cook, and I didn’t have much interest. I did learn to make cookies and brownies for parties or bake sales at school. Later, in Boy Scouts, I learned to do some cooking while on campouts; I was particularly fond of making french toast. But I still wasn’t much interested in preparing regular meals at home. We all settled into fairly well-defined roles: Mom would make dinner, one of us would set the table, I would always clear the table, and my sisters would wash and dry the dishes.

As I got older, I very slowly and gradually became willing to try more foods. Macaroni salad is a good example: my mom’s macaroni salad is made with mayonnaise, pickles, celery, and eggs, all of which are things I believed I didn’t like (besides macaroni itself). However, one day for whatever reason I decided to try some, and discovered it was really good. Likewise, I found that cheese by itself was good, not just when it was on pizza, and I started eating sandwiches with meat and cheese, instead of just peanut butter and jelly. Still, I was never that adventurous about eating, and it took years for my palate to expand.

I’d never liked vegetables much. Carrots, peas, and corn were all good, other kinds generally not. Beets were the one vegetable that my sisters and I all hated, while my mom loved them. When we were older, my mom added broccoli into the vegetable mix; I didn’t really like it, but it was okay in small amounts. The one vegetable I still hated passionately was green beans… until one day, for some reason, my dad brought home fresh green beans and prepared those instead of canned. What a revelation! Fresh green beans were good. We’d always had fresh carrots, so my only guess about the green beans is that the fresh ones didn’t keep as long and that’s why we had canned.

Once I moved out of my parents’ home, I had to start cooking for myself. While living in Medford, my home-cooked meals stayed fairly simple and conservative, featuring a lot of pasta because that was easy to make, and including at least one frozen dinner a week and at least one can of chunky soup as a stew-like base. Boxed couscous and rice pilaf were also regular items. I did however also make a point of buying frozen vegetables and mixing them in or having them on the side; I also started taking a daily vitamin supplement, just in case.

In Seattle, my cooking and eating menus have slowly expanded even more over the years. I’m now more willing to try new foods or foods I rejected in the past often without trying them. I’ve also been a little more ambitious about cooking. In 2003, I decided I would invite a bunch of friends over for Easter dinner and make chicken cordon bleu, which I’d never done before, and it turned out fine. I stopped buying frozen dinners and started buying more fresh meat to keep in the freezer and prepare for myself. Out for lunch at a mall one day, I decided to try a grilled chicken sandwich that included spinach on it, and found it quite tasty, so I’ve since added spinach into my regular home menu, both uncooked as a substitute for lettuce on sandwiches and cooked with various meals. Pasta is still a staple of my diet but I found some meals took long enough preparation that it was worthwhile taking the time to bake potatoes, too. I not only started using recipes out of cookbooks, but also felt able to experiment and adapt them to what I had on hand. I’m now at a point where even though I often don’t feel like cooking, or feel like it’ll take longer than I want to spend in order to get a meal, I’m always happier for making the effort and cooking a decent meal instead of falling back on something like a pseudo-stew made from chunky soup with macaroni and frozen vegetables added.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention ice cream. I’ve always loved ice cream, and my family almost always kept ice cream on hand for dessert, as well as often going out to ice cream stands during the summer. So naturally as an adult I continued to keep ice cream at home for myself. A couple years ago, I made some idle remarks about how I should learn how to make my own ice cream, and Tony and Farida gleefully took me at my word and bought me an ice cream mixer. It turns out that homemade ice cream is much better than store-bought ice cream. I actually eat less now than I used to because I feel obliged to make it myself rather than buy some at the store, so that means I have to take the time to make it. (Similarly, I used to always have cookies on hand for snacking, but I came to feel that homemade cookies were better-tasting and better-quality, and so I rarely buy cookies anymore and only have them when I make a batch.) Plus, bringing homemade ice cream to a party always makes me popular. Now I just have to figure out how to make an ice cream cake, per Farida’s request…

Starting around the time I was in college, maybe once or twice a year I would go down to Boston with a few friends to go dancing out at the clubs. We went a few times to the clubs on Landsdowne Street next to Fenway Park—Axis, Avalon, Venus de Milo. But as the years went on, most of the time we went to ManRay, the goth club in Central Square, Cambridge.

I was never part of the goth scene. I only learned about it during college when I got into alternative/underground rock; I was too young (and effectively sheltered) to have known about the original goth scene in the early ‘80s. On the other hand, I did learn about it before Hot Topic stores and teenage mall goths became common, but still I didn’t really know anyone in Nashua who was actively part of the goth subculture. Not that that mattered, because there seemed to be a certain amount of dressing up and wearing makeup involved, which didn’t appeal to me. I also strongly sympathized with the associated outsider/outcast/punk mentality, but didn’t really feel a need to make a stand on that.

However, I did appreciate gothic fashion in general, even if I didn’t feel it was for me, and I had no problem with the basic rule of goth clubwear: dress in black and you’ll be fine. I always had a pair of black jeans, several black shirts or t-shirts, and black boots; for several years I also wore all-black Converse All-Stars sneakers. I was never anything to look at but at least I was able to blend in appropriately. And in my experience that was enough: I wasn’t there to impress people, to hit on women, not even to try making new friends, I was just there to enjoy the music and the dancing.

Throughout of the ‘90s when we did go to ManRay, we would go on Saturday nights, which featured ‘80s underground rock and new wave, and was generally the most accessible night at the club. Starting in 2001, Jay had some friends at his new job who liked to go to “Hell Night,” the third Friday of the month, and we tagged along. Fridays were the fetish-themed nights at ManRay, which meant lots of people in PVC and more outlandish (and skimpy) outfits, but Hell Night despite its name was actually the least extreme, it was just the basic goth night, with music ranging from gothic to industrial to techno. Sure there were a few people dressed in ways we didn’t care for, such as the hefty dude in nothing but a g-string and chaps, but though we may have found him decidedly unappealing, he wasn’t actually bothering us and we didn’t bother him. And people like him were more than balanced out by people such as the hot redheaded woman who likewise wore little but strategically-placed straps and a pair of angel wings. And again, we were there just to have a good time dancing, which we did.

We enjoyed that first Hell Night enough that we started going each month regardless of whether Jay’s work friends could make it. I don’t recall whether we actually made it every single month that year, but we did go to more than half I’d say, and we always had a good time. Once we arrived early enough to claim a couch for some hanging out while the club was filling, and a friendly woman struck up a bit of conversation with us and gave us strawberries from the table of food that was always set up for the event. Once or twice I had to politely turn down a guy asking me if I wanted to dance. Often we recognized the same hot women from previous times, but we never tried chatting them up. Always, the music was good and the dancing was fun.

The last time I went to Hell Night was by myself. Jay had some reason he couldn’t or didn’t want to go that month, and I decided I still wanted to have fun dancing and wanted to see if it was something I could go do by myself. So I went and I did have fun, but it was slightly less fun for not being shared with friends, and though I was confident enough to not care what others thought and just go enjoy dancing, I wasn’t confident enough to try talking to strangers. None of that would’ve stopped me from continuing to go to Hell Night, of course; rather, moving to Seattle did.

When I was young, my parents’ car had only AM radio, and we listened to WBZ all the time, but back then AM radio stations still played music. So I grew up hearing a mix of pop and light rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s; to this day I associate a lot of top-40 ‘70s pop-rock with trips to the beach in the summer, and thus think of it fondly.

Around when I was twelve, in my first year of Scouts, and starting junior high, I started being exposed to a wider variety of rock, mainly what we now call classic rock or album-oriented rock (“classic rock” hasn’t already been drifted to mean rock of the ‘80s, has it?), but also with some new wave and punk mixed in. I think I learned about “Rock 101” WGIR-FM from some of the older kids and younger leaders in the Scout troop, and we’d listen to that station while driving to or from camping trips. I distinctly remember being in a cabin on one early camping trip and hearing The Police on the radio, and recognizing for the first time that I’d heard those songs before and really liked them. In that respect, The Police was the first band I became a fan of, knowing who they were and being actively interested in hearing more of their music. Rock 101 also featured “Block Party Weekends,” when all weekend they’d play songs in sets of three per artist, and so it quickly became one of my favorite stations. For some reason we had an old FM radio in the basement, and I claimed it and started listening to my own music in my room.

We also got MTV around that time; I don’t recall whether our local cable company had it from the start, but we definitely had it within its first year of operation. My younger sister proved to be the MTV fiend, watching countless hours of it, but my older sister and I certainly watched a fair amount as well. At the time, I remember rejecting a lot of the music on account of the goofy and outlandish videos; if I thought the video looked stupid, I was likely to think the song was stupid as well. However, my tastes were still developing, and before the ‘80s were over I was already looking back at that music and realizing a lot of it was catchy and I really enjoyed it. A couple years later, I got my first boombox, which included a cassette player. I remember I was given three blank cassettes as well, which I was supposed to use for some kind of French class project, recording myself practicing my French I think. Instead, I started taping songs I liked off the radio, filling all three within a few months. I still have those tapes today, although I haven’t actually listened to them in over a decade and suspect they might be too worn out to play.

I already knew of Heart and liked them before they released their self-titled album in 1985, but that was when I really got into their music and acquired all their older albums. A couple summers later when I heard that they were coming to Manchester to play a concert, I realized for the first time that I could choose to go see a band I liked: I had money, I knew how to drive, and they were playing close by. So I got Scott and Eldy to come along with me, and that was my first rock concert, in a park along the river in Manchester.

Despite that realization, I continued to treat concerts as special events over the next several years, something I did only once or twice a year. During college, I saw Joe Jackson (for the first time) in Lowell, I saw 10,000 Maniacs at UNH, I saw Genesis at Foxboro Stadium (my first and so far only actual stadium show), and I saw They Might Be Giants at the Avalon nightclub in Boston. That last show was I believe my first time going to Boston to see a band play, and my trips down to Boston to see shows continued to be few and far between for the next several years.

Two events in 1999 caused me to start attending concerts more often. First, I started working full-time in Boston, and as my life centered more around being in Boston, it was easier to be there for shows. Second, I saw the band Mistle Thrush live for the first time. My friend Jay had been a huge fan of Mistle Thrush for a few years, and had gradually won me over. In April of that year, they opened for Love & Rockets at Avalon, a show we were sure not to miss, and I thought Mistle Thrush’s performance was fantastic. More importantly, neither of us recognized most of the music they played, it was new material, and we soon learned from talking to lead singer Valerie at a later show that due to some complications the band wouldn’t be releasing an album of this new material for quite a while; the only way to hear it was to attend their shows. So I made a point of seeing them as often as I could, and fortunately they played fairly regularly. This became even easier the following summer of 2000 when I moved just outside Boston and no longer had to drive back up to Nashua afterward.

Mistle Thrush played varying slots at shows, sometimes opening, sometimes headlining, sometimes in the middle. Because of that, and because Jay and I had befriended the band and liked to talk to them, I always made sure to get to the show when it opened, regardless of when Mistle Thrush were scheduled to play, and that meant I started seeing a lot of other bands, local or touring, that I’d never heard of. Usually the other bands would be okay, nothing special, but sometimes I’d discover a great new band and fall in love with them, and only very rarely was a band so bad that I thought I’d rather have missed them. These experiences led to me formulating my two rules about going to see live music: one, it’s always the right decision to go to the show; two, it’s always worthwhile to catch the opening act.

By random chance, Mistle Thrush’s long-awaited third album came out about six weeks before I moved to Seattle, so I had the fortune of attending their CD-release show, which was phenomenal and easily one of their best performances. Just the other day, Jay pointed me at a YouTube video from one of their live performances—it’s hard to say for certain, but I believe I’m actually in the video as part of the crowd—and I had shivers from the thrill of hearing them again. I still miss them very much.

When I moved to Seattle, I didn’t know any of the local bands or clubs, and so for the first few months I didn’t go out to any shows. However, it happened that my favorite radio station in Boston, Boston College’s WZBC, had the same frequency as Seattle’s independent music station KEXP, 90.3 FM, and it was immediately clear that KEXP was the station to listen to here. One Saturday afternoon in June, I was listening when a local band, Orbiter, played live in the KEXP studio and mentioned they were playing a show that night (at the long-gone Sit & Spin laundromat/nightclub). I enjoyed their set, and realized that with nothing else planned anyhow, I should go see the show. That began my concert-going adventures in Seattle.

For my first couple years, going to shows remained an occasional activity, but late in 2004 I realized how much I missed going out regularly like I used to do for Mistle Thrush, and resolved to make a point of attending at least one show a month in 2005. Because I also resolved to write once a week in my LiveJournal, I started writing reviews of the shows I was attending. It took another couple years for me to realize I should be volunteering for KEXP, and another couple years after that for my music writing and volunteering to merge into writing for the KEXP Blog.

Back in fifth grade, near the end of the school year, we had a special kickball game event pitting our classroom against one of the other fifth-grade classrooms, complete with the teachers themselves participating—not the typical recess-time game. When our class was up to kick and I had a lot of downtime waiting my turn, I started to amuse myself by pretending to be a news reporter interviewing others about the big game. In talking with my friend Andy, we became enthusiastic about the idea of actually creating a school newspaper, and we stuck with it. We figured we could get our fellow students to submit stories and articles and whatever, and produce a few pages a month. Conveniently, we happened to be in the same classroom for sixth grade, making it easy for us to work together. We went to a meeting of the school’s PTO to present our idea and ask for paper supplies and use of the school’s ditto machine (I remember it being called a mimeograph, but it turns out that’s a different technology) to produce the newspapers, and they decided to support it.

It ended up not being much of a newspaper as such; we had some kind of school news blurb in each issue, but mostly it ran stories, drawings, poems, and recipes submitted by our classmates and some of the kids in the other sixth-grade classes. I don’t recall specifically what I wrote for it, and haven’t gone looking in my box o’ memories in the closet for my copies which I should still have, but I think I wrote at least some of the letters from the editor about each issue. I also don’t remember how many issues we did; it was less than one a month of course, because we did still have other classwork to do and we had to get other people to submit things, but I believe we did at least five or six over the course of that year. It was a lot of fun and enjoyed by at least some of the kids—near the end of the year I was even approached by two fifth-graders who wanted to take over the paper the following year. (I still wonder what came of that, I know at the time I explained it wasn’t really up to me, they’d have to get the support of the PTO to continue.)

In junior high, I joined the yearbook staff and served all three years. And I can hardly remember any work I did on it. I know at least one year I got stuck on the advertising team, trying to sell ads to support the yearbook, which I had no interest in doing at all. I don’t remember how the writers or editors were chosen, but I was never one of them, although I do remember helping to choose the fiction contest winner at least once. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m listed on staff and appear in the photos for all three years, I wouldn’t even be sure I’d participated. It may have been due to that less-than-memorable experience that I never sought to be involved in the senior high yearbook or even with the regular monthly school newspaper.

In college, my friends Tony and Conrad first came up with their own take on an unofficial student paper, The Goliard; I believe they did manage to put out two issues, but no more than that. I did contribute a poem to one of the issues but otherwise had little to do with it. A year or two later, another student, Kevin, revived The Goliard and put out several much nicer-looking issues, but again I think at most I promised to submit something and never did.

However, during my college years I also became good friends with one of my younger sister’s friends from high school, Jay. Jay (and my younger sister) was more in touch with the modern alternative music scene than I was, and he was interested in zines, the small amateur-press photocopied magazines often connected to the underground rock scene. He put out the first version of his zine, Banner Bauhaus, just after he graduated from high school, and then a few years later as I was finishing college he revived and expanded his zine under a new title, The Maudlin Order. With the second issue of that version, I became involved as an editor, helping to get the various stories and articles into shape, and that began our off-and-on collaborative efforts as zine publishers. After another couple-year hiatus, in late 1996 we agreed to revive and rename the zine yet again, this time as The Park Bench.

For The Park Bench I played my most active role since elementary school, editing all of each issue’s content and writing some content myself. The zine was always Jay’s baby, though, and we clashed over it on occasion: I never wrote as much as he would’ve liked, and my writing was almost always done last-minute when Jay set a firm deadline for starting his layout and going to print, making him worry each time about having enough content. We did publish three issues in the first half of 1997, but then Jay felt burnt out again and quit; I finished up the third issue myself, but did not follow through with any further ones. We bounced back in 1999, putting out volume two in two issues that year and following on with another three-issue volume in 2000. Jay then moved to Los Angeles, and although he was there only a matter of months, the zine fell back into another long slumber.

Shortly after moving to Seattle, I joined LiveJournal and started blogging. For my first couple years my writing was very sporadic, but two things changed that: late in 2004 I decided that I wanted to attend concerts more regularly and should make a point of seeing at least one show a month, and early in 2005 I made a list of goals for the year which included posting in my journal at least once a week. Those two decisions naturally combined to start me writing reviews of the concerts I was attending, which increased along with my show attendance. After a couple years, I added a new goal of getting my music writing out to a wider audience, which I finally achieved this year when I started writing for the KEXP Blog.

Unfortunately, at the same time my journal writing dropped off this year. Mostly because of my dismal feelings about work and finances and my perceived failure to improve those situations, I was too disheartened to set down any goals for the year. Although writing weekly in my journal had seemed to become a habit, I couldn’t bring myself to keep writing publicly about how miserable I was feeling over those issues, nor did it seem a good idea to write much about my struggles with finding work. I also started feeling more pressure to be discreet about my dating efforts. The thing is, I’ve always felt that my online journal served a useful purpose by being public: I was able to work out my feelings and get troublesome thoughts out of my head through the process of journal writing, and by doing so in a public venue such as LiveJournal, I had the opportunity to get feedback and advice from friends without having to ask anyone to sit down and listen to my endless agonizing. Once I started feeling that I had to restrict my writing, avoid topics like work and friends-lock topics like dating, I lost the heart to write much at all. My journal became largely about music, and even that writing tapered off later this year as I developed a backlog of reviews to write and it started to feel like a chore.

This series of posts about my life was directly inspired by the drop-off in my personal writing this year. I was restless and unhappy that I hadn’t been writing, and wanted something to get me back into it; doing a series of 40 posts on 40 topics, leading up to my 40th birthday, was an obvious idea to accomplish that. I don’t yet know what will happen after that; I expect I’ll set down some goals to get myself back on track, and returning to writing weekly in my journal will be one of those goals. I also want to step up my writing for the KEXP Blog, and perhaps there are other opportunities I may want to pursue. It’s worth remembering that all those years ago in elementary school, I had a fun idea and without any real understanding of what it would take to make that happen, I pursued it and did make it happen. I can still do that.