101 Things

I was born on August 29th, 1972, just before 9:30 P.M. local time.
I grew up in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and even went to college there. Arkadelphia is a town of 10,000 in southern Arkansas, with a nearby lake (man-made in the year of my birth). The closest towns of notable size were Hot Springs, where the Mafia used to vacation and where folks go to bet on horses, and Little Rock.
Despite the small size, Arkadelphia has two colleges, Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson State University. Because of this, Arkadelphia was something of a hot-bed of liberalism as viewed by people in the surrounding counties. My dad teaches history and runs the library at OBU; my mom is a high school english teacher. This left me with something of a split personality: educated intellectual on one hand, country bumpkin on the other.
I have a slight southern accent which thickens in the presence of my extended family and, inexplicably, car mechanics.
I discovered that some people are fascinated by southern accents the summer my family and I spent in Ithaca, NY, while my dad attended a conference at Cornell. My dad and mom grew up in south Alabama; while my dad's accent is, like mine, not overly pronounced, my mom's is. We would check out of the grocery store and the salesclerk would say, "You're from the south! Say something again!" It was all very odd.
In third grade my school considered bumping me up a grade. My parents discussed it, but decided against it.
Instead, I was moved into a class taught by an extremely competent teacher. I had her for third and fourth grade. In fourth, as an experiment, she let four of us set our own schedule of homework, tests, reading, and the like. By the time the year was over I was doing work normally reserved for sixth graders.
My fifth grade classes were normal fifth grade classes. I was very bored that year.
In sixth grade, all of the cool guys in my class permed their hair. I wasn't cool enough to do this, so left my hair in a shapeless mass of bangs.
When I look at my old yearbook pictures from sixth grade, I am very glad I was not cool that year.
In seventh grade I was on the yearbook staff. Our yearbook was put together using rubber cement and typewritten labels. Our school principal was a man named Mr. Forte, who was promoted far beyond his level of competence. As a joke, my best friend and I took the typewritten label for his picture and added a small tail to the "o" in his name, making it look like an "a".
This bit of tomfoolery escaped the eye of our teacher, and all of the yearbooks were printed with our principal's name listed as "Mr. Farte." This enraged him to the point that all of our yearbooks were confiscated, altered so as to alter the offending label, and returned to us.
I conveniently kept forgetting to bring in my yearbook, so it's not been altered.
My original intent upon completing high school was to go to Swarthmore or possibly Oberlin. I was accepted to Swarthmore on early admission.
However, Swarthmore believed my family could pay far more than they might be comfortable in doing. My dad said it could be done, but I saw into his eyes.
The day I made the pragmatic decision to attend OBU for free and save money for a kick-ass graduate school, the day my college dream died, was my third major hint that on occasion life makes sudden and dramatic turns.
My first was when my dad was forced from the history department into the library at OBU. This was part of a plot by the chairman of the history department, in collusion with OBU's then-president, to remove one of the more credible threats to his chairmanship.
My second was when my mom, who used to work in OBU's library as a reference librarian, was fired as fallout from the above plot.
In college I was part of the Major-of-the-Month Club. However, I missed the step wherein you drop your old major. I graduated with a B.S. in physics and chemistry and a B.A. in theatre arts (with a math minor). Of course, it took me five years to do so.
As part of my theatre arts degree, I spent a semester in the UK at Bretton Hall studying drama -- mostly Commedia dell'Arte. I was Arlecchino in our performances, and ended up bruising one of my hips terribly as I had to fall on it a lot.
That semester was one of the best experiences of my life. I started out being incredibly homesick for about a month, then suddenly found I was over that. I learned a lot of improvisational performance and became much more self-reliant. At one point I decided I wanted to see Edinburgh, so I hopped a train, went up there, and wandered around by myself for a weekend. My friends, including the one who had visited America the year before as part of the exchange program and wandered around Chicago in a similar manner, were horrified.
If you want to be generous, you could call me a passable actor. I was a really good director, though, and thought about going on to grad school to get my MFA.
Instead I ended up going into physics, specifically at Duke University.
I smoked for a while in England, but gave it up pretty quickly.
The only times I drank alcohol was when it was legal for me to do so. This meant that my first drink occurred when I was in England.
Other than that, I've tried no illegal drugs, though I did inhale a lot of glue fumes when I used to put together model airplanes.
My first girlfriend was...interesting. On occasion she seemed to think she was a vampire. Her mom had mid-stage Parkinson's, and used to joke how much her cat liked her disease, since it meant the cat got petted almost continuously.
If I ever have an incurable progressive disease, I can only hope to have as much strength of character as my ex-girlfriend's mother did.
I've been married since graduating from OBU. I'm still amazed that there's someone who knows all these things about me and my habits and still is interested in being married to me.
Misty and I met on the library steps my second year at OBU. I'd been trying to date her roommate, who promptly jumped out of the way. Misty actually worked for my dad in the library, but he studiously avoided bringing us together, even though he thought we'd be perfect. It was raining that day, and I was carrying this gigantic golf umbrella that was big enough for two people with room left over for everyone who lives in Guam. She remembers my eyes; I remember her laugh.
We didn't date, but near the end of the year I called to talk to her roommate, Missy. Misty answered the phone, crying. "Put on some shoes," I told her. "We're going to get some food and then talk." She had just had a terrible conversation with her then-boyfriend.
The next semester I was in England, but when I came back (with shoulder-length hair, no less), we dated for a while. Then she dumped me.
She wanted to get back together some time later, but I'd been down that road before. Nuh-uh. No way.
We did get back together, and married a year later after graduating.
I am a Christian. If you're into sectarianism, I'm Southern Baptist by heritage and choice. I suspect, though, that the more modern strain of Southern Baptists would think of denying my claim.
I come from a family of preachers. My grandfather on my dad's side and two of his brothers were preachers, and there were a number of others in that branch of the family.
My granddad baptized me. He married Misty and me; he also married my mom and dad, and my brother and his wife.
I began wearing glasses when I was in the second grade. I moved to hard contacts in the third, because my optometrist, like many others, had this wack-ass theory that the rigid structure of hard contacts would slow down the deterioration of my eyes.
Just three months ago I switched to soft contacts, nine diopters each. I can sleep in these.
Of course, that's what they said about gas permeable hard contacts back in 1991 or so, then promptly recanted a year later.
I had a number of troubles with pre-school and kindergarten. In pre-school, I was unable to skip, and was convinced I wouldn't be able to pass. After about a week of intensive work with my parents, I learned how to skip, as well as how to gambol and cavort. In kindergarten, I had a teacher who decided I was a socially maladjusted trouble-maker, since I would hug the other kids from time to time and could never stay very still during nap time. This teacher told my parents that she was afraid I was slow, and that I should be tested.
I was the oldest child, and my parents didn't know enough to tell the old hag that she was an idiot. Instead, they got a friend of theirs at OBU in the psychology department to give me a battery of tests, including IQ. I measured somewhere around 160, as I recall.
When I was young, I was diagnosed as being borderline hyperactive, this being the days before the term "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" gained currency. The testing took a while, and at one point I had to lie on a table with electrodes on my head for an hour or so. I had real trouble lying still.
I was put on Ritalin for a few years. At first the dosage was too high and I was rather zombie-like, but the doctor quickly lowered the dosage. I also learned to control my habit of flying about uncontrollably. My mom still feels incredibly guilty about putting me on Ritalin, though I don't know why. It's done me no lasting harm.
As one of the side effects of my brain chemistry, I tend to pick up and discard projects at a terrific clip. Paradoxically, I am readily able to focus intently on something, as long as that something doesn't last for too long. When reading I am often oblivious to everything around me.
In addition, I become mildly addicted to things on occasion, especially foods. There was a six-month stretch of time in graduate school when I craved Subway sandwiches for no good reason.
While I am on foods, I am overly fond of chocolate, cheese, and pasta.
My first job was at McDonald's. The day I was hired, they were short of cashiers, so I was assigned to the register instead of to the kitchen and its terribly frightening clamshell ovens. I was the only male on register.
The training videos were very simplistic. Happy people showed me how to work the register, which then still had words instead of pictograms, and reminded me not to steal.
If, at the end of your shift, your drawer was less that $5 from what it should be according to the register, you got little slips of paper that could later be turned in for prizes. If you were more than $20 over or under, there was trouble to be had. The $5 range was a surprisingly-hard target: after eight hours of work, you tended to be off by $6 or $7 in either direction.
The job wasn't too demanding. After I'd been there for two months, one of the girls who often worked drive-through was sick. The swing manager was short-handed, so asked if I thought I could handle the pressure of drive-through. I said I could, so she gave me the five-minute rundown. Thirty minutes later, the manager came by and told me, "You picked that up faster than anyone else I've ever seen."
When I left McDonald's, it was to go to OBU. I told them I probably wouldn't be working there again, but they encouraged me to keep my uniforms "just in case." These days those uniforms are in the costume department of the OBU theatre.
The most drudge-like job I had was carrying new mattresses into the dorms at OBU. I gained a new respect for how hard it is to manhandle large, light, and extremely floppy squares of material. Plus the mattresses were still encased in their plastic, which we couldn't remove. After the third day the skin around my knuckles was mostly scab.
This is why I quickly began tutoring and teaching to earn money. I like teaching, and I'm damn good at it. I ended up being awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching at Duke one semester. Two of those are handed out each semester to TAs, and are chosen by students.
The theatre thing helps with the teaching thing: even if I'm not comfortable, I'm at least able to stand up in front of people, project my voice, and look like I'm enjoying myself.
The teaching event which I'm convinced earned me my Dean's Award had little to do with teaching. The large classroom in which I was teaching had been newly renovated, and had nifty new touchpad controls for dimming and raising the lights. These controls were on the table at the front of the room, under a glass pane. On one occasion I bumped the controls and plunged the room into darkness, then wasn't able to get the lights back on until I fumbled my way to a side door that led out into a courtyard, opened it to let some light in, then returned to the table to turn the lights back on. A week later it happened again, and I managed to get the lights turned back on right away, having practiced since the last time. "Who's your daddy?!?" I said, forgetting I was mic'ed at the time.

The laughter didn't stop for a few minutes.
What I'd really like to do is be a Gentleman Scholar of Leisure, allowing me to work on the projects I find interesting. I imagine I'd get a lot more IF written that way.
I have night terrors every few months. In general I am convinced that there is a spider on my face, or there are people in the room trying to kill me. On one memorable occasion I realized that there were laser beams in the room, and that those beams were about to cut me into ribbons. I rolled off the bed and crouched on the floor, then realized Misty was in danger. I woke her up and incoherently told her to drop to the floor. It took me a few minutes to wake up completely.
Possibly related with this, I have moments of thunderbolt-from-the-blue existential terror. What if this is all there is, and I die, and that's it? When these moments strike as I am, say, stepping off the curb, they're damned inconvenient.
I like guns. Part of this is the experimental physicist in me: here's a moderately complex mechanism that's powered by simple physics and is extremely well designed. Part of this is that I like shooting guns, and for a time was a good shot.
I don't get the NRA at all. Guns are dangerous things, and are designed to throw little bits of metal terrifically fast. And access to them should be more free?
For a number of years I was a fat kid. There's a snapshot of me from Space Camp when I was twelve. I'm strapped into one of the spring-tensioned chairs that is meant to simulate what it's like to run on the moon. I look like an age-regressed version of Old Elvis in, appropriately enough, a NASA jumpsuit.
Around fifteen or so that weight suddenly went away, banished by the magic wand of puberty. Only now do I weigh more than I did when I was thirteen and fourteen.
I wish I had more hair, a problem I solved by shaving my head. I have a number of complaints about my body, beginning with the excess of moles which has the side benefit of keeping me from tanning worth anything. My best features, as determined by independent corroboration, are my eyes and my butt.
My social skills were mostly acquired consciously. I had only a few friends in middle school, and didn't quite understand how people related to each other. So I started paying attention to other people and how small talk and the like are done.
Because of this I'm something of a social chameleon, tending to fit in where I can.
In addition, it often feels as if there is a wedge between my brain and my body. (I'll sidestep the question of dualism for now and just point out that this is how it feels.) For a while, as I went through life, I would discover that my brain was happily composing the novel version.
When I was a teenager, I was acutely aware of being left out of things. Though I temper it as much as possible, I still have this terrible rending sense of loss when I feel I am being left out.
A corollary: because of this, I am hypersensitive to other people being left out. You really have to annoy me for me to be able to ignore this.
I want to be liked by people. If I work very hard at it, I can be actively unpleasant, but it takes a fair amount of willpower to do so. "Like me!" seems to be my rather stirring battle cry.
Like veek, I tend towards a haptic interface, though being from Arkansas I don't use terms like "haptic," preferring "touch-feely." This was a major component of my theatre classes, which was nice. This is rather frowned upon in the physics community, so Misty bears the brunt of my haptic habits.
My temper is violent, and held in check by long practice.
When I was little, I was often in fights. On one memorable occasion, in fourth grade, I was in a fight with a guy on the playground. It was one of those fourth-grade fights in which the combatants circle each other slowly and occasionally slap at each other. This annoying girl named Lee Ann who lived next door joined the crowd watching us. "Kick his ass, Matthew!" she called to the other guy in this nasal whine.

Until then, I had no idea that the term "blind rage" could be literally true. The world went red, then white for a while. When I could see again, I was bemused to see that my hands were around Lee Ann's neck, and I was bouncing her against the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, and people were pulling me off her.
As Matthew, Lee Ann and I were trudging to the office of the ever-so-terrifying Mr. Forte, Lee Ann kept going on and on about how she couldn't believe I'd hit a girl, what was I thinking, that was terrible of me! Eventually I got tired of her stream-of-consciousness ranting and said, "Yeah? Well, I'd do it again." "I'm telling Mr. Forte!" she wailed. I'd have been more concerned if a) she wasn't a twit and a schemer, and b) it had been someone other than Mr. Forte.
Mr. Forte consoled Lee Ann, then brought Matthew and me into his office. "I'm not going to punish you boys this time," he told us, "but if I find out you've been fighting again, I'm going to paddle you both twice."
My temper got me in plenty of trouble in ninth grade. I was having an argument with a boy just before band. He ended up slapping me. I started to kick him, then stopped short. The guy shook his head, turning away from me and laughing at me.

That was it. The world did its red-then-white thing, and when I could see again I was raining blows down on his head and back while he cowered in the fetal position. Apparently when I lunged at him my arm caught on a band stand, which flew across the band room as if I'd thrown it deliberately.
For that escapade I was suspended for a day. I missed a physical sciences test, which brought my nine-weeks grade down to a B. My semester grade was still an A, which is the only thing that counted towards calculating GPA, so I didn't care. My popularity in the school soared, and I ended up being good friends with the guy I fought.
When my parents came to pick me up from school, my mom was distraught. "How could you?" she said, and "I can't believe you did that?" My dad had but one question: "Did you get any good licks in?"
Don't feel too bad for my mom. A few years before that I had gotten into a shoving match with another student before choir. The choir teacher, who had a large thick oak paddle with holes drilled in it, told me she was going to spank me but good. Mrs. Evanson relented and called my mom, who said, "He needs to know teachers will follow through on what they say. Paddle him."
Mrs. Evanson had an incredibly painful paddling method. You bent over, hands on knees, and she wound up that paddle and smacked you one-two-three, with plenty of follow-through. She had to move forward to apply strokes two and three, since you went stumbling forward. I couldn't sit down comfortably for the rest of the day.
The other paddling I got was in P.E. This was during my fat phase, and we were doing relay races. No one wanted me on their team, and when we assembled before the race, one of my teammates growled at me, "You'd better run fast." Instead, I strolled down the relay course at slower-than-walking speed. My team was yelling at me, but my brain reinterpreted their shouts as cheers.
The P.E. instructor took me into his office and took down the strip of flexible plastic he used as a paddle. "You've got to understand, Stephen. P.E. is like a simulation of life. It's not perfect, but it's one of the better ones we've got." He talked like that for another five minutes, then paddled me three times. The paddling was less painful than the lecture.
I am exactly like my brother but extremely different. We even look the same in dissimilar ways. These days he is in graduate school at UIUC, working on becoming a musicologist. While we tormented each other a fair amount growing up, he's four years younger than I am so we never really competed directly. At this point he is one of my best friends.
In fact, I have a really good relationship with all of my family.
I have yet to have anyone who is really close to me die.
I took piano lessons for sixteen years, including in college. I haven't played in about eight years, though, so I'd have a lot of work to get good once more.
I also played trombone, though for not nearly as long.
My singing voice is good, though mostly untrained. I am a baritone.
Though not very active as a kid, I've become moreso as I've aged. When I got to Duke I started riding my bike a lot, for instance, and playing racquetball, which I used to do with my dad.
Much of this came to an end when I began having knee problems. The tendons in my left leg no longer pull equally, resulting in my kneecap being dragged up and in instead of merely up. This irritates the cartilage, causing pain.
The problem is caused by how deeply I flex my knee, not how much stress I put on it. For this reason I've taken up running and jogging, though most of the time I go to the gym next to Duke and use the elliptical machines. The ellipses described by the machines' pedals are not tall enough to aggravate my knee problem, and are low impact so I won't further mess up my knees.
Just about my favorite place to be is at the beach along the Gulf of Mexico. The blue-green water, the white sand, all are extremely soothing.
My reasons for liking the beach tend to be different from the partygoers in Panama City, so I want to go to more secluded sections along the Gulf.
My family has roots around Grayton, Florida, which started life as a small artists' colony, and to this day retains much of that feel. I expect the developers will put a stop to that, though, in the next ten years.
I read voraciously. Misty and my apartment is covered in books. When I was young I read mainly genre fiction, specifically science fiction, fantasy, and mythology. As I grew up I learned about characterization and other such literary folderol, and my reading tastes grew.
In fact, I'll devour most forms of media. I have a running list of TV shows I think are great. I enjoy going to the movies. I like reading comic books and listening to music.
I'm a passable writer. I suspect that I'd be good enough with practice to turn out mid-level science fiction. But, enh, the practice thing.
Graduate school's first indelible lesson for me has been that I am not as smart as I think I am, and am in no wise destined for great things.
Its second lesson is that I'm happier that way. Being merely mediocre is not in and of itself bad, especially when the competition against which I'm comparing myself are several standard deviations to the right of the general population.
Part of my problem is that I wish to do everything, and do it all rather well. Remember that ol' hyperactivity thing? It makes it hard for me to stick with something.
I have elaborate structures built up in my head to let me keep working on things far beyond the point where my natural tendency is to say, "Ooh, shiny!" and run on to something else.

Ooh, shiny!