Shhh! 7 Secrets About Me

I’m not a fan of blogging a meme around, but Marc Meyer tagged me to share seven things that he and you may not know, not to mention this occurred several lines underneath his confession of being a hippie once upon a time, so who am I to not play along?

First: During my preteen years, I was a Cub Scout. I progressed through the Tiger, Bobcat, Wolf, and Webelos awards. I quit shortly after receiving my “Arrow of Light,” marked by a literal bridge-crossing ceremony in the middle of a room that symbolized the shift between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts.

This photo shows me at 8. I enjoyed scouting and met many friends in my “den” (as the group was called). I recently saw one of my den-mates at a Jewish networking event. It was surreal.

Second: You wouldn’t realize it from my early adoption of internet technologies, but I am a late blossomer in other things. For instance, I lost my first baby tooth at 10 1/2. It took a couple years for all my teeth to fall out. I wore braces throughout high school. I’ve never had my wisdom teeth extracted.

I lost that tooth during my first summer away from home, at Camp Wingate * Kirkland. I attended for five summers. I met many people there, including Twitter user Seth Bloom. Britney Spears briefly used the Cape Cod camp for a dance school.

Third: I don’t drink coffee. I used to be addicted to the stuff, but one day in 2004, I quit. No reason. I had started a new job and figured why not? Oddly, my three immediate managers since didn’t drink coffee, either.

Fourth: A year before internet addiction was spoofed by a doctor in 1995 (leading to American Medical Association talks last year), I was hooked on an interactive role-playing Dungeons & Dragons-like LPMud called Infinity, of which a website was built after the mud died.

My addiction was very distracting, as I was in college and my classwork suffered; at one point, my cumulative GPA dropped to a zero-point-three. I remember a time, as bright as the sun, when my character “died,” slain by some dragon, and during an automatic process when I recycled from human to ghost (and losing a level, before praying and getting whole again), I cried in the academic library. Then, I laughed, wondering how insane I became, crying over an internet game.

But we had mudding meetups, not unlike Twitter meetups. Twitter can be very distracting, but it can also be very productive. There was no productivity with mudding, other than slaying monsters. However, for what it’s worth, my mudding experience was a direct cause to evangelizing the internet in college newspaper stories and ultimately taking a semester off from college and working in tech support for an internet provider two years later.

Fifth: I cry during movies involving separation, such as the end of “Armageddon.” This is directly related to my dad’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1995. My last memory of Dad was 11 p.m. during summer break when I came home late after almost spending the night with a friend who I knew through Infinity. I’d rung the bell, not having a key to the house, and Dad met me in a slumber, wearing a white undershirt and boxers. He asked me if I had a good time. I said yes. And he said he looked forward to having breakfast with me and Mom in the morning.

The morning came and my sister and I were awaken by a neighbor who said our parents were walking with the dog around the neighborhood when Dad collapsed. Sis and I drove to the hospital to find Mom and those neighbors in the “Quiet Room” when a doctor soon entered and said, “I’m sorry.”

Mom and sis turned into Niagara Falls. I was confused. Sorry about what? I wanted to know. I was 19 and he was three weeks shy of 47.

Later that summer, my parents would have celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. It was around that time when I first cried for my dad. My tears are more routine now, especially during sappy movies.

I write about Dad sometimes, most notably over the summer about my experiences leading to blogging, and a year earlier about sadness in Jerusalem.

Sixth: I am “an inveterate traveler,” as the Boston Center for Adult Education once described me in their catalog for a series of Great American Road Trip classes I taught in 2002. I toured through most of western Europe in 1999, visited Alaska in 2000, and journeyed through 20+ U.S. states and half of Canada in 2001.

Visiting Alaska was like walking into National Geographic magazine. That’s the best analogy I can relate. Here’s a picture of me a few hundred miles into the North Pole with the Eskimo village of Anaktuvuk Pass in the background:

Seventh: I am allergic to aspirin. Advil, Ibuprofen, Motrin. If you give me it, be prepared to rush me to the ER and inject me with Benadryl.

There you go.

As memes, by design, must be passed around and echoed by others, I tag seven people to join me and everyone else before me (Beth Harte, Amber Cadabra, David Mullen, Shannon Paul, etc.) by following these rules:

• Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged

I tag the following seven people, frequent commenters on my blog, to continue this on their blogs:

Craig Kessler, Kim Woodbridge, David Bradley, Andy Krzmarzick, Josh Fialkoff, Dave Atkins, and Kristi of Kikolani.com.

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