You're It

It appears that I have been tagged by Assistant Village Idiot with the instructions that I blog five things about myself that I never have before, and potentially tag five others. I may have to take a pass on the second (or at least do a much smaller list) because the majority of the bloggers that I read are much higher in the food chain than I, and as AVI notes, to tag any of them would be highly presumptuous.

So, five things...

1. Every once in a while I Google the names of old college friends. This started several years ago when I tried (successfully after a bit) to get back in touch with my former design professor, who is now an Emmy Award winning designer on the West Coast.

This morning, I think I found two others, both women. One I'm not so sure of, but the other I'm pretty certain, as her name is unusual to begin with, the age is right, and the information shows connections to Boston.

Now what do I do?

As for guys, with the exception of my prof, they've either not gotten written up or otherwise attached to the web, or their names are so common that a web search (without more recent or identifying info on them) is futile. Or more likely, I'm not very good at hunting people on the web....

UPDATE: I don't know why I didn't think of this when I first posted, I recently found my Costume Design professor through Flickr. I also just found my best friend from college (so much for the theory on guys-on-the-internet) and we've emailed each other.

2. I have asthma. When I am stressed it is worse, and can physically make me sick.

I am also a self-stress-monger. Bad combination.

I know, TMI.

3. My wife and I had known each other for almost three years before our first date. She and I had been great buddies, having all sorts of interesting conversations about topics that no one else we knew cared much about, and one day, when I knew that she was down in the dumps, I suggested that we get together for a cup of coffee and just catch up. Through a comedy of errors (worthy of a Shakespearian play) our plans for a morning cup-o-joe morphed into an evening at an art gallery where we were to meet several other couples and then go out for desert. Though they all showed up, we somehow never found each other and so my future wife and I gave up, walked to the Blue Diner (now renamed) on Kneeland St, and had coffee and a desert. We fell in love. Then in three months she moved to D.C. After a bit she came back to Boston, and (being a bit old fashioned) I asked her to "go steady".

The week after that, at church, I went to introduce her to an old friend and completely blanked on her name. (She still ribs me about that.)

I was a bit freaked out that she was ten years younger than I and so I started adding to her age in my head, until I told someone in front of her and she corrected me.

Two years and one day after that botched attempt at a prosaic and platonic cup of coffee we were married.

4. My father was an electrical engineer, and my mother was trained in the arts. Both were bibliophiles, history buffs, and continually seeking new knowledge for themselves. As a result I grew up surrounded by art and history books which I avidly read. My mother loved my creativity and always encouraged it. However, my dad taught me critical thinking and problem solving. When I gave up Physics in college for Theatre Design it took me six months to tell him (and almost another six months before he would really speak to me again). When my family came to the first show for which I designed the set, my freshman physics department advisor and his actress daughter came as well. He congratulated me in front of my dad for making a good choice for going into the Theatre. It still took me a while before I stopped feeling guilty.

Looking back on it, my dad, with all his stories of scratch-made machinery and creative thinking in engineering, was the greatest influence on my becoming an artist.

5. I'm probably smarter than I was when I was twenty. When I was twenty, I wasn't half as smart as I thought I was.