Hey Buffy.
Sorry for the delay in responding. I just started a new job and it's been pretty hectic. I'm working for the College of Health and Human Services at San Francisco State University. It's a really great job though. I'm designing an information system to track all of their scheduling and financials. I've never worked on putting together anything this large before and there are a bunch of puzzles to unravel. It's great but it makes my brain hurt sometimes (and challenges my somewhat ever-taxed attention span as well).
My girlfriend's name is Michelle. We met in grad school in Wisconsin. She is finishing her dissertation on rhetoric and dance. She danced ballet professionally for a long time before going back to school so she likes to incorporate that life with this. She's currently teaching rhetoric and composition at the University of San Francisco. We've been together since 2006.
I left Denver in 1998 and moved back to dc where I eventually started working for another non-profit doing admin stuff. They needed a database to track participants in their economic development projects, so I told them I could do that. in a couple months I had the db done and they sent me to Siberia for four months to install it at the field offices all over. It was winter. brrr. i mean...f*ing brrr. That was a great time. That was 1999-2000 over the new year.
I was back in dc for a while building a larger version of the database and then went to Azerbaijan to install it there. On the way back, I hopped off the plane in Vienna and decided to move to prague. They were going to cut my hours back to 20 a week, so I said fine, but i can't live in DC on that salary. I was in prague for almost a year. That place was very hard on my system. I actually ended up screwing up a relationship that I was fostering long distance with someone that I'd been seeing before I left. I was going to come back from Prague and we were going to move to New York City together.
I got swept off my feet a couple weeks before I came back by this amazing Swedish (musician, chef, bohemian) woman and, based on the plan that she and I had made, was coming back to the US to say goodbye and then move to sweden. I broke up with Gina and then the Swedish woman (Molly) broke up with me. Justice indeed.
I did end up moving to NYC from DC (after a brief relationship in Chevy Chase which grew largely out of the fact that I needed a place to live...that was the third and final time I had a rent-relationship) in november 2001. Not a great time to be moving to new york.
I moved onto the couch of some guy i knew through my then girlfriend and who had told me that if i needed a place to stay I could crash on his couch (in his one bedroom apartment) until i got set up. Well, I was there for a year and half. We turned out to be really good friends...though I think he appreciated it also when we were friends and not roommates :)
I eventually got a temp job working for the National Basketball Association. I started out as a temp exec assistant to a VP there, and when the real assistant came back, the VP asked me to stay on. Of course, by that time I'd already made them a gob of database apps that they couldn't live without. It turns out i'm insidious like that.
I move to France in 2004. I lived and studied French in southwest france near Bayonne/Biarritz. I spent the summer there lazing through classes (I was nominally enrolled at Brooklyn College and this was my study abroad) and spending the afternoons hanging out with friends at the beach. good times.
I was supposed to study in Paris for the year, but, just before I'd gone to france, I ran into Gina (the one i broke up with, and with whom I had off and on tried to maintain a friendship, though at this point, we hadn't spoken in a while) on the street and we'd struck up a conversation. That turned into dating a bit before I left. While i was gone, I thought, hm. I screwed this up last time by not coming home. This time I'll come back and it should work then right? well, not so much.
I left france and came back to NYC. Gina and I moved in together and after about a year, a bad year, we busted up. Friends again. This was the beginning of the end of my Gina orbit. After another year in New York I had finished my degree (transferred the credits back to UMD). I decided to move out of New York and start fresh.
I moved to Madison with the intention of slowing down a bit and going to grad school. A couple months later applied to the school of Journalism and Mass Communication. I spent the first six months in Madison by myself. I did a bit of the monastic thing. I slept on the floor, contemplated, didnt cut my hair and I didnt work (thanks to the dramatic disparity between cost of living in Madison and NYC). It was a great decompression and it was the final exit from the mess I'd made of my life starting long before, but accelerated by my time in Prague.
I started grad school a year after moving there (yay in-state tuition!).
I really liked school. I met some great people and learned a lot. I went to Africa with a friend of mine and spent a month in Zanzibar (where I picked up a little work with another nonprofit doing database stuff...these things are everywhere!) which paid for week-long safari near Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Other than school in the last couple years, I've been involved with this thing called Burning Man. It's this great desert thing were 50 thousand people come together out in the desert of Nevada and make art and community together. I first went out in 2006. I contacted some people online who were looking to gather a collective to drive to the event together, share costs and shelter. I flew from Madison to Portland to meet people I didn't know and to drive from there to Nevada. It was a really fantastic trip, though we almost died several times on the way there. It was a death trap of a delivery van. I went out before Michelle and I started dating. But it turns out that we are both burners so it's one of the wonderful things we have in common.
I was out there for three weeks last year. Michelle and I went out there two weeks before the event started, when there were only a few hundred people out there building a massive city. We helped build a three-story, steel sculpture (we unloaded 12,000 pounds of steel mostly by hand from the back of a semi) fighting the heat and dust storms that lasted for days. It's challenging and paradigm altering. And then it's a week-long bohemian party.
Not sure if i'll make it out there this year. I prefer to go out there before it starts and help build art, but my artist is not going to be making something out there this year. we'll see.
So that's the brief catchup. Michelle and I are having a really great time out here. She is a good partner and, most importantly, seems to not only put up with me, but somehow manages to enjoy it.
I knew i was perhaps going to be in trouble on our third date. We had a good dinner and then we were heading back to her place (international third-date rules being what they are). We were walking up the stairs in her building and I laughed to myself. She asked me what I was laughing about, and I said that I had never been out with a date who even knew Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Battlestar Galactica, let alone bring all three of them up over the course of a conversation. Without missing a beat, or even turning around to look at me, she tossed out, "Well, that's bound to happen when you start dating women your own age."
Classic.
well, I think that's about everything. Man, i don't think i've written it all down like that before.
Most of it is documented, as you may have noticed, on my picassa site with photos from all the places i've been since college. You can see it at: http://picasaweb.google.com/rcatuw
Hope you're having a good day!
Rich
Sorry for the delay in responding. I just started a new job and it's been pretty hectic. I'm working for the College of Health and Human Services at San Francisco State University. It's a really great job though. I'm designing an information system to track all of their scheduling and financials. I've never worked on putting together anything this large before and there are a bunch of puzzles to unravel. It's great but it makes my brain hurt sometimes (and challenges my somewhat ever-taxed attention span as well).
My girlfriend's name is Michelle. We met in grad school in Wisconsin. She is finishing her dissertation on rhetoric and dance. She danced ballet professionally for a long time before going back to school so she likes to incorporate that life with this. She's currently teaching rhetoric and composition at the University of San Francisco. We've been together since 2006.
I left Denver in 1998 and moved back to dc where I eventually started working for another non-profit doing admin stuff. They needed a database to track participants in their economic development projects, so I told them I could do that. in a couple months I had the db done and they sent me to Siberia for four months to install it at the field offices all over. It was winter. brrr. i mean...f*ing brrr. That was a great time. That was 1999-2000 over the new year.
I was back in dc for a while building a larger version of the database and then went to Azerbaijan to install it there. On the way back, I hopped off the plane in Vienna and decided to move to prague. They were going to cut my hours back to 20 a week, so I said fine, but i can't live in DC on that salary. I was in prague for almost a year. That place was very hard on my system. I actually ended up screwing up a relationship that I was fostering long distance with someone that I'd been seeing before I left. I was going to come back from Prague and we were going to move to New York City together.
I got swept off my feet a couple weeks before I came back by this amazing Swedish (musician, chef, bohemian) woman and, based on the plan that she and I had made, was coming back to the US to say goodbye and then move to sweden. I broke up with Gina and then the Swedish woman (Molly) broke up with me. Justice indeed.
I did end up moving to NYC from DC (after a brief relationship in Chevy Chase which grew largely out of the fact that I needed a place to live...that was the third and final time I had a rent-relationship) in november 2001. Not a great time to be moving to new york.
I moved onto the couch of some guy i knew through my then girlfriend and who had told me that if i needed a place to stay I could crash on his couch (in his one bedroom apartment) until i got set up. Well, I was there for a year and half. We turned out to be really good friends...though I think he appreciated it also when we were friends and not roommates :)
I eventually got a temp job working for the National Basketball Association. I started out as a temp exec assistant to a VP there, and when the real assistant came back, the VP asked me to stay on. Of course, by that time I'd already made them a gob of database apps that they couldn't live without. It turns out i'm insidious like that.
I move to France in 2004. I lived and studied French in southwest france near Bayonne/Biarritz. I spent the summer there lazing through classes (I was nominally enrolled at Brooklyn College and this was my study abroad) and spending the afternoons hanging out with friends at the beach. good times.
I was supposed to study in Paris for the year, but, just before I'd gone to france, I ran into Gina (the one i broke up with, and with whom I had off and on tried to maintain a friendship, though at this point, we hadn't spoken in a while) on the street and we'd struck up a conversation. That turned into dating a bit before I left. While i was gone, I thought, hm. I screwed this up last time by not coming home. This time I'll come back and it should work then right? well, not so much.
I left france and came back to NYC. Gina and I moved in together and after about a year, a bad year, we busted up. Friends again. This was the beginning of the end of my Gina orbit. After another year in New York I had finished my degree (transferred the credits back to UMD). I decided to move out of New York and start fresh.
I moved to Madison with the intention of slowing down a bit and going to grad school. A couple months later applied to the school of Journalism and Mass Communication. I spent the first six months in Madison by myself. I did a bit of the monastic thing. I slept on the floor, contemplated, didnt cut my hair and I didnt work (thanks to the dramatic disparity between cost of living in Madison and NYC). It was a great decompression and it was the final exit from the mess I'd made of my life starting long before, but accelerated by my time in Prague.
I started grad school a year after moving there (yay in-state tuition!).
I really liked school. I met some great people and learned a lot. I went to Africa with a friend of mine and spent a month in Zanzibar (where I picked up a little work with another nonprofit doing database stuff...these things are everywhere!) which paid for week-long safari near Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Other than school in the last couple years, I've been involved with this thing called Burning Man. It's this great desert thing were 50 thousand people come together out in the desert of Nevada and make art and community together. I first went out in 2006. I contacted some people online who were looking to gather a collective to drive to the event together, share costs and shelter. I flew from Madison to Portland to meet people I didn't know and to drive from there to Nevada. It was a really fantastic trip, though we almost died several times on the way there. It was a death trap of a delivery van. I went out before Michelle and I started dating. But it turns out that we are both burners so it's one of the wonderful things we have in common.
I was out there for three weeks last year. Michelle and I went out there two weeks before the event started, when there were only a few hundred people out there building a massive city. We helped build a three-story, steel sculpture (we unloaded 12,000 pounds of steel mostly by hand from the back of a semi) fighting the heat and dust storms that lasted for days. It's challenging and paradigm altering. And then it's a week-long bohemian party.
Not sure if i'll make it out there this year. I prefer to go out there before it starts and help build art, but my artist is not going to be making something out there this year. we'll see.
So that's the brief catchup. Michelle and I are having a really great time out here. She is a good partner and, most importantly, seems to not only put up with me, but somehow manages to enjoy it.
I knew i was perhaps going to be in trouble on our third date. We had a good dinner and then we were heading back to her place (international third-date rules being what they are). We were walking up the stairs in her building and I laughed to myself. She asked me what I was laughing about, and I said that I had never been out with a date who even knew Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Battlestar Galactica, let alone bring all three of them up over the course of a conversation. Without missing a beat, or even turning around to look at me, she tossed out, "Well, that's bound to happen when you start dating women your own age."
Classic.
well, I think that's about everything. Man, i don't think i've written it all down like that before.
Most of it is documented, as you may have noticed, on my picassa site with photos from all the places i've been since college. You can see it at: http://picasaweb.google.com/rcatuw
Hope you're having a good day!
Rich
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