Red Militante

The abridged version of my life since Jr. High is that I went to Hersey for a year and a half, moved to Barrington and finished high school in Barrington (it's always pleasant to transfer high schools junior year). Then I started college at Boston University, but wound up changing my major, moving home for a semester, then transferring to Indiana University for the remainder of my undergrad. I got a ba in math, but I didn't use my degree after college and instead moved to New York City with some vague plans of playing guitar in a band and living the party life, which didn't exactly pan out. I lived in Manhattan for five years, during that time I started working as a consultant for a tech firm, and I taught myself stuff like basic TCP/IP networking and programming in C. Eventually I was accepted to a Master's program at Northwestern, and moved home to attend school. I wound up working at NU as a programmer, then was recruited by some friends to work at a similar position at University of Chicago.

The past couple of years have been really tumultuous for me. I started living with, and finally got married to the most amazing woman. We were not engaged for more than two weeks before we found out that we were pregnant. So we had a shotgun wedding at the Cook County Courthouse to appease my parents, and a nice reception this summer in Michigan where my wife is from. Our baby was born in September, and we've been adjusting to being new parents the past few months - getting up in the middle of the night, changing diapers, driving an extra half hour out of our way in the morning to drop Nina off with her grandma while we're at work. I'm really happy these days, though. I'm satisfied with staying home with my wife and baby, watching movies or reading, exploring the city together when the weather's warm, trying out new restaurants. Lately I've taken up running, I've run a few 10k races and am training for a half marathon in the summer sometime.

I transferred to St. James after being 'kicked out' of my previous Jr. High for bad behavior. I was a wild, irresponsible kid with an attitude problem. I didn't arrive at any type of maturity until well into adulthood.

At the time I really hated it, as I had already settled on a group of friends at my old Jr. High, it was weird for me as I still lived close to my old classmates but I didn't go to school with them anymore, so I had this feeling of being disconnected. I remember being in 'trouble' a lot, and I think I was able to manage good grades although I was always stressed due to the pressure of waiting til the last minute to complete assignments.

I'm getting old, I guess. I can think of very few incidents, perhaps you guys will enlighten me. I remember going to church a lot, our teachers, Mrs. Ditmer(?), the one funny teacher who liked Garfield, Mr. McNamara(?) the gym teacher. I remember 'recess', being able to drift from group to group (probably the last time in my life I ever felt like a social butterfly). I remember a lot of names and faces - I still remember you guys a lot more vividly than I do even people I went to college with. I actually came away with a really good general impression of my St. James classmates - on the whole smarter, classier, nicer than people at my old Jr. High, or the people I went to high school with.

I don't have any tattoos but I grew my hair out long and had a pierced nose during college (the Grunge years).