My Life in Photos
Jimmy Carter was president when I was born near the Grand Canyon, in a tiny hospital in Williams, AZ. My grandmother's Mormon Bishop (Dr. Bates) delivered me. Pulled me out with forceps. (Once when recounting my birth, I messed up and said Dr. Bates pulled me out with "triceps". I suppose that is also partly true, albeit irrelevant.)
Two years later, my platinum-haired little sister came along.
My father owned a gas station in a dodgy part of the Phoenix sprawl, a ne'er-do-well place in the shadows of Mesa and ASU -- Apache Junction (AJ). That is, he owned it until the gas station failed in 1993. A freeway was built that kept winter travelers from driving through AJ on their way to Tucson, so people stopped stopping in AJ for gas.
Both parents barely graduated high school and had few wage-earning options. Dad died at 59 in a van with a rolled cigarette between his nicotine-stained fingers and a beer between his legs. He had disguised a baseball that was sticking out of his neck with a ZZ Top beard and had sunk into such an immobilizing depression that he was living in the van, parked at a friend's house. His laryngeal cancer wasn't diagnosed until autopsy, since he had no insurance and would literally rather have died than be hospitalized. (I used "literally" correctly here, by the way -- versus figuratively. He really did literally prefer death to giving up his autonomy, what was left of his dignity, and perhaps more importantly, his beer and cigarettes.)
I left home at 13 years old and have purposely had little contact with my biological family for decades. I put myself through college and graduate school.
There's a major gap in the photos: bupkis from 1989-2009. Those are the Dark Ages. Scant photo evidence exists for the survivalist years as a young teen and the early wonders of all higher education had to offer.
During the Dark Ages, a lot happened. I skipped grades (three in total), got two degrees in linguistics (a BA in speech pathology and audiology and an MA-TESL in applied linguistics) and an MTS in divinity (I'm an atheist and more-or-less culturally Jewish, but you'll have to wait for that explanation). I spent a summer in Papua New Guinea and learned Tok Pisin, a creole spoken there. I traveled to Taizé, a monastic village in the Saône-et-Loire region of Burgundy in France. Four years later I became a (temporary) monk: I lived as a Zen monastic at San Francisco Zen Center for three years, just like Leonard Cohen: with black robes, gongs, and poetry about the height of the moon. I even got a Japanese Buddhist name: Kogetsu Hekishin.
This all culminated with a job in genetics in Seattle, naturally. Notice that that last sentence is intended to come out of nowhere like the final line in a haiku. It's the pirouette to my current life. For nearly 15 years, I've been building a career in the crosshairs of genetics, epidemiology, and bioinformatics. You can see my CV for details about that.
I currently live in Brookline, Massachusetts, the most educated town in the US! Fourteen percent of those who live in Brookline have doctorates. It's a shame I don't know anyone here, due to COVID. But the brownstones and Queen Anne architecture are beautiful.
Two years later, my platinum-haired little sister came along.
My father owned a gas station in a dodgy part of the Phoenix sprawl, a ne'er-do-well place in the shadows of Mesa and ASU -- Apache Junction (AJ). That is, he owned it until the gas station failed in 1993. A freeway was built that kept winter travelers from driving through AJ on their way to Tucson, so people stopped stopping in AJ for gas.
Both parents barely graduated high school and had few wage-earning options. Dad died at 59 in a van with a rolled cigarette between his nicotine-stained fingers and a beer between his legs. He had disguised a baseball that was sticking out of his neck with a ZZ Top beard and had sunk into such an immobilizing depression that he was living in the van, parked at a friend's house. His laryngeal cancer wasn't diagnosed until autopsy, since he had no insurance and would literally rather have died than be hospitalized. (I used "literally" correctly here, by the way -- versus figuratively. He really did literally prefer death to giving up his autonomy, what was left of his dignity, and perhaps more importantly, his beer and cigarettes.)
I left home at 13 years old and have purposely had little contact with my biological family for decades. I put myself through college and graduate school.
There's a major gap in the photos: bupkis from 1989-2009. Those are the Dark Ages. Scant photo evidence exists for the survivalist years as a young teen and the early wonders of all higher education had to offer.
During the Dark Ages, a lot happened. I skipped grades (three in total), got two degrees in linguistics (a BA in speech pathology and audiology and an MA-TESL in applied linguistics) and an MTS in divinity (I'm an atheist and more-or-less culturally Jewish, but you'll have to wait for that explanation). I spent a summer in Papua New Guinea and learned Tok Pisin, a creole spoken there. I traveled to Taizé, a monastic village in the Saône-et-Loire region of Burgundy in France. Four years later I became a (temporary) monk: I lived as a Zen monastic at San Francisco Zen Center for three years, just like Leonard Cohen: with black robes, gongs, and poetry about the height of the moon. I even got a Japanese Buddhist name: Kogetsu Hekishin.
This all culminated with a job in genetics in Seattle, naturally. Notice that that last sentence is intended to come out of nowhere like the final line in a haiku. It's the pirouette to my current life. For nearly 15 years, I've been building a career in the crosshairs of genetics, epidemiology, and bioinformatics. You can see my CV for details about that.
I currently live in Brookline, Massachusetts, the most educated town in the US! Fourteen percent of those who live in Brookline have doctorates. It's a shame I don't know anyone here, due to COVID. But the brownstones and Queen Anne architecture are beautiful.
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