5 Things

Know thyself and Nothing in

excess

(inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at

Delphi)

Since I’ve now been ‘tagged’ with the 5 Things meme thing, in the spirit of

the first aphorism above I’ll share a bit about myself. I’m not a fan of chain letters

(or, in this case, chain blog posts?), but I confess that I have enjoyed

learning more about the personal lives of some of my favorite bloggers. So on

the off chance that some of my readers would like to know a bit more about me,

I’ll play along…

In high school some of my buddies and I created the South Lakes High School Sleeping

Club. We had a motto: “We sleep around” (we even had buttons made!). On random

weekend nights we’d sleep on some unsuspecting girl’s lawn and, if we were

lucky, sometimes get invited in the next morning for breakfast. We thought we

were so cool…

I have what my wife might call an inexplicable fascination with a few key TV

shows and comic strips from my childhood: Looney

Tunes

Beaver

is one of the (unintentionally) funniest shows of all time.

I’m a huge baseball fan and grew up idolizing Mike Schmidt. I told my

professors during my first summer of doctoral

coursework

that I would be leaving class early to see the best third baseman

of all time get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and that

they would just have to figure out with me how I could satisfy the rest of my

course requirements. I think the conversation went something like this: “You

want to miss several weeks of your doctoral courses for WHAT?” “It’s a

once-in-a-lifetime event. I have to go now or miss it forever.” “Oh. Umm…

okay.” Kudos to them for helping me figure it out (’cause I was going no matter

what!). Definitely the highlight of my sports fandom.

I almost flunked out my freshman year at college: a classic case of a kid with a repressive

parent letting loose in a completely unstructured environment. If you told my

former hallmates that I now had a law degree and a doctoral degree and was

teaching at a major research university, they’d laugh in your face. I later

posted that freshman year report card in my classroom to show my eighth-graders

that you can come back from adversity. Not sure any of them bought it (maybe if

I had been making millions instead of a first-year teacher salary…). [On a side note, that middle school’s mascot was the wapiti.]

I have the three cutest, nicest, smartest kids on the planet. I know you

think your kids (or grandkids) are, but actually mine are. Really.

now that I’ve shared, in the spirit of the second aphorism above I’ll cut off my part

of the chain here. Tag, no one’s it.

Happy New Year, everyone.