autumn tactics

Today I have to say goodbye to someone very important. Today I have to say goodbye to my mentor, Randy Pausch. Randy died today after a two year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was my inspiration and my teacher. He came into my life when I was lost and aimless, and he gave me something to live and dream for. He helped make me who I am.

He was intelligent, outgoing, and an excellent speaker. He talked about ideals and dreams, and what to live for, and I believed in him with my heart and soul. He was honest and straightforward; he demanded much from me because he knew what I was capable of.

From the moment I met him I admired him, and he drove me to excel beyond my wildest imagination. I sought his approval and recognition, and through my efforts and my passion, I achieved them.

When I was was joyous, he rejoiced with me, and when I was lost he showed me the way. He spoke to me plainly, and wisely. He made me feel good about who I was, and what I could achieve.

After I found out he had cancer, even though we were apart, he still continued to touch my life. As the world came to know Randy Pausch, I found an even deeper lesson to learn from him. In his suffering and trial, he endured with a strength that defines the beauty of the human spirit. He will always live in my heart.

I cannot repay a fraction of the compassion and wisdom he has taught me. I can only hope to spend every remaining day of my life to live as he did: with honor, and strength, and endless gratitude for all that I have been given.

I miss you Randy…

In this age of screencaps and the fraction of time it takes to assemble plausible proof of status, you may have understandable doubt about the validity of the image above, but we both know how little money means to me at this point in my life (look at where I’m living). So I have no obvious reason to fabricate such a statement, aside from perhaps giving cause for my family to sleep a little easier at night. Since they, however, are the source of the above figure, though, that too, is debunked.

When I was very young, I received some shares in a variety of Virginia regional banks from my grandfather. Those funds, while nothing to sneeze at, were not capable of any life-altering changes, but time rolls onward and bigger fish/banks eat little fish/banks as the market goes up.

Aside from a few shares for the next tax year, I sold virtually all of my investments and now have a five-digit sum in my bank account. It will be there, happy with my other paltry earnings, and earn about a dollar in interest from BoA, before disappearing quickly to strike down my stupid Citibankl 8.75% APR loan with furious anger. It dawned on me last autumn that this stock is most certainly generating less per year than I am paying in interest on my loans, so liquidating it was an easy choice to make. Unfortunately this only quashes half of the debt I generated in graduate school, but it’ll save me at least 2500 dollars a year (I was currently on track to pay it back over the next twelve to fifteen years).

Hopefully this won’t be the last time I have more than ten thousand dollars in my possession, but with the way things are in Japan, it’s going to be a while. Thank the good Lord for birth control.

Seven years ago I was listing and adrift. Seven years ago I was a confused teenager, with no direction, no motivation, no success, and a whole lot of, “Why?” Things weren’t going well, and it looked like they were only going to get worse. Then one day I had to help coordinate an event for a guest speaker. Vice Chair of the ACM, I got a room reservation and a projector. That late evening in the fall of 1999 I sat in for your talk, second row, two seats right of center. You held up a Furby, and said that this was the future of entertainment technology. You passed out crayons, and told us all to close our eyes and focus on them: the texture of the paper, the smoothness of the wax, the smell that brought back memories of childhood. From that moment on, I’ve never doubted what I wanted to do once.

You inspired me to make something more of myself. Without directly telling me, you gave me a goal to shoot for; something so far and so high, I almost lost it in the sun. But it didn’t matter how many people said it was a long shot, or how much I was told that I should prepare myself for the chance that I wouldn’t make it. There was no chance. I knew what I had to do. I had to take the latent flame in my heart and make it erupt like magma. You were strict, but fair. You spoke unlike anyone I’d ever seen before, boldly and with such disarming confidence. You were everything to me, and everything I wanted to be.

I worked my tail off for a year and a half, inventing parts of myself that I never knew could exist, laying track just seconds before the fury of my momentum came rumbling down the rails leading to the stars. I built cities, castles, networks, and libraries. The roaring cavalcade of the human spirit reverberated through me and leapt onto all manner of media. I poured every drop of life I had in me into my CMU application package, and when I got that call in the hotel room in Seattle, the call that said I made it, I couldn’t believe it.

I was euphoric. I couldn’t believe it. But later, talking to you, you said that when you saw my portfolio, you knew at once that I had to be in the ETC. You knew right away that there was no doubt I belonged there, in that environment, so I could help build the amazing things you spoke of. To receive that kind of praise from you, it meant everything to me.

You have been, and always will be, my hero. Your vision and passion are unmatched, and you’ve changed more lives than you will ever know. You told me the most honest and straightforward things anyone had ever said to me, and you said them when I needed them most. It breaks my heart to hear about what’s happening in your life. I wish beyond words that there was something I could say or do that would make things different. You deserve so much more, more than I could make in a lifetime.

On Tuesday, you’ll be in my thoughts all day. Already, your spirit is in every noble thing I do. Next week, I will pray for you. But for now, I dedicate this, my first art exhibition, to you. You gave me the courage and determination to choose this path, and I will do all I can to honor that by giving every fiber of my life to being the very best I can be.

Thank you, Randy. This weekend is for you.

Forever your student,
Dave

What is it about the smell of scotch tape that makes me think of Christmas? Every time the roll comes near my face I’m flooded with visions of hanging multicolored twinkle lights by the yard in yet another modestly furnished room. Putting up my posters, magazine clippings, and photographs today I wonder how many times I’ll perform this ritual before I settle. As is my tangentially-driven nature, one half-finished thing led to another and loan consolidation led to hunting for the checkbook, the driver’s license, then organizing and recycling through my paper store, finding the checkbook, entering the routing number, thinking to call dad about the DL, finding the license, entering that data, and then again needing to call dad about loan account numbers. In the midst of all this I pulled out my infamous red folders of wall decorations and starting putting them up. I decided that the company really wasn’t going to move anytime soon, and I don’t have any friends to split a new apartment with, so I’m staying where I am for at least the rest of the year. So, might as well maximize the livability (a challenge I go about upgrading every weekend with new appliances and crockery).

Did you know that I’ve been hanging the same stuff on my walls since 1998? Somehow the poster cache I had from working two years at Blockbuster disintegrated, but ever since I lived in Lambeth Field Apartments my second year at Virginia, I’ve been putting the same core material up in my room: Sandra Bullock from Premiere, Jennifer Aniston gracing the cover of Rolling Stone, an ad for Davidoff Cool Water, an article from the front page of the Cavalier Daily about VDOT requesting state funding to form a beaver-trapping squad. Indiana Jones. The Man with No Name. James Bond. The Monkees. The most notorious of my trappings are a set of Abercrombie girls and lovers on the ocean. Of course none of these are as dear to me as my ever-present homage to true love, 5×7 inches of my own Elysium, an American-Eagle discount flyer featuring a tall, wayard-looking young man with a fair-skinned island girl, embraced in love. The background is perfectly out of focus, it’s summer and the grass is green, his long shirt is white and her dress is pale yellow. I showed up for dozens of parties in six years dressed just like that…faintly hoping every time I’d meet some dark-haired, bright-eyed girl that I’d share life’s greatest adventure with.

It’s funny how 10% off 1997′s summer clearance can give one person so much to dream about.

So school started yesterday. I just realized it now, over my monitor lunch of mustard sandwiches. This is the first time in 18 years that I have missed the first day of school. 18 years. That’s 78% of my life up to this point, and I really don’t remember more than a few camera outtakes about the first 5. So basically my life as I know it is like over, and now for the first time practically ever I have to figure out what that means and not go insane with identity loss.

I guess a lot of people go through this, I wonder if it happens the first day of school for them too? It didn’t even occur to me all summer, it was just another internship…any time now I’d get back to a college town, already have like 10 emails in my inbox about parties, and just grin quitely as a housemate storms past the mammoth entertainment certer, in from Kroger or Giant Eagle with armfuls of Jack Daniel’s and generically labeled “Cola”.

I miss the fact I’ll probably never eat at another cafeteria, unless some number of countless days and knee-high socks later I’m helping my son or daughter move into their dorm. I’ll be gushing over how we _have_ to eat at Newcomb and get to the omelette bar, while Jr. will be grinding his/her teeth just counting the nanoseconds until I un-double park the station wagon and leave him/her to the inaugural parent-liberation.

That’s pretty depressing, isn’t it? The Mo’jox are off basking the warm glow of independence that only $16,000 / semester can provide, while the big purple sofa is already soaking up someone else’s drool. What color is the grass on The Lawn? How many people will throw up tonight as a result of St. Maarten’s? What sort of risque carousing will follow a GSA opening party at Doc’s? Why can’t the lame traffic lights and incompetent driving elderly of Pittsburgh inconvenience me now?

Yea. I guess I’ve been working so much lately at tomorrow I didn’t notice yesterday had come and left without me.