Six Random Things

I curse Marck Bailey and all he stands for.

The rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged me. (Above.)
2. Post the rules on your blog. (Yup.)
3. Write six random things about yourself. (Sigh.)
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (Sigh again.)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. (Zzz.)
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, six random things.

1. My high school had an actual, legitimate broadcast radio station. These days I suppose you’d just stream it on the Internet. I think we broadcast at fifty watts. It was like a light bulb. But my Junior year in high school I did radio, and had my own radio show for two hours every Wednesday, 3-5. I have a sound-check tape of my last show somewhere. I played a lot of Peter Gabriel. (One of the girls in my radio class was, in fact, the person who suggested that I might like a song called “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by a group called Crowded House. Uh, yeah.)

2. I was on my elementary school basketball team. Seventh and eighth grade. We didn’t have any place to practice or play at our school (I believe they’ve since converted the cafeteria into a combination cafeteria/basketball court). So we had to walk a mile down the Frank Dondero Nature Trail to the National Guard Armory at the Columbia Airport. (The Columbia College basketball team also practiced there, though they played at the high school — these days they practice and play at their own gym.) We were really terrible, especially after half the team quit or was ruled academically ineligible. We lost one game, to Twain Harte, 82-2. I kid you not. I wore a bag over my head to school the next day. Also true.

3. My favorite TV show of all time used to be “Max Headroom.” Great show. Waaaay ahead of its time. What it says about our culture and media and technology today, twenty years later, is still relevant. However, a couple years back I realized that it wasn’t true anymore. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has eclipsed it. Depending on how it ends, “Lost” might beat that too.

4. I met my first girlfriend online. Which in 1987 meant on a computer bulletin-board. We had just had a scandal at the BBS I ran, where a user had posed as a girl, going to far as to having a girl he know call people and pose as this fictitious female user as “proof.” So when my new user from Michigan claimed to be a girl, I expressed skepticism. She immediately told me to pick up the phone. When the modems died out, we were left on the phone together. She was a girl, I can verify, and within a few months we were pretty much obsessed with one another. At seventeen years old I bought an airplane ticket and went to Michigan to spend a week with her. You’d think we would have been worried that we wouldn’t hit it off in person. We did. She’s one of my Facebook friends these days and I hear from her every now and then. She’s got three kids and is married to her college boyfriend. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know about how serious it was between her and me, which is probably all for the best.

5. My daughter Jamie is named after my cousin, who we called Jamie growing up. (He was the last in a series of James Hysongs dating back to my great-great grandfather.) Jamie Hysong qualified as a pilot very young and was hoping to be a flight instructor when the plane he was flying disappeared over Lake Michigan in the spring of 1993. Eight years later I asked my aunt and uncle’s permission to name my first child after their son.

6. The first computer I used was not, in fact, an Apple computer. It was a Commodore PET, which my family bought in 1980. In the summer of 1984 I dipped into my college money a bit early to buy an Apple IIe, and experienced my first period of “buyer’s remorse.” That feeling didn’t last long — I wore that Apple IIe out. I joined the Mac world when I bought a Mac SE on clearance at the UCSD Bookstore in the spring of 1990. And I’ve never looked back.

I’m going to tag Lauren, Lisa, Matt because he’ll give me hell for it, CRAIG BECAUSE HE WOULD DO IT WITH THE CHOCK LOCK ON OK, and Andy. Though I’m not sure any of them will really do it. Nor should they.