Sam Ervin and I celebrate Ademola Okulaja Day.
What's New
A second page of quotations and a preliminary draft of a replacement for my page on reading.
Free time + parents' spiffy new scanner + a pile of old photos waiting to be sorted = baby pictures online.
I have become a member of Epinions.com and have posted my first opinion, on Thomas Wolfe.
In an alternate life I am a romance novelist. (Just kidding - when would I have time to write novels? :) The romance novelist is, of course, a completely separate person from me, albeit we both operate under the same name.)
*And* this web page is finally listed on Yahoo! How cool is that?
My Life Story (abridged)
I was born on April 23, 1977 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Eighteen years later, I graduated from Lowell High School. A number of interesting things happened during the years in between, but none of them will be recorded here.
When I graduated from high school, I could neither whistle, snap my fingers, nor roll my tongue. Despite these deficiencies, I was clever enough to choose unerringly (with some help from fate) the best school in the world at which to study: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I could list hundreds of things that make Carolina special, but I'll confine myself to two. They are the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies and basketball. In May of 1999 I graduated with a double major in history and Russian. I still can't whistle, snap my fingers, or roll my tongue. I can, however, discuss Plato's Republic, recite Russian poetry, and tell you more than you wanted to know about pretenders.
In August 1999 I began work in the history program Georgetown University for a graduate degree in, oddly enough, Russian history. Only time will tell if Georgetown is the second-best school in the world.
Family
My parents teach science at the two middle schools in Billerica, Massachusetts. My brother is a sophomore at UMass-Amherst. Our cat, Dusty, died last September. We have a new cat (well, she's actually nine or ten years old, but she's new to us) named Ella. We also have a turtle, Fred, who likes to eat live mealworms.
Links - Original
Pictures.
Friends.
Quotes.
Poetry for Amateurs
Reading Material
Once a critic, always a critic
and
Links - Unoriginal
Edward Gorey.
Author and illustrator of many darkly humorous stories, including The Gashleycrumb Tinies. The online books aren't as distinctly-drawn as real books,
but you can use them as an introduction to Gorey's work. Or you can have
your fortune told with the fantod deck here.
Tribute to Ademola
Okulaja. Need I say more?
The Simpsons. This is a
way-too-serious site
on a show that used to be a lot funnier than it is now. It has more Simpsons
information and links than you can shake a stick at. One linked site is
devoted to my favorite character, Ralph. I'm fan club member number
59.
American
Pie. Lyrics and interpretations. Why do people spend so much time on
this kind of thing? Because it's good exercise for their imaginations,
and because they can.
Russian Youth Hostels.
When I visited Russia in the summer of 1998, I stayed at the St. Petersburg
International Hostel, where they
spoke English, and the Heritage Hostel in Moscow, where they did not. If
you're independently wealthy, you should stay at the Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg.
If you're not independently wealthy, you can at least sneak in and use
their bathrooms during the day.
Email me with your
comments
Last modified July 15, 2002.