Am I Blog Enough For You?

At college, I made friends at the rate of one per year. When I graduated in 1989 I had made five friends. Last month my family and I went to Purdue for a mini-reunion with these lucky people, hand picked out of the approximately 35,000 other people at Purdue during this time.

I haven’t been back to Purdue since graduation, so I wanted to see how it felt to be there. I do this thing where I stand somewhere I have been a long time ago and try to conjure up memories and feelings about the place. I learned this from observing humans. I forget what they call it. I also do this thing at various locations around the Bay Area too — especially Berkeley — but I’ve noticed that I can’t reproduce any feelings any more. It’s probably just as well.

On the drive down (we flew into Detroit, stopped by Toledo, then drove to West Lafayette), I made a list of things to do and people that I wanted to check up on. Here is the list with my comments:

1. Hear Lady In Red on the radio

I fucking hate this song. It seemed like any time I would turn on the radio this song would be on. Every time my clock radio would turn on in the morning, it would be playing this song. I did hear some song with lyrics like “she loves me for my tractor.” Matt dug this song a lot.

Status: Failed to hear Lady In Red on the radio

2. Buy Indiana University souvenir for Susan M. at work

A woman at work went to IU, and boy wouldn’t you know it. Her AIM icon is the IU logo, and her dog has an IU collar. She also has a pennant in her cube. I tried to find something saying IU on it, but it was generally followed by an expletive. There is some sort of rivalry between Purdue and IU. Interesting. I also saw a T-shirt that read, “Ann Arbor is a whore.” I was going to buy this because there is a DJ at KFJC with the air name Ann Arbor, and I thought she might like it. But I ultimately didn’t buy it.

Status: Failed to buy an IU souvenir

3. Buy Purdue sweatshirt made by Champion

When I first arrived at Purdue I really wanted a fancy Champion sweatshirt that said “PURDUE” in big letters. It didn’t fit in my $15/week budget, so I never bought one. Even when I was working at Magnavox at a co-op and blowing obscene amounts of money on guitars, guitar pedal effects, guitar magazines, and various guitar accessories, I felt that these Champion sweatshirts were too expensive. So whenever I saw a well-adjusted, corn-fed student wearing one of these sweatshirts my bile would rise just a little. I’d see the symmetrical block letters from far away and then the little “c” on the end of the sleeve as I passed. I would suffer this humiliation several times a day. I couldn’t wait for my classes to be over, so that I could go back inside and wait for the darkness. Anyway, I bought one. You can see the relief in the children’s faces as a terrible darkness was lifted from my soul. I haven’t worn it yet. I may just hang it up like a trophy.

Status: Success!

4. Visit EE building

I visited the EE building. I explained to my family that it’s like a sifter that weeds out the unworthy and sends them to a satellite campus or to a lesser major like EET (Electrical Engineering Tech). Check out the freshman engineering lecture hall in the EE building. I put Stephanie at the lecture podium, turned on the overhead projector, gave her a pen, and told her to teach us something. She wrote “I LOVE YOU KLAS!” in big letters. We all learned a lesson that day.

Status: Success!

5. Visit Von’s bookstore

The bookstore has grown. Diana bought a sudoku book and a kid sudoku book. I couldn’t find a book I wanted, so we left.

Status: Success!

6. Walk around campus

I walked all around campus several times. It was smaller than I remembered it, though I’m the same height as when I attended and the campus has actually grown. Notable changes: The smokestack is gone; the fountains have been replaced by much cooler fountains; there is a clock tower, which frightened Matthew; Cary Quad (my freshman year dorm) is the same except I don’t think they serve meals there.

Status: Success!

7. Read Exponent

The Exponent is the college paper. I found a copy and read it. It was easy. It was summer, so there wasn’t much crazy college stuff to read through. I discovered that Purdue has switched off of a 6.0 grade scale (I always had to explain the 5.89/6.0 GPA on my resume) and that they are considering implementing a +/- scale as well, so people could get an A- or a B+ in a class. Considering how many students would battle for extra points after an exam, I think this is bad news for the professors and T.A.s.

Status: Success!

8. Hit various record stores for vinyl

I only got to go to Von’s. They had only one row of vinyl records, and they were expensive. The used CD section was more interesting, but I didn’t pick anything up. I recognized a lot of the vinyl from the station, so they had pretty current stuff. There was another store down in the levee that I didn’t get a chance to visit.

Status: Partial success. 50%

9. Get called a fag

This is unfair of me to lay on Purdue. Actually this happened to a friend of mine (Japanned in Japan): He was walking down the street in Maumee, Ohio when someone driving by yelled, “Fag!” out of his pickup truck. I find this story funny and poignant because JiJ is straight and not to mention the fact that he’s cool and has done a bunch of interesting stuff. Then this ridiculous townie calls him fag for what — walking down the street? It’s a fun exercise to contemplate the motivation behind his action. So anyway in my paranoid, Midwestern hating mind I have decided to transpose this story to Purdue and me. And no one can stop me and no one will know except for people who read my blog which isn’t many. (I know because I have Google Analytics on it.) Despite all these thoughts going on in my head, no one called me a fag.

Status: Failed and was forced to confront a lot of displaced anger that I still have.

10. Get whooped at by a drunk guy

This did happen. We were leaving the EE building, and some people were drinking in front of their apartment building across the street. When they saw us, they started saying, “Woooo! Wooooooooo!” meaning that they are drinking and very excited about it. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I didn’t. No one else did either. Eventually, they stopped saying “Wooooo!” and we were out of “Wooooo!” range, which resolved the situation.

Status: Success!

11. Hear John Cougar Mellencamp

When Lady In Red wasn’t on the radio, John Mellencamp was. I didn’t hear him on the radio unless he wrote that song about a tractor. I did see a picture of him on a sign though.

Status: Partial success.

12. Check out college radio at Purdue

There used to be a radio station in the tower of Cary Quad. Way back in 1984 I put my Dead Kennedy’s logo on my long black trenchcoat, summoned up all my courage, and went up to check out the station. I was too nervous to remember much about it, but I figured out that it only broadcast on the closed ircuit cable in the dorm and maybe had a tiny transmitter. I needed to go back and think about that puny coverage, and then I never returned for some reason. I didn’t even return when I learned that my hero at the time, David Letterman, had his own college radio show at Ball State. There was one other radio station at Purdue that played classical and jazz. Not only that, it was really far away. When I arrived to check out the Cary Quad station, there was no access to the tower. I found out later that they have moved to the basement of NW and only broadcast over the Internet. That’s kind of a waste. There are plenty of open radio slots on the dial there, and the radio situation is pretty bleak from a college music point of view. Someone is buying those hip records at Von’s.

Status: Failed

And here is the anonymized list of people that I wanted to check up on, along with their latest status if available. I still need to use the Google brand search engine and my new clues to hunt down a few of these people that I want to contact. Actually, I know that I won’t.

1. Person A — Living in Chicago; working as a corporate attorney; had dinner last month at work

2. Person B — Lived in Denver briefly; once lost her concentration at a gym and was shot off the back of a treadmill (first time I heard this great story)

3. Person C — no information

4. Person D — Confirmed a vague memory that this person had rich parents; no further information

5. Person E (actually we couldn’t remember his name — we referred to him as the “Hurr-de-hurr guy”) — no information other than eventually remembering that his first name is Earl

6. Person F — co-authored an article in some electrical engineering journal

7. Person G — living in Ft. Wayne; possibly divorced

8. Person H — no information

9. Person I — doing SAP consulting in Singapore

10. Person J (I couldn’t remember his name, so I wrote “roommate guy, has a mullet, used lots of toilet paper.”) — still living in Indiana

11. Person K (”Jake’s roommate who handed me a loaded gun in a bar”) — was arrested for drunken speeding and went to jail for a while; lost touch after that

12. Person L (”Secretary that Person D dated”) — no information

13. Person M — living in L.A.; married with kids

14. Person N — still active in SCA; still working in Ft. Wayne; was recently seen in a business meeting by one member of our party but they didn’t speak.

15. Person O (”Optivisor”) — technically speaking, not a person but a magnification device. But, still.

16. Person P — visited a member of our party in Phoenix a few times; lost contact after that

17. Person Q (”Big, red girl”) — no information

18. Person R (”best friend of big, red girl”) — no information

19. Bitter, Bearded Person S — no information

20. Person T — we all suspected he is gay, but no one ever asked him or kept in touch with him so I guess we’ll never know for sure; not sure what we would do with this information anyway; he made me a Led Zeppelin tape once, which was very nice (do gay people listen to Led Zeppelin, even in Indiana?)

21. Person U — no new information, but I heard these stories concerning him: (1) A member of our party smoked in his room despite knowing he had asthma, (2) In one late night confrontation, a member of our party yelled, “Are you going to take a swing at me?” Person U answered, “No,” so the member of our party said, “Then shut the fuck up. I’m going to bed.” This cracks me up.

22. Person V — added by someone else; I don’t remember her

Well, it looks like we weren’t very good at keeping in touch with folks. But we all scattered to New Jersey, Phoenix, Berkeley, Louisville, and Michigan once we graduated. This made it hard to keep in touch, though we still did a pretty bad job. Now there is social technology for finding people from the past, but after reviewing this list there are only about five or six that I’d really like to catch up with anyway.

The thing that struck me the most when I caught up with my friends is that I’m the only EE not doing EE work. Everyone else is somehow working or teaching in this industry. I’m the only one working with computers. One member of our party said, “Hey, do you remember writing code with vi?” He was taken aback when I said that I use it pretty much every day. I was the one who hated computers the most out of our group because (1) I got my first B at Purdue in microprocessor programming, (2) I couldn’t afford a computer, (3) I was interested in the math and physics side of EE and I felt that programming was sort of unclean because the instruction sets on microprocessors were decided by people and therefore inferior to something like Maxwell’s equations, (4) I wasn’t too good at discrete math.

It’s not like I planned to work with computers and the Internet, but after a year of unemployment a job at a software company was the only thing I could find. I had to learn most of what I needed to know about computers as I went along, and it turns out that they weren’t so bad after all. And after reading some technical articles about networking and some crazy magazines like Mondo 2000 I kept drifting further and further in that direction with each job.

There are more EE jobs then Internet-related jobs in the Midwest, so if I had stayed there in 1989 I would probably be doing something like circuit design. I was actually tracked down by Mead Corporation in Dayton, Ohio shortly after graduation. The found my resume from a HKN book, called me at home and basically offered me a job. No, I sniffed, I’m going to UC Berkeley to become a professor. How dare you disturb me. I wonder what EE jobs there are at Mead anyway. I just checked and found an Electrical Project Engineer position in Alabama.

In summary, it was great to see everyone again after 17 years. We’ll probably get together again in less than 17 years. I didn’t mention anything about everyone’s kids, but they were really the best part. You can see some pictures here.