What happens when your entire life as you know it is blown up and completely replaced within four months with one you never could have conceived of? I’ll give you a hint – it’s a tad bit disorienting…
April 1, 1997 – still dating Horrible E. Still in grad school, barely. Basically commuting once a week to Vandy, for a day, and spending the rest of time trying to push Horrible E through her 1L year of law school in a stroller. Hell, I basically wrote her big brief – and if you need to know about the extent of legal culpability in accidental needle-sticks in a medical environment, I’m your boy. Most of the time? Just plain miserable. Occasionally had a little time to myself in the library, or the laundromat, reading up on the prospects for the Mac OS now that the next version was being built around NeXT…or whether the BeOS was going to surpass the Mac OS with cloners, or whether the pundits were right that zero-config Windows NT4 workstations were going to lay down the smack on every other form of personal computing.
At this point, I was spending way too much time with the computer, reading up on various IT topics. That should have been a clear clue which way my life was headed, especially since – with the perestroikan movement in political science still a good five years away – political science had become, for me, the study of the study of politics. And I was clearly not the sort of person who was going to sit and run crosstabs on a Senate Electoral Study database until I found something interesting. Ironically, I think the thing that ultimately drove me into computing was the lack of an easy graphical solution for statistics – running SPSS on a VAX through a terminal was an insurmountable obstacle. Being able to load a data set and then pick statistical measurements with the click of a mouse probably would have kept me in the field a good two years longer, given that the struggles in three different statistics classes were the principal obstacle through my first four-and-a-half years in the business. If I knew how to do stats, I probably wouldn’t have fallen back on political theory as my second field, especially since my actual interests ran strong toward comparative and IR. And if Vandy hadn’t been between theorists following the departure of Jean Elshtain, I might not have sank like a rock trying to do theory anyway, and…well, never mind. Ultimately, I think the problem is that you couldn’t make a whole second field out of a thesis on the Southernization of national politics and the prospects for a second civil war in my lifetime. So it goes.
By May, I had picked up a new girlfriend, ditched the old one for good, moved home, taken a temp job at an employer so stuffy that casual Friday meant you could omit the necktie, and found out that yes, I had in fact flunked out of grad school. By June, I had found out that I was getting an MA as a lovely parting gift.* By July, I had the inconceivable – a nibble on a possible job in computing. Irony of ironies – in Washington DC. By August, I had lost the temp job, thanks to too many unpaid days off driving back and forth from Birmingham to northeastern Ohio and parts northeast of that, and found myself living in Ohio for the sake of halving the impending drive to DC for an interview.
And then, in September, that most insane of weeks. Wake up Monday morning in Akron, drive to DC, look at apartments. Tuesday, drive home to Alabama, stopping at Cellular One on the way out of town to order a new mobile phone. Wednesday, pack the car. Thursday evening, drive as far as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and spend the night at my uncle’s. Friday, drive on to Arlington, pick up the new phone, and move into the apartment. Saturday, drive to Ohio, pick up supplies at Target, Sunday, drive home again, and Monday, start work at the new job. 45 hours behind the wheel in 7 days through 7 different states.
When the smoke cleared, I was in a one-bedroom apartment facing right out on a main thoroughfare in the mid-Orange Line sector. I had no furniture – the cable was working and the TV was on the floor, and the telephone was working…but the Power Mac 6100 was sitting on top of a pizza box with a hole cut in it over where the fan intake rested. I had an inflatable mattress to sleep on, with my boom box at the head, and every morning at 7:30, I awoke to Z104, playing Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” regular as clockwork. We were still shirt-and-tie then four days a week, and I honestly don’t remember what I did with my shirts – hopefully I wasn’t coming to work too rumpled, because I sure don’t remember bringing an ironing board. I got up in the morning, walked down the main drag, turned to cut through the local mall, and down the road between towering condo and office buildings to the Ballston Metro station, catty-corner from The Nature Conservancy (a sharp reminder of the ex-girlfriend). And then on the weekends, an early Friday exit to allow me to beat the rush hour traffic on the Beltway as I headed back for the Pennsylvania Turnpike and back west, through rolling hills splashed with autumn color in a strange world of tollbooths and cornfields and bits and pieces of Colonial architecture. And on the occasions I didn’t – there was an actual local NFL team, live and in living color, freely available every week. Seven years after first becoming a fan, I finally had access to the Redskins, and I wasted no time getting on the list for season tickets…which first became available to me this past summer, 12 years later and three thousand miles away. Alas.
That was my world by October 1, 1997. In six months, I had completely traded one world for another…and one life for another that was completely inconceivable back in April.
* Certain persons at my place of work have started referring to me as Doctor. I don’t have the heart to correct them, despite the fact that going by that title is the height of error for me…but then, it would be fraught with peril to be referred to as “Master,” so I suppose I’d better let it slide until I find an excuse to be formally titled “Commodore.” An SEC title would help with that…