Ten years in ten minutes.

A friend from high school boiled the interim down to a paragraph. i didn't manage such a feat, but my reply does ok for itself. incase you were wondering, too, i'll copy you on it.

last ten years? hm. well in my senior year at ncsa i applied solely to conservatories (against the advice of my flute teacher, mr. dunigan, who i gathered has retired since). and when i got to the auditions (at manhattan, at juliard you know, i of course was hit with the understanding that i was out of my league... way out. so the next year i applied to colleges, but of course didn't have a safety school then either and didn't get accepted anywhere. in the meantime i lived in jamaica plain, boston (just the name is reason enough, right?) and worked as a cook at a breakfast/coffee shop (Coffee Cantata, owned and run by a meticulous man who plays classical piano, no less).

well in the third year oberlin decided i wasn't a total slouch (got wait-listed at unc-somewhere). by that time i had decide to become a scientist and was trying to decide between physics and engineering. i went with the more applied field and probably saved my GPA in so doing. now, oberlin doesn't have an engineering school (it's not a university, after all), so i enrolled in the dual-degree program. after three years at the OC, i transferred to washington university in st. louis (the school with the ridiculously long name that you have to use in entirety or everyone thinks you mean washington state U). five years of undergrad and i got two degrees, one from each school. kind of neat, though i don't think it really matters that i have a second.

if you count the year i got off (for good behavior) somewhere in there, that brings it up to (3+5+1=) 9. with the spread between graduating last may and not actually landing a job until this april, that pretty much makes ten. i guess i have a way of taking long routes about.

side projects include living in camden, ME for a while, working as a cook at a camp one summer, and falling in love (and then breaking up) with capoeira angola. living crept in through the cracks. fun fact: i applied to jobs in Defense, got several nice offers, and then was denied security clearance. but who wants to build WMDs anyway, right?