The 29 Things About Me At Age 29

1.) I was born at 8:30 in the evening on February 1st, 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The hospital where I was born (Abbott-Northwestern) is still standing. No, Gregory Peck, it did not burn down years ago.

2.) I grew up in Edina, Minnesota where I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac with a large yard. I'm the oldest of three children with one sister two years younger and a brother four years younger.

3.) When I was really little (my aunt estimates 3 or 4 years old) I kept another little boy from drowning. We were up at my family's lake cabin and this boy hadn't been raised near the water like I had and thus couldn't swim very well. I laid down on my belly on the dock as I held his head above water and shouted until the adults heard me.

4.) I've been to the hospital a few times in my life. I can't give you an exact number because a good number of them happened when I had epilepsy as a very small child. There are the three times I remember.

When I was four, I was playing in the basement of our old house with my dad and my sister. My sister and I were taking turns jumping over a comforter my dad was swinging back and forth. Normally if you tripped you'd fall into the comforter. I overshot once and had to get stitches in my chin.

When I was 13, I had an incident during my sleep at summer camp which made it seem like my epilepsy was coming back. It turned out it wasn't. But I did have to have a battery of tests to verify this. The one upside was my dad and I stayed up all night watching "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" and "The Commitments" per doctor's orders.

Then when I was 20, I fell into a door frame and needed stitches in my eyebrow. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. It was a klutzy trip into a door frame, not a shameful display of foolishness. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

5.) Since I was very young I've been fascinated by the news. As a kid I would read Newsweek and US News and World report while being glued to CNN Headline News. On the morning the democratic demonstrations in Tienanmen Square were suppressed I watched the news report on CBS's This Morning with Charles Kuralt. It was the same day the Ayatollah died.

6.) The very first time I was on the Internet was in 1988 or so when the kid up the block got a modem. He had to place a long-distance call to Houston in order to sign into a very basic version of Prodigy. Later his father got the phone bill and hit the roof. The point was we were there.

7.) I was there in-person with my dad, my sister and my brother when this happened.



The fact I love baseball is not entirely unrelated.

8.) After my ninth grade year I transferred away from Edina to Orono where I graduated in 1998. Being at a smaller school allowed me to letter in varsity basketball, concert band and theater while participating in the school newspaper, the literary magazine and ultimate frisbee. I would not have had the opportunity to participate in all these extra curriculars at a school like Edina High School.

9.) I lived in the state of Wisconsin across three academic years while I attended school near Green Bay. This experienced exposed me to what it's like to live in a town smaller than Minneapolis.

10.) While I was in school at St. Norbert, I was a member of a "frat." It wasn't frat really. It was technically a "men's independent social group" and it was made up of a the really smart, really independent kids who "would never join a frat except... Hey, what's this?" To this date, my best and closest friends are people I met through this group.

11.) In the fall semester of my junior year, I won a student-faculty grant from the school to write a manuscript under the supervision of a professor. The college gave me $2000 which I promptly dumped back into tuition. To this date I have yet to finish the manuscript. But at one point in my life I was technically an endowed writer.

12.) I published the on-campus underground satirical newspaper while I was at St. Norbert. We were pretty serious about getting the paper out every two weeks. So serious that one time I drank too much, got up the next morning, puked during class (I was running to the restroom at the time), went home to sleep it off and still got up to meet my own self-imposed deadline of that evening.

13.) After my junior year of college I was blown out. I wasn't feeling challenged by my school work so I was making up impossible challenges to complete this school work. For example, I would type my papers for the critical writing class (the hardest class in the English major) on the day of class. When this wasn't enough, I started writing them in the two hours before class. In April I took incompletes in all of my classes and moved home.

14.) I graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2003. Since I'd missed some gen ed classes on my first time through I took an extra two semesters (fall and summer) to finish. Recently I saw my diploma for the first time in five years. I put it back in the box it was in and don't expect to see it for another five years.

15.) I've visited 31 out of the 50 states. My family was very good (and fortunate) at taking a lot of trips when I was growing up. Since then I've added to my 50-state tally by taking long road trips to each coast either with my friends, my high school band, protest trips or just by myself. These are the states I've visited.




16.) I've been out of the country three times total. I went to Canada with my mom for a week and I've been over the border from Brownsville into Matamoros twice. I don't consider this a deficiency. Do you know how much of the United States there is to see?

17.) The one time I ever tried to hitchhike I was successful. In fact, it was someone I knew who picked me up. My friend Pete and I were leaving the Phish concert in the middle of the Everglades for Y2K and he needed to be on a plane the next morning. We were holding a sign near the front gate when my friend Jake drove by in an RV. It's possibly the luckiest moment of my entire life.

18.) When I got out of college, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I did what any person would do in that situation. I went into whatever paid me the most. In this case, it was insurance.

19.) There was one Friday night when I was nary a year post-college I was sitting at home watching a re-run of "Cops." Suddenly it occurred to me. I was sitting at home on a Friday night watching a re-run of "Cops." Even worse, I'd seen that episode previously. It was that night I decided to be more of an extrovert.

20.) I've had seven girlfriends in my lifetime. I loved all seven of them in their own way. I've felt bad about how things ended with all seven of them. The good news is three of the last four will probably read this so I'm getting better at staying friends.

21.) I lived in the state of Illinois for two years while my now-ex-girlfriend pursued an acting career. This experience exposed me to what it's like to live in a city larger than Minneapolis.

22.) When I lived in Chicago, I worked for the insurance arm of a large property holding firm doing complex filings of yada yada yada and blah blah blah. Our offices were on the Magnificent Mile and I would ride the train down from Evanston every morning. This was the best job I've ever had. The work was challenging, I was given a great deal of autonomy and there was an amazing culture of camaraderie amongst the young people of the office.

23.) The best part about living in Chicago for me was the really cool concert festivals I attended in that city's parks. I went to Pitchfork three times, the Touch and Go 25th Anniversary weekend and numerous great bands famous and otherwise playing at the summer street festivals. Still one of my five favorite moments ever was at Lollapalooza last year when this happened by accident.



24.) Three of my friends have died in my lifetime. The first was my childhood friend Brendan who used to come down the block to play when we were little. He died from a sudden onset of meningitis when we were in high school. The next was my college friend Emily who crashed her bike and flipped over her handlebars while not wearing a helmet. She used to call everything "fascist!" and I'm sure would've actually exploded if she had lived to see the Bush years. Then I was 24 when my friend Chuck who worked across the hall passed away after coming home from the bar. He complained to his girlfriend about feeling ill and went to bed. That "feeling ill" was his vital organs shutting down.

25.) I have only one grandparent left, my paternal grandmother. I was six years old when my dad's dad died and that makes me the youngest member of our family who remembers him. My mom's mom died when I was a sophomore in college and my grandfather died two days after I'd visited him when I was 26. I realize how lucky I am in all four circumstances.

26.) I cried when Kirby Puckett died. I actually cried twice, once when I heard the news and once when they held a moment of silence for him at the T'Wolves game two days later. After the moment of silence I turned to my then-girlfriend, pointed at Kevin Garnett and said, "That's the only other athlete I will cry over when he dies."

27.) I've been quoted twice in the newspaper of the metro area in twice I was living. When I was in high school, I was a part of an article about kids who transfer high schools under Minnesota's open-enrollment rules. When I was in college, I was a part of an article about a protest trip we took to the School of The Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. I also appeared on the front page of the newspaper in the later article.

28.) My brother and I were in a band together called MidDef when I was in college and he was in high school and even wrote a few original songs. We played exactly two concerts; once in Dad's basement for X-mas and once in our Mom's backyard for some friends.

29.) When this posts I will be when I have just turned 29 years old. If I live until at least 70, my life isn't even halfway over. The best part isn't that I feel like I've done a lot with the 29 years I've had. It is that I feel like I can do even more in the coming years ahead.