I Am Bismark

part 2

my employment record sucks. my first job was a student computer technician/help desk assitant for the baraboo school district. during the summers, i upgraded computers, set up computer labs, etc. during the school year for one hour of my daily schedule, i would give technical support to teachers throughout the school district. it was a lot of fun, i got paid decently, and i had a desk with a nice chair and an internet connection. unfortunately, it was pretty laid back and relaxed, so i think i am a bit sheltered when it comes to work. i did that for about three years. then i went on my mission. so far, i haven’t tried working during the school year (though i probably will this semester). i was in provo for spring term going to school, and by the time i came back home to wisconsin, all of the good jobs were taken, and no one wanted to hire an unexperienced college student who was leaving in two months. so i did some temp jobs picking up trash, catering banquets, and building fences (a much harder job than i ever thought). i also worked in a popcorn shop on weekends. i still don’t like popcorn much. i applied to become a tutor at the byu math lab, but it looks like they dont have any open positions this semester, so i will have to find something different.

i used to play the trombone. in high school, i was first chair for three years. i was in the symphony band (which was by audition only) for two years. but it was never a passion. so i quit my senior year of high school, and i haven’t touched the thing since. my mom is a piano teacher, but i never learned to play. if i would have started when i was young, i could have a decent singing voice, but now it is nothing worth hearing. i have tried picking up the guitar, but can’t seem to find the motivation to sit down and do it enough.

my father never played sports with me as a child. instead, we played video games. i remember sitting around with classics like legend of zelda, final fantasy, and ultima V. my dad is a computer geek (i so wish he would have stayed in san francisco in the 70s and stuck with his computer hobby instead of moving to wisconsin to become an optometrist…just imagine how rich we would be…), so we have had a computer in the house since i was born. so i have been computer literate for a long time. as a kid, i tried sports, but sucked pretty bad. i was horrible at little league baseball. i remember this one time that i was at bat. we were so young that they just kept pitching it to us until we hit it, and i was up there for like 10 minutes swinging. my coach even came to guide my swing and i couldn’t hit it. baseball wasn’t my thing. i didn’t think sports were at all. by the time i got to middle school, i was one of the least athletic kids out on the playground. i was horrible in physical education. i tried 7th grade football, and for some reason they stuck the skinny little kid on the offensive line. yeah, i got knocked on my back every play. i was tall, so i tried basketball, but again found i was too scrawny to be a big man underneath. my homeroom teacher convinced me to go for the track team, which i tried. i think i did the 400 meter dash, the high jump, and discus. and i thouroughly sucked at all of them. but it got me in good enough shape to so that i ran a 6:34 mile in phy ed class at the end of the year, which earned me an invitation to join the cross country team during the fall. i was a middle runner in 8th grade, but when track came around, i was the teams top mile runner. so i trained hard over the summer. during my freshman year, i acheived varsity status about 2/3 of the way into the season, got all-conference second team, and a letter. so began my running career in high school. i was all conference all four years in CC, and two years in track. i was MVP my senior year in track and field. i really liked running, but i guess it never became a passion enough to make me great. i have sort of lost touch with that whole scene lately, but i am trying to get back into some distance running. lately, i have been doing some weight lifting, though it hasn’t changed the fact that i am a scrawny white kid.