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Seedling Tagged Me

January 20th, 2007 | uncategorized

You can read her five weird things over at Seedlings in Stone. Cher Chariot and Lightning Craver already responded, so I figured it was time to get on board. As per L. L. ’s odd rules, here are five odd things about me.

1. I was an exchange student to Germany when I was 16. I won a contest to go, but I didn’t speak a lick of German. Turned out to be a pretty cool year. My host family let me do some wild stuff: We tore down a three story house with our bare hands (and a sledgehammer). I joined them in the town festival play Der Meistertrunk or The Long Drink, the only onstage extra who couldn’t understand the dialogue of the play he was in (and I carried a six foot spear). There are some other things I did that I won’t mention here. I was Lutheran that year. It was a good year. (On the first link, in the third picture, you can see several very tall poles in the corner behind the actors. Those are the spears. That is where I stood.)
2. My wife and I met in a church play. Elijah the Musical. She was Jezebel. I was Ahab. We sang and danced. We parted the Jordan river with two baggies of blue colored water on an overhead projector. During the curtain call, I kissed her for the first time, but her boyfriend wasn’t in the audience that night. (You can see it on video.) How many people have their first kiss on video? Be sure to watch me strut out later on all proud of myself. Now we run the drama ministry at our church.
3. I made my students sing and called them sinners. When I taught High School AP English, I used to do some wacky stuff. I would dress up like Jonathan Edwards and preach “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to them in all earnestness. Slapping a stick on their desks and damning them to hell. Good times. I also made them line up in military formation and sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as we marched up and down the halls. That was part of the Grapes of Wrath unit. Some of the other teachers didn’t like me very much.

4. In college I had the weirdest job in the world. I was part of an ergonomic study to measure the long-term effects of standing on the human body. So I would go to work every day for six hours and just stand around. They had a table that was chest high, so we could work on homework and stuff. Part of the study measured the longterm effects of typing. We all worked on Mavis Beacon typing tutorial, and I learned to touch type really well. Four hours of practice every day for six weeks. You can learn too!

5. I accidentally converted a German Muslim exhange student who was in my high school English class. As a teacher I tried to be really careful to be honest about my faith but never proselytize. After 9-11 this student was very upset with her host family. She was ethnically Afghan and her host father was grilling her about the Taliban on a regular basis. She felt attacked. “And they won’t even let me go to church,” she said. I took that to mean Christian Church. So I started reading the Bible with her at lunch and on break. It was several weeks before I figured out that she was Muslim. Had I known I never would have been so bold. I baptised her at the same church where I had played Ahab in Elijah the Musical. She and I are still very close.

It’s all true, Senator. Really.

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