Let’s face it. At this point, I’ve done so many shameful things that there’s no use in hiding any of it. We could start with how I used to poo under the table in kindergarten and the teacher thought I should be held back, or we could start with how I related that nugget of biographical information to a reporter from the Des Moines Register in 1997. I think it’s better just to skip over my pre-college years and go right on to graduate school.

Today I was talking to a coworker about how I’m going to Seattle this weekend. This is only the second time I’ve been up there. She was asking me if I had any friends up there, and I made a joke about no, I was just planning to run up to someone on the bus and go home with them. But then I realized that I did exactly that on my first trip to Seattle.

My first trip to Seattle was in November 1999. Yes, you figured it out. Two days before I went, in the middle of Dead Week, I thought that going to see the WTO protests would be a good idea. I bought a plane ticket and went up the coast, in the process giving my CS140 partners the shaft. (I do feel guilty about that in retrospect.) The first night I went back with this German girl I met on the bus. Her roommate flipped out (”You found him on the bus?!”) and I was ushered across the hall to these nice musicians whom the girls had never met before. (One of them worked at Amazon. I hope he is very wealthy now.) The next night I stayed with a bunch of Mennonites. Very nice people. That’s enough about Seattle, let’s talk about something else now.

Let’s not talk about the e-mails I’ve sent that have come back to haunt me. Let’s skip over that little matter entirely.

Long ago I was a modest man. I’m not sure when that changed, but sometime after I came to Stanford, all sense of decorum went out the window. People have told me that the first time they saw me, I was, say, swinging from sprinkler pipes in red tighty-whiteys. You’d probably expect that I’d remember being introduced to someone, especially if I happened to have been swinging in my skivvies from a water pipe at the time. Well, I don’t. That sort of thing has simply happened too often to remember.

I have the dubious distinction have having had a letter published in Savage Love. This was the illustration that The Onion drew to go with it. I’ve also had two unattributed submissions published in the Spencer Katt column of PC Week (the one about Geoff Tate and the one about SGI/KFC), half a dozen or so in the Network back page of the University of Minnesota Daily (including one they published twice—must have been a slow news day), and a letter in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. If you’re a Nintendo fan you might read cube.ign.com - I had a few letters published there, too, including the one that prompted the death threat from Rare’s Leigh Loveday. I’m not particularly proud of any of these, except maybe the one in the Star Tribune.

At this point I’ve given up. I figure there’s no sense in trying to revive my sense of dignity. If you want to see a naked white boy, amble by my window around bedtime. No point in going to the effort of shutting the blinds.