Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Ten Things: My Edition

(As with all such lists, these aren't necessarily the ten most interesting things I've done, though they're the most interesting things I not only could blog but also thought of to blog.)

1. Gone to law school, only to spend the summer after my 1L year in an overnight job getting paid to process baseball statistics. Returned to the same job after 2L and 3L.

2. On at least four occasions, led the stat room of either an entire 64-team national championship quiz tournament or at least one division thereof. (Yes, both Craig and Mike have similar experience; what about the rest of you?)

2a. Organized a pair of quiz tournaments (one academic, one trash) that took place three days before I took the bar exam. Discovered the unfortunate timing when I asked a player if he'd be attending and that player declined on account of said bar exam. (Unlike me, I assume Answer Guy passed his...)

3. Covered an NHL game for a wire service, including access to both teams' postgame locker rooms highlighted by a mostly naked Martin Brodeur answering interview questions in broken English. (Yeah, Cooch blows this out of the water...)

4. Played chess at a Canadian collegiate team tournament as Harvard's first board, then chess at the Pan Am as Boston University's first board, then chess in New Jersey as BU's fourth board with teammates of Italian, Belarussian, and Russian heritage.

5. Won a high school quiz-bowl national championship on a team with my sister, then won a college quiz-bowl national championship with her on the team we beat in the final.

6. Gone undefeated in 17 lifetime games at CBCI nationals. (Unless some other team has gone undefeated in recent years, I hold this distinction alone, as all three of my teammates from that year played on subsequent CBCI NCT teams, though all three of them topped me on PPG in '95. We were all between 40 ppg and 22.5 ppg.)

7. Gone to baseball's Winter Meetings in seach of a job, and - at a forum sponsored by Baseball America - asked Sandy Alderson a question tough enough to make Scott Boras (also on stage) smirk.

8. Strategically dressed in baby blue sweater and white slacks, snuck out of a college journalism conference on the first amendment, taken a Manhattan subway train, and walked right into a college football stadium, trumpet case in hand, to sneak into the halftime show of a college band whose school I didn't even go to. (Sight-read the music over some other trumpeter's shoulder, faked it as best I could for formations...) Led other members of that band to believe I was an alumnus who'd managed the band a few years earlier.

8a. In postgame festivity, gotten wasted along the banks of the Hudson(?) River, consuming so much that nobody would sit next to me on the Greyhound bus back to Boston and even by the time I got back to my dorm I still purportedly smelled like a brewery.

9. Been referred to as "editor cum puppet" (all normal typeface in the original; by not italicizing the middle word I claim they inadvertently made the reference obscene) in a Harvard Crimson staff editorial for my work on a libertarian/conservative alt-paper.

10. Done contract work at $100/hour, then eighteen months later done contract work for $20/hour. (Which one involved Java programming and which involved Excel tricks is an exercise for the reader.)

Posted by Matt Bruce at February 27, 2005 10:57 PM