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vast archipelago of negligible real estate Wednesday, November 12 2003
The world might be a big place, but the parts of it I interact with constitute a vast archipelago of negligible real estate. It turns out that the disabled guy whose computer I've been working on went to Oberlin College, and Gretchen even remembers him from when they were both students. In 1994 this guy was riding a bicycle in San Francisco when a car ran a yellow light and slammed into him. He was in a coma for a long time, but eventually came out of it, recovering facilities one by one but nonetheless remaining confined to a wheelchair. The story I've heard is that his personality underwent a dramatic transformation after the accident. Before it he was your typical Oberlin student, outraged about racism, homophobia, and the covert support of the right wing insurgency in Nicaragua. Afterwards his politics took a turn to the right and he also became somewhat religious. That ought to tell you something. (Not that I've paid much attention, but I've never heard of a case where a brain injury resulted in a conservative person developing liberal political leanings and losing his religious zeal.)
In other Oberlin-related news, the other day Gretchen got the latest copy of the Oberlin Alumni magazine, to which she'd emailed an account of our May wedding. It was a typical story for an alumni magazine: we'd met at Oberlin, and our wedding had been richly attended by Oberlin alumni. You'd think in this day and age magazine staff would know how to undertake such basic computer operations as cutting and pasting names from an email into a Quark XPress document (or however the magazine sets up its pages). But no, somehow they managed to print my name as "Gus Miller" and then imply that I graduated with the class of 1990. If I ever need to "prove" I graduated from Oberlin, I suppose I could cite this issue, although I'd have to come up with an explanation for the "Miller" part.
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