I Cannot Fail: Maxwell on The Eye
Twenty-Five Things About Me
1. Coffee is my favorite beverage.
2. I enjoy sweeping the floor.
3. I love peeling garlic.
4. I suffer from debilitating anxiety. I call this anxiety by the name Mara, who is a Buddhist personification of evil and cowardice.
5. I have three memories from 1984: Visiting my newborn sister at the hospital; on the living room couch, talking to my father; my father holding me in the backyard and pointing to something. These are my earliest memories.
6. I didn’t learn how to spell my own name until I was five. (It probably didn’t help that my kindergarten teacher spelled it wrong.)
7. I am the greatest living scholar of German never to have visited Germany.
8. I really want to go to Germany. I’ve missed several opportunities.
9. I eloped with my high school sweetheart at a wedding salon at the western edge of town. It’s called Yerkes. There may be pictures of this event somewhere. No one has seen them except for those present at the event.
10. I spend most of my time with my wife, and I love it.
11. My Myers-Briggs profile is INTJ. I’m not crazy about the J; I’d rather be a P.
12. I had a band in high school. We could never agree on a name we all liked, and there was only one album that all four of us owned, Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model. Being in a band was the first thing that gave me confidence as an adolescent. I haven’t performed music in some time, not live since 2002, and only rarely at home.
13. I love the Moon and the planet Venus.
14. I can’t imagine living away from a college campus.
15. I believe I have squandered my gifts.
16. I believe it’s not too late for me. This year is already off to an auspicious start. Venus and the crescent Moon together. An old computer’s death and rebirth. A ten-year anniversary with my first love. Ten years on the tenth of January. That’s a decade, bitches.
17. In middle school my most hated class was shop class, but I was always too embarrassed to say so, because all the other boys loved shop class so fucking much.
18. Barack Obama’s Inauguration did not make me cry, but I did shiver.
19. My favorite poem is “Max und Moritz” by Wilhelm Busch. My favorite poem in English is “Kubla Khan”.
20. I don’t believe that music is mankind’s greatest treasure, gift, expression, or virtue.
21. Sometimes I hate music full stop.
22. It doesn’t matter. I am going to release a collection of music in 2009. I cannot fail.
23. I am going to publish a book in 2009. I cannot fail.
24. I am going to become fluent in German in 2009. I cannot fail.
25. I am going to get my girl into college in 2009. I cannot fail. It was especially difficult to write “I cannot fail” after that sentence.
