In the Fall of 1985, I entered Glencoe high school as a sophomore, and Roger moved to Seattle where he was starting as a freshman at the University of Washington. I had a good time in high school and made some good friends. I started swimming as a sophomore, and continued through my senior year. I also played soccer, ran on the cross-country and track teams, and threw javelin (just to try it out).
At the end of my sophomore year in high school, I got my first real job working as a courtesy clerk (i.e., bag boy) at Safeway. As a courtesy clerk, I was in charge of bottle returns, stocking the beverage isles, and bagging up front; as long as things were busy, the job was a lot of fun, but when things were slow it could get boring. I continued working two days a week once school started again, but when the swimming season started up again I quit the job.
Some time
during my junior year I started to worry about where I was going to go to
college. I would often visit Roger up at the University of Washington, and the
thought of joining him up there, even if we only had a year of overlap, had a
lot of appeal. I also thought that I might want to go to the east coast for
school, and Berkeley was always a top choice. I discovered that there was a
summer program at Cornell University that allowed high-school kids to take some
college courses a little early, and I thought this would be a great chance to
check out the Ivy League scene. So the summer after my junior year in high
school, I headed to Ithaca, NY, and studied Calculus and Psychology. I had a
great time and I met lots of cool people. Having seven extra college credits
ended up being very useful, too. I found the general attitude at Cornell to be a
little snobbish, however, and I decided that I’d prefer to stay on the west
coast.
When I returned from Cornell in the summer of 1987, I
had a few weeks remaining before school started again, and I took a job at a
roofing company as part of the tear-off crew. This was physically the most
demanding job I have ever had, but it was a ton of fun. I would get up very
early in the morning, and the crew would head over to the current job, and we’d
spend all day pulling old roofs off. We got paid by the square, and by working
hard you could make a lot of money relative to comparable hourly wage jobs. When
I got home, it would take a very long time to get cleaned up, and by the time I
was out of the shower I would often go straight to bed.
I had
an enjoyable last year in Oregon during my senior year in high school, spending
lots of time partying with friends. A particular highlight was participating on
the Chess team; some friends and I got together and decided to compete in
tournaments, and we had a great time with the super-dorky nature of the whole
scene. Note the “Don’t Get Mated!” slogan in our yearbook picture.
At some point early on in my senior year, I decided that I wanted to go to the University of California at Berkeley, and happily I was accepted.
