Call meJeffrey

Here it is. It was only a matter of time. The “Seven Things” meme. For a while I thought that I had dodged it completely, seeing how it’s been cycling through my friends and acquaintances for some time now. To be honest, I was a little worried about getting tagged. I felt that finding seven things that most people don’t know about me to write about would be difficult; specifically because I’m an open book about everything in my life – plus I have the tendency to be a story-teller (read: I talk a lot). I’ve decided to not worry about what people may or may not know, and just go with what has helped define who I am in one way or another. I was tagged for this by my co-worker, Dylan Richard, an uber-talented engineer working in our Chicago office. Dylan is an amazing dude. If you don’t know him, you should be jealous of those who do.

On with the show…

1. On two different occasions, School District 21 in Buffalo Grove, Illinois ripped off my architectural designs.
Occasion one: I’m not sure why, but growing up, I had always wanted to be an architect. It probably started with my obsessions with Legos and Lincoln Logs and grew from there. As a kid, it was not uncommon for me to draw pictures of building, real and imaginary. When I was in 5th or 6th grade, my elementary school announced that they were going to be putting an addition onto the school to expand the library on the second floor as well as the space directly underneath it.

While the details are a bit hazy 18 years later, for some reason they asked all the students to draw pictures of what they thought the addition would look like when it was finished. Most kids broke out markers and crayons. I broke out a mechanical pencil and a scale. (Side note: if you called an architectural scale by the wrong name, my high school drafting teacher used to say, “THIS is a scale – I’M the ruler.”) I worked on this drawing for a while – long enough for my family to become familiar with it – and then I turned it in. Over the summer the addition was built, and to our surprise (especially my mom’s) the addition looked exactly like what I had drawn. Coincidence? I think not!

Occasion two: The summer before my senior year, I moved from my Dad’s house back to my Mom’s house and switched high schools back to the school district that I went through elementary and middle school. I was well on my way in my architectural studies, having twice completed the “Atelier” program at the University of Illinois in Champagne/Urbana, and taken a ton of classes for hand drafting, CAD, model building, etc. Because I had moved so far ahead, my aforementioned drafting teacher let me come up with my own projects to work on in class.

One of these projects was the redesign of the football field’s press-box that sat atop of the bleachers. The concept didn’t come out of thin air, all of the students knew the old, rickety press-box would be replaced come spring of 1997. After a few weeks I completed my project and turned it in. They started work on the pressbox in the spring, and by the end of the school year what sat high above the bleachers was my drawing incarnate. When I approached my drafting teacher about it, he got pissed at me for asking. It was an odd, yet curious reaction. Granted, he was an odd, yet curious dude.

2. A teacher from my middle school hit me with a car.
On a summer day between 7th and 8th grade I was riding my bike on a residential street with a bunch of my friends. A car approached us from behind and started honking. We waived it around, but it slowly got closer and closer to us. When it was close enough for us to see the driver’s face, we realized it was a teacher at our middle school named Mr. Sailor, a guy who had a reputation for being a crotchety old bastard. Think Dick Cheney teaching 8th grade science.

I’m pretty sure he thought he was being funny by creeping up on us – accelerating towards us, slowing down, honking, repeat. I was unluckily towards the back of the group, and during one of Mr. Sailor’s hilarious accelerations, I got freaked out, reflexively hit the brake on my bike, and he crashed into me. Keep in mind this all happened at pretty low speeds, but I was a 13-year old on a bike and he was in a car. He stopped his car after his bumper hit my back tire hard enough to throw me off balance and I crashed. As I lay on the ground, tangled in my bike, he gets out of his car and says “that’s what happens when you ride in the middle of the road,” and then drives away.

I had one of those “I need to go home RIGHT NOW” panic moments and hopped back on my bike and rode home as fast as I could through people’s yards, too scared to ride in the street. When I got home I realized that my leg and hands were bleeding and my neck hurt really bad. My mom was at work, so a friend called 911, then my mom. An ambulance came to my house along with a police officer. I was treated for my minor scrapes and told the police officer what happened, and he went to find Mr. Sailor. I’m not clear on the exact details, but I do know the police couldn’t find him for 3 days. I also know that the school knew that this happened and didn’t fire him. My neck injury was bad enough that I had to spend part of the summer in a soft neck-brace.

While I didn’t have him as a teacher (the school made sure of that) I did have to see Mr. Sailor every day for an entire school year in the hallways. Awkward.

3. I have the words “drug free” tattooed on the back of my legs.
I was straightedge pretty much all through high school, and throughout my exhausting three semesters of college. I got my first straightedge tattoo when I was 15. It says “SXE” on my right hip, and it’s done with the skill level of someone who would tattoo a 15-year old. A few months later, I upped the ante with “XXX” tattooed on my left hip – same “artist”. When I was 17, I got “X Straightedge X” tattooed across the upper part of my left arm (which is thankfully now covered with something much nicer). All of these tattoos told the world that I was committed to being drug and alcohol free, and were all strategically placed so that my parents couldn’t see them while I was wearing regular clothes.

When I went away to college, I started getting heavily tattooed on my arms by Aaron Coleman in Phoenix. As anyone with a lot of work done can tell you: each one leads to the next. Mix that with being 18 years old and you potentially have a recipe for disaster. I don’t recall the exact day it happened, but I imagine I was sitting in my dorm room, listening to Earth Crisis “Gomorrah’s Season Ends” and came up with the brilliant idea of getting the word “drug” tattooed down my left leg, and “free” tattooed down my right. Hilariously, this was before I got into graphic design, so I opened Microsoft Publisher on my computer and designed the tattoo in the toughest looking font the system had to offer. I then printed it out as large as my 8-1/2″ x 11″ ink-jet could handle in a format that I’ve since learned is called “left justified.”

Pro-tip: When your tattoo artist laughs at you when you bring him or her a tattoo idea, maybe think it through for a few moments more.

The best part of this story is that the tattoos gained me the nickname “rug ree” because when I wore shorts, as you tend to do when you’re in college in Arizona, the “d” and the “f” would get covered. Awesome.

4. I’ve DJ’d at clubs and raves all over the country.
There was a point in my life where I really strived to be the next Sashweedvanoakendyk. At the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, I lived in an a giant apartment with my closest friends, two of whom taught me how to DJ, and the other who would dance like he really meant it whenever you were behind the decks. We were a solid crew. We also lived right above another apartment full of DJs, so suffice to say – noise wasn’t an issue at all. Living with two fairly established DJs did get me introduced to promoters and afforded me the opportunity to play out very, very early on in my “career.” This gave me the confidence to stand up in front of a lot of people and play records (yes, records – not CDs) for hours.

The most people I played in front of was probably a little over a thousand in San Diego at a huge multi-stage outdoor party called “The Movement” on the UCSD campus. Being much more established than me, my roommate played the main stage to easily double that number. I played raves and clubs all over the midwest as well. I never did get to play anywhere east of Chicago, but I would have loved to play at one of those East-coast 3-day mega-raves.

My relationship as a DJ with promoters helped when I started getting into graphic design. Being a designer and a DJ really gives you a ton of leverage to do both. I literally began my career as a graphic designer designing huge rave flyers, and one of the smartest things I ever did early on was tell promoters “if you let me DJ at your party, I’ll do your flyer for free.” This lead to me getting paid for both. One of those promoters, who at the time was a very close friend, left Chicago and moved to DC to go work for a dance music station called “The Move” on XM (channel 80). I not only briefly had a DJ residency on that channel, but I got to design the station’s identity. XM80 was dropped from the lineup in the Sirius/XM merger, so you can no longer see my logo on XM radios. I quit playing raves as my design career started to take off, and eventually stopped DJing altogether because…

5. I have no colon.
In 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, I got the stomach flu – and I got it good. After 4 weeks of dry heaving for seemingly no reason, passing considerable amounts of blood every time I visited the little boys room, and losing a ton of weight, I got the bright idea of seeing a doctor. I can’t imagine how I must have looked when I entered my internist’s office. Incredibly skinny, incredibly pale and incredibly weak. She sent me into the hospital for some emergency tests (her office is in the hospital), and within 2 hours I was admitted. After a night’s worth of testing, I was informed that I didn’t have the world’s worst case of the stomach flu – I had ulcerative colitis. I left the hospital just shy of 4 weeks later.

On a mixture of medicines and incredibly strong painkillers, I spent the next 4 years literally at war with my immune system. There were short periods of time where everything would be seemingly normal, and I could try to resume some semblance of a normal life. Going out with friends, going to parties, being social. Without fail, the bottom would drop out and I’d have to return to my life as a hermit, high as a kite on hyrdocodone, making sure to be no more than a few steps away from a bathroom at all times. Between 2001-2005 I was hospitalized almost 15 times, sometimes for malnutrition, sometimes because I was losing so much blood that I’d need transfusions. The 14th floor of the Feinberg Pavillion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital became like a second home.

The only upside to this situation is that I amassed an incredibly impressive DVD collection, and the only thing I could do that brought me any amount of satisfaction was work. Both are still going strong.

In late 2004, I started a new infused drug called Remicade, which was one of the first drugs to treat the disease, and not just the symptoms. For a few months I had my life back completely. It was awesome. When my UC flared again, it did so with a vengeance. To say that I was fed up with being sick, would have been the understatement of the millennium. I literally hit my rock bottom, and I made the decision that I knew was an option, but never thought it would be something I’d elect to do. I decided to have my colon removed.

I went to meet with the surgeon, and we set a date for the first of 2 surgeries. The first surgery would be the total colectomy and creation of a J-pouch. The 2nd surgery would be 8-12 weeks later, depending on how I was healing, to “take down” the temporary colostomy I had to have while I was healing inside. My first surgery was April 5, 2005 and my second surgery was June 10th, 2005.

This was easily the best decision I’ve ever made. While having frankenguts isn’t the most normal thing, it’s normal enough for me, and it’s better than being dead. It also gave me unique opportunity to send my friends and family new, clean colostomy bags filled with candy as a thank you for being supportive (almost no one thought that was funny except me). Plus I can say that I have no colon – how many people do you know that can say that?

6. My cat’s name is Murder.
There isn’t really a great story behind this one. I just thought it would be an awesome name for a cat.

7. I can’t watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Ever.
It’s funny how memories screw with your perception of time. I just looked at wikipedia to see when Thriller came out and it said 1983. This means I would have been 4, so I’m now realizing that my memory of my dad somehow getting a copy of The Making Of Thriller documentary had to have happend a good two years later. Either way, here’s the story…

For whatever reason, my parents thought it would be a good idea to sit the whole family down to watch the Making of Thriller documentary together. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they probably hadn’t seen it before, knew we all loved Michael Jackson, and didn’t realize they were about to scar their child for life. The “making of” part was innocuous enough, but once they started putting makeup on Michael, I started to get scared. I made it to the actual video, and that’s when shit went bananas. I can’t say for sure what happened, but I do remember trying to leave the room, and to be fair to my parents, I’ll just say that I remember being told to come back and sit with the family. I don’t remember who said it or why, exactly. All I know is that the part when Michael sees the moon, hunches over and turns back to the girl and says “GO AWAY!” with those yellow eyes and teeth, I about crapped my pants.

In all seriousness, I’m getting cold sweats typing this. It’s so messed up.

By the time the video made it to the zombie dance, I was more scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life, even to this day. I went to bed that night and insisted on leaving the door open and all of the lights on. My mom always put on the radio for me at night to help me fall asleep, and that night was no different. Unfortunately, to add injury to injury, right about the same time that this happened, one of the most popular songs on the radio was Maxwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”. It’s a creepy enough song for a 5-year old with the music alone, but Michael Jackson sang the hook!

For what seemed like months, I slept with the lights on, refused to close the door when I went to the bathroom, couldn’t bathe without someone in the room, or be in any part of the house that wasn’t drenched in light. I was also terrified to go near windows at night.

Still to this day I can’t watch the video. I can barely hear the song. A couple years ago I decided that I was being irrational and resolved to take my fear head on. I loaded up the video on YouTube (during the day) and started watching it. I hit the “GO AWAY!” part and literally had a panic attack. I’m almost 30 years old, and if I’m flipping through the channels and land on VH1 “I Love the 80’s” and happen to catch a tiny glimpse of that video, I sleep with the lights on and shower with the curtain open. It’s so bad that I get anxious watching the parts of Edward Scissorhands that include Vincent Price. The oddest part is that I absolutely LOVE horror movies. I can watch them by myself at night and then go directly to bed – no problem. I even helped start a horror movie club! At some point I should probably see a therapist about all of this.

So, that’s all folks! Meme complete. However, this is where I break the rules. I’m not going to pass this on to anyone, because everyone I know who I would tag has either done it, or has been tagged to do it and has chosen not to. I’m in the middle of writing a couple different posts, and wanted something to write in the meantime, so I chose to take this on. If anyone WANTS to do this, email me at jeffrey [at] skinnycorp [dot] com, and I’ll tag you, but I don’t want to force it upon anyone.