Meme of 7

I got tagged by Steph! For an entertaining meme where I tell you 7 weird or random facts about me.

Steph approached this meme in a very interesting and fresh way — she picked 7 dates in the past and described what was going on in her life at that time: 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5 years ago. So I’m going to copy that, agreeing with her logic that *something* about that is likely to produce random facts about me.

1) November 1972: I turned three years old, living with my parents in a duplex in Milwaukee. By that time, I was going to the Highland Community School, a very cool Montessori school in our neighborhood. My teacher, Tim, lived with his family in the same duplex. (Actually, I don’t know exactly when Katie and her family moved out, and Tim and his family moved in.)

2) November 1977: I turned 8 years old. My family had moved across town into a single-family home. It was the second year of Milwaukee’s school desegregation, and I was in the 4th grade at Lloyd Street School. Most of my friends from the neighborhood school I’d attended also switched to Lloyd, but we didn’t have classes together. I’d skipped 1st grade, so at this point, I was 1-1.5 years younger than most of my classmates. Two years later, I demanded to be allowed to repeat 5th grade so that I could be with kids my own age. I still don’t know how that worked, but it did.

3) November 1982: Rough year. My Dad ran for Congress in 1982, and lost in the September Democratic primary. Out of 13 candidates, he came in second. It was hard as hell on the whole family. I was in 8th grade. Around this time, the gym teacher pulled 6 or 8 of us girls out of class and made us talk about cliques and gossip. After the second time, I asked her why I was there, and she told me she wanted all of the popular girls to be in the discussion. I was totally shocked that she saw me as a popular girl.

4) November 1987: Fall of my first semester in college. By this time, I’d figured out that Reed was NOT where I belonged, that my roommate was a thoughtless bitch, and that I was too far away from my friends and family. But I had already made a lifelong friend, who took my out for my 18th birthday and made me feel special and loved.

5) November 1992: Fall of my first year out of college. I was BACK at Reed, working as a “Resident Adviser” aka live-in dorm supervisory staff. Reed had never had anyone like that before, and it was insanely controversial: the students who liked me introduced me to their friends as “Liza’s the fascist adult who lives in Foster-Scholz!” They hired me because the pressure was intense to hire both a woman and an alum, but no women graduates actually applied for the job. I was the closest thing. And I was completely miserable — it totally affirmed my decision to leave in the first place. I quit after the first semester.

6) November 1997: Fall of my first year out of law school. I was working for a small civil & constitutional rights law firm, and dating a man whom I fully believed I was going to marry. The innumerable levels on which we were wrong for one another were still hidden from my view.

7) November 2002: Jill and I were engaged, but not yet living together. Hee-hee. Isn’t that sweet? But the main reason was because her busy season kicked in days after she proposed, and we hadn’t had time for her to move. Also, my then-boss and I were absolutely not understanding each other, and we were both miserable. Jill took me away for a long weekend, the weekend after my grandmother died. When I got back into the office, we had a huge confrontation that was the end of my official lobbying career — in January 2003, I took my first corporate job and discovered that I loved it. (And that boss? We are still in touch and have a fine relationship now that I’m not miserably working for her.)

Who can I tag? It seems like I’ve read this meme on tons and tons of people’s blogs. Leave a comment if you haven’t been tagged and want to play. Or if you’re a non-blogging commenter, feel free to answer in the comments.