This week has been amazing. I would definitely encourage anyone who's interested in this to sign up. It bends the brain in good ways. And now I've been going back and reading the past interviews, and feel like I know the people much better as a result.
- What are some foods that you do not like? Any particular reason that you don't like these foods? Foods I don't like, and it's all down to taste: besides some of the meats, there are Brussels sprouts, green peas and Lima beans. Also, the sweeter ways of fixing yams. I can eat them fried, seasoned with rosemary, olive oil, garlic and salt, but not with marshmallow, brown sugar and/or pineapple.
- Is there any particular job or occupation that you thought about doing in the past but decided against it? What was it and why did it/does it appeal to you? I thought about becoming a lawyer because even then I enjoyed making arguments, but when I was taking pre-law classes I was tongue-tied in class discussions. I just couldn't think on my feet well enough to keep up with the more confident and aggressive students, and when I sat in on actual law school classes, the Socratic Dialogue technique of grilling students looked horrifying. That diffidence seemed like it would persist and handicap me in courtroom settings.
- What is something that you would like to see more of on VeggieBoards that would benefit the community? Something where we're all motivated to cooperate and help one another out, the way we are in the Recipes discussions or when someone's getting grief from family members or co-workers. For example, we probably all agree that restaurants need to be encouraged, urged, pressured if necessary, to provide more and better veg*n options and to use plant-based protein sources instead of just starches. And I don't think the people who determine most menus have a clue that half of all vegetarians prefer vegan food. On VB we could provide text of e-mails we've sent to restaurants and their responses, or UrbanSpoon reviews we've posted. When something someone wrote seems to be hitting home and having a positive effect, we can cop some of that verbiage ourselves next time we communicate to a restaurant's management.
-What jobs have you done in the past? Right after college I administered aptitude tests for the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation. After that I was a production manager and later a reporter for newsletters in the Food Chemical News family. Since then I've most often worked as a technical writer, except for five years in public affairs for an office of the Defense Department that was looking into possible causes of Gulf War illnesses. That's the most interesting job I've ever had. I answered a lot of e-mails from sick and/or worried veterans, and did some other public affairs-related jobs whenever it was time to roll out another paper showing our subject matter experts' findings, as they pretty much ruled out one possible cause after another as to why some Desert Storm service members got sick and stayed sick: polluted air, drugs that were handed out as pretreatment in case the soldiers were later hit with nerve gas, vaccines, overuse of insecticide, depleted uranium exposure, low-level nerve gas exposure, those were the main ones. No one possible cause was ever tagged as being a significant or certain cause, and some of the possibilities were impossible to tease out from one another. For example, insecticide is a nerve gas. Once we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense wound down these efforts because there were too many other military health issues to worry about by then.
-Is that you in your avatar? That's me, breaking in my new iPhone in 2011. I don't think the term "selfie" had been coined yet.
-What's the largest group you've ever played to? Maybe a thousand, whatever the seating capacity was at some HS auditoriums where I was part of talent show lineups. Since high school, maybe 200 or so was the biggest audience, and most often the size would be counted in the dozens.
-Do you prefer mountains or beaches? I love them both. I'm looking into Portland Oregon as a vacation home and maybe a full-time place to retire to. It's within an easy drive of its mountain and its ocean, among other enticements.
