Archive for June, 2007
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
He really wore that sometimes.
Nic Stoffle, “Quantum Nic,” was a difficult person to track down. Very friendly, well-meaning, but rare. Everyone could remember seeing him around recently, but he wasn’t ever actually there when you needed him. A physicist, he was perpetually at UH working on something or other related to education. He was president of the Fencing Club the year before me, and cemented the popular opinion that the club president almost never showed up to practice. I think he just wrote checks.
I was team captain that year, so we were both tasked with running the club. A previous president aptly compared leading fencers to trying to herd ducks: they make a lot of noise, wander off incessantly, and sometimes manage to hurt each other. He backed me up the following year, when I was president, once helping me keep the team from getting kicked out of an entire hotel complex on one particularly stressful night.
Nic taught me the basics of self defense, the basics of knife fighting, the basics of kendo, and the basics of handgun maintenance. He had a closet dedicated to weaponry and would have had a black belt if he’d taken the last test. He once let me go to his place just to be able to play Shadow of the Colossus on his 50″ tv. The last party I attended in his apartment involved him scorching all the hair off one of his arms while making a complicated mixture of alcohol and other ingredients called “glog.”
He went to Florida to get married and then came back. He and his wife have two cats, one of which is named “Pawsitron.” Nowadays I can call and leave a message on his phone and usually receive an answer a week or two later saying he’d just heard it and would like to hang out some time. That sort of vicious cycle can wear down on the spirit rather quickly.
Category: People I Know
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
Sometimes that’s just how my memory works.
While none of these have been in any particular order, I think that if I went back to the beginning, Jamie LaLonde would be right there. She was the first friend I made during my first semester at UH. I knew her a bit from Summer Orientation, and she happened to be in my Algebra class. She was half Korean, she attended poetry readings, she wore fairy wings to the park, she had a car named Betsy and a boyfriend named Jared, she ate slowly and carefully tore food to bits with her fingers, she smiled when it rained, she laughed with her eyes, she shook her head when she was nervous, she was never too busy for a picnic, she swore there were roaches in her phone, her eyes misted when she was worried, and she was as kind as she was humble.
I had her in classes for my first couple of semesters. Once we were supposed to go to Mardi Gras and meet up with her then-fiance, only she was disallowed at the last minute. So instead we drove down to my hometown for a day. Which in a way is the equivalent of planning a trip to Las Vegas and settling for a game of checkers.
She was married in the Summer. It was the first wedding of a peer I attended. She wore a long white linen gown and her fiance wore traditional Scottish garb, kilt and all. There were bagpipes, an arch covered in flowers, and a little white cake. That was one of the last times I saw her. There wasn’t a disagreement, it was more that suddenly both our lives moved in very different directions.
I remember once having a conversation with her that came to a long pause when she finished a thought with something that’s stuck with me ever since: “Friends come and go.” She said it vacantly, as though she didn’t know whether she believed it or not. I didn’t know what exactly I thought of it, but it was a bit fitting, as within a few months of her uttering that phrase, she went.
Category: People I Know
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007
Wearing a clay derby, wielding a bottle opener. Kind of a long story.
Julian, of the Gaton family, is Filipino. That is his ancestry. You either know Filipinos or you don’t, so that opening can be interpreted as solemn, humorous, or confusing. He was in my first photography class along with Chan, though Julian lasted longer. His father owned the house that some of us art majors rented for a year. We called it “the hub,” because all of us were of different ethnicities and art majors. I lived there until there were more rats than roommates. Moving along.
Julian does impressions of people. Constantly. Some are good, and some are irritating simply because they are accurate depictions of people I don’t like. He did impressions of other Filipinos which I at first thought were really humorous and abstracted. Then I met his parents and realized that he wasn’t actually making any of it up. One time his father was talking in my general direction and began, “So, uh, are you, ehhhh,” and then just walked away. Julian quoted an enraged uncle as using the most peculiar threat I’ve ever heard: “Do you want to smoke jungle life?!” If I ever figure out what that means, it’s too late for me.
The Graphics program at UH chewed up and spit out Julian, so he and Chan jumped ship to Media Productions. Which was the wise decision, really. He eventually picked up a degree and is presently employed at Texas A&M in College Station doing things reasonably related to his major. He divides his time between living there and at “the farm,” a term which has always meant his parent’s property off to the west of Houston. The last story I heard about “the farm” involved a cousin of his leaping from a moving tractor, pulling a handgun from his pants and using it to blow away a snake he’d spotted in the tall grass. I don’t ask about the farm anymore.
Category: People I Know
Monday, June 18th, 2007
The rare Frank in its natural setting
In a way, there’s not much to say about Frank Rose. There are a number of nuances and quirks to his mannerisms and demeanor that can only be appreciated by being around him in person. He was certainly the most calm person I’ve known. He had a perpetually positive personality, and I can’t recall a conversation involving him in which he was not smiling a majority of the time. I also can’t really recall him without a cup of tea in his hand at all times.
He was like a well-traveled, quiet philosophy professor. Or yoga instructor. I don’t know anyone else who’s actually driven a car to Alaska. I first got to know him due to his being in the small group of photography majors accepted into the Block program in Fall of 2003. He produced some interesting self portrait work, as well as some more elemental-focused material. People would go to him to have mature conversations. Seeing as my other social circles at the time were the anime club and fencing club, that was kind of a big change of pace for me.
Prior to our graduation in Spring 2005 he took up curating at a small gallery that shared space with a hair salon. More recently, he became owner and publisher of ArtHouston Magazine. One of the last things I told him during our final critique was that if he ever found the end of the world, he’d have to send me a postcard. His response was simply that I’d have to keep him up-to-date with my address.
Category: People I Know
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
I think he’s shaved and cut his hair now, but this is the Chuck I know
Chuck was born Matthew Cooper, a name which he managed to hang onto until the moment I first saw him during fencing practice, pointed at him, and said, “Chuck.” He’s been Chuck ever since. Everyone in fencing called him Chuck. His girlfriend calls him Chuck. That’s just how it is. I don’t know if I should bear pride or guilt at that.
He joined the fencing club some time after I did. He was always a foilist, and got pretty good at it. He was team captain once, and that’s what he’ll always be to me. He had a bad habit of laughing and being terribly amused if someone was injured or mentioned grievous harm. One of his end-of-year awards was “Most likely to laugh if Billy dies,” Billy being a particularly clumsy club member at the time. If Chuck ever approached and said, “smell this,” the proper course of action was to leave immediately. He had a lot of gross stories, his most infamous being something Rod always called the “Pooper Cooper” story. I never allowed myself to listen to it.
His major was journalism and he wrote for the campus newspaper. I didn’t realize until putting together all of these posts that I knew so many people that were somehow associated with the Daily Cougar. It’ll stop some day. Chuck sometimes expressed anger and frustration with the poor work ethic and moral standards of the other journalism majors, whereas I always thought those two qualities were course prerequisites considering today’s media.
After obtaining his journalism degree he moved off to the state of New York when his girlfriend was accepted into law school up there. He did manage to get a job at a newspaper, though the few stories I’ve heard about his work experience over there haven’t been encouraging. I suppose even those “poor work ethic and moral standards” people end up as head editors somewhere.
Category: People I Know