|
|
|
Who?
Being a Very Frequently Asked Question
I'm not particularly good at writing about myself. A Hundred Facts List, however, I can just about manage:
- My name is Martin Patrick Marks.
- I am 27 years, 276 days old.
- I'm named for my maternal grandfather, Martin Patrick Shivnan.
- I never met him. He died before I was born.
- In fact, I only ever really knew one of my biological grandparents—my maternal grandmother—though I met my father's mother when I was eight and visited England.
- I was born in London, and lived there for the first two years of my life before moving to Baltimore.
- I consider myself an London-born Baltimorean of Irish, English, and Welsh ancestry, which is a perfectly serviceable description as long as you don't go analyzing it too hard.
- I was born in Stepney, so I am in fact a true Cockney.
- When I was a kid, I didn't understand why they didn't put all the hospitals in London within the sound of Bow Bells. I figured everyone would want to be a Cockney if they had the choice.
- I certainly don't sound like either a traditional Cockney or a modern Eastender. But I don't quite sound like an American, either.
- Sometimes I find myself using obscure Hiberno-British dialectal words that no one I know has ever heard before. If you ask me where something is and I reply "oh yeah, it's over beyant," please do not stare at me, just go look where I'm pointing.
- Where other people would simply have a look at something, I might have a gander, a butcher's, or even, on special occasions, a shufti. Dekkos, however, are rare.
- Also, I use an obscene number of adverbs. It gets me in trouble sometimes, when I'm trying to write something professional-sounding, and my emotions keep slipping in through an ill-chosen "definitely" or "obviously" or even (eep!) "blatantly".
- "Actually" is the bane of my diction. We'll see how far I make it before I inadvertently toss one of those in. [EDIT: Thirteen sentences.]
- My vocabulary wasn't much different when I was a child—I just didn't know how to pronounce any of the words I kept using.
- I tend to think fifth grade was probably the high point of my life to date, but I have a tendency to romanticize—and to conveniently forget things I'd rather not remember.
- I was always a terrible student, even then. I had a severe aversion to anything that smacked of pointless busywork—which is 90% of what teachers expect you to do, on any level of the educational system.
- I almost didn't graduate high school because I nearly failed calculus, despite the fact that I could do the work in my head.
- (Which may seem kind of strange, since I'm borderline dyscalculic, and can't in fact add single digit numbers in my head with any reliability—I have never gotten the hang of eight plus six—but, in reality, arithmetic has almost nothing to do with actual math.)
- My first college was Saint John's College, Annapolis. (Books, not basketball.)
- It wasn't a very good fit for me, and I ended up leaving of my own accord after three semesters.
- Admittedly, if I'd waited five more minutes to leave of my own accord, they'd've kicked me out.
- I'd like to claim it was because I threw a flaming chicken out the window or something, but it was mostly just the "bad student" thing again, with a healthy mixture of other drama I don't feel like telling the entire Internet about. It was some other guy who threw the flaming chicken out the window. (And I don't think he got kicked out for it, actually.)
- After St John's, I went to the University of Maryland, College Park—which I hated, but survived.
- Six years and nine months after my high school graduation, I had not one but two bachelor's degrees (bachelors'? bachelor'ses?), one in theoretical linguistics and one in Spanish language and literature.
- Now I work as a draftsman for a precast concrete company.
- To get the job, I walked into the front office, drew an X-bar tree on a whiteboard, and translated Neruda's twelfth soneta. I was, naturally, hired on the spot.
- Actually, I got the job through a family connection. They'd had no luck with people who were qualified, so they decided to go with someone who had no relevant qualifications whatsoever.
- I should mention that it worked. I'm very good at my job—and I enjoy it tremendously. Well, mostly tremendously.
- For a long time, I dreamed of being able to teach linguistics someday. But then I realized that linguistics professors are actively discouraged from teaching. That, plus the idea of graduate school, caused some major dream reevaluation.
- I guess the closest thing I have to a new goal in life is to never work in the same job twice.
|
