College Classes

112

Past the turn of the year into Nineteen Ninety-Three, I didn't want to make the same mistake I had seven years earlier when I was pursuing my computer degree. Back then, as I was focused on getting the Bachelors level degree, I didn't worry about taking the Associates degree. As fate would have it, I couldn't complete the full Bachelors due to my growing health issues at the time and I ended up with no degree at all after three part-time years of College. Had I planned ahead, I could have chosen the classes needed to complete the Associate level degree, first, then continue onto the full degree. But I hadn't and thus I had nothing. So with my return to College after a five year health related break, the moment I had those few classes needed to finish the Associates, I filed for the degree and kept it for safe keeping, just in case something unexpected came up and I once again couldn't complete the Bachelors.

At first nervous returning to College after my lost years, I soon liked the variety of activity and topics it gave my starved mind. But to my surprise, after finding I was at the coding expert level in the eyes of Rocky Mountain Telecom, it was the handful of remaining computer courses I was bored with. In the past I could have bucked-up and tried to test-out of them, but I was so apathetic with the courses, rather than put in the effort to bring myself up to speed on the topics in order to test-out, I felt it would be easier to sit in the class room and work on other class material while 'absorbing' the nuances of the subject matter being discussed 'in the air' around me. This might have worked with the computer teacher I had quickly impressed the year before, but with this year there was a new instructor for my last two computer courses, and his only impression of me was my not paying attention to him in the classroom as he taught. Still, I got my projects done on time and without error, as well as getting all of the test answers right, so he didn't have a way to vent his displeasure other than glare at me. Then he assigned a project where he found his opportunity.

The coding project was to simulate the lottery number drawing. This was a program I had mastered for my Junior year of High School and needed to simply transfer it to the chosen computer language. I did and I was done in an hour at home. For the class he spent a full week working with them to figure out the logic. He hadn't figured it out himself ahead of time. So he came up with having them write a program to pick six random numbers, but then realized they could get a duplicate number or two as a result. So he had them place all the possible numbers into memory slots, then picked the numbers out of the slots, but how would they detect if a number had already been picked? He had them fill each picked slot with a invalid number after the original number had been chosen, thus if a random number was repeated, it would see the invalid value and not print it. The problem was this would then only result in five or four numbers being produced by the program instead of the six required. So he then had them create a second variable to count how many valid numbers they had gotten and not let the program finish until six had been printed. Next, as the real world lottery balls would tumble about in the cage between each one that was chosen, he wanted the students to randomly pick two slots a random number of times and swap the numbers in them. But he felt they should check for invalid number slots and skip those, yet still complete the same number of valid slot switches. They were trying to debug the logic on this twist when the time frame ran out for the project.

All of the students who followed his lead during the course of the two weeks received an 'A' for their program, even though it still didn't run. My program which fulfilled his requirements and ran flawlessly each time, he gave a 'B' noting that I had 'poor logic'. Whatever, I only had one more computer class with him and I spent a large chunk of that one staring out the window and watching the summer foliage as it grew during the semester. This time I made sure that not only were all of my tests and projects complete and error free, but if he led the students into a rabbit hole figuring out logic, I made sure my code followed that convoluted logic and then took the final steps needed to make it work, even though it ended up tied like a pretzel while doing it. He had to give me top marks for that last semester with him and I could tell he resented it.

But my other classes still captured my attention and one of them was 'Comparative Religions'. I enjoyed this class as it gave me a chance to become familiar with many different faiths without having to become an acolyte to do so. As Daina herself was interested in all of the world's faiths, she had a selection of books in her personal library I could draw upon as additional resources when working on the projects and other class work. For the Final, we were to give a presentation selecting a topic and then using it to compare two or more religions we had discussed during the semester. Now being familiar with the content of Daina's books, I decided to be daring when choosing my topic. You see, Daina's books didn't only just have the information, but often featured full color reproductions of classical paintings displaying aspects of those religions...

We had two days to give our presentations before the class and I chose the second day simply to reduce the number of hours I'd miss if I got kicked from the classroom for my topic. When my turn came, I brought with me a pile of Daina's books with various page markers in place. I then compared five different religions and their beliefs about sexual activity in the afterlife, showing various pictures from the books as I went along. The teacher placed her knuckles to her mouth to stifle her laughter as I did this. And I assured that the students had a good view of the various pictures, some depicting couples & threesomes, others including full orgies, though nothing too explicit. I ended with the Christian depictions of sex in Heaven, which pretty much was a good handshake, if that. The teacher loved my ballsiness and gave me top marks for the presentation and for the class.

I could tell I had won her respect and made sure to take more classes with her for my last year.

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Being Handy

111

As I couldn't afford to buy Daina things to show her my appreciation for the support she had been giving me over the past few years, I offered to apply my skills. She decided to get her first PC computer and I helped her shop around until we found the best pre-made fit for her needs and cost level. Getting it to her home, I put the components together on a small desk she had in her guest room and booted-up the computer and spent a little time reviewing its bios settings and pre-installed software. I then pared it down to what she needed and then gave her a copy of my original check book program, since expense tracking was one of the things she wanted to use it for, as well as preparing her quarterly student reports.

I guided her as she used the word processing software for the first time to prepare her next set of reports. When it came time to print them up she had a ratty photo copy of a poor photo copy of a school letter head page. Seeing this, I went home and created a new school letter head form for her with a group of mountains in the background using my desktop publishing skills. For her next set of student reports, the new letter head sheets made them stand out and look more professional.

As she would have handyman tasks at her condo from time to time, I would help when I could, such as installing a ceiling fan for her after she had seen the two I put into my own apartment. As I worked on it, I entertained her with my ability to mimic various music artists I liked and sang various songs in their voices. She enjoyed it and was impressed by my ability to change the sound of my voice, even for singing. Given her positive feedback, I took up the habit of occasionally leaving hoax messages on her answering machine to see if I could fool her with a new voice or accent I'd worked out.

She asked if I could make her an exercise step for her routine at home and, as I hadn't a clue what an exercise step was, she explained to me that it had to be steady as she would be constantly stepping up and down it. I realized it was more of a little platform than a stair type of step or foot stool and she paid for some scrap particle board at the local hardware store and I measured and cut it into three pieces by hand, two thin strips I crossed & mounted corner to corner on the underside of the square main piece. It was the height Daina wanted and very stable. She was very appreciative and the next time I was at her condo, I noticed that she had a collection of spices and jars of base ingredients inconveniently stuffed into a cabinet where she would have to pull most, if not everything, out to find what she was looking for each time. I saw she had an empty patch of wall at the end of her kitchen and offered to custom craft a 'spice rack' for her. She was willing to see what I could craft up but wasn't sure she would use it if she didn't like the look. More as a box of shelves, I measured the various sizes of her items to place on it and decided to make it tapered so the large jars would fit on the deep bottom shelf and the rest would become less deep until the final shelf would hold the smallest spice bottles. As with the step, I hand cut pine boards and then assembled them, this time with wooden dowels rather than screws so there wouldn't be any unsightly screw heads. Showing it to her and how I could secure it to her kitchen wall with the mounting brackets hidden from view, she agreed and it was soon in place with the jars and spices stacked in their new home and Daina had a new portion of a cabinet cleared out and available for other uses.

With her enthusiasm for these two projects, I looked around her kitchen to see if there was anything else I could do for her. She only had a limited amount of counter space and a large portion of it was taken up by her microwave oven. I noted an odd part of her kitchen where there was a row of high cabinets that spanned over her refrigerator, across a bare portion of wall until they spanned over the open area sink dividing her kitchen from the rest of the living space. I said I could build a suspended shelf that would fit under the bare wall portion of that cabinet span next to the refrigerator and she could place her microwave into it, clearing counter space. For Daina this was one project too far and she declined. Assuming she feared it would be made out of particle board or the such, I assured her I could get quality wood and custom stain it to match the cabinets so once installed it would look like a natural part of them. But the answer was ''No.''

Still, she had a birthday coming up and I did have a few pennies saved away. Assuming her refusal of the project was based on her not having confidence in my ability, I decided to go ahead and create the microwave shelf at my apartment, trim it, and stain it. It would be suspended by two side pieces that would slide up between small mounting gaps between two of the high cabinets with bolts crossing between the cabinet insides for support. On the nights I was over to her place for television shows or playing card or board games, she would often use the restroom before she'd drive me home for the night. I took this moment of time to pull out the tape measure in my pocket and plot the area where the shelf would be placed, and later bring stain sample slips to match against the existing cabinets to insure my work would match. As I'd hear her hand grasping the bathroom door knob, I'd quickly stuff these back into my pants pockets and act as if I had just been standing there doing nothing while she was busy.

When she would come over to my place, I would furtively scoot the pieces of wood and trim from my living room into my bedroom and pull the door to, so she wouldn't see the work in progress and misjudge the half completed shelf. And then it was done and I asked to borrow Daina's car on her birthday when she was working as I needed 'to run an errand'. In reality I placed the completed parts of the microwave shelf into the back seat of her car and brought them to her condo as, since her house key was on the car key ring, I was able to bring in the pieces and compression fit them into place. Not yet mounted with the securing bolts I wouldn't trust it to hold the actual weight of the microwave, but I wanted to let Daina see the finished product and approve the final step of drilling the holes for the bolts. If for any reason before that step she still didn't want the microwave shelf, I could simply pull it out of it's place hanging under the cabinets and take it home, leaving no trace it had temporarily hung there. After I picked Daina up at work, we first went to her place so she could change before we went out to eat for the evening and I settled on her living area couch and waited for her to notice the shelf. After changing her clothes, she briefly puttered in the kitchen for a bit and then was ready to leave.

She saw my big smile and asked if there was a makeup blemish or something on her face. In reality it was the fact that the microwave shelf had blended in so well with the existing cabinetry that she hadn't noticed it when she went in. But instead of telling her this, I lead her back into the kitchen while she looked at me and I asked her if she noticed anything different. At first she thought with me, but then I clarified 'the kitchen'. She glanced around and then suddenly gave a yelp. She briefly covered her mouth from the involuntary sound and then as she realized what it was she said, ''I told you not to.''

Before any anger could develop, I went up to the suspended 'U' shaped shelf assembly and pulled it out of its place between the cabinets to once again reveal that nothing permanent had been done, yet, and she could still have that space in her kitchen just as it had been. But now she could see it as it would look if permanently mounted and I slipped it back into place. She eyed it for a while and said she'd think about it during dinner. When we got back she had me take it out again, and then put it back in place. She said she wanted to see the microwave oven in it before she would make her final decision, but without the supporting bolts, I instead offered to hold the shelving in place as she slid the microwave into the space herself and stand back for another look. She was warming up to the idea but still wasn't convinced and so I noted that the supporting bolt heads would be hidden in the cabinets and so what I could do was mount it for a week or two and if she still didn't like it, I could remove it and the only thing left over would be some holes in between the interior sides of the cabinets that I could cover over with some faux wood grain patches.

Mustering up her courage, she agreed to let me drill the holes and physically mount the shelf in place. Then I slipped the microwave in and plugged it into the spare outlet behind the refrigerator. She tried the microwave to make sure it worked and noted it was easier to program, now, with the display closer to eye level. But she still wasn't sold on it...

The following week she felt the need to tell me, after days of having more free counter space, and a spare outlet with the microwave being out of the way, she had fallen in love with the shelf...! Hearing that, I was thrilled. When her friends and coworkers visited in the subsequent weeks and months she would point it out to them and eagerly compliment me and they in turn would appreciate it and she would come back to my apartment to share this news with me.

A year later she was still tickled with it and while it had been a gift for her birthday, a single day of a year, it had given her happiness for many more days than just that.

And reflecting on it as I type this, that success and her appreciation of it has tickled me more than most any other project I've ever done these decades since.

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On With The Show

110

My copy of the final television script, for 'The Other Show' I watched and had sold my story to, arrived in the mail. With a snazzy picture on the front of the script cover, I paged through it and was disappointed. I had expected that if they wanted someone else to rewrite it, it would be for the better. Instead there were beginner scripting mistakes and a cliché climax device that turned my stomach. On the other hand, this revision did make the robots the android suspected of being sentient more accessible and visible than my own script and that was an improvement. Before the end of the year the show would be broadcast and I would see it as it came to fruition and even glimpse my name in the writing credits. I decided to see this as my first step from which more success would come.

Returning to Dr. Czarnecki in Denver, after having considered the options for my mixed-sexed condition, I reported to him that the vitamin B12 shot didn't seem to have any noticeable effect on me. He mentioned that it wasn't unusual. In retrospect I wondered if he had actually just given me a shot of water to see if I had a significant placebo effect response before trying out other things on me? He asked me what path, if any, I had decided to try and I told him I thought we might as well try an initial estrogen shot to see how my body reacted to it. He went to have his nurse get the shot ready and there seemed little else to talk about. When she returned, the doctor noted that, given my likely greater number of estrogen receptors versus testosterone receptors, he was going to give me a very low dose as I might be over sensitive to it. That made sense to me and I got this shot in the thigh.

Returning from Denver in Daina's car, I went to pick her up from the school and told her of the decision. She didn't like the idea for some reason which surprised me as she had been supportive of my looking into my 'situation' for the preceding six months, to the point of loaning me her car for these trips. We had a long talk about it and she was concerned about me 'changing' and 'becoming a different person', but I assured her I was going to be the same person, regardless of what sex I decided to normalize as. She seemed to accept this.

As the week approached where 'my show' was going to be broadcast, Daina decided to organize a viewing party for me and invited many of her school friends to join us at her apartment on that night. I would have expected to watch it with my long time friend Jeff at his house with a number of other science fiction friends we knew, but as Daina had gone to all the trouble I decided not to disappoint her. When the night came and the show began, I was quickly disappointed that my name was not included in the writing credits at the front of the show. In reflection, I realized that our agreement to have my name included had been a verbal addendum over the phone, so I guess I should have realized it would have been a 'buyer beware' moment. Still, I had gotten the pilot script & writers' guide for the upcoming spin-off series as well as the cash and official script, so I didn't think I could complain too much. Especially if I wanted to stay in the show's good graces and pitch more scripts and stories to them for their next series.

But then as I continued to see the show, I realized this was the first time I couldn't 'watch the show', instead experiencing it as a group of filmed moments which had been subsequently knitted together. Yes that's what movies and television shows are, but our minds then take this assemblage and use the spark of our own imagination to see it as a continuous story and not as a collection of moving pictures. But having been involved in the creation of the show, I could only see the pieces, like the 'forest for the trees' analogy. And even though I had read the final script and should have become aware of it then, it was only while seeing the show that I realized how scene for scene the same sort of things happened, often with the exact same characters, as my script. It was just the dialog and guest character names that were changed. It was a bit creepy.

Once the show finished, Daina's friends gave me a smattering of applause and I tried not to spoil their moment by noting my discomfort and disappointment with the show. We visited for a bit longer and Daina tried to solicit questions from her friends to ask me but I was glad that there weren't many, if any, and they soon filtered out. I think Daina and I played a card game to close up the night before she gave me a ride back to my apartment.

Unlike after the B12 shot where nothing happened, I was caught off guard by the effect of the estrogen. Since the age of sixteen, for no apparent reason, I had been having sudden fevers that would quickly go away. The first few times this happened, I went to the school nurse about it and while she confirmed I 'felt hot' her only recommendation was to see a doctor once I got home for the day. Yet, by then the sudden fever had just a quickly disappeared and I came to just not worry about them, even though they became more frequent and annoying over the subsequent years. But now, for the first three weeks after the estrogen shot, I didn't have any sudden fevers until they came back during the fourth week. When I saw the Denver doctor the following month and told him about it, he humorously told me that my sudden fevers were called 'hot flashes'. He explained that, as my testosterone level skyrocketed at the beginning of puberty, so had the background estrogen level. But that after three years of continuous effort, my hormones had naturally tapered down a bit and likely the associated estrogen level had dipped below the minimum point that my body needed. If this was the case, then my hot flashes would most likely have been happening in the afternoon and evening, which they had been, as the body builds up its sex hormone level overnight and is at its highest during the morning.

He asked if I wanted to continue with the estrogen injections and my question was: Could we increase the dosage to last through all four weeks?

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The Beast

109

At first going from having infinite free time and then back to full-time College was a bit of an adjustment; I was suddenly having to keep to a daily schedule again and perform tasks other than the ones I chose at the spur of any moment. But only within a few weeks my mind lit up with other things to think about and cognitively toy-with during my days. One semester, I had a 'business' class as well as a 'marketing' class. Marketing class was more interesting as it gave me insight as to what physically formed, versus what the intentions were for, various types of advertisements.

Yet one day in 'business' class I perked up when the teacher proffered what he felt was obvious to him, that someone could buy the vacant two story national bus building downtown and turn it into a drive through grocery store. The 'Trailways' bus line was the competitor to the more dominant national bus line in the country. But times were hard for it and they eventually had to close their branch in our town by the nineteen eighties. Their building, designed to have the buses pull through the lower story while the passengers would wait on the upper floor, had been empty ever since.

Our business teacher envisioned people driving into the bottom floor and giving their grocery lists at the pull in. It would be sent to employees upstairs with the stock and they'd bag it for them and send it down to the drive through exit, where the customers would have already paid, and the groceries would be placed in the car. It was the grocery store equivalent of a fast food place. While other students in the room murmured various notes of surprise or acceptance, given my years in the grocery field I knew it would never work. First off the top floor of the building wasn't large enough to hold the variety of food stuffs that customers would expect. Second, running through all that stock to pick out the items people wanted would take far more time than picking a burger out of a bin. And while it was annoying enough when your fast food order arrived and had one or more wrong items in it, could you imagine families paying fifty to seventy-five dollars for a grocery order and have bags placed into their car with them assuming it'd be correct on faith and just drive off? For something like this to work, there would need to be strict verification of the orders, when given and once delivered. But including this additional verification time would leave customer cars sitting in the lower level for up to half an hour. Why would customers find this more desirable than picking the items they wanted off the shelf and seeing for themselves what they were getting as they checked out?

Not liking the business teacher's idea struck me as writing for a television show struck me. If I watched an episode I didn't like, my mind would go to work on figuring out how to do it better. In the case of this drive through grocery store idea, I couldn't help myself but to dwell on it and work up a viable alternative. By the end of the week I had the better idea in mind and it was just sitting there waiting to be delivered when the business teacher assigned us our final project 'to create a detailed business plan for a business of our choosing', and the marketing teacher's Final was 'to create a marketing plan for an imagined business of our choosing'. Needless to say I was primed and ready!

Creating the business plan was the hardest of the two whereas given my previous years of writing, desktop publishing, knowing artists, and even failing to produce an audio drama on tape, I was quickly done with the marketing campaign and example advertisement scripts. In the case of the marketing material, some of it was television commercial scripts and while I couldn't film the actual ad, I knew I could make the soundtrack for it using my audio equipment and multi-voice talent. So for the visuals I approached Suzi, the founder of our defunct writer's group and asked if she could help me out. Before coming to our town and forming the writer's group, she had lived in a rural part of Colorado and formed an artist's group there to help feed her own drawing and painting interests. I knew what I needed the various pictures to show for the television commercial storyboard and asked her if she would be willing to draw them up for me. As I had hoped, since it tickled an area of her creative talents that she hadn't used in years, she was happy to do the minimalist artwork I wanted.

While she worked on that, I then focused on the business plan and tapped into my long time friend Jeff for insights. As he had grown-up watching his father create and run a dry cleaning chain, he had a broad knowledge of what businesses would need to get off the ground as well as technical names for the various types of equipment I'd need. Discussing my 'alternative' grocery store concept with him over the course of a few hours he helped me nail down the broad details I'd need to keep in mind and budget for. Then it was time to start calling the various companies who would be involved in such a business and crunch the numbers. In the case of building costs, I contacted a construction company touting their recent work on a grocery store building they were nearing completion on. The secret was not to ask how much that project had cost, but how much a project like that would cost; thus client confidentiality was maintained as they gave me the rounded off, but closely accurate figure. I then called the utility company and did the same thing for the utility costs of such a place, giving two different existing businesses I felt would be on par in their energy usage. While she couldn't have told me the figures for either business without breaking confidentiality, since I had given her two businesses to look at, she could give me the average of the two which was close enough for my plan's estimate.

There would be a need for large refrigerated rooms, one each for chilled items & frozen items. I could estimate the size of the rooms based on my own knowledge of the percentage of a store dedicated to those items. I then contacted an industrial refrigeration company in Denver and asked them for an installation estimate which would include specialized insulating concrete floors, the insulated metal sheathed housings and the specialized piping and compressors for those rooms. I was so detailed when giving this information to the company representative on the phone that he assumed I was doing this for real and said he'd draw up a detailed estimate for me and call back with the figures at the end of the week. Given the level of work he was going to do, I decided not to correct him and tell him I was only doing a project for College.

Touching base again with Jeff I figured the number of initial employees I'd need to start the company and he provided the associated costs beyond an hourly wage for each. He also helped me fill in the broad strokes and costs associated with an online ordering system for the business and I had all of the information I needed.

I created the business plan with at least a two year financing window for it to become established and start breaking even. Adding the figures from the industrial refrigeration company when they called back, I was done with my full detailed business plan for my delivery or pickup grocery store business. People could place their order online, or if desired with a live person over the phone, and it would be assembled overnight and then they could pick it up at their leisure the following day or it could be delivered to their home at a specific hour. Given the overnight assembly of the order, this provided plenty of time for the customer to confirm what they wanted with their order ahead of time, then a group of employees to roam the warehouse and collect the items needed for the order, and finally a string of people to validate that the order had been properly filled with all of the items desired. Based on a nineteen ninety business understanding I didn't include the mechanical automation that would now be naturally incorporated into the business if pursued today.

Picking up the artwork from Suzi a day before hand, I arrived at the College with my audio soundtrack tape in hand and waited for many of the other students to present their work first in marketing class. I found I had little competition to worry about. I quickly described the business I had created my ad for and when I played the tape and displayed the story board pictures in sequence on the overhead projector as the tape ran, I knew I was doing well. The wide-eyed silence of the other students was all I needed and I soaked it up. I got top marks from the teacher. For business class I came in and while the other students placed their handful of pages long business proposals on the teacher's desk for him to review by the end of the week, I plopped my folder on his desk with my business plan and, just for fun, included the advertising story board drawings and soundtrack tape as well.

Having grown up with little positive feedback from parents or teachers as a child, I had learned to live without it. In order to survive I developed my own sense of when I was doing well or not and for anyone's feedback to have any impact on me they had to provide the facts to show how their opinions were grounded. Without that grounding, others' opinions were gravely disadvantaged in my eyes when compared to my own self-judgment. This has left some people baffled when I would curse myself for not having something done to perfection while they thought it was 'good enough', but this would also lead me to unshakably know when I had done a good job, regardless of what some other people might think.

This built in sense of self appraisal & judgment Daina found to be my biggest drawback. But assessing & judging it for myself, I've found it to be my greatest strength.

Why do I feel the need to explain it's not ego based...?

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