Well, I haven't really led a very interesting life, so this will be pretty short. Maybe using my old (pretty!) color scheme will make this page more interesting, although less readable. Two birds with one stone.
I was born in on March 11, 1983 in New Jersey, but I moved to Southern California when I was a year and a half old. My parents are both biology professors. I have two younger sisters, Deborah and Naomi, and a younger brother, David, who are a two, five, and seven years younger than me, respectively. Eventually this page might have pictures of my family, but at the moment I'm too lazy (it's been a years since my parents bought a scanner, and I still haven't bothered).
When I was 3 years old, I began school at Broadoaks, which was connected with the college where my mother was teaching at the time. I attended Broadoaks through kindergarten, and hated it, and then attended the local public schools, Ocean View Elementary School and East Whittier Middle School (both of which I liked much better), through 8th grade. I was very precocious (and obsessive) as a child, and thus was able to skip 7th grade. I then attended Sonora High School. I had to pass two public high schools to get to Sonora every morning, even though it was itself a public school, because the local high schools were so bad. What made Sonora better than the several near my house was that it had the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. This is a form of honors program, about equivalent to AP, whereby one's performance is evaluated both in class, by the teachers, and in standardized tests, which are sent to random parts of the world to be graded. I suppose IB is helpful for getting into college, but having done it certainly isn't helpful once you're there, so I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone else, since it's rather painful while you're doing it.
At both East Whittier and Sonora, I played flute in the band. I'm not very good, but at least I'm better than someone who's never learned to play, and I can play by ear to some extent. I also play recorder reasonably decently (although much worse than flute) compared to how well most people play it, because I actually had lessons in elementary school. All in all, I have absolutely no musical talent, but I'm not tone-deaf either.
Right now I'm attending Swarthmore College, where I'm a senior. I am majoring in physics, and spent my first two summers doing physics/astrophysics research at school. Last summer I did more engineering related research at Aerospace Corporation. I am continuing to play flute for my own amusement, although I allow others to listen to me increasingly infrequently. I am also learning to juggle, contact juggle, and play ice hockey (although not all at the same time... yet...). However, my main activity is SWIL, which stands for Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature, and is the campus sci-fi/fantasy/gaming group. My freshman year, I used to have a description of it here that the older SWILlies thought was funny, so I took it down in the interests of keeping this as boring as possible.
Among my other interests are reading, especially fantasy, although I'll read just about anything if I'm told to or it's sitting on a coffee table in front of me, and video games, especially console RPGs. I also sometimes draw ASCII art (nearly all of which I have posted here) on the rare occasions when I can think of anything I want to draw. I also have lots of other hobbies that I do less frequently (not that I have much time for anything during the school year), but I can't remember what any of them are. Oh, I collect coins and do jigsaw puzzles. I'm just generally pretty boring.
