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postauthor's postMy first interview....thanks Aristotle for giving me the pleasure and I hope you all enjoy it...<br /><br />**********<br /><br /><b>1. For the record, what&#39;s your real name and how old are you and where do you hail from?</b><br />Christopher R Sanders; 26; Tulsa, Oklahoma<br /><br /><br /><b>2. What do you do for a living and how long have you been doing it and do you enjoy it?</b><br />I teach courses on Web Programming, specifically ASP, ColdFusion, Perl, PHP, and XML. While I enjoy teaching at a technical college, I want to move on to a professorship at a traditional college or university. I’ve been here for about a year and a half. Before that I was an Intranet developer for a telecommunications firm building database-driven web applications. I hated working in the corporate world; I was laid off from the teleco twice (they hired me back a week after they laid me off the first time). I will never return to Corporate America.<br /><br /><b>3. Are you married or are you doing the bachelor thing?</b><br />I am married. We celebrated our third anniversary in June.<br /><br /><br /><b>4. What sparetime activities do you take part in?</b><br />I surf the ‘net, play tennis, work out, go to movies with my wife, work on some side projects and freelance work, and so forth. Primarily though, I work on my novel. <br /><br /><br /><b>5. When did you get interested in computers, graphics, programming, etc. and do you have any formal training in the field?</b><br />I started a crappy Geocities page my freshman year of college in 1995. My first job out of college was in corporate computer sales and I found myself much more interested in the technical side of stuff than the sales, and I started doing some freelance work and substituting for instructors in the training classes we held. When I left that job to work for the teleco, I decided to take advantage of their tuition credit and go back to get a Masters degree in Computer Information Systems. My graphics skills have always been sub-par; in fact, my wife introduced me to DBM when she was doing some Photoshop for her work and I got into the forums and the rest is history. I am definitely better at the graphics side now than I was a year or two ago, but it is still pretty pathetic.<br /><br /><br /><b>6. Where are you located at on the web?</b><br />I used to have a terribly unfunny site called Unholy Router that featured a terribly drawn comic detailing the frustrations of people with Broadband (yes I am a nerd). I gave up on that and have recently started www.blueleafdesign.net for my freelance work. The goal of that is not so much to get work for myself but to sort of pimp out some of my talented web programming students. At the moment the site is really far from complete, but I wanted to have something, anything, out on the web. <br /><br />Later this summer I am going to put up a site for my writing and resources devoted to helping people fulfill their dreams of following creative passions. You know, share with others the things I’ve found helpful, books that have inspired me, common fears and myths and patterns of thinking that keep us from realizing our goals. That sort of thing. I plan on having that up in August, September at the latest.<br /><br /><b>7. Your profile says your lifelong goal is to become a novelist. What sort of pieces do you write and are any on the web that we could check out?</b><br />Yes, my goal in life since I was probably 7 or 8 is to be a novelist. I’ve sketched out roughly 63 writing projects, the majority of which are contemporary fiction; there are a couple of screenplays I’ve envisioned as well as a couple of collections of interwoven, experimental short stories and a collaboration project (with my arch-rival and good friend, a conservative republican in Wisconsin). I am brilliant at coming up with ideas, but I’ve had trouble actualizing them. I think it comes down to fear. Being a writer is so important to me that I’ve become subconsciously terrified that I will fail to be one thus it is safer to want to be a writer than to write and fail at it. Now that I realize this, I am better able to combat the lethargy that has stifled me for so long. Yeah for cognitive behavioralism&#33;<br /><br />As for seeing some of it, you’ll have to purchase copies of my first novel available in spring 2005 from Simon &amp; Schuster <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.designerslounge.org/images/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> Actually, see above. I’ll have some of my work on the web late summer, early fall. <br /><br /> <br /><b>8. What genre of music do you prefer? Any specific groups or individual artists? (It would certainly make my day if you said...Bon Jovi...but then again, you probably aren&#39;t interested in making my day are you? <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.designerslounge.org/images/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> )</b><br />I listen to both kinds of music: Country and Western. Not. I am somewhat eclectic in my music tastes (doesn’t everyone say that?) When I put a playlist together it invariables contains some Tori Amos, They Might Be Giants, a dose of techno, some indie bands, some New Wave 80s music, a little Mozart, and lately Catholic Latin chants and hymns (don’t ask why). I appreciate jazz more than I ever used to thanks to NPR, but it’s still not my favorite genre. I just cannot get into country. I am neither a fan of nor do I hate Bon Jovi. I think I even had a CD of his in college. <br /><br /><br /><b>9. Have you travelled outside of the USA? If so, where to? If not, where would you like to go if you had the choice?</b><br />I spent a semester in Moscow back in ’97. Russia was phenomenal. I loved every minute of it. I spent a couple of days in St. Petersburg and three days in Paris. I love Europe and have contemplated moving there. This fall I hope to be able to travel to Tokyo and Seoul; I have a friend who moved to South Korea earlier this year and he has threatened to do vile things if I don’t come visit. <br /><br /><br /><b>10. What sort of movies do you enjoy? e.g. Action, comedy, horror, etc... Any specific movies?</b><br />Hmmm. I don’t know if I could pick a genre of movies that I like better than others. I’ll watch just about anything except stupid, scatological humor. We recently signed up for Netflix which is far more awesome than you might think. A couple of gems that I would probably never encountered otherwise are Igby Goes Down – a fantastically dark comedy with Susan Sarandon, Claire Danes, Kieran Culkin, Jeff Goldblum, and others - and Equilibrium which is a dystopia about a future where emotion is outlawed. Some of my other favorites are Snatch, Clerks, 2001, Fight Club, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, Shakespeare in Love, Gosford Park, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Princess Mononoke, and the list goes on and on. I like movies. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.designerslounge.org/images/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--><br /><br /><b>11. Do you participate in any outdoor activities or sports?</b><br />I play a little tennis – I suck – and I jog sometimes. My knee isn’t the best anymore thanks to a skiing accident a few years back, so I tend to not run or jog much, For exercise I go to the gym. I used to be pretty religious about it but I had knee surgery about 18 months ago and my attendance dropped dramatically, and I paid the price for it. I’ve finally kicked myself back into the habit of going again, woohoo&#33; <br /><br /><br /><b>12. It&#39;s not hard to see that you have an interest in politics...what party are you affiliated with, if any, and why have you chosen to stay well-informed on current events?</b><br />I began my political life as a Republican. Along with a couple of friends we charted our high school’s first Young Republicans club. I then volunteered on conservative Republican Jim Inhofe’s Senatorial campaign several years ago. In college I lived in the Honors House with a very eccentric group of people. Up until then, diversity had only been a vague concept to me; here, though, were minorities, foreigners, gays and lesbians, drug users, theater majors, poor people, rich people, and I grew immensely. Between that and studying political philosophy and moving away from home and visiting Russia, I realized that there are not any easy answers. The world is not black and white. And for me, it seemed like the conservative movement preached dogma and saw the world only in terms of good/evil, black/white, patriot/traitor. And yet, knowing such a wide spectrum of people who fit none of those molds, I realized I could not subscribe to conservative ideology. <br /><br />Today I am an independent. I am definitely left of center, but I am not as far left as I usually sound, and that is pretty much on purpose, as the center has shifted so far to the right, it takes some real effort to move things back to the middle. It needs to be acceptable for people to be moderate. That seems to be lost in today’s politics.<br /><br />For most of my college days, I thought I wanted to be in politics as a career. My junior/senior year (I graduated early) though, I burned out completely. A lot of that had to do with politicians themselves. I was busy attending dinners with politicos and my professors were always introducing me to local and state and the occasional federal politician. These people are some of the sleaziest, most disgusting people I’ve ever encountered. I could not imagine becoming what I saw in them, and I was done. <br /><br /><br /><b>13. Do you engage in political activism offline in any way?</b><br />We donate regularly to Amnesty International and I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. I write letters to senators and congressmen regularly and so forth, but that’s the extent of my offline activism. If something came along that I was really behind, like a movement to abolish the Electoral College, I would definitely join in the cause. <br /><br /><br /><b>14. What is it about Designers Lounge keeps you coming back?</b><br />I left DBM when the whole ‘ban-everyone-who-blinks-wrong’ debacle happened, and was the 4th person to join the rebellious Somethingleet. I came to DL to extend an olive branch to Rachel, with whom I used to chat often. I found DL to be very saccharine but interesting enough to hang around, and there are some talented people (Katheryn comes immediately to mind) and others with whom I enjoyed chatting or debating. <br /><br />For the moment I am on hiatus. I’ll spare everyone the (lack of ) drama of why.<br /><br /><br /><b>15. Do you have any personal heroes or people (past or present) that you look up to?</b><br />She was a poor single mother not even making end-meet and now she is richer than the Queen of England. That passion and drive and making a life that she wanted to live when everything was against her. Simply phenomenal. Stephen King is a similar story, poverty, writing late at night and on breaks.<br /><br />Another cheesy answer, my wife. She is amazing and overcome a lot of obstacles to get where she is today. She’s going to be famous in her field some day. <br /><br /><br /><b>16. What are your biggest pet peeves?</b><br />People that cannot think for themselves, what Socrates called the unexamined life. I want to make people think, to look inside and continuously question their thoughts and beliefs. This is, in my opinion, the only way in which we grow, and our greatest gift to ourselves and to the world is to always keep growing. <br /><br /><br /><b>17. Have you any crazy personal traits or eccentricities you would be willing to share with us?</b><br />I do a weird thing with paper clips. It’s best we not speak of it. I aspire to be cool enough to not have to do my hair. <br /><br /><br /><b>18. What are your guilty pleasures in life (for example: a Britney Spears fetish, a secret desire to join the Pink Party, etc.)?</b><br />My guilty pleasure is playing the collectible card game Magic: the Gathering. /hangs head in shame<br /><br /><b>19. Do you have a personal motto or saying to live by?</b><br />I am a cool guy. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.designerslounge.org/images/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> No, actually it is something like “Always challenge yourself and never stop learning.” Every night (or at least most nights) I reflect on my day and see what I’ve learned, whether it was some new function in PHP or an insight into some idiosyncrasy of mine. <br /><br /><br /><b>20. What is one thing you know now that you wish you would have known growing up?</b><br />Hmmm. That’s tough. I think if I had been more confident back then I would have experienced more, learned more. I was so painfully shy then; I still struggle with shyness today which is one of the reasons I like teaching, it forces me to confront that demon every day.<br /><br /><br /><b>21. What will it take to turn you into a Conservative Republican? <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.designerslounge.org/images/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--></b><br />If Conservative Republicanism stood for conservation, internationalism, gay rights, women’s rights, fighting poverty in meaningful ways, actually followed the classic conservative ideal of making the government smaller and less intrusive instead of bigger, costlier and completely at odds with civil liberties, and got away from trying to sneak religion into every facet of public life, I’d be all for it.
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