I was described to someone, right in front of me, as “…the sort of person who educates people involuntarily.”

The saddest thing is that as I get older, I find my recall starting to fail. I’m struggling more and more to pull facts I know that I know. The deluge of information coming from my yammering maw is increasingly choppy and punctuated by trying to remember exact bits of info.

My wife told me the most impressive and the most annoying thing about me both is the amount of random knowledge that comes out of my mouth. If only she knew how much time I spent on Wikipedia since that site became a thing. And just following links around before that…

My nicknane was “walking encyclopedia” when I was a kid so that tracks.

In my undergrad I went from being a chemistry/physics double major to a biochemist and finally finished my chemistry degree. (I am not far from having 3 degrees) I studied ASL, German and Japanese, modded video games and competed in a semiprofessional starcraft league. I wrote instrument guides and procedures for undergrads, contributed to papers on bioremediation, synthesized nanoparticles using genetically engineered enzymes. I developed a method for a plant alkaloid assay and a new way to reduce noise in an experiment designed to measure the rate of certain reactions that occur in extremely diluted systems. i.e single or double digit number of molecules in the entire sample.

Now I tutor college students in chemistry, physics, math and biology and work on computational chemistry projects.

As a kid, my grandfather used to say I knew everything… not seriously, but I sure thought I knew everything.

Checkmate papa.