David Bede:  

Where have I been since Central? Where HAVEN'T I been since Central?! First of all, an acknowledgment. Your memories of me may not be very nice ones. That's okay, because my two years at Central were pretty lousy. Besides the usual teenage angst, I was dealing with some nasty family problems at home, and a couple of "friends" at school who had turned their backs on me, and I mostly reacted by shutting down and not really trying at all for most of those two years. I say that not to invite pity, but just to set the stage for what followed. In any case, I have only one truly joyous memory of Central, and that is riding my bike home after my last final exam sophomore year, knowing I would never have to set foot there again. It was pouring rain, but that just made victory all the sweeter! I can't even remember if I told anybody at Central that my family was moving that summer. Move, though, we did, to the leafy green DC suburbs of Northern Virginia. Out of my patch a bit, but after ten years in grubby Manchester, the clean air and safe streets felt like being released from prison. My memories of the next two years consist mostly of playing basketball and baseball after school at the beautiful parks there, and spending my allowance on secondhand records, and studying at the library and actually enjoying school for a change. My grades reflected that change: they got a lot better overnight. All I ever needed was a change of scene, and I suspect I knew it at the time. I wish I could also say I found my calling and settled on a course for college in those years. But I didn't, so it was off to the usual fallback for smart but unfocused kids, a liberal arts education. I went to Grinnell College, in Iowa. Why Iowa of all places? I felt I needed another complete change of scene - and boy, did I get it! You haven't lived until you've seen an Iowa sunset; the horizon just seems to go on forever. After a bumpy start freshman year, I did reasonably well at Grinnell, majoring in history with an eye to teaching it as a fallback if I couldn't find a job elsewhere. But even halfway through Grinnell, I knew what I really wanted to do was go back to DC and work on Capitol Hill. As a Democrat who graduated in 1995, though, that was not an option - at least not immediately. So for a year and a half after graduation, I hit the road back and forth between Iowa and Pennsylvania (where my parents lived by then), working a variety of day jobs and volunteering for a number of political campaigns I thought might be promising. None of those went anywhere, as it turned out. So just before Election Day 1996, I threw caution to the wind and moved to DC. The gamble paid off handsomely: I soon found a job at an insurance company, followed shortly by a part-time internship on the Hill. Within six months, I had a part-time paid job there, and six months after that I was full-time. Alas, sometimes one's dream job turns out to be a dud once it finally arrives. Such was the case here. Luckily, this was DC and there were lots of other opportunities for political junkies, so I soon found a job I liked at a polling firm. Meanwhile, throughout my time in DC, I had been living in an international student center with students and interns from all over the world, many of them studying international affairs. This made me rediscover my own love for all things foreign, so I decided to go back to school myself. My GRE results were quite good, so I applied to Yale on a lark. And to my great amazement, I got in. I arrived in New Haven fully expecting to keep my nose buried in a book for the next two years. But almost without realizing it, I got swept up in the grad student unionization movement there and made a lot of friends and enemies alike and had a lot of fun making Yale a better place. (The blatant selfishness you've been seeing lately in the health care debates? No surprise to me, I'm afraid, thanks to my activism at Yale.) I also loved my coursework there, and considered staying on for a PhD or maybe even going to law school. But in the end, I decided I was ready to get back to the real world. Big mistake, I now kno...Expand for more