Michael Wolf:  

Ah, where to even begin! For those of you who haven't seen me in 22 years since graduation at old SPS in Kenmore, I'll pick up after that time. The age when the thunder of Duran Duran rocked the airwaves and every milestone event had a soppy Whitney Houston ballad set to it had finally passed. Highschool beckoned and where my old friends and early puppy loves went on to Kenmore West and Cardinal O'Hara, I was bound for St Joes. The SJCI years were good ones despite being sorely lacking in girls; although droves of young ladies in short pleated skirts descended upon us every afternoon, so it wasn't all bad. During those years I kept in touch with many of the gang from SPS though CYO; another of the acronym organizations I'll be peppering this entry with. My time was split between two groups - the gamer geeks consisting of Paul Knaus, Louis Norton, and Dan Mooney and the CYO posse with Sean O'Donnell, Mike Ende, Kevin Walsh, Greta Pangborn, Tish Alberti, Marita Draves, Bill Collins, Jeff Siuda, Pat Cavanaugh, Lynn Stackowitz, Tony Thomas, Casey Ludkovitz, and plenty of others who will probably be pissed I temporarily forgot their names. Graduation finally came and I was happy to be moving on finally to a non-religious based instituition, namely UB, the Berkley of the East. At this point my strong sense of independance set in and I insisted on dorming even though I lived right down the street. The first two years I roomed with Paul Knaus, Aaron Thies, and JP Mohr. The dorm life was good although an unfortunate incident in which we blew up the toilet in our suite in a photography experiment gone bad forced us to seek other accomodations. During these years I was an archeology major, followed by anthropology, until it occurred to me that there were relatively few jobs after graduation in these fields, and settled on a joint major of Psychology and English, which of course had the same conditions. I can't say that during this period my main focus was academics, but the ease of the courses allowed for good grades nonetheless. After the toilet incident we moved to a house on Comstock where life became truely bizzare and memorable; a condition not attributed to chemical enhancement but the company we kept - Paul Knaus, Aaron Thies, Jason, Dan Mooney, Matt Schultz, Dave Walsh, Jason and all the rest. The stories from these years are captured in a collaborative blog called comstock.wordpress dot com (this thing doesn't like hyperlinks or email addresses). Check it out if you are at all interested in tales of relatively smart people doing abominably stupid things. By some miracle I graduated from UB in '95 with a fresh hot degree in nothing at all useful to the local job market. I got a gig as a counter manager at an auto parts store and realized verily, this doth truely suck. I scrambled for alternatives and made a momentous decision between moving to NYC and trying my luck on Wall St as a scrappy neer-do-well with more balls than brains or join the Air Force. The latter won out as I worried abut the casting choice in the film of my inevitable success with the former. So, to the amazement of all, I signed up and shipped out one cold January morning in '97. Boot camp was all it was cracked up to be and comparable to 'Full Metal Jacket' though without anyone so nice as Lee ...Expand for more