As part of my continuing education, I decided to take a creative writing course that is being given through Pixar University, Pixar Animation Studio’s ongoing attempt to train and educate their valued employees (and me too) in topics generally related to movie production. Last week was the first class, where we had as an exercise to introduce yourself to others by writing a Harper’s Index for yourself. Since any form of writing is useless without people to read it, here’s my (not especially good) attempts:

• Number of books that I buy and read per week: 2
• Number of shoes I buy per year: 2 (1 pair)
• Number of different computers that I use per day: at least 5
• Number of obsolete computers I have powered down, sitting in my hall: 4
• Number of years it took to build my first telescope: 17
• Number of people I’ve helped to build telescopes since then: > 700
• Number of vacation days I haven’t taken: 43
• Number of servings in a pint of ice cream: one, not four.
• Number of foul balls that have struck me in the head at Oakland A’s games: 1 (thank you Jeremy Giambi)

Today’s exercise was to write five paragraphs which begin with the sentence “I don’t know why I remember…”. Eeesh. I forget an awful lot, and generally know why I remember things. I found it a difficult exercise. Perhaps I’ll suck it up and post some of these later.