Name:  Dave Sailer. Also known as Dumbnuts, Butthead, and Hey Armpit!

Interests:  Just about everything. Did you hear that? JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING! (But I don't listen to music much.) Hamsters, cats, an occasional human. Hiking, photography, quiet places. Storms.

Occupation:  In the words of someone I once met, this means "what do you do for money?". I've done several things for money, but my real occupation is contemplative, as in "I am a contemplative". I think. A lot. I observe. I speculate, and worry. And wonder. I used to meditate, and ought to start again, I think.

Meditation is the one thing I learned to do that is valuable. Not much else. Not much else at all. Aside from meditation, maybe coming to the edge of death, which is a place I've gotten to several times so far. It has a way of putting things in perspective, but doesn't pay that well.

Now there's a degrading thought. Doesn't pay that well. As soon as we begin thinking thoughts like that, the rabbit has escaped across the field. Looking into its moist eye this second, and then it's gone, run away into memory. Did we really sit on the grass next to an acute living something? Pull the heads off the clover people and offer them? Have them accepted?

Did the rabbit really sit here four feet from us, munching our offering? Was it here? Then where is it now? Only a memory, and then we begin to doubt our own memory. First the presence in all its fullness, then the collapse inspired by gross clumsiness, then the regret and doubt. Maybe it never happened at all. Gone, then doubted. Once doubted, forgotten. Let us not talk about money.

For money, to broach a new subject, I've been an assistant history museum curator, a driver of a lumber delivery truck, a newspaper reporter/photographer, a clerk-typist, a window washer. And for many years, several kinds of computer programmer and web developer. (This has paid the best. And lo, I have saved and put it away.)

But I'm really a contemplative, with two college degrees, first in English, a B.A., then a B.S. in physics and computer science, with minors in math and chemistry. In all, this covered a span of 20 years, each degree taking roughly five years of class time, but 10 years of calendar time.

For the first 20 years after high school I averaged roughly $1.25 an hour in the jobs I held -- total money divided by total work time, whether I worked or not. And for most of those years, for almost every one of those years, I took at least one college class per year, interspersed with erratic but intensive sprints in classrooms. I've written large pages of my life in libraries. (continues)