I’ve been tagged.
1977: In the middle of sixth grade, we moved from Ohio, where I’d been in school since first grade with a bunch of great friends, to California, where I knew no one. The weather was an improvement, but the public schooling was not, the Ohio schools being vastly superior at the time. I, a sixth grader, ended up as a tutor to a fifth grade class. The school officials wouldn’t let me transfer to the honors school, because, they said, my having always been in honors classes I instead needed socialization with “normal” students. Welcome to California, the land of fruits and nuts….
1987: This was the second year of my studies at UC Berkeley, in the Near Eastern Studies department, with a Classical Hebrew emphasis (Biblical through Mishnaic), a program run by Jacob Milgrom at the time. I was also a reader (a paper-grader) for Isaac Kikawada, a lecturer, from whom I learned the foundation and many background stories of Ancient Near Eastern scholarship. I was in my second year of both Biblical and Modern Hebrew, and my first year of Akkadian. This may have been the happiest year of my life.
1997: I was two years into doing IT support for the UC Berkeley Library system (which has twenty-odd branch libraries all over the campus). They’re still using the help desk system that I put together for them at that time.