Eighth grade was a pretty good year for me. I had a new best friend, Elizabeth Mitchell, that moved to my school that year and we spent all our time together. Apparently I left some of my longtime friends in the dust, but we hugged and made up later. Ironically my friendship with Elizabeth didn’t last all that long, but my friendships with Abigail, Liz and Kate since third grade have lasted to this day.
My favorite past time in eighth grade was hanging out at the mall, so I got the nickname “mallchick”. So that whole shopping thing with me is genetic, I’ll have you know. My mom and both my grandmothers have the shopping gene bigtime.
I think the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, 1989 is what prompted my foray into environmentalism. My friend Jen Bungo convinced me I should try to be a vegetarian. That didn’t really stick. My dad. the oilman, seemed pretty opposed to the movement, which at the time was led by more extreme factions like Greenpeace. He did a pretty good job explaining the problematic issues with the economics of environmentalism. Anyway, if you watch the video you’ll see I got a reputation for loving the Earth. It was just a phase that died out in college but amazingly I ended up working in the environmental industry, protecting water from pollution.