My father spent the period 1950-1980 in the U.S. Foreign Service, a.k.a. Diplomatic Corps, and as a result much of my childhood was spent overseas in Europe and Africa, mostly in Germany, Morocco, and the country currently known as Zaïre (at the time, it was still the `Democratic Republic of the Congo'). Much of my knowledge of French and, to a lesser extent, German derives ultimately from this formative period.

The first seven years that i spent on my own, away from my family (1968-1975) are covered in more detail elsewhere.

I spent 2 years, 1975-1977, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, which were not a terribly positive experience for me. This is partly because, after the fairly open, ecumenical spiritual atmosphere at Kenyon, i was suddenly thrust into a very hard-core Protestant (read: Calvinist) environment that was deeply suspicious of my Anglican identity. But i think it was even more because it was really the first time in my life i found myself living inside a big city, rather than on the outskirts or suburbs thereof, and i am forced to conclude that i am not by temperament a very `urban' person. Like C. S. Lewis, i regard a big city as a fine place to visit for an occasional major cultural event but an abomination to live in. (So why, might one ask, have i repeatedly applied for jobs at the University of Pennsylvania or other universities located in large urban areas? Well, for one thing, a job's a job and beggars can't be choosers. Besides, i figure that as a faculty member at such an institution i might work in a big city but i wouldn't necessarily live there; i noticed that a lot of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania lived in the suburbs.)

In 1977 i moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in the East-Central part of the state (`central' in this case meaning `neither north nor south'; it's not a modifier of `east', since we're less than an hour's drive from the eastern border). As a community of less than 100,000 hosting a major university, Champaign-Urbana is frequently said to combine the virtues of a small town (proximity to `nature', in the form of farmland, and to one's neighbours) with these of a major city (in the form of stores and cultural centers). My only complaints about Champaign-Urbana are the climate (tending to range from extreme heat and humidity in the summer to abysmal cold and heavy snow in the winter) and the topography (Illinois is one of the flattest states in the U.S., and i have discovered as a result of living here just how much i love mountains).

Having decided that it would not be feasible for me to pursue a career in music, i was somewhat at loose ends. I took some odd jobs, finally settling into a job at the University Library. I did well at this, rising gradually through the ranks as i managed to find work i enjoyed and supervisors who appreciated my skills, but i was never motivated to want to pursue a career in librarianship.

I continued working at the University Library half-time throughout the time i pursued advanced degrees in linguistics. In many respects this was a hardship: it was draining on my time, preventing me from taking some courses i would have liked very much to take. There were several reasons i nevertheless kept at it, which boil down basically to two:

It is also for this reason that i was unable to pursue a teaching assistantship as vigorously as i would have liked, a circumstance that i have never ceased to regret. From time to time i might be called upon to take charge of a class in historical linguistics or Romance linguistics or diachronic syntax or morphological or syntactic theory when the regular instructor had to be away; i was extremely grateful for these small opportunities and, to the extent i got any feedback, the students generally seemed to find them profitable. But throughout my graduate-student career in linguistics i was unable to secure a real teaching appointment. Such appointments are extremely hard to come by for linguistics students at UIUC (unless one happens to be a native speaker of some `exotic' language like Tshiluba or Thai, which unfortunately i am not), and my attempts to secure one, passionate as they were, repeatedly fell through the cracks.

I kept my job at the library, under conditions of increasing mutual dissatisfaction, until the end of 1993. In November of that year i received what i regarded as my first big break: an offer of a one-term visiting lectureship in the Theoretical Linguistics Department of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Although this lasted only five months and i ended up only teaching one course (in historical linguistics -- a rather odd offering in a theoretical linguistics department, but that's what the students wanted; i also offered a seminar in comparative syntactic theory, but there were no takers, the students being, in the words of one staff member, `syntaxed out'), i loved nearly every minute of it: my first, and so far only, full-time teaching stint in linguistics.

After returning to the U.S. and to Illinois in summer of 1994, i spent some time being ungainfully employed; the residue of my earnings in Budapest, combined with my wife's income and what, for us, is a sizeable inheritance from the decease of my father's sister meant that i was not under a great deal of financial pressure at first. It was during this period that SYNTHINAR was born. But i still wasn't getting the academic job i kept looking for, and i couldn't take back the library job i had left. I began to draw unemployment insurance, and to look for some kind of work -- any kind, since the people who provide unemployment insurance don't look too well upon deadbeats who are too finicky about the work they're willing to do. Job-hunting was made more difficult by my refusal to give up looking for an academic position; to every prospective employer i had to point out that, should an academic position be offered i would disappear.

At the end of January 1995, i was offered a job at Omegatype, a typesetting firm located at the western edge of Champaign, Illinois, about 7 miles (11 km) from home. This job was offered in spite of my scrupulous honesty about my real goals. Actually, i think my boss welcomed this honesty; certainly, he was amazingly forbearing about the fact that i was not particularly content with the work and would much rather be doing something else, somewhere else. The work was occasionally mildly interesting -- most of what is processed at Omegatype is in the nature of college-level textbooks, and i came across some interesting things during the two years i worked there, that i might not have run into otherwise (as well as some first-hand experience with just how appalling college textbooks in composition/rhetoric can be, experience which i now hope to turn to turn to account in a scholarly essay). And i know a little something about the production angle of the book world. But it's not for me. Worse, working full-time at Omegatype i had almost no time for any of the scholarly activity i love, have been trained for, and have reason to believe am able to do well, as opposed to the quality of my work at Omegatype, which i frankly think was usually little better than mediocre.

In April 1997 came a major turn for the better. I received an offer of an assistant-professorship in the English Department of a Taiwanese institution that in communication with Westerners at least seems to prefer going by its old (pre-revolutionary) name of Soochow University, although it seems to be better known in Taiwan as Dongwu Daxue (or rather, to use the Wade-Giles romanization favoured in Taiwan, Tungwu Tahsueh) -- `Eastern Wu University'. Bearing in mind what i said earlier about my experience at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, i am glad to note that the University campus is in the northern part of Taipei, and look forward to living on the northern edge of Taipei (nearer the beach!) than in the central part. The climate may be warmer and more humid than i might like, but at least i won't be stressed out by the climactic swings so characteristic of Illinois. And, Taiwan has no daylight savings time!