Timeline of My Life

On December 31, 1986, I was born at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My parents were John and Betty Rintoul, and I already had a six-year-old brother, Andy. By Thanksgiving Day in 1987, I could walk. For the early years of my life, I had a pretty good life. I remember little, but the rest is filled in by photographs and memories that my parents have of me. I attended a day care center called Victory Village for probably three or four years until kindergarten. I went to Carrboro Elementary School for six years, and then life began to get more interesting when I graduated to middle school. I attended McDougle Middle School and had some really good teachers and some perhaps not so good. It was around this time when I first became really interested in science.

Many of the interesting experiences of my life took place during the summers between school years. As far back as I can remember, I’ve taken annual week-long trips to Ocean Isle Beach. Most years, we invite relatives from the Midwest to join us for a week. My favorite cousin is Joey Rintoul, my father’s brother’s son. He was born six weeks before me, and he is a truly wacky person. He lives in Manhattan, Kansas. During most of our time together until we reached the age of about 12, we played with action figures and other toys. He had a bizarre see-through glow-in-the-dark bat, and I had a pair of ghostbuster figures, “Rockman” and the “dragon-car.” We would create long, inter-dimensional, truly weird adventures for our characters, usually ending with the triumph of Rockman over the Batman figure. During these adventures, we were interested in nothing else. “Joey and Stephen, do you want to go swimming in the ocean?”

“No,” came the response.

Later, “We’re going out to look for shells on the beach, would you like to join us?”

“Nah.”

“The house is burning down; would you like to evacuate with us?”

“Maybe some other time.”

For the longest time, we were inseparable. The biggest argument we ever had was over bubble gum. Our Aunt Helen had given us both a carton of bubble tape. Neither of us wanted to share ours with the other, but both wanted to taste what the other was like. The episode ended in tears and we both ran to our respective mothers, who suggested a compromise. “Why don’t you both give each other a piece of your gum?” We did so, and found that the two flavors of gum mixed together tasted better than either individually.

Another event I remember clearly from my life was the famed George Strait Country Music Festival, to which my father won tickets from a local radio station while renewing his cellular telephone contract. A day of complete craziness ensued, marked by wide rednecks screaming loudly behind my dad and I for about ten hours (our tickets were front-row). It was my first concert, and one of my only ones, in part because of the impression it left on me.

Another thing that should be known about me is that I’m a full-fledged trekkie. I am familiar with all five incarnations of Gene Roddenberry’s space adventure story, and I have unwittingly crammed my poor brain with so many unimportant “facts” about warp engines and quantum singularities that there is precious little space left in my tiny mind. I own five books, seven computer programs, and a number of action figures I won’t disclose here, all Trek-related. I jumped, therefore, at an opportunity to go to a Star Trek convention in Raleigh last summer. I soon found myself surrounded by the very types of people I didn’t want to be associated with. There were people dressed as Klingons, people frantically buying every possible piece of Trek merchandise in stock, and people crowding around the stage to get a glimpse of Lieutenant Worf. When the Star Trek trivia quiz arrived, I began to get uneasy. As each of the nerds lectured the crown on Warp Field Theory, I became somewhat self-conscious as I found myself correcting them when they made an error in their calculations of millicochranes per second. After this happened, I turned and ran from the Raleigh Convention and Civic Center as fast as possible, wanting never again to associate with fellow trekkies.

It was probably my love of Star Trek that got me interested in space originally, but my interests migrated from science fiction to science fact as I grew older. Instead of Starfleet, I became interested in NASA and, at the urging of my grandmother, I decided to join the Future Astronaut Training Program, a summer camp for people interested in the space program. I attended, and enjoyed myself so much that I joined a second year for “Level II” which involved a trip to Houston, Texas to tour Johnson Space Center. It was at this point in my life when I decided I wanted to work for NASA for at least a little part of my life. I loved the atmosphere of science and excitement I found in the people there, and all those with which I spoke seemed to truly enjoy their jobs. I realize I’ll probably never be an astronaut, but there are so many other space-related jobs that I can probably find one to suit me.

Another thing about me is that I like music. I especially like to sing. I’ve been in my school choruses every year since about first grade. In eighth grade, I had the opportunity to be a part of the North Carolina Middle School Honors Chorus. It was an auditioned chorus of one hundred fifty. Nine people from McDougle went to the auditions, and three of us were accepted. I was one, and I had a ball. The event was basically a weekend at which we sang nonstop and put on a concert at the end. It was as a part of that chorus that I made some of the most awesome music I’ve ever produced. Our concert was an unconditional success, and I was very proud of that weekend’s accomplishments.

Another interest I have is that of nature. I have been fond of the outdoors as far back as I can remember. Between seventh and eighth grades, I went to a summer camp called the Green River Preserve. It’s located on a 3400-acre private preserve owned by the camp director, a man named Sandy. It’s a beautiful piece of real estate, containing several waterfalls and countless breathtaking views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The camp consists of morning guided nature walks and afternoon classes on (mostly) nature-related subjects. On the property is a forty-foot climbing tower (of which I reached the top) and a swimming hole with a zipline out to the middle of it. The two weeks I spent there composed the longest time for which I was constantly happy. Part of the camp was a three-day, two-night live-out-of-your-backpack campout during which water was scarce and no one showered, which, in retrospect, sounds awful, but really was a whole lot of fun. The most beautiful moment of the whole camp, though, was near the end, when my cabin and the corresponding girls’ cabin all got up at 3:30 in the morning and walked two miles to an open-air church overlooking some valley south of the Blue Ridge. We arrived around 5:15 and watched the sun rise over the valley. It was truly breathtaking.

Between grades 4 and 5, I had the somber honor of going on a trip to bury my mother’s grandmother’s ashes in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. She had died two years earlier, but had been an organ donor, and after the organ people were done with her, she was cremated and returned to our family. We packed up the beat up Dodge Caravan that was our family vehicle and headed north until we reached Washington, DC, where we were joined by my cousin Julie, who was then working for the United States Senator from Arkansas. When the six of us arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, we went to the Baltimore Aquarium and ate at the Cheesecake Factory (they had something like 506 different cheesecakes in the inventory: one every day for a year and a half). The aquarium was reasonably awesome, and the Cheesecake Factory was pure heaven. We proceeded north until we reached Wernersville, which wasn’t large enough for a hotel, so we stayed in a nearby town. The motel we stayed in was the spookiest part of the entire journey. It resembled the Bates Motel in Psycho, and even more ominous was its name: the Deska Motel. Spelled backwards, that’s Aksed. (“Axed” misspelled.) Alone, those things may not bother me, but someone in residence there had a large black van with rather unusual decals on the back resembling disembodied skeletons and other unrecognizable demons. Miraculously, none of us were murdered in our sleep, and we all lived to tell about the experience. The following day, we went to the cemetery in Wernersville, buried my great-grandmother, and left the area as quickly as possible.

One of the most interesting adventures of my life was in third grade, when I was about as stupid as I was handsome (joke). There was a bucket of small beads in the classroom, about a quarter-inch in diameter, and for a reason that probably doesn’t exist and has certainly escaped me ever since, I inserted one of them deep into my ear. It didn’t come out. No matter what anyone did, the bead was firmly embedded in my ear. I had to telephone my mother to inform her of what I had done, and I felt like a complete idiot. “Uhhh, Mom? I, um, stuck a bead into my ear…no, not a bean, a bead, like on a necklace. Yeah, they want you to pick me up.” She did so, and we drove to the pediatrician. The on-call doctor tried to flush the bead out with water, but with little success. He referred us to a unit at UNC Hospitals that dealt with such foreign-object cases, so that’s where we went. We waited in a waiting room for about an hour, as the pressure gradually built, until we were finally called. The nice lady in the room examined the matching bead I’d gotten before leaving school and told me about a tool she was going to use called alligator tweezers. I allowed her to do so, and while it was in my ear I felt a surge of the most intense pain I’ve ever felt and instantly pushed her arm away. Fortunately, she had already grabbed the bead with her tweezers and my ear was empty. Ever since that incident, the bead had held a prominent place in my bedroom, a reminder never again to do anything quite that dumb.

[As if anyone needs more proof that I embody the quintessential nerd, I enjoy working with computers, and have found myself to have a certain understanding with them that many others (especially my parents) lack. My mother, for instance, has the unusual power to completely crash any computer she even gets close to. My father and I have hypothesized that she must have some magnetic aura that scrambles any computer she approaches. We have not been able yet to test this hypothesis because we have no means to measure her magnetic flux density, but that’s a story for another time. I was talking about me. My experience with computers begins around the age of five, when I first played a game on my family’s old IBM 486 computer. I had to direct a snake around a board to eat numbers while avoiding the walls. I began to create my own programs at the age of eight, mainly interactive stories in which the player had to make decisions (example: should I get a job and earn the money I need to save the world or should I just steal it from the bank?). The decisions made generally affected the outcome of the story, but all outcomes ended up being positive ones. This combined my interests in creating works of fiction and programming computers. However, when it became clear that my brother Andy would forever outshine me in the technology sector (he’s in college now majoring in computer science), I gradually lost interest in programming computers.]

Speaking of my brother, my most recent adventure on the odyssey that is my life was a three-day car trip from Carrboro, North Carolina to Hutchinson, Kansas in Andy’s green Ford Focus. We set out on a shining day in late June, armed with about ten six-packs of various Harris Teeter brand soft drinks, three mix CD’s, a few changes of clothes, a Wachovia debit card, a Mastercard from Mom (“Just for emergencies,” she said as she entrusted it to us), and maps of every state from here to there. On what was supposed to be our longest driving day, we covered the distance from Chapel Hill to Nashville in about ten hours, including meal stops. We ate at the Hard Rock Café, went to a rock concert, and got to bed around midnight, only to wake up again around 7:00 and seek a Krispy Kreme store for breakfast. After that, we were off, traveling northwest on Highway 64. Five miles before we got to Illinois, we realized that I, the navigator, had made a fairly serious mistake and that we had gone 147 miles out of our way. Taking over my duties, Andy soon found the right route on the map and guided us back to the road we were supposed to be on. When we finally arrived in Columbia, Missouri, we checked into a motel and went to see A.I.: Artificial Intelligence on one of the 97+ screens at the local movie theater. On the third day, we listened to the audio from the animated movie The Hobbit and completed our journey in plenty of time to have our photos taken by a professional photographer hired to photograph the Rintoul family.