About
On Me - A Historical Look at the Contemporary Life of Elliott Asbury
Today, you can calculate my age with moderate ease by removing 1981 from our current year. However, it must be noted that should today’s date precede the median day of October (rounded up to the next highest integer, of course), a full year should be removed from the sum of your previous calculation. The last time I attempted this very equation, I discovered I was 95 years old. Of course, I went with my gut feeling that something was amiss, rechecked my figures and came up with what I believe to be the correct answer of 27. I figured this sum would be valid for roughly a year and thus planned to recalculate within those next 12 months. You’ll be the first to know when I do.
After having completed initial potty training, I was issued non-absorbent undergarments and sent into the adult-world of kindergarten. Having mastered the skills of overseeing toy allocation during break times, it was clear that I was destined to advance beyond the level of mandatory nap-time. It was with those earth-shattering results that I flew quickly up the ranks, being promoted to numerically superior grades an average of once per year. It was noted that I “played well with others”, and that “causing relatively few disturbances” was going to get me far in life.
During the mid-point of my fifth-grade position, my job duties were suddenly changed when circumstances relocated my family and me to England. Despite my expectations, learning their language was not simply all that was required to assimilate into British culture. Explicit knowledge of tea times, which utensils to use for eating “pudding”, and what direction should command my immediate attention when crossing the street were clearly all going to become factors in my success. That, and their educational dress-code meant that I was going to have to learn to tie a tie.
The “little British experiment”, as I like to refer to it, met it’s natural conclusion when we were all deported two years after our initial landing. Failure to properly greet people on the street was cited as my reason for expulsion, but I always thought it might have had more to do with the time I swapped out all the street signs so that our town might reflect a more natural “drive on the right side of the road” ambiance. A service that clearly went unappreciated.
Following my re-integration into American society, I was sent forth to take command of middle school, or post-primary-pre-secondary eduction, as I was known to call it. This was assuredly going to be a challenge, as my former compatriots had seemingly undergone hormonally induced changes of radioactive proportions. This upset the complete natural order which I had left and gave me utter chaos when I returned. The girls, for some strange reason, were amusing to study, yet impossible to approach due to their development of complex non-verbal communication. The guys, one of which I quickly became, spent most of their time trying to parse these gestures. Instead of success, we spent most of our time running into our lockers and tripping on our shoelaces when exiting the restroom. I was learning in my life that with promotion comes new challenges.
All through high school, I excelled at passing my classes. According to my rough recollection, I was allowed to continue from each class I took onto the next - a feat that is certainly noted and memorialised in the halls of that great academic institution.
I chose to pause my Portland Public Schools career and decided instead to pursue a position at a Czech public school. Though the similarities were sometimes eerie (the Czechs, too, have chalk-boards, teachers and students), the differences almost seemed to overshadow those facts (the chalk-boards, teachers and students conducted everything in Czech, which I discovered upon my return is a completely foreign language). I vowed that that next time I underwent a high school foreign exchange, I would undertake slightly more preliminary research.
But, at the rate at which I was completing my high school duties, I would be done in four short years, removing any hope of being able to live with a non-American family again.
However, it was brought to my attention one day early during my senior term as a Lincoln High School student that there are indeed colleges and universities in countries outside of the United States. While I was unwilling to believe such a thing at first, I quickly realised that there have been bankers and lawyers everywhere I have been. Clearly, there must at least be some rudimentary mechanism that would allow these foreign professional-hopefuls to achieve their goals of taking other peoples’ money and suing their pants off. My search for “extra-estados-unitos-educastione” (as the Spaniards say) led me to McGill University in Quebec. Here I could learn to be a Habitant from observing the locals while benefiting from a stunningly Anglo education within the confines of the institution. The system was so perfect that I prayed nobody would let the Francophones know such a place existed for fear of having it be shut down or blockaded in some mass strike. And I had just cause to be afraid as nobody puts on a blockade like the French.
Well, the one element I neglected to consider prior to taking up my position as a “year zero” was that a Montreal winter can easily consist of a few days at 40 below zero. (This is without doubt where Mr. Celsius was from, as he chose this temperature to be the intersecting reference point with the more widely used “Fahrenheit System” - from German, meaning “The Better System”.)
It was with frozen defeat (”da feet”) that I hiked home to Oregon. After some time spent puzzling over which slightly warmer place my future would take me, I was directed by some helpful advertising professionals to the University of Oregon. If I too should have any chance of being part of the creative chicanery institution that is advertising, my challenge would be to become a U of O Duck. Growing up in an Oregon State University household, I was alway unspokenly taught that it was a Beaver’s job to eat Ducks for breakfast. Beavers build dams, after all. Ducks just poop on your picnic blanket and steal your bread. The challenge was set, and I flew south to engage in some quacking without giving away that it was all a ruse. I was, of course, the infamous “beaver in duck’s clothing” of which you hear so often in children’s literature. Luckily for me, my waterfowl companions were none the wiser and accepted me as one of their gaggle.
With their misguided trust, I was awarded the highest honor of my career to date: a diploma issued by the University of Oregon, asserting that I had authority to engage in conversations pertaining to Advertising. With any hope, these new found conversations might lead to a new type of employment for me: one in which I didn’t have to buy any more damned textbooks. And, like one astonishing success after another in my life, this was inexplicably the case. I was quickly hired by Lamar Transit Advertising in Portland, OR. It was to become my future to put signs on buses. And while it sounds a simple task, I knew my mental superiority would play a large role in me being able to explain to clients that a sign 30″ by 144″ is really damn big. This mastery of the system continues to propel me forwards towards unseen heights and unknown destinations. I just know that if the past serves as any guide for the future, this world should brace itself for the new Renaissance Man, the modern Leonardo Michelangelo.
