"...Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything..."

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on Monday, August 4, 1975, at 2:22 PM EDT. (Astrologers out there, make what you will of that crucial information). The summer of 1975 was notable for two events: the 1975 Red Sox World Series season, and one of the worst heat waves of the century. I was born at the crest of that week-long heat wave.

For the first three years of my life, I lived in Everett, Massachusetts. My family and I moved to Revere, Massachusetts right after the infamous Blizzard of '78. I guess extreme weather has chased me around my whole life. Surrendering to the forces of inertia, my family has lived here in Revere ever since.

My years of grade school aren't important. When I left 8th grade, I attended Malden Catholic High School, a private college preparatory high school. I won't say unequivocally that my years there were hell. Suffice it to say that the school was a) single-sex and b) full of people with whom I wouldn't ordinarily choose to associate on any kind of social basis. Nevertheless, my four years at MC were valuable, educationally. I also made quite a few friends.

I spent my high school years playing Dungeons and Dragons, watching my friends play Street Fighter in arcades all over the North Shore, and writing lab reports. I was a science geek, because that's the way they made us at MC. But then I was accepted to Harvard.

Harvard

What can I say about "the big H"? Was it full of even more people with whom I wouldn't choose to associate ordinarily? Not neccesarily, because some of my best friends right now were also students there.

It's a strange place, though. One of my Harvard roommates once described the endemic attitude of Harvard students as "full of ambiguity and guarded opinion." I think that says it all. See, my personal opinion is that many Harvard students are really quite intelligent (I don't include myself) and somewhat mentally unsteady (I don't include myself either).

What did I do for four years? I studied medieval history and literature. It may have been naïve and shortsighted, in retrospect, to have majored in such a limited and limiting field. Why not computer science, or economics, or one of the sciences? In the end, I received a liberal-arts humanities education, and I am damn lucky to have gotten it. And, unlike many people I knew there, I enjoyed my studies.

Wilderness Years

So, out of school for the first time in eighteen years, I got a great job at Sportscircuit, a division of NESN, the New England Sports Network, which produces a sports news and features site on the World Wide Web. One thing I liked about this job, apart from the fact I get to work in Fenway Park, is the fact I worked for a web site that provides hard content. It's refreshing for the web, these days.

For a year, I lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I was recently accepted to the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Not the most enjoyable year of my life, but an important experience.

So, now, I'm working for Kaplan test prep, which is a pretty nice place to work.

Besides history

Granted, you can't tell that much about a person from just his or her story. I'd love to tell you about all the things that interest me, all of the things I like to do in my spare time, in detail. But you'll probably find much more in the other sections of the site.

To summarize, though, I'm into sports, science fiction, TV of any kind, literature, and so forth.

Images

There's tons of new images up now, but warning, it's a graphics-intensive page and will take quite sometime to load, depending on the speed of your connection.

Contact

If you'd care to make comments on the site you're viewing, there are many ways to find me. My email identities are legion.

Your best shot is with mgrasso@sprynet.com. It's my most commonly-used email address. I'm on AOL Instant Messenger as mgrasso 98. I'm also occasionally on ICQ. My ICQ# is 10311981.