A Knack for Embarrassment (ePub)

As a child, James wanted to be a cowboy, an astronaut, an author, an inventor, a computer guy, a marine biologist, a professional basketball player, or an archaeologist when he grew up. When he finally reached adulthood (does growing up ever really stop?), he settled into probably the least lucrative of the fields-archaeology. But that doesn't mean he didn't give the other fields a try.

Between five- and seven-years-old, he used to don chaps and a plastic cowboy hat while riding his stick horse outside Boss the Cow's pasture, daring himself to cross the fence and do some real cow roping. When he was eight he wrote his first story-a five-pager about an Indian named Run Away Bear.

During the 1980s he fell in love with his friend's Commodore 64 computer and played a lot of Oregon Trail and Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego? Also during the 1980s, he watched the movie Space Camp and launched and lost a couple dozen Estes rockets.

By the time he was ten, James's parents had purchased a membership at the local pool and he took an interest in radio controlled submarines and poisonous octopi. In his pre-teen years, with a mile of yarn and a few hundred tacks, James figured out how to open and close his bedroom door, turn the lights on and off, shoot intruders with darts, and wake up his little brother just by pulling a few strings.

In his early-teens, James came off an undefeated basketball season, scoring nearly 100 points for his eighth-grade team. Then he signed on with a church basketball team and lost every game for the next three years. At that point, James decided to give archaeology and writing serious thought.

By the time he was a junior in college, his professors had convinced him that creative writing was nearly impossible and that archaeology was only slightly less difficult. So today, James sits at a desk and writes technical papers about ancient peoples' trash (aka, archaeology).

Until recently, James

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