Erik E

I'm always amazed when anyone actually reads my blog (my theory is that it's mainly English teachers calling it up to show examples of bad grammar and faulty logic to their students).  In the long run it will end up being for me, and thus I find myself increasingly featuring pictures or stories that I'll appreciate in my dotage.  Here's a funny, and totally non-representative picture of my excellent friend Erik. It took me a while to get to know him, mainly because neither of us are particularly good at jumping out and meeting new people.  He's popped up in my blog before, mainly in postings related to Gentlemen of Excellence shenanigans (he's one of the founding members) such as the Four Sport Triathlon.  Years ago in the first Four Sport Triathlon when he handed out the score sheet (which is very precise and detailed and the creation of which always leads to a lengthy argument/negotiation) it featured pictures of me.  The event was on my birthday, which I had not shared with anyone, so that was a mystery which I eventually solved - Erik, who I barely knew at the time, was the culprit.  It is a classic Erik move in that it was creative and funny and carried out behind the scenes, and never calls attention to him.  You never want to be the person handing out gifts at a birthday party after Erik, because yours will seem very pathetic and unimaginative by comparison.  I think he was also in the blog one time (you would think I'd know more about the contents of my own blog, but we're rapidly approaching 800 posts and I'm often quite surprised at my own posts) because we acted in a student film together; thankfully, we only had one scene together, so I wasn't too embarrassed.  Besides being a good actor, Erik is also a published author.  Essentially, he's that really talented and accomplished guy that you should hate, except that he's such a great guy and unassuming soul that you can't.  He's also the other resident film whore (as my students like to call me) at Champlain, so we often find ourselves squirreled away at the St. John's Club talking about Hal Hartley or Atom Egoyan or French or Italian films.  A couple different times when we've (mainly he's) run film series on campus the only people who showed up in Alumni Auditorium were the two of us, and so we showed the film anyway and happily sat chatting away.

This is him goofing and responding to my usual request when taking photographs to "show me angry," which I mainly do to get people to laugh and thus get a more natural picture.  Here he clearly ran with it.  In real life he's actually about the most calm and level-headed person (other than Andy Burkhardt) than I could possibly imagine.