Insects, the cosmos, engines, lakes, painting drawing...what was your childhood obsession?

For me? Language. Other children played "school," "house," and "doctor." With a discarded headset, I played UN interpreter.

After graduation in 1973 with three years of Spanish, I headed to Israel to study Hebrew in an immersion environment ("ulpan") at a kibbutz. This enabled me to master enough Hebrew to live in Israel. Life in the 1970s was so much different than now, and I was attacted to the pioneer spirit of the kibbutzniks, many of whom left the concentration camps of Europe in World War II for a new life in the Middle East.

In 1975, I entered Georgetown University as an Arabic major. I moved to San Francisco in 1976 where tuition was cheaper, attended San Francisco State University and worked full-time at Pacific Bell. After five years with the telephone company, I was convinced I could do better. I transferred to UC-Berkeley as a junior, graduated with a BA in linguistics in 1984. Here I worked with Farsi in a field methods class, and completed a senior thesis about the Iroquian languages with Wally Chafe, a renowned Iroquian scholar. In 1986, I earned a Master's Degree in Library and Information Studies.

Based on my background in linguistics, I was asked to be the Hawaiian studies librarian at UH-Hilo. I believed a erson responsible for a language collection should have some proficiency in the language, so I enrolled in Hawaiian language classes in 1993, and completed 4 years of work in three.

I took a sabbatical in Fall 2001 to work on a PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu. I needed a second MA or a PhD to be eligible for promotion to Associate/Full Professor rank. In the middle of the Spring semester I decided that the doctorate would take more effort than I felt it was worth at that stage of my life, so I completed required coursework for a Master's Degree in one year, spent five years writing my thesis, and graduated with a second MA in 2007. I made a useful contribution to Micronesian linguistics with "A Sketch Grammar of Satawalese, the language of Satawal Island, Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia."

By that time, I had moved to Honolulu and transferred into the UH Community College System, where the pay was greater. It turns out that I didn't need a second MA in the Community College system. Oh well. I met interesting people, traveled to the Island of Yap for fieldwork... I tend to finish major projects that I start.

In the Fall of 2007, I sat in on American Sign Language classes at the community college where I worked. I ended up enrolling in the ASL Interpretation program and finished almost all required work in 2010. I passed the written exam required of interpreters, but, in 2012, decided to work on my therapeutic music work and I did not progress to the interpreter's Performance Exam.