Bio
Introductions
A persons life is hard to put in to words. The challenge is greater still when that person is yourself. I face that challenge now – to find select words that will convey, as best is possible, my existence. Knowing a person is an experience. Without knowing them, without having experienced their physical being, it can be difficult to grasp the essence of that person. We are forced to resort to the factory of our mind to produce a theory. The theory of a man. So now I must supply your mind with the raw materials that it needs to begin the process. You will absorb these words. They will seep in to your mind and then it’s up to you. I hope to dispel misconceptions. Perception. It’s all we have. Of course you can look at a picture. This is really where the process of perception begins. With visual stimulation we can come up with certain judgments. It’s human nature to judge on sight. This isn’t wrong – it simply is. The hard part is to understand that these visual cues don’t necessarily have much to do with fact. We can make all the judgments we want based upon a persons image, but seldom does this allow us to delve in to actualities. However, as we are human, it is on image we must begin. Accept the conclusions you came to when first looking at the picture. These are perceptions. Perceive as you will. Now let us introduce the facts.
The Mundane Facts
My name is Alexander Schwartz. No middle initial. It isn’t needed because there is no middle name. Some find this odd. Despite whether it is odd or not, it is fact. I was born in Meadville, PA on March 30th, 1975. I do not, however, consider this my birthplace. While it may be where I actually left the womb, I have no memories of it. I was too young, my brain still too tentative, to form actual memories from that place. My memory, therefor what I consider my existence, began in Raleigh, NC. I am a little below the average height for a male in the United States. While I have been measured several times there is still debate on my actual height. The truth is somewhere around 5 feet, 8 inches. My weight is more or less average for my height. It can be quite variable based upon current eating habits, and levels of beer consumption. I am a white male. That is quite apparent. My ancestry traces back to Poland, Ireland, and Italy. Simply put I am a typical American mutt. I am from nowhere in particular. I am just from here. I am proud of that. I do not tie myself to some culture I have never actually been a part of. The various places I have lived in the US is my culture. Bits and pieces of it make up the whole. I am proud of this as well.
Places I’ve been and things I’ve seen
I lived in North Carolina until after my 7th birthday. I remember the Catholic school I attended for first grade. I have memories of the apartment complex I spent those years in, and of the people I called friends. I remember specific incidents, some of which are mundane, some of which have a sharp clarity in my mind to this very day.In 1982 I moved to Ithaca, NY. I remember arriving there, and meeting my first friend within minutes of getting out of the car. It’s amazing what running wild with a toy gun can do. I lived in the same apartment for the next 11 years of my life. I remember growing up there, forming the basis of what I believe there. People came and went, a few close ones remained. Some friendships don’t go away even with time and distance to contend with. The good memories outweigh the bad, even if my 4 years at Ithaca High School were not 4 years that I cherished. In fact most of those memories I think about only out of necessity, and not out of fondness. In 1993 I attended Niagara University. I had never heard of it before applying there. I was only accepted to a few colleges, and I can’t remember my reason for choosing Niagara. Whatever the reason may have been I certainly do not regret it. The start was rocky, at that point in my life my ability to make new friends had diminished. Fortunately friends made me and life there become a new experience with every breath. After many classes I finally declared English as my major in the spring semester of 1994. My years at Niagara are amongst the best of my life. In 1997 I graduated college and moved back to Ithaca, NY. I had nowhere else to go. Shortly after returning I got my first full time job with Cornell University. I moved in to my first apartment by myself. It would be the first of four apartments I would inhabit in Ithaca. The job there was also the first of three full time jobs I would have there. My second apartment I shared with two people. Overall things ran well, there were some minor incidents, and occasionally beer exploded. My third apartment I shared with just one person. It was a better class of apartment, but after a year there it became apparent things were going to change. In 2003, due to unemployment, I was forced to move to Auburn, AL to subside on charity from my parents. The changes was a dramatic one. It was a different culture, certainly a different climate. I had been removed from all my friends, all the social circles, some of which has spanned the course of nearly twenty years. Despite my difficulties, some friendships were cultivated. In the summer of 2004, after a year of life in Alabama, I was given the opportunity to move back north, this time to Newport RI where I lived with my cousin Jay. Alabama wasn’t bad to me, I just didn’t feel it was a place where I wanted to live. I missed winter. As crazy as that sounds it is indeed the truth. When I had the opportunity to move in with Jay in Newport I jumped at the chance. I soon ended up working The Music Box Annex. It’s a store that sells novelty T-shirt and a popular brand of T-Shirts known as Life is Good. I loved many things about Newport but I was never able to cultivate any significant friendships there. After almost a year of living in Newport I moved back, once more, to Ithaca, NY.
Circling Back Around
Once again I found myself in Ithaca. Despite my protests I found myself inexplicably drawn here. The years away did me much good. They taught me a lot about myself, and allowed me to reflect on my life in many ways in which I would never have imagined had I stayed in Ithaca. I have come to realize that while I shall always be a geek at heart I’m not sure that’s where I want my career to take me. To say that I was often unhappy while working in the IT industry would be a vast understatement. There are several things about the field I miss, but as a whole I feel better off without it being a full time part of my life.After a few months here of having problems finding work I pretty much stumbled in to a job. Through second hand sources I knew someone at the Ithaca Beer Company who was leaving. She encouraged me to apply for her job and by the end of June I was the newest employee there. Not only had I stumbled in to a job, but I had ended up finding myself, for the first time in my life, in a field that I loved. Working at the brewery gave me time to think about things and what I want out of life. I’ve always had an interest in beer (not just drinking it, but the science behind it as well), so the job was a great learning experience, giving me access to many people with lots of knowledge about all facets of the industry.
Starnger Things Have Happened
When I was younger I never really imagined myself being married. It’s not that I didn’t want that, it just hadn’t been something I’d seen as a possible direction in my life. Of course I’ve also come to understand that often I’ve been a horrible judge about which direction that my life would take me. It was at my cousins’s wedding that I began dating a very good friend of mine whom I had known since before I left Ithaca for Alabama. Many people told me they had seen this coming for a long time, but it took me by surprise that our good friendship involved in to something new, something so much more intimate. After almost a year of dating we became engaged and in June of 2008 we were married here in Ithaca, NY. This, however, wouldn’t be the only preconceived notion of my future that would be turned on it’s head. Almost two years after we were married we had our first, and only child. For most who knew me this came as a surprise. To say I had always felt uncomfortable around children, especially babies, would be a massive understatement. They downright terrified me. My wife, however, convinced me that we should have a child. I took on the role of stay at home dad since I had once again found myself unemployed. This has become the greatest, and best, challenge of my life. My son, despite the not-so-good times, is not only the brightest spot of my life, but the best thing I have ever done with my life. I’ve learned a lot about the world and about myself seeing things through his eyes as I watch him grow and develop. There is a new fascination to the world I hadn’t previously experienced.
And Back to the Beer
Losing my job with Ithaca Beer did nothing to tarnish my feelings for the industry. It also didn’t slow down my home brewing. In fact, my brewing ramped up not only in quantity, but also in quality and complexity. It became a lot less random experimentation with mixed results, and a lot more running the numbers, doing the research, and tailoring recipes towards my own palate. I learned a lot more about styles and what defined them. I spent a lot of time learning how the various ingredients contributed to the flavor, the body, and the overall character of the beer. My homebrew system grew from a basic kit of buckets and a carboy for making and bottling partial mash beers, to having an all grain system with a fancy brew kettle, measuring equipment, a pump, and many other bells and whistles. It was because of my growth in the hobby, as well as a good friend, that I find myself once again working in the world of beer. A friend who bartends at a local pub knew the owner was working towards brewing their own beer. She put me in touch with the owner and after a few meetings I found myself in the role of assistant brewer at Rogue’s Harbor Brewing. I still am in my role of stay at home dad, we do the brewery work a couple nights a week and the occasional weekend. It’s a small operation, but their are plans to slowly grow it in to a great Finger Lakes beer destination. I’m thrilled to be a part of it.
A Final Analysis
There they are: facts. You can do with them as you choose. You can piece them together, discard them, put each through the microscope and draw whatever conclusions you will from them. They are little pieces of a much larger puzzle – it is a puzzle without end. There are always new pieces to discover, new images to be seen. The image from far away is different from the image up close, but both images are part of the same intricate design. To discard one in favor of the other is to ignore the whole and only focus on a small segment. Life is a sum of its parts, but even the whole is only a piece of something much larger. Things link together. Life flows. All around us change. We have our perceptions and we must use those, along with an understanding that there are no constants, to come to a conclusion about a person. There is only one truth in all of this, that no matter what we divine from the facts given to us, there is always a degree of error, a statistical skew from the norm. Take from this what you will. Filter it through yourself. Learn. Understand. I am.
