Sean Porter

UNST 141B

Ben Perkins PhD

Fall 2006

Who I am...

My name is Sean Porter, I was born in Portland, OR on the 24^th of January in 1983. I was delivered by a midwife in a small house in northeast Portland, where I spent my preschool years terrorizing babysitters and eating candy from the corner store. When I was old enough to start kindergarten, my family (two older brothers and a younger sister, in addition to my mother and father) moved into a gargantuan house in southeast. Three aboveground floors, seven bedrooms, plus a large basement and a double lot meant we had plenty of room to run around and experience all that childhood had to offer.

When I started school, I went to MLC (Metropolitan Learning Center, or Moron's Last Chance, if you were so inclined). Contrary to the beliefs of most of the children at other schools, I was among the smartest children in the state, at least in terms of standardized testing. I developed at MLC a great passion for learning, along with a healthy respect for the myriad backgrounds of the people I attended school with. I continued in this happy state, more or less undisturbed, until I entered high school.

I determined, around the time I entered eighth grade, that I wanted to be an Electronics Engineer, and upon considering high school felt I should make an effort to get a head start on my schooling in that direction. Thus it was that I left MLC for the technically greener pastures of Benson Polytechnic High School. The unfortunate aspect of this transition was that because the classes at MLC were structured differently from those of traditional public schools (i.e. We didn't receive grades, and our subjects were less linear, especially concerning math), I was forced to begin high school in a lower math class than I should have been in. This was a great disappointment to me, and one of my few regrets from high school was not speaking up about it.

I worked just hard enough to keep my grade point average above a 3.5 for the first two years of my high school career, while playing soccer and generally enjoying myself. Until just before the beginning of my junior year, when my life changed drastically, my oldest brother moved back to town after having lived away from home for the past several years, and he and his girlfriend at the time took me to my first rave. I was instantly hooked. This was where I was meant to be. I continued to go after the school year started, and at some point began using ecstasy (MDMA). I went through a very tough period in my life at this point, I was very depressed, my grades started to slip, and my relationship with my mother and sister was swiftly deteriorating. After a month or two of this, my parents started to catch on, and began limiting my activities. They also got me into a drug treatment program, and were very supportive and understanding. I got my life back together, at least somewhat, although I continued to go to raves. When it came time for graduation, I just barely scraped by with a 3.25 GPA, but by this point I was getting seriously depressed, even without the influence of drugs.

Somehow I managed to get a decent score on my SAT and get accepted to Oregon State University. I would have preferred CalTech or University of Washington, but they were more expensive, and I just didn't have the grades to get in. Off to college I went, and pissed away about TWELVE THOUSAND DOLLARS of my amazing grandmother's money. By the time May rolled around, I was on the verge of sleeping myself to death, and I was hardly going to class at all. It was time to leave Corvallis, so I left. I returned home, much to the delight of my mother, who had been missing my presence in her small home. (She and my father had divorced a few years earlier, and she couldn't afford the taxes on our big old house, so she moved, a block away!)

I lived with my mom for about six months before I found a job, but it wasn't meant to last. When I found a job, she asked that I pay rent. This wasn't a problem until I was fired from work on my last day. I was being laid off, because the client hadn't renewed the contract which I was operating under. Unfortunately for me, that didn't mean I didn't have to pay rent anymore, it meant I had to find a new job. Welcome to the real world, I guess. I “looked” for work for about another six months before I finally decided I actually wanted to find employment. The next week I got hired at Safeway #2448 in downtown, and I've been working there ever since.

Why I'm in College...

I finally have decided that I'm ready and stable enough to return to my pursuit of knowledge. I've felt somewhat stagnant for these past five years, and although I've learned a lot about how to live, and how to keep myself happy (which is somewhat hard with my mild depression), I don't feel like I'm going anywhere. I had no real goals, at least none that I was truly pursuing, and I didn't even have a relationship to distract me. I continue to go to raves, but they too have lost some of their lustre, and I long to be more financially secure so that I can turn my attention to more productive and socially constructive activities.

I wish to learn to be as sharp as my father, who always challenges my assumptions and makes me think about WHY I believe what I believe, which is why I'm truly looking forward to this course. I want to sharpen my skills in my chosen field so that I can competently solve at least some of the problems of the world today. I have so many ideas for the world, I want to be able to articulate them and turn them into reality so that I can shape a better tomorrow for the children I may eventually have. I don't want to see the dark things that I can imagine taking shape on the horizon EVER materialize.

Concerning My Living Environment

I believe that one of the most crucial concerns that our society has today is that of energy, its generation, efficient use, and distribution. One of the things that has struck me in recent months and years is the thought of applying distributed models to power generation. I think that it makes much more sense for us to generate power where we use it, through wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and other non-polluting forms of energy. I think that the best forms of generation will store energy as hydrogen gas, as it is highly energy dense and there are no losses involved in transferring it, unless you have a leak. It strikes me that if we used solar panels on the roofs of homes and had an electric grid that was constructed more like a marketplace or a computer network, it would prevent brownouts and other vagaries of the traditional power generation models that we currently have in place. In essence, when one person was not using all the energy they were generating, they would either store it for later use, or sell it off to the highest bidder. That way, since everyone is a consumer and a producer of electricity, there is no need to have a utility that consumes tons of money paying huge executive salaries and other common wastes involved with corporate entities. The only need is to have everyone pay a small amount for service and repair, which generally is not a huge problem or priority, since the network structure brings with it inherent redundancies, and most of the time, people will probably be generating more energy than they consume.

Another benefit of having a distributed power generation model is that if we begin to utilize electric cars, or hydrogen fuel cell cars, it will allow us to fuel or charge our vehicles almost anywhere. No more will we worry about finding the nearest gas station, we can just have our in-car computer query the electric grid to determine who has enough fuel to top us off and then proceed there.

Mass transit is a big part of this equation as well, I think it makes much more sense in dense urban areas to have automated infrastructure for getting people from one region of town to another. The most interesting solution for this problem that I've seen is Sky Web Express(http://www.taxi2000.com). This system combines the best features, I think, of mass transit and personal transit. It gives people more flexibility than buses or light rail, because they are able to travel from one point to another without stopping in between, and it is more efficient than everyone having their own vehicle because the vehicles will be utilized much more. I would say that the only impediment to widespread implementation of systems like this, is that most dense urban areas already have some sort of mass transit in place, and making a new investment in a total rework of those systems would not be financially prudent.