David Kelly
Updated 10/2004
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Here's my news: Just recovering from the emotional roller coaster of the 30th reunion celebration in Nashville. It was a wonderful time, and also a thoughtful one. Above all, it was a tremendous gift from Brent and the Ware family, one for which I cannot adequately express my gratitude. It had been decades since I revisited the two years I spent at ASIJ, and the reunion showed me how important that time really was in the strange path to getting wherever it is I am now. A few highlights(?): a year and a half at Vassar (turns out you can? major in marijuana and minor in Frisbee who knew?); a year or two working as a DJ in upstate New York; a year or two working as a door-to-door siding salesman in Boston (a tin-man, and not a very good one); a bunch of retail jobs, ending up managing stores for B. Dalton Booksellers. Then, finally back to college at age 30 at a small school on the eastern shore of Maryland called Washington College. I was fortunate enough to find a school that knew what to do with aging students trying to get back on track, and it was a great place to get an education. A major in history later (you want fries with that?), and I found myself doing financial admin in Bethesda, Maryland for Sybase, a software company. A few years of that before I decided to go out on my own and make the photography that had been my obsession into my living. Bad move: make your hobby into your job, your hobby becomes a job. I did some good work, but was neither failing nor thriving, and that got to be a bit frustrating. An opportunity came up to work in a software startup in Silicon Valley in '98 (in a year or two, we'll sell the company for $100/share and we'll all be rich!), so I took it. Then the software bust came along, but Callidus somehow managed to survive and even to thrive. None the less, the dreams of taking a few years off to go back to school or sail the south seas or become a rock star got put on the back burner. Currently I am a solution architect/smoke jumper/ hostage in the client services department, with no plans to change any time soon. I'm living in the San Jose area with Anne, my S.O. for the past 13 years. She's a middle-school music teacher who plays in local orchestras and also plays electric violin in my band (we put the funk in dysfuntional). My passion for photography turned into a passion for electric guitars and amps (Brent your office is SCARY!), but after 6 years, I'm finally getting excited about cameras again, too. The reunion helped me reconnect with good people I'd lost sight of, and it also showed me that I really have to go back and visit Japan and ASIJ. Maybe do that next summer? We'll see. But it will happen, and sooner rather than later, I hope. David Kelly |