Tuesday, May 26, 2009

#177 Brian Oliu: He Loves the Kaplunk

Brian Oliu was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was an only child and his childhood was great. He spent a lot of times in piles of leaves. He played a lot of video games and ate a lot of cookies. Growing up, Brian learned a lot of useless trivia, including an absurd amount about fragrances (because he is larger than most people and was always afraid of smelling terrible when he was a kid, so he did his research). In high school, he played football (tight end) and basketball (power forward). In college, Brian studied English at Loyola in Baltimore, in part, because his friends were all English majors. He started writing essays and memoir—after he realized that he was awful at making things up. Another thing that you should know about Brian is that his ex-girlfriends all move away immediately after or close to the end of their relationship. His first kiss moved a few miles away and out of his elementary school district. His first girlfriend moved to Rhode Island in the fourth grade. His high school girlfriend moved to Los Angeles. His college girlfriend moved to San Diego. The girlfriend after that moved to the United Kingdom. So Brian moved Tuscaloosa, Alabama to terminate the loop. He also moved there to work on his MFA and currently runs the flag football league for the University of Alabama English Department; its mantra: athlete's mind, poet's body. Once, Brian spent an entire year in Belgium drinking beer, eating beef stew with fries, and hanging out with his Italian roommate Danny Apples (this name isn’t made up), a male model from Milan. Brian wears a lot of brightly colored track jackets. Also, he beat Contra and Super C without the Konami 30 Lives code. He really loves his computer and the internet a lot (but doesn’t like that he now has a very short attention span for anything that isn't sitting in front of his computer). When Brian isn’t designing of websites, he’s viewing of ephemera on the web. Plus, he loves the kaplunk of the GChat new message. Right now, Brian is wrapping up his MFA at the University of Alabama and teaching composition and creative writing there. He has a bad tendency to count down the time he has to do something, even if he’s having a great time or his on vacation. He wishes he didn’t do that. Also, he’s going to Romania to do a reading tour with his friend, the poet Jeremy Allan Hawkins. Next year, he’s going to become an instructor at the University of Alabama. And Brian just finished a memoir called i/o—it's going out to publishers as soon as he becomes less afraid of sending it out.

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1 comment:

Jeremy said...

Very accurate! You got Brian down, which does me a service, since now I won't have to agree to be his biographer. Thanks for the mention, too!

-JAH