I never know what to say when someone asks me what I do and I say I’m a web developer and they ask,

“Oh, is that what you studied? Have you always been interested in that?”

The easy answer is to say,

“No, it’s not even close.”

I spent six years at an art school, where I studied creative writing. Then, I went to a liberal arts college, where I majored in English. I wrote my thesis about Ernest Hemingway’s childhood.

In college, I did not take a single computer science class. I did sign up for a calculus class, but after failing the first midterm and having my professor tell me that I was, in his words, really bad at math, and having my dean tell me to, in her words, drop the class like it’s a hot potato, I withdrew.

When I was really little, I went to Hebrew school. This is a photo of me in a Purim parade. In a sea of Queen Esthers, dare to be the hamantaschen.

I stopped studying Hebrew after my Bat Mitzvah.

I started to learn Japanese because I was supposed to be an exchange student in Japan. The trip was all set, but then 9/11 happened and the program canceled all international student exchanges.

I was in a Spanish immersion program in elementary school, and then I studied Spanish again actually in high school, too. I was never any good at it, though, largely because I didn’t put in the effort but maybe also because it was a public art school and the one teacher was thrown into a classroom of more than 30 students who together made up a class of four different language levels.

And then I took Italian my first year of college, and much to the chagrin of my mother of Italian heritage and also probably to the chagrin of that high school Spanish teacher who had rooted hard for the romance languages, I was pretty bad at Italian, too.

I spent a few years working for an after school program in Boston’s Chinatown, teaching elementary school students who spoke mostly Cantonese but sometimes Mandarin at home. These six to 11 year olds, they all used to talk to me about learning English. They used to tell me about how hard it was to learn grammar and sentence structure, vocabulary and spelling.

I don’t remember how it came up, but one day they joked that I should learn Mandarin and I said,

“All right. I will.”

And they looked at me with that fierce but fleeting curiosity found only in small children. Then they all had a laugh about it and said,

“No, Sara. You can’t learn Mandarin. It’s too hard.”

And thus, the story of how I learned Mandarin.

In hindsight, I probably should have taken that same approach with the calculus teacher in college. Maybe there’s something, though, there’s just a kind of sweet revenge that comes from proving a group of your own students wrong that you just don’t find when it’s merely the teacher you’re trying to impress.

I also used to be a tournament chess player.

This is me and my brother. He was getting ready for a game and I was giving him a pep talk, I guess.

It’s funny. The joke when I was six was that I loved playing in chess tournaments because I never had to wait in line to go to the bathroom. Two decades later, I attend programming language conferences. The difference, of course, is that now I would gladly have to wait in line.

I also used to be an actor.

Call it community theater, call it professional theater, call it whatever — I did all kinds of weird things. I did a summertime production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the Oregon Coast. I did a Halloween production of Night of the Living Dead in an old movie theater. I did that one actually a few years in a row because I was Judy. Anyone who’s familiar with the movie knows that Judy is eaten by zombies halfway through it, and she never comes back as a zombie. The show started at midnight, so by 12:45a, I was dead and I just got to go home.

I was in a production called The Apple Tree, a musical, the fictional account of Adam and Eve. I was in a production called columbinus about the Columbine shootings. I did Henry V. I did Footloose. I did Titus Andronicus. I reluctantly did High School Musical.