I remember the first time I got a tool for Christmas. It was a miniature saw, just big enough to fit a five-year-old craftsman, and I learned that anything and everything could be cut with that saw. As soon as I completed the set with the hammer, wrench, and blowtorch, I began designing the world's most extravagant tree-house. Too bad the biggest tree in our yard was about as tall as I was.

When I was a kid, I owned any kind of toy that required assembling: Legos, Tinker-Toys, Lincoln-Logs, you name it. Once I started building, I was never able to stop. It began with Legos, and it continues to this very day with my entire apartment. Anything that can be improved with a hammer and nails, drill and wood-screws, nuts and bolts, or everybody's favorite—duct tape—has been improved well beyond the ordinary. It's one thing to have a couch, but it's a whole different world when that couch is suspended from the ceiling by chains, adjusts up and down, and has a fold-out, cushioned footstool that hides away (completely out of sight) when not in use. If you think that's something, the phone, TV, light switches, and door were all completely operable from that couch. If Dominos delivered to the door and I knew how to do indoor plumbing, I'd never have had to get my lazy butt off that couch.

Building stuff is one thing, but tearing stuff apart is so much more fun. Ever since I've owned toys I've known how to dismantle them. My parents would get me remote-control cars, model planes, or a new bike, all of which I would immediately tear apart in an effort to see how they work. Of course, once I put them back together, they never seemed to look the way they did before my screwdriver and ratchet set struck. Eventually, my parents simply bought me lumber and nails for birthdays and Christmases. Sometimes, I even got paints.

With this natural curiosity to understand how things like Stompers and telephones work—and the knack for eliminating that functionality—the natural choice for a college program of study was engineering. Math and science always came to me pretty easy, and with my "gift" with mechanics, I was destined to become a great creator. Imagine my dismay when I got to college and found out that engineers don't actually combine random objects with on over-abundance of duct-tape for a living. My whole world was shattered.

So, how did I get into English? Well, my best grade my freshman year was a "B-" in English 105; I figured I should pursue that great aptitude. Actually, I had an English 105 teacher who really helped me figure out what it was I thought was missing from engineering: critical thought, free thought. I'm not saying engineers are drones, but the curriculum up to that point had always led me to an answer someone else had planned for me to find. I was used to finding my own answers, not being told "This is correct; this is incorrect"; but looking at issues and debating ethics, morality, value of right and wrong, if such a thing could exist.

Now, since I was about 2,500 years too late to stand on a street corner in a toga and preach about "What is Existence?" I figured the next best thing would be to get involved in teaching—teaching classes that allowed for the free thought that forced students to discover their own ideas and positions on fate, determinism, freedom of thought, and the trend-setting fashion and lyrics of Vanilla Ice. While I may not have what seems from the outside to be a hands-on, craftsman-type job, I figure that if the Toolman can teach people how to build cars on his show, I can teach people how to build arguments in my class. Just like a smooth-running car, an argument has a lot of complicated parts that each can be suped-up to give an argument more power. [Insert Toolman Grunt here]

And despite two degrees in English, how could I compare myself with the Toolman without being able to fully insert my foot in my mouth? I have said stupid things so often that I wonder whether I should become a mime. My only problem is that I don't have a fence between my apartment and my next-door neighbor's, so I'm out of luck when it comes to getting advice from anyone. Maybe I could build one...