Profile: Alan Freed

Personal background
I'm a 50 year-old civil rights attorney currently living in Milwaukee, WI. I represent workers in discrimination actions against employers. I was born and raised mainly in NYC, CA, OH, and CT, but have lived many more places since reaching adulthood.

I took a long, circuitous path to lawyering. After dropping out of high school in the 10th grade due to extreme and persistent boredom (probably mixed with [then unknown] attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder), I permanently borrowed (read stole) my mom's car and headed out to be a ski bum in Colorado with a buddy. I was 16 and altered my driver's license to say I was actually 18, so I could rent an apartment and find work. I took any jobs I could back then. Having absolutely no skill set other than getting high and skiing half-way decently, I ended getting a lot of experience in restaurants, doing everything from washing dishes to cooking to hosting to waiting tables and eventually, after about 5 years of this, to managing.

Eventually I moved to L.A., where I continued working in restaurants and experimenting with various mind-altering substances. I developed an grandmal seizure condition out of the blue that lasted the next 10 years and thankfully really put a crimp on my drug experimentations. The epilepsy also really helped steer me toward a generally more healthy and responsible lifestyle. Part of that change meant leaving the chronically unhealty environs of L.A. and moving to the relatively healthier city of Austin, TX, where I spent the next 18 years of my life, finally took my G.E.D., went to the University of Texas, where I earned a B.A. in Sociology and Russian, then went on to the law school there and got my J.D. degree. By then the epilepsy was a thing of the past, my 15 year marriage to a wonderful woman, Susan, was beginning to unravel, and I felt the need for another move.

Moves to Providence RI, where I worked for the RI Disability Law Center doing rights protection for persons with disabilities followed by a short move back briefly to Austin to try to repair the marriage (a futile attempt) then moved to Montana to get distance from the divorce. Stayed in MT the next 10 years and practiced disability law for Montana Advocacy Program. Finally, I met the latest love of my life, Lisa, on the internet, and we've been together for the past 5 years, now living in her home state of Wisconsin to be close to her family, with whom she's very close. I've hopefully taken my last bar exam (the fourth) and will live out my days here in Milwaukee (or in some other place with reciprocity). Lisa and I are due to be married next October!
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I've been fascinated in the possibility of extraterrestrial contact for as long as I can remember. I hope such contact happens in my lifetime, but I'm not holding my breath. The likelihood of some type of life "out there" may be all but certain, but sentient, self-aware life, capable of communicating in a manner we would find intelligible? Me thinks this is more than a tad more uncertain. Nonetheless, I believe SETI remains a worthwhile endeavor, no matter if or how long it takes us to establish that we're not alone in the immediate interstellar neighborhood. Besides, it's FUN! Contact, if it happens at all, will probably result from continuous monitoring of our immediate stellar vicinity. As technology advances, we should become more successful in filtering out all the earthly extraneous background noise, listening more acutely, and perhaps someday have listening posts on quieter venues like the Moon or Mars or on extra-solar objects like comets or asteroids.

I hope that with whomever we make contact will not be as paranoid, nasty and predatory as we are as a species, but perhaps self-aware species never make it to where we are technologically without being paranoid, nasty and predatory. Those "qualities" might just go with the territory, but hopefully not. Finally, if we have slotted ourselves for certain extinction here on Earth, it would be comforting to know that the challenge of evolving out of such propensities would carry on in other species, elsewhere and elsewhen. Good luck SETI!
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