Scarred for Life | Links

What the Critics said: "He's not really my father, is he?" -- E. Learn "Schizo on a good day." -- M. McGrath "typically smart-alecky" -- G. Hartman "I didn't say that!" -- M. McCloud "Funnier than Al Gore." -- D. McCandless "He's diseased." -- N. Henson-Verb "Fully self-absorbed ... incredibly ignorant." -- G. van Lier

"So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it, but I couldn't find honest work." -- Attributed to Mark Twain David Learn was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Aug. 24, 1970, the anniversary of the Huguenot Massacre in Paris, France, and simultaneously the anniversary of the invention of the waffle iron. During the year David was born, three major volcanoes erupted, five small countries were decimated by hurricanes, and scientists announced the discovery of a previously unrecorded wobble in the Moon's orbit. David attributes these events to coincidence. In 1987, during his junior year at Penn Trafford High School, David became a foreign exchange student with AFS, and spent a year living and attending school in Rotorua, New Zealand. Again coincidentally, this was the year a massive earthquake hit the North Island of New Zealand, about 60 miles from Edmund Rice College (now John Paul College), a Catholic school where he was enrolled in the sixth form. After returning to the United States in 1988, David graduated from high school and enrolled at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., where he majored in biology for about two weeks. He graduated four years later with a bachelor's degree in English and a minor in religion, and remains the only student in the history of Lafayette to write a 120-page honor's thesis on the contemporary religious themes of Classic Star Trek, specifically the Death of God, the rejection of Western religion and the return to Paradise. (Paradise, incidentally, is a small city in northern California. Why the Enterprise crew was so determined to visit California remains a mystery, but David is glad they finally accomplished it in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.) From September 1992 to June 1994, David lived in Haiti as a missionary and English teacher. During this time, in addition to dysentery and tapeworms, he began to succumb in earnest to the writing bug Scriptus terminus ("I write because I cannot stop"), and kept friends, family and supporters informed of his activities with informative and entertaining prayer letters. In 1994, when David returned to the States for two weeks to visit his family and to raise money to continue his work in Haiti. Just as he was preparing to return, the United States invaded and occupied Haiti. Blocked from returning to Haiti, David was forced to find a job Stateside and re-establish himself here. Years later, he still hasn't found time to return to Port-au-Prince quite yet and sincerely hopes he didn't leave the stove on. In November 1997, after a year of teaching English in Bethlehem, Pa., additional time delivering pizza for Pizza Hut, selling gas for Mobil and running errands for Lehigh Blue Print Co. Inc., David finally made a wise career choice and accepted a job as a reporter for The Princeton Packet. In February 1998 he became the managing editor of the Hillsborough Beacon and The Manville News, and he still denies everything related to the Cheez Whiz incident which remains under federal investigation. Most significantly of all, in mid- to late 1994, David met Niki Hinson. Nearly a year later he finally asked her out on a date and received the encouraging words, "I guess" as compensation for the existential angst he had endured. In 1998, to his great surprise, she married him. Their first child, a daughter named Eowyn, was born in October of 1999. Currently working on a novel and two audio projects with his best friend, David is living proof that Spam is not a good breakfast word, but is a good word to say at breakfast time.