About Closet Full Of Weasels

I am constantly (well, not constantly, but often enough) asked where I came up with the name closet full of weasels. The short answer: I didn’t.

The longer answer: it was given to me while talking to a friend in college. I have this fortunate, or unfortunate depending on how amusing I am at the time, ability to tell a story in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner. This isn’t just wandering off topic, this is serious meandering. After one conversation with a friend who has a Ph.D. in social work, she looked at me seemingly out of breath and said, “Phil, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were flying on cocaine.”

As an illustration, I once injured my thumb pretty badly. The nail was pretty much sheared off. I had some scary dressings on it and some friends asked me how it happened. Well, after I-kid-you-not thirty (thirty!) minutes recounting the hideous auto accident my dad was in, cameras, the strength-to-weight ratio of sheet metal, leaf-spring suspensions, capillary blood flow in extreme cold, jaws-of-life, the swiftness of adrenal reaction and the delayed reaction to pain, I finally ended with “…and that’s how I smashed my thumb.” They still tease me with that one ten years later.

I seem to lack some essential get-to-the-point filer in my head. Most of this can be attributed to the fact that I find a staggeringly large number of topics absolutely fascinating. And as an autodidact*, I have crammed my brain with huge amounts of information. So when I usually tell a story, I interject what I think are interesting asides. Which of course leads to more asides and then, bam!, a 30 second explanation turns into a 30 minute dissertation on the Great Wall of China, the Asian-Pacific economy, Pacific Rim volcanoes and propagation of tsunamis. But what truly astonishes some of my friends is the fact that I never lose track of how the story started. I always get to the point.

So anyway, back to the name (see, I’m doing it here as well). A friend in college once said this about conversations with me (paraphrasing):

Your mind is like a closet full of weasels. You need to get a specific weasel out and when you open the door they all come tumbling out in a wriggling, enthusiastic mess. Sure, you got that one weasel out, but all the others managed to escape as well.

And that’s how I smashed my thumb.

* – Seriously, nothing I went to college for applies to what I do professionally. I, at times, majored in computer engineering, vocal performance, astronomy, English, and (most recently) psychology. My career, however, is in Information Security and I’m almost entirely self-taught and reasonably successful.**

** – Kids, stay in school! I’m not exactly the norm for a college drop-out and things were decidedly dicey in my life before I got my big break.