dannydmc

Since the responses were so good for the last one, I submit for your approvel

further excerts from "America's Little Giant"

...

The Dan McCollum who left college in December of 2004 was a vastly different man than that who entered it in 2000. For years McCollum had held out hope that college would liberate him from the chains of small town life. A poem written during his Senior year of High School reveals a child who felt "the walls closing in on me from all sides, with only one escape; up". His journal writings from the time continually lament his perceived inability to change or reinvent himself amongst people who had known him since he was five years old. He constantly wrote of wishing to be free from the chains of small town life, and to "soar".
However, like many country children who first go to college, his first impressions of college were not exaultation, but rather fear. Suddenly cast adrift on his own, and unsure of himself in so many ways, he at first floundered in the seas of college life. Although it is apparent that his first two nights in college were spent partying, marking the first time he had ever become drunk as well as the first time he came close to bedding a girl, he soon fell back upon his own high school habits; he began to rely far to much upon the internet for his social life, withdrew from dorm life, and except for meeting Crystal Crowder a life long friend, his writings show his first year to have been a desperately lonely time.
This was not to last. Its impossible when exactly the change occured; partially because McCollum would tell two different stories in later years to explain, and also because the seeds of the change might well have been planted years earlier while still in High School. The first story was that McCollum was playing an on-line role playing game and was complaining about his lack of a social life when he suddenly realised that he was sitting on a compluter rather than meeting people. The second story, in his own words was that one day he was "looking in a mirror at myself, when I suddenly realised that I couldn't go on living this way". Either way, McCollum was soon to enter into a period of personal reinvention which lasted, off and on, throughout the rest of his life.
The first thing he apparently did was begin to work out in his room and began to diet, trying to hold himself to 1000 calories a day. This, in his own mind, was most likely one of the biggest steps he could have taken. Heaviness ran in the McCollum branch of the family, and from 5th grade onwards Dan had proceeded to gain weight. He often blamed many of his problems on the size of his waist line, claiming that people didn't want to be near him due to it. Although his weight would be a constant source of worry throughout the rest of his life, by Christmas he was able to happily announce that people back home were complimenting him on his loss of weight.
The second step was by far the more difficult. Although McCollum had been a precocious child in his youth and not given to shyness, many family stories revolve around him walking up to strangers in stores or on the street and talking to them for half an hour, from the time of Middle School onwards he had become convinced he was an introvert and had become quiet shy. Much of this appears to have been a reaction to the relative dissaproval he faced, or at least felt he faced, from his own peers. Now in college, he became determined to change it at all costs. On Christmas Eve of the year 2000 he logged off of his on-lone role playing games for what proved to be the last time. Upon returning to college he forced himself to take part in many of the dorm activities, and slowly came to feel much more welcome and comfortable in crowds.
The third major change did not occur the summer following his Freshman year. After gaining a job at the local newspaper in the printing ring, he devoted himself to the job and came to genuinely enjoy it, despite the long hours and tediousness of it. This stands in sharp contrast to his previous jobs where he himself viewed himself as rather lazy and disinterested. It was also during this summer that he gained his first girlfriend, a girl by the name of Sarah who he dated for three months; it would sadly remain his only relationship for several years.
Dan liked to say that the first thing his Mother said to him after he returned home from college for the first summer was "What the hell have you done with my son?" He himself took a slightly more poetic stance when he claimed that so much trash had built up on his personality since Middle School that he was simply engaged in the hard work of scrubbing it clean and returning it to an uncorroded state.
This was true in many ways, but it should not be taken to show that he had left all bad traits behind him; because even as a young child he had never been fault free. In fact, many of the tendencies he had shown as a young boy began to re-emerge; he became boysterious, loud, often unpredictable. One sin which he had also chastised himself for many times over the years had also down gone away; McCollum still showed a deep yearning to belong and be accepted by his peers. His struggles against this personal demon, the feeling of not being accepted, would continue to plague him for years; even into young adulthood he would often appear shocked and bewildered when he realised that people liked him.
This may have lead him to one of the stranger aspects of his personal revival; the emergence of the persona he would sometimes call "The Crusty old Irishman" or, sometimes, "The Beathick". It was around this same time that he began to truly exault in heritage as a country boy, and to loudly proclaim it in his speach, dress, and music. McCollum began to wear flannel, baseball caps, listen to nothing but country music; all of which ran counter to the image of the typical college student. He used to love how ill at ease it made people who were never able to judge him correctly; it went so far that he would often claim later in life that it played to someone to dress "like a hick" because people always had a low opinion of you, and so when ever you said something smart, it threw them off.
This all ran strongly counter to his desire to be accepted, an irony which was not lost on McCollum. However, it seems that there were several forces at work in the sudden image change. One was a strong streak of indivualism and a desire to stand out in a crowd, another was his deep pride in his own heritage and where he came from, and finally it seems likely that he was trying to recreate the past in some form. Where as he had often felt like an outsider growing up, by dressing and talking as he did it became possible to convince himself that he was now a true Wisconsinite, a man tied to the land, and not a pretensious young man still searching for his identity.
Perhaps another factor was his desire to put his past behind him in a constructive manner. Where as before he had viewed himself, and been seen, as a 'geek'; he now sought to become the exact opposite. He there tried to take on many of the habits and mannerisms which he saw a truly manly and strong; earthiness, hatred of weakness, plain spokenness, and an utter repugness for pretensiousness. Interestingly enough, pretensious and weak are two terms that he would often use to describe himself during those formative High School years.
By the end of his second year, Dan had become such a different creature from the one he had once been, that many former classmates no longer recognized him on the rare occasions he met them. He had also developed several friendships which would last for years; although he often berated himself in his journals for his own lack of social skills. However, these were all cosmetic changes when one consideres what the very fundemental shifts that would occure during the next year when he embarked upon a semester abroad to Ireland; a time which he would later describe as one of the happiest in his life.