My name is Andrew de Geofroy and I am a 24-year-old journalism, modern European studies and English student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I grew up on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and have lived in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, NM and Aix-en-Provence in southern France. I have a twin brother, Alex, who is an engineering grad student at UMass and who wishes he was as cool as I am, but we don’t always get what we want out of life. I have an older brother, Maury, who works a day job to support his artistic habits and hosts a show called “Monkey on the Lam” on the Vineyard radio station WVVY.
I recently got married, proving that many of my ex-girlfriends were wrong about me and that someone actually can love me.
I was the co-editor, along with my twin brother, of my high school’s newspaper, The High School View, which was published in the Martha’s Vineyard Times. I’ve written a bunch of fluff for the Vineyard Gazette as an intern and freelancer, and wrote a sports article for the Boston Globe, for which I was never paid. I have sold shoes, been a production assistant on an Academy Award-winning Paramount Pictures movie (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events), driven and dispatched buses, been a garbage man and most recently, been a taxi driver. I am currently driving buses for UMass Transit for half of what I used to make on the Vineyard. In otherwords, I am unfulfilled and wondering what else is out there.
This is a fresh start of my first blog, which was primarily for a class on online journalism. The name Riverhed comes from a song by the band Prick. I was playing video games with my brothers many years ago and the whole song name (“Riverhead”) didn’t fit, so I dropped the a and it stuck. However, the blog is called “no strings attached.” Here’s an old post I wrote elsewhere on why I chose this name:
Given the multiple uses of the phrase “no strings attached,” I thought I would clarify why I used it as my blog title. No, it doesn’t mean you can hook up with me and I won’t call you three days later to say I think I might be pregnant, or ask to meet your parents. I probably won’t anyway, though, so don’t worry.
As far as my usage of the phrase goes, it’s more in the “nothing holding me back” sense; having recently gotten married and gone back to finish college, with little money and no solid job prospects, you might think that I have a lot of strings holding me down, but it’s quite the opposite.
Getting married was a surprisingly liberating thing. It has distanced me in many good ways from my family and lessened my responsibilities in caring for them to the degree I have before. My wife, who is from Bulgaria, has nothing tying her down to any particular place, aside from me, and she is supportive of any crazy idea I can come up with for where I want to live and work.
I have to finish this last semester of school and then I can literally go just about anywhere in the world and try to make the kind of life I want. This, for me, is ultimate freedom, with no strings attached, for the first time in my life, and it feels pretty friggin’ good.
I also stared at my computer, with a blank screen and equally blank head, for about twenty minutes and this is the first thing that popped in, so what the hell.
So, I hope that answers your questions. If not, I can be reached at drew@riverhed.com.
