Sam Merrin: Living the Good Life
Sam Merrin, a Santa Rosa public high school teacher, is a woman with a number of assorted interests and pastimes, from European travel to blogging, and she enjoys what little spare time she has apart from work, preparing classes, and correcting homework to exploring her passions and hobbies. As a teacher, she takes pleasure in using her interests to expand her horizons and educate herself in an array of subjects in which she would otherwise be ignorant.
Sam Merrin strongly believes her life would be unbearable without her leisure activities. She feels like she would turn into a lifeless, emotionless being doing the same routine tasks everyday with no expectation or hope of getting something more out of life. To Sam Merrin, hobbies and interests give meaning to her life, in the way color brings excitement and definition to a simple black and white sketch. Sam Merrin uses her recreational activities to help her keep a healthy balance between the busyness of life and her down time, and her interests and hobbies allow her to escape life’s monotonous routine and experience something new and pleasing that increases her knowledge base, awakens her curiosity, and nourishes her soul.
Sam Merrin’s Interests
Among her fondest interests, Sam Merrin lists travel, gymnastics, books, authors, films, and wine. She is particularly fond of European travel and has made numerous trips to the continent. On her last excursion, Sam Merrin returned to France and Belgium, as well as her beloved country: Luxembourg, a minuscule, land-locked sovereignty located in Western Europe that captivated her interest with its vastly diverse and rich culture on her very first visit. Since then, she has continued to be astounded that so much history could be concentrated in such a small area, and she spent the majority of her latest trip exploring every aspect of the grand duchy’s points of interests, where she satisfied her curiosity about the nation and soaked up its culture. She was also able to revisit Paris and Brussels on her vacation, as well as travel to Rome for the first time. She took a train from Paris to Italy expressly to visit the capital city, and she thoroughly enjoyed the European countryside on her way, as well as the plenteous time to catch up on her reading and post card writing. She also utilized the lengthy trip to practice her foreign language skills and meet fascinating European residents and tourists. As much as she loves Luxembourg, Italy was definitely a major highlight in her travels, and with any luck, she hopes to return to Europe again one day to visit new and exciting cities and countries, as well as to visit some of her familiar favorites.
In addition to travel, Sam Merrin is also vastly interested in sports, particularly Rhythmic Gymnastics. She fell in love with the physically demanding and highly focused team sport during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, before which she had never witnessed or even knew of the sport’s existence. Sam Merrin encountered it for the first time when she happened to turn the TV on one Saturday morning in late August. Aside from the obviously exquisite movements, elegant poise, and dazzling artistic expression of the gymnasts, Sam Merrin was riveted by the athletes’ unbelievable talent. She watched them twirl, twist, kick, flip, and pose, seeming to defy gravity and physical limitations, while catching, tossing, and utilizing a number of apparatuses, such as balls, hoops, ribbons, and clubs, to add interest, excitement, and difficulty to their routines. Unfortunately, she was only able to witness a few short routines on the day she discovered her favorite Olympic sport before the day’s competition ended, but as soon as the leader board flashed on the screen and the Olympic theme song was cued, Sam Merrin started searching for when the next competition would air. After some probing, she found the top competitors’ final performances and the medal ceremony were scheduled to air the next morning, and she set her VCR to record it.
Sam Merrin got up early Sunday morning to catch the first few moments of the gymnasts’ routines, but to her chagrin, another competition was going overtime. Thinking her newfound sport would be bypassed altogether in favor of the more popular one on the screen, she stopped the recording and went to have a quiet breakfast. While she was enjoying her coffee and the comic strips, she decided to check to see the progress of the tournaments, only to find her newly discovered sport had been edited to the highlights and thrust in a break between two inconsequential sports involving people chasing each other around on grass. She immediately restarted the recording and was able to catch the breathtaking performances of the Italians, Chinese, and Russians, her favorite’s being the Italians, who captured her vote with their awe-inspiring routines, consisting of a series of intricate, yet playful, leaps, balances, and turns that effectively demonstrated their masterful integration of the less strenuous theatrical dance movements with the highly demanding gymnastic qualities. In addition, they kept perfect track of the constantly moving apparatuses and moved in perfect synchronization with both their team mates and the music. Although Sam Merrin had missed the other contenders’ performances, she was certain the Italians would win until the Russians took the floor; however, after their performance, Sam Merrin was still convinced the Italians, with their brightly colored sequined costumes and highly energetic presentation, would win the day, and she was disappointed when they took Silver. Ever since then, Sam Merrin has been following gymnastics closely and is very much looking forward to the quickly approaching Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics. She is extremely excited about the prospect of resuming her deep passion for the sport and rooting for her favorite team.
When she is not traveling or keeping up with gymnastics championships, Sam Merrin enjoys burying her nose in a good book. She is particularly fond of the classics, and her book shelves are dotted with such familiar titles as “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott, “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, and “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, in addition to housing Jane Austen’s entire canon. Sam Merrin also adores biographies and memoirs, and she reads through several each year, particularly those on the lives of her favorite authors. She is also enamored with films, and while her eclectic film tastes may seem like a jumbled assortment at first glance, her taste in movies are actually rather logical and are in perfect harmony with many of her personal interests. Sam Merrin particularly enjoys watching films adapted from books, like Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, and Roger Michell’s Persuasion; in addition, she appreciates several film-adapted versions of the Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice novels. In keeping with her classical tastes, Sam Merrin is also extremely fond of vintage films like Top Hat, North by Northwest, Sabrina, La Belle et la Bête, All About Eve, and Rear Window, and during her most recent tour in Europe, Sam Merrin discovered the foreign film genre and has since fallen in love with the genus. When she was in Rome, she was exposed to the Italian directors Roberto Benigni, Federico Fellini, and Michaelangelo Antonioni, and she has spent a great deal of her spare time of late tracking down movies by these great directors and other directors of the same caliber.
While she was in Italy, Sam Merrin also came across a variety of Italian wines that were new to her, which reawakened her interest in wine. Having been raised in the California wine region, Sam Merrin was instilled with a deep appreciation for wine and the various wine regions of the world at a very young age. Her grandparents owned a winery for a short time during her childhood, and she spent many a summer following her grandfather around the vineyards. He taught her everything he knew about wine, and she grew up understanding and appreciating the great care, devotion, and labor that go into producing every bottle of wine. Sam Merrin even worked for a winery as PR Associate for a time before she became a teacher. Her close, personal connection to the vintage makes it a natural interest of hers, and her train ride through the French and Italian countryside reminded her of how deep her connection to the winemaking process runs. Once she returned to California, Sam Merrin began taking regular trips to the heart of the wine country again, and she has found new joy in wine tasting and dabbling in the various season’s wine festivities and events. Since she lives in Sonoma county, Sam Merrin finds it particularly easy to make day trips out to local wineries with her friends, and several weekends a month, you can find her wandering through the vineyards or sipping a cool glass of chardonnay or a full-bodied cabernet sauvignon on the veranda of some quaint wine country bistro.