#WeAreArity Wednesday: Chad Kaufman

You can only eat one food again for the rest of your life. What is it?

That’s tacos, or Mexican food in general. When I was a kid, I would help my mom make tacos. It’s one of the things I’m pretty good at cooking, so I make it pretty often. Anything can be a taco. If you have tortillas and some other stuff, you can probably make a taco out of it.

What is your favorite movie genre to watch?

I watch a lot of Marvel. I like fun movies. I’m not into the super dramatic, “I need to feel something in my soul” type of movie. That’s not really for me. If it won an Academy Award, I’m probably not interested unless it’s for Best Cinematography. I honestly don’t want to think a lot when I’m watching a movie. I just want to enjoy it and have fun.

What is something interesting we would not know about you just by looking?

I’m an ordained minister. I got ordained in ‘08 or ’07. I was bored at the time, and somebody was talking about getting ordained. I was like, “I bet it’s not that hard.” And it really isn’t. You just go on a website and put your name in. So, I got ordained – just randomly. Why not?

And then I was talking to my mom. My stepdad’s brother was getting remarried, and I had sort of been joking about it a few weeks before that, so my mom was like, “Well, if you wanted to do the wedding, I’m sure they’d go for that. It would be like your gift to them.”

So, I did that one for my step uncle, and then my friend from college, my former coworker, and my stepsister.

What is the best dessert?

Cheesecake. My wife makes it for me. I don’t like it with a lot of stuff on it. Some raspberry-type stuff is good, but I don’t like a lot of chocolate. My wife makes fun of me. She’s like, “You’re so boring about this.” But she makes me one every year for my birthday, which is really cool.

What was your first job?

I’m pretty sure it was detasseling. Plants have their own reproductive system sort of built in. So, there’s the part that needs to be fertilized, and that’s how the seeds get made. The corn itself is the seed that we eat.

But at the top — if you’ve ever driven past a field of corn — there’s the big, golden tassel thing and that’s the pollinator. Anyways, what you do is walk through the field, and you take those off the corn. And what that would do is create a situation where the corn gets cross pollinated from corn that was planted nearby instead of from itself. The corn would normally be able to pollinate itself, but you remove half of the genetic material so that genetic material from other corn comes in and pollinates it.

They would basically pay troops of teens. People would come back summer after summer and do it, and they would be given more responsibility. Sometimes, you’d walk through the field if the corn was short enough, and other times they’d have a tractor with a bunch of buckets on it that would go through each of the rows. And they would basically just lift you up so that you could easily reach to the top.

I don’t think I would do that job again if I didn’t have to. Because in the morning, there would be so much dew on the corn that you basically would want to wear full rain gear to keep from being soaked. And then, of course, this is in the summer. By the end of the day in July, once the sun is up, you’re melting.

But I got a decent amount of money, and I was able to save it. I think I used some of that money to buy my first car.

How did you find out about this job?

They advertised in schools.

If you had to move to another country, which would you choose?

I feel like Scandinavia would be cool. I’ve never been there though.

I’ve been to Canada, and I would also move there probably. I live in Minnesota, so I’m already pretty much about as close as you get to Canada.

But a lot of stuff in Scandinavia seems pretty cool, for similar reasons, I suppose.

What do you do in your free time to help you relax?

Almost anything that involves going outside. It can take on various forms depending on the time of the year and circumstances, but just in general, not being in front of the screen is important.

There’s life outside of the Zoom box. For work-life boundaries, I’m also very much a stickler for turning my laptop off at the end of my day and that’s it.