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LA: What made you decide to get married right out of high school?

NI: My parents didn’t save up money for me to go to college, and I always wanted to. When you’re married and both going to school, you get a lot of financial aid. We were going to get married anyway, but it was just convenient for us to get married then. His parents wouldn’t pay for his college tuition either, so it was like ‘okay!’

LA: How did your parents react when you told them you were getting married?

NI: My parents didn’t know that we were married until six months after it happened. We were both a bit angry with our parents at the time. We had been dating for a long time and we were living together, so they weren’t really surprised. They just wished I had told them.
LA: I’ll bet! I hear you have quite an interesting job. Tell me about it.

NI: I started school-bus driving around the same time I started school at Hamline. I drive for Anoka-Hennepin, which is a huge school district. I usually get up around 4:30 a.m., because I have to get on my bus at about 6:25 a.m. But I love doing it. I want to be a teacher, so it’s better than working at a place that’s not going to give me any experience.

LA: What do you want to teach?

NI: I’m intending on teaching English at the high-school level. I didn’t always want to teach English, actually. I’d like to teach something like art; however, it’s very difficult to get a job in a department like that because of all the funding issues. And English is important, so why not?

LA: So your last name is Infinity. Is there a story behind that?

NI: Yeah, actually, there is. When my husband and I got married, we decided to change our last names to be the same. I wouldn’t take his because I didn’t believe in taking a man’s last name for no reason. Plus, he didn’t really like it all that much. His last name was Wood-McFeters and mine was Oltmanns. We didn’t want to hyphen our last names, and they let you change it to whatever you want on your marriage certificate, so we were just like ‘okay!’

LA: Why “Infinity”?

NI: We thought of some other words, but you want it to still sound like a last name, and you want people to be able to spell it. We were thinking foreign-language names, but it just wasn’t practical.

LA: Do you enjoy married life?

NI: Oh yeah, definitely. There’s a lot of security. I don’t know how people work through relationships and get through college at the same time. Oh, dating? God. My husband and I have a lot of fun together. We’re best friends, so we just do everything together and try to have as much fun as possible around our school work.

LA: What kinds of things do you do in your free time?

NI: I’m really interested in music and art, and so is my husband. I want to use music in my classroom when I have one. It sounds silly, but I don’t have one specific thing that I listen do. If it’s good, then it’s good. I really like Pink Floyd, Incubus, 311, definitely, but I even like Outkast. I like a lot of their music. You know, Dave Matthews, Cake. My husband makes me CDs every once in a while, and he’ll use the same songs that I’d put on there. We’re pretty silly. We just kind of hang out, watch cartoons, and play Legos when we have free time. Our lives are way too serious, so we try to lighten up a little bit.

LA: What are your favorite movies?

NI: My favorite movies are pretty serious. Pi and Requiem for a Dream are a couple of my favorites, but my husband and I also watch a lot of movies like Shrek, Tommy Boy, and Monsters Inc. We watch a lot of cartoons, too. We watch Jimmy Neutron, and we watch this new show on Nickelodeon called Avatar, which everyone should check out. It’s kind of like anime, but it’s not. It has this whole earth, fire, water thing going on. It’s sort of Buddhist and very multicultural. It’s pretty deep, as far as cartoons go.

Editor’s note:
“Lost in the Crowd” is a Q&A column highlighting one Hamline student each week.