Thursday, December 13, 2007

Sans witty tagline.

Right. So I got tagged some time ago. I could try to come up with excuses for avoiding it for over a month, but instead I'll just jump right into it.
  1. I have animal magnetism. Not the good kind. The good kind is when you inexplicably attract the romantic attention of others. What I have is actual animal magnetism. I have had close encounters/run-ins/altercations with many wild animals, including, but not limited to: an entire colony of fire ants, a giant horsefly (on my birthday), a goat (alright, he was a little less wild than the rest), a rattlesnake, various skunks, and schools of jellyfish. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but you get the picture. Interestingly enough, I have never been stung by a bee. I thought every child is supposed to get stung at some point.

  2. Every child is also supposed to break a bone at some point. I have an experience with that, but I tend to discount it. (When I was one year old, my mother mildly spanked my diaper for doing something I wasn't supposed to do. The force made me stumble head-first into the corner of the wall, which had one of those metal strips to prevent it from getting damaged. The collision cracked my skull. I still have a faint scar on my forehead.) I never broke a bone during my childhood, if you discount my infant story. But misfortune caught up with me in high school. My first broken bone was my radius, damaged while snowboarding.

  3. Do any of you out there ever have a muscle twitch? You know, one of your muscles, say, your thigh, ever so mildly spasms every several seconds for a couple minutes? Then it's all over? It's happened occasionally for me, but usually in my appendages. Well, for about the past week, my left eyelid has been doing that, but more frequently and persistently. It's really bugging me. ("You people make my [eyes] twitch.") Don't worry, I'm not psychotic. That's what the voices tell me, at least.

  4. In elementary school, there were the "cool" kids (quotation marks absolutely necessary) and everyone else. I was in the latter group. (Somehow, everybody says that. Does no one really want to admit that they were cool in elementary school?) Well, I knew I was fairly smart, but I was always intimidated by some of the "cool" kids who were also smart. They talked themselves up (and put others down), and I believed them. It wasn't until sometime in the last couple years of elementary school that I won the school-wide mathematics competition that I stopped believing.

  5. (This is going to sound like I'm continuing a story, but really I'm getting around to another fact about me.) From then on, I had what must have been an obvious disdain for the "cool" kids. For the rest of my public education, they continued with renewed and targetted efforts to make sure everyone knew I, in particular, really wasn't all that smart. When I graduated at the top of the class, they reassured me that if I had been in any other graduating class at that school, I would have been several positions lower. (I guess they just didn't want to say it the other way -- that they were all a little less smart than other classes.) Yet, they still wanted to sit by me during tests, and they all asked for my input on difficult assignments, or even to "compare answers." I began to expand my disdain, little be little, until it included just about everybody. Yes, I hate people in general. I hate crowds, I hate pop culture.

  6. Last week I had my first experience of driving the capital beltway during rush hour. It wasn't as bad as I'd expected, but I was expecting something apocalyptic. It's hard to live down to expectations that low. Granted, it's not something I'd want to do every day, let alone twice daily, but still.... I'd asked my manager about it. I told him I wanted to get from 95 in Maryland (I don't know where this "Murraland" stuff is coming from -- I've yet to hear it) to just past the 66 west exit. I said I'd like to be there in less than two and a half hours after work, and he let out one of those dubious grunts -- not quite a chuckle, but neither a full-on scoff. And how long did it take me? About 90 minutes. I sometimes wonder if people just really enjoy talking about how bad it is, like some sort of adolescent pissing contest. As if magnifying their own suffering somehow makes them superior? I don't understand people. (See #5.)

  7. Moving ever more towards the trivial, in an attempt just to finish this post and be done with it after having a draft for over a week.... At work, my keyboard's shift keys are terrible. It frustrates me to no end. Keyboards are made to operate with x number of pounds of pressure. You can feel that initial resistance, then, and you provide just enough pressure, it gives in and the keystroke is registered. But not so with these two keys on my keyboard! I can keep the key fully depressed, but if I'm not exerting extra pressure, or not pressing at the right angle, it doesn't recognize my efforts. Let's just say I've become acquainted with the backspace key. And that my pinky fingers are getting quite a workout. I imagine now that this is the reason that I come home at night with aching hands.

Well, this is supposed to be the spot where I "tag" others. Except all of my friends with blogs have already done it. So, once again, I stop a trend.

No comments: