I've been tagged a couple of times in Facebook to write 25 random things about myself. The idea is that you write the 25 things, then you tag 25 other people to do the same thing, until the entire pyramid scheme collapses and the federal government bails you out. And so while I've been tempted to just post 25 links to entries in my blog (e.g., "Good old Post ID 518! Oh, how I miss that one."), I guess that would be recycling, and that would be bad for the economy. So here goes... click through to find my list.
- I like to consider myself well-informed and able to discuss any topic in excruciating depth. But I don't know any baseball trivia, and I don't keep up with "General Hospital", so don't ask me about those things.
- Actually, I do know a little about General Hospital because my sister was addicted to it back in the 80s, when Luke rescued Laura from Mikkos on the frozen planet Hoth, and discovered that he was a Jedi after all... or something like that. I don't remember very well because I did a lot of LSD during that time.
- There are four people who, I suspect, harbor secret attractions to me. One of them is a dude.
- I almost used "whom" instead of "who" in that last item... so embarrassing!
- I find it odd that "embarrass", spelled with two Rs, has a flat A in the second syllable, whereas "harass", spelled with one R, has a schwa in the corresponding position... unless you're the type of person who pronounces "harass" as HAIRus instead of huRASS, and then I'd want to punch you in the head. But in the end, both words contain "ass", so can't we all just be friends?
- I usually sleep on my back. But before I can get to sleep, I have to lie on my stomach for a while, because my ass is hot. And while I'm doing that, I sometimes think of the song "Le Jazz Hot" from Victor/Victoria, but of course I change the words around.
- All euphemisms and slang terms for male genitalia make me uncomfortable, except for "wang", because that was the name of a computer company. By contrast, I'm perfectly fine with anything that means "boobs", especially "fun bags".
- I used to be extremely proud of the fact that I "discovered" Jewel before Jewel made it big... but now when I tell people that, they say, "Who's Jewel?"
- Speaking of jewels, whenever I hear someone mispronounce "jewelry" and "JOOLery", it makes my ears bleed. And when someone further goes on to spell it as "jewellery" to fit their mispronunciation, somewhere in the world, a nun kills a puppy.
- I'm pleased with the fact that I've managed to work the terms "ass", "wang", and "fun bags" into this list, but I'm disappointed that my discussion of jewelry did not somehow involve the term "family jewels". Until NOW, that is!
- The median individual income in the United States is about $33,000 a year, or just over $15 an hour. If it takes one hour to complete this meme, and it's propagated according to the directions (to 25 new people), then by the time the meme is propagated nine times past the originator, it will have cost us $57.2 trillion in lost productivity, or approximately four times the U.S. annual GDP. Of course, by then, the meme would have hit every man, woman, and child in the country 12,500 times, so perhaps that's not so realistic. This item is a random fact about me because I'm the type of person who bothers to compute these sorts of things.
- Along those lines, one of Amy's favorite expressions for a large number is "the speed of light times pi", and the first time she said it, I started trying to calculate it in my head ("roughly, 940 million meters per second"). This type of thing hasn't worked on women before, but Amy swooned, and this is why I married her. (Among other reasons.)
- My rules on tipping: if you're a waitperson and you wink at me once during the course of a meal, your tip goes up to 25%. But if you wink at me twice, then your tip goes down to 15%. Once is flirty, twice is creepy, regardless of whether you're male or female. (Note: these percentages do not reflect the eleven other variables that factor into my tip calculations.)
- I was an A student all through school. I can remember the two times in high school when I got a "C" on anything. One was a pop quiz in English; there were four questions about something we had just read, just trivial details that the teacher picked out to see if we had really done the reading. I missed one question; that turned into a "C" for the quiz, and that dropped my semester grade from an A to an A-, despite acing every other test in the class. I didn't speak to my teacher for a month, I was so angry. The other was a paper in Art History class, but the grading seemed so subjective and random that I didn't really know how to react except to have fantasies about burning down the school.
- It's taken me over two hours to reach this point, and now I'm considering re-doing the lost-productivity item above. (How long did everyone else spend on this thing? Did anyone else feel pressure to make this interesting?)
- I was in some sort of training thing at work when I was 23, and we all had to go around the room to introduce ourselves. The directive was, "Tell us who you are, and what you like to do." Most people talked about how they liked spending time with their families. My answer was, "I like drinking and playing cards." Nobody seemed to find that amusing. In retrospect, I should have said "hookers and cocaine", which would also have been my answer if Regis Philbin asked me "what are you going to do if you win the million dollars" on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire".
- I love sushi (big surprise) but even I have trouble with baby octopus. Actually, I could probably generalize that into "I'm not fond of eating Head."
- This one occurred to me while watching "Hell's Kitchen" this week: I'd love to have my own reality television show for software engineers, where I could berate them for writing bad code. ("You're explicitly instantiating this [bleep]-ing template but you didn't turn on the -fno-implicit-templates option! You're a [bleep]-ing DONKEY!") However, I'd settle for just having this idea show up as a background joke in one of Javi's scripts.
- I don't really have many brushes with fame or famous people. Once when I was a kid, I got within ten feet of Skip Stephenson, and if you know who that is, then you must be old like me. Years ago I got an autograph from Ellen Degeneres after a stand-up show she did. I may have seen Al Roker at LaGuardia airport. That's about it, I think.
- I hate driving. Actually, I just hate other drivers. Except for "you", of course; "you" are, um, a very good driver.
- I had intended to make this list all sarcastic and cynical, but I'm starting to realize that I don't want to give the impression that that's all I am. I actually have a pretty sunny and hopeful view of the world, especially now that Bush is out of office.
- I have both male and female friends, but my friendships with women tend to be more intimate and personal, while my friendships with men tend to be activity-oriented. I wouldn't mind having a friendship like the James Spader/William Shatner relationship on "Boston Legal", but I think many men have a hard time getting past the machismo/homophobia barrier.
- I looked for the oldest files on my hard drive that I could find, and one of them was a shopping list. The items I felt I needed to buy in 1993 were: a recliner; a 50" Home Theater System; a coffee table; an end table; rugs; art; drums; speakers. Such was the life of a single guy.
- For the penultimate item on this list, I tried to come up with something in my life I regretted. To be sure, there have been lots of questionable hair and fashion choices in my past; there were girls I should have asked out, but I never got up the nerve; there were friendships I should have worked harder to maintain. But it's hard to have regrets when I love the way my life turned out, you know?
- Post ID 62! Good times... good times.
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