Wednesday, December 5, 2007

the 7 meme

If I am tagged with a meme, it usually dies with me. I suck at following along. The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme? Yeah, my species died out. Sorry about that.

But Kermit tagged me, and then my school chum Michelle said "I've been reloading your blog to see if you answered it," and I felt guilty so here you go.

I also had a hard time trying to think of seven random things about myself because, if you've read my blog(s) for any length of time, you know I'm totally random all the time.

Here be the rules:
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Per usual, I will be breaking the rules. If you haven't done this meme yet, consider yourself tagged. And if you have done it, consider yourself tagged retroactively. What the hell.

Random things:

1) I am what my best pal calls "predictably unpredictable." That is to say, you can count on me to to have an unpredictable answer for everything. This is especially burdensome to her, as she is also my boss. However, we have also been friends for a bazillion years (14), so she has a warehouse of "unpredictable" answers she attempts to use as predictors. It doesn't work. All she knows is that if she thinks she knows what I'll say, I end up saying something else.

2) I love ethnic food, including all sorts of weird Pennsylvania Dutch/German-influence cabbagy things and what not. The type of food I'm least enamored with is Italian—which just happens to be the ethnicity I actually am, more than any other. You see, I do not like red sauce—not on pasta, not on pizza. I'll eat it, but in general I am not a fan of warm tomato products.

3) I can't open wine. Ok, that's not true. I can. I just have performance anxiety. Yes, that's right, I have performance anxiety regarding opening bottles of wine. You see, the first time I opened a bottle of wine, oh so many years ago, I screwed it up and busted the cork into a bunch of pieces. Whomever I was with at the time (I honestly don't remember) made a big deal about how I screwed it up and ha ha isn't it funny that the Italian person can't open wine, and blah blah blah. So I never opened wine after that. A few years ago, another person (of Italian ancestry as well, actually) handed me a bottle of wine and said "here, open this," and I totally freaked out (internally) because oh my god what if I fucked this up too and wouldn't I look dumb. I handed it back and said "no, I can't open wine," got a(n understandably) strange look, and that was that. To this day, when handed a bottle of wine by someone or in a group, I get stage fright and won't do it. In my house? I can totally open wine just fine. So yeah, of all the things about myself that I could/should worry about, I worry about opening wine in public. Believe me, I know it's beyond dumb.

4) For someone who works in technology (or did, whatever), I don't own a lot of it. I haven't even hooked up my DVD player since I've been in Washington. The stuff I do own is not cutting-edge or anything like that. When it comes to software, I don't use a lot of new and "exciting" things because I know I can either do whatever I have to do faster without it, or I could build something just for me that does the job better and faster, so why bother with the expense (either of time-to-learn or of money)? I guess what I'm saying is that for someone who works in technology and still writes books about certain things, I'm really pretty damn ambivalent about it. There are plenty of people who have way more "stuff" than I do, and I'm cool with that.

5) I make a good cookie. Yes, I just ate one as I typed that sentence...and I was thinking "damn, seven is a difficult number to reach".

6) Given how I look and interact with others, you would be surprised to know that I watch/have on in the background Little House on the Prairie and/or The Waltons at least twice daily. Then again, maybe you wouldn't be so surprised (see item #1, above).

7) When I was a kid, I lived in the woods. We had a nice yard, but randomly scattered throughout the yard were these huge rocks (ok, huge to a kid) that I played on. I named them. One was the Texas rock because it was shaped like Texas. One was the Montana rock because it was shaped like Montana (notice a trend?). And one was the Millennium Falcon rock because it looked like the Millennium Falcon had crashed outside my bedroom and was stuck in the dirt. Yeah.

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