meme: 10 weird things about me

For as long as I've been online, doing the web thing, the email thing, the chat thing, and now the blog thing, I haven't done much of the community thing. One of the community things I haven't done much of is follow a meme. But I've been tapped to follow a meme by my sweetest one, so herewith is my attempt to follow through and provide...

10 Weird Things About Me.

The rules are deceptively simple: "Each player of this game starts off with ten weird things or habits or little known facts about yourself. People who get tagged must write in a blog of their own ten weird things or habits or little known facts as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you must choose six people to be tagged and list their names. No tagbacks!"

Caveat #1: As I begin, I'm not sure there even are 10 weird things about me, despite my loveliest's assurance that there are.

Caveat #2: These are not in order of weirdness. Not all of them seem weird to me.

1. I have to eat. I absolutely must eat three meals a day, just about exactly according to the ol' food pyramid (though consuming far less animal protein), or else I feel like complete and total crap.

2. I have lived for 8 or more years in 4 states (Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and California).

3. I played ice hockey for a couple years (sadly only a couple) in Ohio when I was a kid. I played goalie. And I was a holy goddamn terror, though I played for the worst team imaginable (we won 1 game, the first game). I usually saw 30+ shots a game, and usually allowed 4 or 5 goals a game, which gave me the highest goals-against and the highest save percentage in that league. I slashed more ankles than God can count.

4. I own several vintage manual typewriters dating from the 1920s to the 1960s. I love 'em. I wrote a few hundred pages of notes on my dissertation on two of them (and my dissertation was under 200 pages).

5. I floss. You should too, but you don't.

6. From what I've gathered, I was the youngest person ever to complete the requirements for a Ph.D. degree at Duquesne University. I get this second hand. My grad school pal Paul Swift told me that when he filed to complete his Ph.D., the folks in the graduate school told him he was the youngest ever to complete the degree. He finished his the same spring I finished mine, but he was older than me. Q.E.D. Being the youngest, and having a buck and a quarter in your pocket, would get you a bus ride in Pittsburgh.

7. I dream in color, in stereo, lucidly, with taste and smell, and in pure abstract concepts. That last one is what really throws people, perhaps because I can't explain what it's like. Once, when I was reading a hell of a lot of (German philosopher G.W.F.) Hegel for a period of a few days, I dreamed what seemed to be my understanding of the way Hegel makes concepts fit, work, and fight together. It was amazing. I woke up, tried to get some of it down, went back to bed, and in the morning, my notes made (you're expecting this) absolutely no sense whatsoever.

8. I'm terrified of thunder and lightning. More than anything else except vicious homicidal gangsters and my ex-wife, I am stone-cold afraid of thunderstorms. The only thing to do is curl in the fetal position, preferably under the bed, while covered with blankets and cuddling our stuffed bunny or the cat. My fear of thunder and lightning is, as far as I can tell, my only true phobia.

9. My oldest friend, Bob, has been my friend for 32 years. We spent lots of our childhood together in Maumee, Ohio, making ridiculous tape recordings of TV and radio parodies under the auspices of radio station WDUM. Bob was the host of "This Stupid Program," which was (he would say, as the only content to the show) 32 and one-half seconds, even though in fact it only lasted about 12. I wrote ads for products from a conglomerate called Krazy Kooks Inkorporated, which sold flavored puke, manuals on such topics as how to read, and basically anything else that came to mind.

10. Unsightly stains!

The rule is, I have to tag 6 people. There's no rule that they have to participate, but I think if they don't, that means I lose. I'm not sure. Back in the day, memes didn't have rules, you were just in the grocery store and somebody said "where's the beef?!" Newfangled contraptions!

Tag:
Bobo, the Wandering Pallbearer
This Girl I Used To Know
Lancelot
You Gotta Be Kidding You
Bob, whose blog really puts this in perspective
Lascivious Polyphony, aka KOM, because KOM seems to need the boost.