All right, all right! I’ll do the damn meme, Facebook. Yeesh. Pushy bastard.
25 Random Things About Me:
1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as
garnet, swelter, and
bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.
2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said
Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.
3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No,
really.
4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)
5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”
6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.
7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.
8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.
9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can
still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “
Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “
Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.
10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)
11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.
12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course
those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.
13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.
14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.
15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.
16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
17. I’ve had malaria.
18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.
19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”
20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.
21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.
22. I collect mermaids.
23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.
24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.
25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.
Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!
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