Ten Weird Things About Me*

1. I refuse to walk on sidewalk grates, because I am convinced they will break and I will plummet to my death.

2. As a precautionary measure against breaking my right arm, possibly by falling through a sidewalk grate, I taught myself to write with my left hand. In case I ever found myself in a full body cast, I also tried to teach myself to write with my toes. That was not nearly as successful.

3. When I was a kid, I went to see an exhibit on Leonardo Da Vinci, and discovered that I, too, could write backwards. I am a regular renaissance woman. There I was, in a room full of parents and kids and mirrors and erasable whiteboards, and while everyone else furrowed their brows and struggled to make their pathetic little backwards letters one-at-a-time, I sat myself down and wrote fluidly and with an ease that would have surprised me, had it not been for the fact that I had spent many frustrating hours trying NOT to write backwards with my left hand.

4. I still have two of my baby teeth. The adult teeth never formed and so never pushed the baby teeth out. This is not much of a problem, since my adult teeth are comparatively small and my baby teeth were comparatively large.

5. I have caught not one, but two winged invaders. I will share my harrowing tales of bat capture in another post.

6. For my college essay, I wrote something about how I learned to say “hello” in twenty-seven languages. This is a lie. What I actually know how to say in twenty-seven languages is a synonym for “poop,” but one can’t exactly put that on one’s college application.
It’s not like I set out to learn this particular word. You know how if you casually mention that you have a couple of moose figurines, everybody starts giving you moose stuff, for years and years, whether you want it or not? Oh here, this is a “chocolate moose,” ha ha ha isn’t that funny? Right. Well, I was taking calculus at a local private school the summer before my senior year, because I am a big fat nerd, and the school had a huge ESOL program. Somehow somebody got wind that I knew how to say – ahem – “poop” in their language, and suddenly I had the entire foreign exchange student body offering me translations of this most useful word.

7. I once applied for a job in crayon. I was mad my boss was making me go through the long, tedious, formal hiring process in the midst of finals for a job that nobody else even wanted. I was already working thirty hours a week. I had better things to do than sit through interviews, pretending I wanted this job for anything other than the $.50 pay increase. So I wrote my resume in crayon as a series of stick-figure illustrations and captions that would demonstrate my superior qualifications. This was not my proudest moment, but we all do obnoxious things under extreme duress, and finals period did not bring out the best in me that year. Incidentally, I got the job.

8. I love making charts and to-do lists and planning stuff. I mean, I loooove it! It’s a great way to feel a sense of accomplishment without having done anything. I don’t ever follow my game plans, however, but that’s OK, because then I can make another one.

9. Thanks to my dad’s side of the family, I am fearless. The girl who is afraid of plummeting to her death through a sidewalk grate is fearless? Ha. No, I mean that I’m not afraid to try things and fail. Whenever I see anything that I like, for example, my first reaction is, “Huh…I wonder if I could make that?” My utter lack of preparedness is no concern to me. The more ambitious the project, the better.

10. When I graduated college, my plan was to buy a Winnebago and be a gypsy. I still think this is a better idea that suffering through my boring job. I can feel myself getting dumber by the day as my brain cells die off one by one in protest.

*I have been “tagged” to write ten random facts about myself. I’m also supposed to tag ten other people, but I know exactly four people with a blog, and they’ve all been tagged. So the blog stops here. I’m glad there are no voodoo curses involved for those of us who break the chain.