seven quite random facts about me

A meme that Dance tagged me for. If you want to be tagged, too, consider yourself tagged. (At this point, I think everyone has probably done it.)

1) I really, really wanted to be Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall when I was nine or ten. I'm not sure how I ended up in a sedentary profession without great apes. Nowadays I just go to the zoo a lot, although I do want to go to Africa and see some mountain gorillas in the wild someday, assuming there are still mountain gorillas left in the wild by the time I can afford it, which may, sadly, not turn out to be the case.

2) My brother has the same birthday as Harry Potter (month, day, and year) and Juliet Capulet (month and day). I find both of these facts far more interesting than he does.

3) I would much rather travel alone than with somebody else, because (among other things), if you take the wrong bus when you're alone you can sit back and enjoy the ride, rather than worrying about spoiling somebody else's day by getting them lost.

4) The oldest of my second cousins on my father's side (of the same generation as me, none of this "removed" business) was born in the 1940s. The (probable) youngest will be born in 2008.

5) The closest I ever came to the corporate world was a one-semester stint as business manager of our student-run coffeehouse when I was a sophomore in college. Both I and the coffeehouse survived, but I consider this something of a miracle, and have not been tempted to repeat the experiment.

6) I find many of the villains in Renaissance drama oddly sexy. Richard III, Edmund, Bosola, Angelo. Yow.

7) When I was a kid, my father traveled a lot on business, and he was something of a dabbler in languages -- the sort of person who would check out a bunch of teach-yourself-Hebrew tapes at the first hint that he might be going to Israel, and so on. I have inherited this tendency, but I usually end up trying to learn the language after I've visited the place, which doesn't work as well.