Sunday, July 8, 2007

The "Eight Random Things About Me" meme

Because it's Sunday and I'm bored. If you want to be tagged for this, consider yourself tagged.

1) When I was a kid, I wanted to be a veterinarian ... specializing in bugs. I hadn't really worked out that nobody wants to pay a veterinarian to treat bugs.

2) I discovered Shakespeare at the age of ten, when my father went on a business trip to England and came back with a book called Stories from Shakespeare. I was hooked, and started bullying my younger brother to act out scenes with me. He wouldn't do it unless he got to be Hamlet, and he generally insisted on rising from the dead at the end.

3) I was not a straight-A student. In fact, until I hit junior year of high school, I was so very very far from being a straight-A student that my mother despaired of me. I sometimes think grad school is a lot easier on the ego for people who are not used to being straight-A students.

4) I was a card-carrying Marxist for a while in college. I think I still have the card somewhere.

5) My great-grandmother lived to be 105, but since she's technically a step-great-grandmother, I don't get any of her genes.

6) I am a packrat. I can't stand to throw things away if there is a chance, however remote, that they might be useful someday. Moving is going to be traumatic.

7) I worked at a children's bookstore for a while after I moved here to start my MA. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was published that summer, so I read the whole thing under the counter, a week or so before the official release date. I kind of wish I still had that job right now.

8) I've never worn makeup, except once or twice at Halloween. Actually, I'm not sure how you apply makeup; I seem to have missed learning all those little girly skills most people pick up in adolescence.

6 comments:

Sisyphus said...

Huh, how do you get a Marxism card? I want one. I am a card-carrying ACLU member ... except I don't actually know where the card is. My friend has a card saying "liberal," to be, you know, a card-carrying Liberal. We were going to get him some wool and dye it, but the joke never seemed worth the effort.

I think life would be way more interesting if everybody wore makeup like it was Halloween every day, rather than all try to paint the same face on themselves, but nobody has taken me up on my idea yet.

Fretful Porpentine said...

You join whatever socialist organization is active at your college. (To judge by the last antiwar protest I went to, there are still at least half a dozen of them around selling slightly different versions of utopia -- I'm not sure they all give out membership cards, but at least some of them do.)

I didn't last very long as a socialist, partly because we were supposed to sell copies of the Socialist Worker in parking lots and I was too shy to do anything of the sort, but mostly because I had way too many questions about utopia -- but I did stick around long enough to give $10 to the Steelworker's Strike Relief Fund, and accordingly received the steelworkers' union newsletter for the rest of my undergraduate career, addressed to Mr. Norm Porpentine. My first name, let it suffice to say, is not Norm.

Anonymous said...

Did I mention my tip for packrats? Take a picture of the things you don't know why you are keeping. It has worked for me (with clothes, anyhow), and I also have to move this summer.

Bardiac said...

I love your number 8!

I always looked like a clown, anyways, when I tried as a teen. I don't know how folks who wear make-up well do it. I'm missing some other skills most women in the US consider important, too. Oh well!

Fretful Porpentine said...

Dance -- Ooh, interesting idea! Of course, since a lot of these things are papers, I might need microfilm...

Bardiac -- Nice to know I'm not the only one!

Anonymous said...

Try a scanner with an automatic feeder? I've still got three boxes of papers that I moved across country three years ago. I refuse to move them again.

I did just have to get a larger harddrive, but that's okay.