25 Things About ME. (It's ALL about me.)

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

I'm sure you've all seen this, but I've been tagged, and I have seriously had SO MUCH FUN reading all of my friends' lists that I don't even feel guilty about the chain-letter quality of this.

1. I can do the splits.

2. I can cross one eye at a time, and pretty much move them independently.

3. I have a more-than-five-octave range, and can sing those Mariah Carey notes.

4. I have discovered that there is no practical application for 1, 2, or 3.

5. I have a fear of oven mitts.

6. I have a habit of turning every song into one about my dog (or the ferrets or rabbits or boyfriend, depending on who's closest at the time) and serenading the subject of the song. The current rotation includes "I Have a Pooch," (to the tune of "I Have a Dream" by Abba) and "Who's that pooch, running around with me."

7. My boyfriend does not find #6 to be the least bit charming and/or endearing. He has been known to threaten me after the 17th rendition of "Hey there, Mr. Bee" (To the tune of "Hey there, Mr. Blue," and sung every summer to the bumblebees in the garden.)

8. I deal with pain by growing things. When someone you love is terminally ill, you do everything you can and then some, and nothing makes a darned bit of difference. At times like that, there is something strangely comforting about nurturing a plant and watching it thrive. Plus, you can generally eat plants after you've nurtured them, which is generally frowned upon when it comes to family members.

9. I once fell on top of a blind man on a moving bus. He never saw it coming.

10. Every so often, I mix up my facts in the most horrifying way imaginable. Example, and true story: I used to work as a genetic researcher. One day in the lab, I was talking to a physiologist about Parkinson's Disease. I said, "My uncle died from Parkinson's Disease." The physiologist said, "That's not possible--it's not deadly," and, without skipping a beat, I said, "Oh, yeah, that's right, he was murdered." There's just no backing away from that.

11. My uncle, who had Parkinson's Disease, was murdered in a hotel room in Los Angeles.

12. As it turns out, once you have said something really weird, and you are convinced that the person to whom you were speaking thinks you are deliberately lying as opposed to just having a brain lapse, no amount of talking is going to fix it, so you may as well just shut up.

13. I have never learned to just shut up.

14. When I first moved to Oakland/San Francisco, I was "a girl from a small town" and everything terrified me because I didn't know how to do it. Like toll bridges, and the subway. I thought, "How do these work? Do you have to buy a ticket somewhere first? Do you have to have exact change? What happens if you get to the toll place and you're supposed to have a ticket or something? Will people point and laugh? Will I be stuck on a bridge and unable to back up?"

Then, after working up my courage to go to the subway, a mentally challenged man walked in front of me to get a ticket from the machine, and it hit me. "Retarded people do this every day."

That's sort of become my mantra, now, every time I've been afraid to do something because I've never done it before, or don't know how it works. It's changed a bit, and become, "Stupid people do this every day." Try it sometime. Buying a house for the first time? Stupid people do it every day.

15. The stuff that really requires brains doesn't scare me at all. Figure out how to repair a nuclear reactor armed only with a few nuclear physics books and a spatula? No problem. Rent a carpet cleaner? Sheer terror.

16. My dad was my hero.

17. I judge people based on how they treat my brother, or people like him.

18. Possibly the best piece of advice I ever received was given to me by my sister, and she probably doesn't even remember it. It was when I was recovering from anorexia, and I said to her, "You know, I sometimes think about things like...oh, I don't know, a class reunion or something, where there are a lot of people who haven't seen you in a long time. And I think, there's so much pressure to walk into that room and be the prettiest, the thinnest, the best-looking, and we spend so much of our lives trying to make that happen. What a waste of time. I think, why don't I think about walking in that room and being a doctor? Or a really good musician? How much better would my time be spent that way?"

And my sister said, "You know, don't get me wrong, I think this is a really good stage for you to be in, in your development and growth. But you're still walking into that room. I hope that someday you don't need to."

19. I could subsist indefinitely on sushi and almost-anything-covered-in-guacamole.

20. My father was a Holocaust survivor, and whenever I move into a new place, I always find myself looking around trying to figure out the best place to hide people from Nazis, Anne-Frank-stylie.

21. I believe that you will only know yourself to be truly free from prejudice when you can pass an absolute idiot on the motorway/freeway and not need to turn around to look at the person driving the car to see if they're male/female/short/tall/old/young/asian/white/etc etc etc.

I can't think of any particularly interesting short facts about myself, so I shall, instead, conclude with four short anecdotes from my life, which may or may not be interesting:

22. The same week that I fell on the blind man on the bus, I was standing in line at an ATM machine. The person at the head of the line was obviously trying to do a hostile takeover of Citicorp using only the terminal, and had been there for some time. So the person in line in front of me turned around and started making small talk, as one does.

Note: He was in a wheelchair.

The conversation went like this:

Him: Terrible weather we're having today, isn't it?

Me: I know! And it was so nice yesterday! What happened?

Him: I was in a car accident.

My brain: Ack! Ack! Ack!

As it turns out, there is no good response here.

23. When I was in kindergarten, we had story time every afternoon. We were allowed to have our milk and cookies on the carpeted area in front during story time, but only if we promised to be careful and not spill our milk on the carpet.

I was PAINFULLY shy. I was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom. So, one day, during story time, I ended up wetting my pants on the carpet.

The teacher, seeing the wet spot, said, "Who spilled their milk?!" Eventually, someone said, "Bethel was sitting there," and I, horrified to have been accused of such infamy, indignantly cried, "I did not spill my milk! I wet my pants!"

I find this to be funny, because, of course, now my response would be, "Oh, silly me, yes, I must have spilled my milk. Ha ha, terribly sorry."

I told this story to my sister a few years ago. My sister, who is still friends with my former kindergarten teacher. She REMINDED HER OF THIS EVENT. They have had quite the little laugh over this.

24. My boyfriend is somewhat evil. He knows I like sushi, and he works upstairs from a fairly nice sushi takeaway joint. He occasionally calls me up to see if I would like him to pick up some sushi for me on the way home. Oh, how thoughtful and sweet, I thought.

...until I realised that a day or two after getting me sushi, he always seemed, coincidentally, of course, to be asking if it was all right if he went to the pub after work for a few pints. [For "a few" read: 9 or more.]

After a while, he quit trying quite so hard to be sneaky. He'd call me up and ask, "Would you like me to bring sushi home tonight?" and the minute I'd reply, he'd ask if it was all right to go to the pub THAT SAME NIGHT.

I just found out that the guys at work now refer to the boxes of sushi he is seen with as, alternately, his "Fish Tithe," "Fish Bribe," or "Fish Penance."

25. This one time, at band camp, my mother came to one of our performances and I met her during the intermission. She had to go to the bathroom, so I walked in with her and waited outside the stall. I was starving, had had no time for dinner, and knew that the break was short, so I started eating a candy bar while waiting for my mother to come out.

Another woman came into the bathroom just as I was leaving, licking the remaining chocolate off of my fingers. I have never seen such a horrified look on any human being's face since.