MAGIC         PORK

I’ve never heard of this concept but looks like there’s something called a “meme” that bloggers will “tag” you with. Then you’re supposed to tag other blogs with it. I don’t know, but Fran of patandfran.com tagged me in the comments to my last post. Usually I don’t go along with these chain-letter-type things (thanks Fran!) but since she’s such a sweet person I’ll give her this one.

The rules of this meme-thingie are:

• Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
• Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.
• Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
• Let each person know that they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

If I were to tag 7 random people’s blogs they truly would be random since I don’t read that many blogs. So sorry Fran but this link of the chain will end with me. But I’ll go ahead & do the 7 random and/or weird facts about me.

1. I think “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a great song.

2. When I was in high school, I memorized the first few paragraphs of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, just to annoy my friend who hated Douglas Adams. And get this… I still remember most of it. Let’s see how I do - I swear this is from memory:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 98 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has, or rather had, a problem which was this: Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, most of which involved the movement of small green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on a whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained, most of the people were unhappy and many of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Now let me pull my old book off the shelf and compare. This is the actual text. Ignoring stuff like punctuation and capitalization, I’ll bold the parts that are different:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Pretty damn close huh? I memorized that about 15 years ago!! I also can still remember most of the Romeo & Juliet speech I had to learn for 9th grade English class. (”It is my lady, oh it is my love… oh that she knew she were…”)

[Edit: WHOA! How weird is this? I just checked out the website of the person that originally tagged Fran (http://stelladevine.livejournal.com) and she mentioned as one of her seven weird things "I know large tracts of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by heart." I swear I wasn't stealing her idea, I didn't read that until just now! How odd is that that we both decided to share that random thing about ourselves?]

3. I once walked into a gay bar with a fedora on my head and handcuffs hanging from my belt. But that’s for a different post.

4. The only time my high school friends saw me furious - possibly the only time any of my friends have seen me furious - was during a game of Monopoly, on my birthday of all times. I was mad over them ignoring a rule (don’t get me started but I remember exactly what it was!). I think that may be the last time I’ve ever played.

5. I have a generous uvula. OK, OK I talked about that already on this blog.

How about this? I very rarely remember my dreams. I know I have them because I’ll often wake from one, but it’s gone in an instant after waking up and I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what it was about. Occasionally when I do remember, it makes no sense whatsoever. And when I say no sense I don’t mean “Pat Sajak was presiding over my briss” type nonsense - that still follows some semblance of logic. I mean totally random things that can’t even be explained but seemed to make sense at the time - like characters starting out one person but ending up another. It boggles my mind when I hear some people recount these complex dreams they had because even the very few dreams that I can remember that actually made some sense haven’t come anywhere close to that.

6. As part of my liberal arts requirements I had to take an English class in college. The professor was some writer, or at least aspiring writer, who was teaching part time. So even though he was supposed to be teaching about how you shouldn’t start a sentence with “so” and proper punctuation and run-on sentences and stuff like that; he instead just taught us about writing. He’d teach things like “honesty” in writing. Interesting stuff, but the majority of the class failed the standardized exam you take at the end and had to take it over. (I passed thank you very much.)

I brought this up to say there was one time he asked the class to write a poem and gave us like 10 minutes. It was one of those types where it has a certain number of syllables - no, not a haiku. I wrote “The mass murderer sharpened his knife on the skull of the poor victim who was buying groceries to feed herself and her cat”. (Again with the memory!) When I discussed this with a couple friends after, no one got that he wasn’t actually sharpening his knife, it meant that he was getting better at killing each time so in effect sharpening… oh nevermind. I didn’t realize he was going to make us read these to the class. I didn’t know anyone else in that class. I was so embarrassed reading this thing that I could feel myself blushing and my voice cracked when I said “murderer”. I think he just said it was interesting or something. Nowadays he’d be notifying the dean about me.

7. When I read a novel, I’ll usually read each paragraph twice, sometimes more. I especially do this if it’s dialogue-heavy because I’m trying to picture exactly how they’re saying it, what their expressions are like, what they’re feeling. I’m not saying I’m proud of this, it’s kind of annoying really.

There… I think I wrote enough about this meme that I’ve excused myself from any future ones.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.