7 Things You Would Never Have Guessed About Me (Unless You Read The Last Post I Did I Like This, I Guess)

Right, EFL Geek tagged me in a meme where the rules are like this:

  • Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog
  • Share 7 facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird
  • Tag seven people at the end of your post
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged

Right, here are seven things you probably don’t know about me…

  1. New Age Album Cover ShotI had long hair in high school. Not that long, because my parents were about the most conservative parents of any family I knew, well, besides that Korean family I met once, and maybe some of those Chinese kids in the Youth Orchestra… anyway, my folks were pretty traditional-minded, but I at least had hair down to my shoulders.

    I had to cut it when I graduated so that I could “go and get a job” which, somehow, I never managed to do that first summer out of high school.

    (Because it was a college town and all the jobs were taken by students until September? Well, and because I couldn’t drive and really didn’t want to work at a burger place or a pizza joint, like my sisters later did. But I did hand out dozens of resumes, really, seriously, and got nothing, and all my hair was gone. Ironically, later on, when I was working in a music store, my boss told me I should grow my hair long, but by then I didn’t want to.)

  2. I wasn’t particularly interested in SF as a child. I read a total of 3 or 4 SF novels prior to high school, or naybe a little more than that if you count the H.G. Wells novel collection my father gave me (which I still have here with me in Korea), and maybe 3 or 4 in high school. I was more interested in horror, and read Thomas F. Monteleone’s Borderlands anthologies (and a few others) quite happily. When I started writing, I was into H.P. Lovecraft, which led me from horror to SF, and the first SF novel I read as an adult was probably David Brin’s Earth. But until I was 25, I was an aspiring horror writer, much more influenced by The Twilight Zone and Peter Straub’s short stories and Whitley Strieber’s so-called nonfiction about alien abduction (which is more horror than SF, and which scared the crap out of me) than by anything I’m into now.
  3. I’m a slow reader. How many pages an hour I can read varies with interest, subject, and distractions, but I am much slower than most people I know. And I can’t/don’t visualize fiction. I just read it, and know what’s going on in the abstract, but I don’t “see” it at all. I don’t know if that’s because of neurology, because I have a lazy eye and it’s impacted my imagination, or what, but there is no movie running in my head when I read a story. (Or write one.) It’s text and information and a story going on behind the screen of my mind.
  4. I’m technically a dual-citizen of UK and Canada. When I was born in Malawi, I got British citizenship first, and it was as a British citizen that I emigrated to Canada as a baby. I actually remember the naturalization ceremony, as a little kid, and I still have the New Testament they gave me, along with a certificate, when I became a Canadian citizen. I haven’t gotten my British passport yet — I’ll be doing that this semester, I suppose. I haven’t done it yet because it’s a pain in the ass to give up my passport for a month to get the British one. But that’s what I’m supposed to do, and I figure it would be nice to have it again: open up some doors in the EU for me, and all that.
  5. I’ve been wearing glasses since 2005. I realized I needed glasses only after finding out that the movie I’d watched hadn’t seemed out of focus the whole time to everyone else, just to me. (It was small-town Korea, and I’d seen audiences put up with a lot, but even this stretched the limits of believability. Still, it was only the next day I realized it.)
  6. I have weird bone spurs on the backs of my heels, right above where the tendon attaches to the heel. On the right leg, at least, and I suspect on the left as well, the bone spur is actually detached from the hell, it’s slightly loose and rubs around when I wear shoes that aren’t soft on the back. That means, yes, dress shoes of any kind invariably have me limping within a half hour or so. It’s horrible.The spurs probably developed as a result of the fact that my dress shoes throughout childhood did not fit me. (Which isn’t so weird, I rarely wore dress shoes and every time it came time to wear them, they were just too small, but it was the day of the event and I had nothing else to wear.) I suspect I know precisely when and how the bone spurs detached — the day I interviewed for my first job out of grad school, I showed up for the interview in dress shoes that were too tight, and I’d walked from the subway station, and I was in immense pain all the way. Got the job (tech writing), but could barely walk back to the subway.I’m thinking of seeing a doctor about having them removed this holiday, if possible. If it’s possible — I don’t know if it is, as I was told by one guy (who’s a little incompetent, I know that for a fact) that it wasn’t — then I suspect it’d be a brief outpatient procedure with a week-long recuperation period where I couldn’t walk around much. (There got my exercise plans for that week, I suppose, but it’d help me in the long run, since tendon aggravation has kept me from exercising many a time.) But for now, I’ve got a full complement of other kinds of shoes that are at least making it tolerable.
  7. If I were better at math, my day job probably would have had something to do with computer science. I took that as a tenative major for a semester, did mindblowingly well in the compsci course, but I’d been out of high school so long I couldn’t remember the math I’d learned, and I would have flunked calculus if I’d stuck around long enough. My compsci professor actually harangued me to change my major immediately, and when I told her I couldn’t hack the math, she told me I could get a tutor. When I told her I’d already done so, she said, “Try again!” I guess she figured I’d have been a good computer scientist. But I’m secretly happy not to have gone down that road.

Well, that’s seven things. Whom shall I tag? Uh, I can’t be bothered, especially for a meme like this, which most bloggers have already done one before in their blogging career. Consider yourself tagged if you feel so inclined. So there.

4 thoughts on “7 Things You Would Never Have Guessed About Me (Unless You Read The Last Post I Did I Like This, I Guess)

  1. I must have missed the first one you posted. Sorry about that.

    For me this is pretty much the first time I’ve been tagged in a meme – at least as far as I can remember.

  2. Long hair suited you. Nice!

    open up some doors in the EU for me, and all that.

    I have dual-citizenship envy. *siiigh*

    You get to be from everywhere useful. : P

    hmm, not sure if I will blog these. in a rush. but here are some…

    1 I may be afraid of heights, but as an 8 year old I took a class in rappelling one summer.
    2 I didn’t get a drivers’ license until last February despite being over ten years past the point most folks do.
    3 I studied piano for eleven years (from age six to age seventeen) before dropping it when I went off to college.
    4 One of my teeth is mostly fake, thanks to a spill on my bike when I was twelve or so.
    5 I still have and ride my first and only bike (which is seventeen years old), the same bike I took that spill on.
    6 I originally wanted to minor in art but realized this too late in my college career to do so, and used to paint (still do photography). So I self-created a minor instead, glomming together the art classes I had taken with the theatre classes and naming it something random.
    7 I used to have a pen pal in Lithuania. I have no idea what happened to him.

  3. V,

    Thanks. Too bad I never grew it out again. Now, if I did so, it would be the older-guy-with-receing-hairline-and-long-hair thing, and that’s not cool. :)

    As for dual-citizenship, yeah, though I will have to finally GET that British passport. I’ve known for years, and never bothered.

    I also don’t have a driver’s license. And my pen pal was in Scotland. No idea what became of him. Can’t even remember his name.

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