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…
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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.