25 Random Things

[being_fulfilled]

This is going viral around Facebook this week, and since I have a lack of interesting things to write about in my blog today, I'll cross-post it both there and here.

25 Random Things About Me

1. I like to tell people that I knew I'd marry Colin the day he brought homemade chocolates to rehearsal a couple of months before we started dating. Any man who could make that kind of chocolate was someone I wanted to be with.


2. One of my biggest pet peeves is inconsiderate audience behavior. I know that it's irrational to expect that people have an innate sense of how to act if they haven't been taught, but it bothers me anyway, and I expect better.


3. Related to #2, Colin and I will laugh at you if you're sitting near us and you exhibit poor etiquette. We usually end up sitting near someone who makes really random, dumb comments during a play or a movie, and it provides us with endless entertainment. We're still laughing at an incident that happened in June, 2007.


4. I love living in L.A., and I'll be sad to leave here next December, but I also love living in a city that I know inside out. I know a lot of random trivia about Calgary, and I make a great tour guide. Still, I'll miss having a reason to become more familiar with L.A.--at least until we move back here.


5. If I had to choose, I'm not sure whether I'd choose to live in New York or L.A. There are things that I love about both, and they have such different personalities that it's almost impossible to compare them.


6. I'm not a nervous flier. I can easily sleep through takeoff and landing, and a normal amount of turbulence doesn't bother me. I used to get mildly nauseated during landing, but even that doesn't happen any more. I also tend not to get stressed out at the airport, going through customs and security, and planning the time to make my flight. I've done it so often, I just go with the flow.


7. My family teases me about my "soapboxes," especially relating to the arts. I get very passionate about them, and will often lecture my family at length during family dinners, even though they're not usually the ones who need to hear it. They all roll their eyes at me; Colin joins me and we tag-team lecture everyone else about the arts. This is why we're perfect for each other.


8. I've filed taxes in both Canada and the U.S. since 2005, not having worked an entire calendar year since then in only one country. 2010 may be the first year that I only work in Canada. I've never had a year where I've only had one T4 or W-2; I've always worked for more than one employer.


9. I watch TV differently since I started posting on TWoP. These days, I'm not involved in online fandoms the same way I was with Gilmore Girls, and I don't spend as much time in the analysis and discussion of any show, but I watch in a different way than I used to. However, that's also due to my theatre background and to dating someone who is in the television industry.


10. I don't think that TV is an inferior, brain-rotting form of entertainment, despite my parents' opinions of it when I was growing up. I think that a balanced TV and movie intake is just as important as reading, current events, theatre and other performing arts, visual arts, and a general observation of the world around.


11. It's vastly important to me that my future kids are very exposed to the arts. I don't know what I'll do if they don't develop a healthy, strong, passionate appreciation for the arts, even if they're not artists themselves. Guess I'll just have to learn to deal with it.


12. When I tell an American that I'm from Calgary, without clarifying that it's in Canada, and they don't know where it is, my esteem for them drops a few points. If they can come back with something about the city (even if they only know that the Olympics were held there), it rises a few points.


13. Colin and I will sit through the credits of every movie we watch in a theatre. It's partly because we want to start to develop familiarity with names that we may work with in some capacity someday, but it's also a professional courtesy. On the TV shows that Colin works on, his name is toward the end of the credits; it's our courtesy to the people whose names are at the end of a movie's credits to make sure someone sees them. Also, I get very irritated when people don't read the entire program of a show that I do, so it's my way of reciprocating.


14. I enjoy doing memes like this because it feeds into my delusion that I'm fascinating and that people actually care about the minutiae of my life.


15. I'm of the firm opinion that mayo is far superior to ketchup as a fry condiment.


16. Having grown up near the Rockies, I have specific criteria for what constitutes a "mountain." It must have snow on the peaks all year, there must be no trees on top (because there's a lack of oxygen), it must be pointy, and it's not possible to go over or around--it had to have been blasted through with dynamite in order to have a road there. I laugh when people talk about going "over the mountain" to the next town, because that's clearly not a real mountain. It's a hill.


17. I pick up the speech patterns and rhythms of whoever I'm talking to, but I don't pick up random accents. It's more that there are certain people I talk faster when I'm around, and certain words, phrases, and rhythms that I'll pick up.


18. I'm passionate about faith-based theater and making it a viable art form in the mainstream, but also I'm very skeptical when other Christians tell me about their shows. My default philosophy seems to be "Cheesy Christian art until proven otherwise," and it makes me very sad that art done by Christians tends to be 30 years behind the rest of the field.


19. Growing up, I loved being the oldest child, and I still harbor a secret belief that I was my parents' favorite. :)


20. I was single when I applied to grad school, but I'm not entirely sure I would have gone if I'd been single by the time the decision came around. I don't know that for sure, but I do know that Colin was a big part of my decision to move down here, and I think I might have talked myself out of it.


21. I can easily spend 8 hours or more sitting in a coffee shop with my laptop, a book, and some music. I tend to get more work done at Starbucks than I do either at home or in my school office, but there's still the potential for distraction, thanks to wireless internet. However, I'm not being distracted by a) my bed or b) other people in the office.


22. I rarely eat at the table at home. Usually, I'll be sitting on the couch or in my bed, leaning up against the headboard. I see very little point in being more formal than that when it's just me.


23. I talk out loud to myself constantly, and I often talk to other people when I'm alone, especially when I'm driving. I have the conversations that are coming up, thinking about what I want to say; I have conversations that I've already had, saying what I wish I'd said; and I explain things to people, trying to make it as clear and thorough as possible.


24. The most surprising (to me) thing to come out of grad school so far is an interest in municipal public policy affecting the arts, and the way that the arts define culture within an urban area. I was never really interested in that before, but I've become very intrigued by the interplay between the cultural industries and their surroundings. That's a big part of why Colin and I will likely never live anywhere smaller than Calgary--both of our careers need a city with a thriving arts scene, and it's hard to find one that can sustain us in a small city.
    
    
25. I actually knew within 6 weeks of when we started dating that Colin and I would get married someday. The grad school decision was made around that time, and I knew that if he was going to be a part of that journey, it wasn't casual, and it was going to result in marriage. It took him slightly longer to figure it out, but he still knew within the first 3 months or so. From that point on, there was (and still is) a lot to learn about each other and a lot of growth together, but breaking up became, and has remained, as much a non-option as divorce would ever be.