the 25 things meme
So, the 25 telling facts about myself thing: it took a while to come up with anything not completely lame. :) So here is the merely claudicated version.
1. When I was 5, my heroes were Albert Einstein and Bugs Bunny. It occurs to me that I haven't changed much.
2. When I was two, my first cat was named Kiy-Kiy, because I couldn't pronounce the 't' in kitty. And they say children have such great imaginations. *eyeroll* I am a fan of making things complicated for fun, but that's an acquired taste. I work with the simple just as well.
3. I am clinically depressed. (I KNOW, RIGHT?!) I do a really good job of keeping it at bay with dietary and habitual stuff, so unless you get to see me in the dumb times when I manage to forget that I have to do those things to keep my brain working, you'd never know it. I'm good at being happy . . . until I'm not. Brains are weird, yo.
4. When I was 13 I had bifocals and no friends. So I read the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and our entire series of encyclopedias. So that's where the vocabulary came from. The need to know everything was a pre-existing condition, origin unknown.
5. Sometimes I can't sleep. You guys think I ramble at you too much, but that's not even as bad as the volumes of random crap that go spinning around in my head when I'm like this. It's why I like blogging: you can just say TL:DR and we both sum up at win in the nattering-Heidi equation. Mostly it's a release valve to let some of the pressure of words out of my head. Very useful.
6. My brother died on our bedroom floor in the early hours of the morning, January 21st of 1989. I had never been to a funeral before the one where I wished I was in the box, so it fucked me up for a long time. I'm past the bad parts of it now, so it's just one of the things that make me this way. It's not a sore subject anymore, so I can talk about it if you're ever curious or need someone to commiserate with.
7. I'm more afraid of me than I am of you, no matter who you are. It reverses a lot of emotional defense mechanisms I would otherwise have in common with normal people and makes familiar tactics into something unrecognizable. Jealousy, shame, hatred: I don't have those; I'm pretty sure they're based in a fear of other people. Sometimes I think I'd understand you all better if I had regular human flaws, but then I wonder whether it would be worth it and I have my doubts. Someone has to live at the edge of the bell curve, after all. Might as well be me.
8. To me dancing is like playing solitaire: you're taking randomness and rearranging it to establish order. With the cards, you're establishing a rigid order within the game's rules of play, with dancing you're making dynamic order with physic's rules of motion. You're using your body to play games with gravity. It's not about other people, though I can do it with them. My dancing isn't art: it's not a form of communication. It's just a thing I do.
9. I'm wearing the orange 'free hugs' t-shirt I made myself. It's a good idea, and I support it. It's also just a matter of time 'til I acheive some critical mass of snuggle-tude and just start hugging people who look like they're having a bad day, upset patrons at the grocery store, everyone. Then come the restraining orders, but that can't be helped at this point. Tragic. *shakes head*
10. My family has had a lot of alcoholics and other addicts, statistically more than its share on both sides. As a teenager I looked at all the family members who couldn't get through their day without relying on drugs, and decided that the things they had in common with each other they weren't going to have in common with me. There's a lot to talk about in that one thing alone, but it's been seen as offensive to people who share those personality traits when I've talked about it before. Someday I'm going to bring it up again, and talk about what bending over backwards avoiding addiction has done to me.
11. I love people easily, but I'm pretty sure my context for love is not the usual definition for it. I don't need people to love me back, though it's nice when they do. And I don't distinguish between the different types of love that other people say exist: filios, eros, agape. I love each person differently because I relate to you all differently. I don't love Doug more because I want to have sex with him, I love him more because I can reach him better. The sexiness is a bonus, though. :) Ditto for Ghost.
12. I am defiant as Hell. Pun totally intended.
13. I know enough random facts to beat you at Trivial Pursuit. Unless you're lord_of_entropy.
14. I can make meatloaf so good it narrows my mother's eyes with suspicions of kitchen witchery. I don't actually like meatloaf, so: irony, but it's always nice to be competent at something.
15. My memory is defective. That's why I write stuff down to remember it so often. A lot of my habits came from designing my personality to make up for that deficit. I have random quirks, too, but most of the odd habits are pretty reasonable. Like Ani Difranco says, "Taken out of context, I must seem so strange."
16. If my apartment and all my worldly goods burned to the ground, I'd be pissed off at needing to replace my stuff. I'd be worried that somebody in my building got hurt. But I don't think I'd cry for the irreplaceable things that were lost. I lose irreplaceable things all the time: we all do. I just noticed it one day, and got used to the idea of time's inexorable slide away from everything we hold onto. It sounds dire, but the future brings tides of new things in, good and bad. And I've never asked that life be painless, just that it be interesting.
17. When I was in grade school I heard the story of the Chinese Curse: "May you live in interesting times." I told the teacher that that wasn't a curse at all, and wished aloud that the "curse" be visited on me. It's tiring sometimes, but I've never much regretted it.
18. I grow twice as many herbs as flowers on my patio. Beauty is nice, but usefulness will get farther with me.
19. When I was little, nobody knew that I had really bad eyesight. I liked looking at photos of Impressionist paintings in books because I thought, "These are my people: they see the world the way I do, they understand me." Later, it turned out that I was just that blind and needed glasses. But if "Starry Night" and a few others mean more to me than they do to you, that's reasonable, right?
20. I like songs that I can dance to, sing to, laugh at, or identify with. The statistical occurrence happens in that order. I like a lot of songs that I had to decode until I understood them, because the emotions behind the writing of the song were alien to me. Hence my love of Fall Out Boy. ;) I may have nothing in common with most people, but I like them anyhow. And you. I appreciate the company.
21. I make a really bad fan. I'm fickle. I don't buy memorabilia or merchandise, I hate live music most of the time, I don't memorize things about TV shows or comics or bands, and I can't be bothered to be impressed with fame for its own sake. That being said, I make a great geek. I can and do hold conversations in movie quotes, and while my collection of graphic novels isn't that impressive to a real collector, most of my friends are understandably mystified that I ever amassed $1000 worth of anything, considering the attention span.
22. I don't like Phil Collins. Or his music, I guess I should say - there's nothing wrong with him, personally. I just can't listen to any of his music without the need to grit my teeth, always feel something is not quite right in my little universe when his music is in the background. What passes for my taste in music is totally inexplicable, even to me. Apollo commands us to know ourselves, but he can fuck off. This shit is harder than it looks.
23. I like solid colors, with contrast piping if I'm being fancy. Prints and patterns never look right on me, because somewhere in my head the default fashion setting is "Marvel Superhero". There's a reason I dress like this, and those of you who are embarrassed by it can suck it up. I LIKE being this way, occasional forays into neon and everything.
24. In college I wanted to be an art restorer. I kinda still want to, but not 'til I'm old. I think that's the kind of job I would settle down into, semi-retirement style, not the sort I'm going to spend my youth and relentless enthusiasm on.
25. I am superhumanly annoying, and superhumanly capable of getting people to forgive me. Natural talents both.
1. When I was 5, my heroes were Albert Einstein and Bugs Bunny. It occurs to me that I haven't changed much.
2. When I was two, my first cat was named Kiy-Kiy, because I couldn't pronounce the 't' in kitty. And they say children have such great imaginations. *eyeroll* I am a fan of making things complicated for fun, but that's an acquired taste. I work with the simple just as well.
3. I am clinically depressed. (I KNOW, RIGHT?!) I do a really good job of keeping it at bay with dietary and habitual stuff, so unless you get to see me in the dumb times when I manage to forget that I have to do those things to keep my brain working, you'd never know it. I'm good at being happy . . . until I'm not. Brains are weird, yo.
4. When I was 13 I had bifocals and no friends. So I read the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and our entire series of encyclopedias. So that's where the vocabulary came from. The need to know everything was a pre-existing condition, origin unknown.
5. Sometimes I can't sleep. You guys think I ramble at you too much, but that's not even as bad as the volumes of random crap that go spinning around in my head when I'm like this. It's why I like blogging: you can just say TL:DR and we both sum up at win in the nattering-Heidi equation. Mostly it's a release valve to let some of the pressure of words out of my head. Very useful.
6. My brother died on our bedroom floor in the early hours of the morning, January 21st of 1989. I had never been to a funeral before the one where I wished I was in the box, so it fucked me up for a long time. I'm past the bad parts of it now, so it's just one of the things that make me this way. It's not a sore subject anymore, so I can talk about it if you're ever curious or need someone to commiserate with.
7. I'm more afraid of me than I am of you, no matter who you are. It reverses a lot of emotional defense mechanisms I would otherwise have in common with normal people and makes familiar tactics into something unrecognizable. Jealousy, shame, hatred: I don't have those; I'm pretty sure they're based in a fear of other people. Sometimes I think I'd understand you all better if I had regular human flaws, but then I wonder whether it would be worth it and I have my doubts. Someone has to live at the edge of the bell curve, after all. Might as well be me.
8. To me dancing is like playing solitaire: you're taking randomness and rearranging it to establish order. With the cards, you're establishing a rigid order within the game's rules of play, with dancing you're making dynamic order with physic's rules of motion. You're using your body to play games with gravity. It's not about other people, though I can do it with them. My dancing isn't art: it's not a form of communication. It's just a thing I do.
9. I'm wearing the orange 'free hugs' t-shirt I made myself. It's a good idea, and I support it. It's also just a matter of time 'til I acheive some critical mass of snuggle-tude and just start hugging people who look like they're having a bad day, upset patrons at the grocery store, everyone. Then come the restraining orders, but that can't be helped at this point. Tragic. *shakes head*
10. My family has had a lot of alcoholics and other addicts, statistically more than its share on both sides. As a teenager I looked at all the family members who couldn't get through their day without relying on drugs, and decided that the things they had in common with each other they weren't going to have in common with me. There's a lot to talk about in that one thing alone, but it's been seen as offensive to people who share those personality traits when I've talked about it before. Someday I'm going to bring it up again, and talk about what bending over backwards avoiding addiction has done to me.
11. I love people easily, but I'm pretty sure my context for love is not the usual definition for it. I don't need people to love me back, though it's nice when they do. And I don't distinguish between the different types of love that other people say exist: filios, eros, agape. I love each person differently because I relate to you all differently. I don't love Doug more because I want to have sex with him, I love him more because I can reach him better. The sexiness is a bonus, though. :) Ditto for Ghost.
12. I am defiant as Hell. Pun totally intended.
13. I know enough random facts to beat you at Trivial Pursuit. Unless you're lord_of_entropy.
14. I can make meatloaf so good it narrows my mother's eyes with suspicions of kitchen witchery. I don't actually like meatloaf, so: irony, but it's always nice to be competent at something.
15. My memory is defective. That's why I write stuff down to remember it so often. A lot of my habits came from designing my personality to make up for that deficit. I have random quirks, too, but most of the odd habits are pretty reasonable. Like Ani Difranco says, "Taken out of context, I must seem so strange."
16. If my apartment and all my worldly goods burned to the ground, I'd be pissed off at needing to replace my stuff. I'd be worried that somebody in my building got hurt. But I don't think I'd cry for the irreplaceable things that were lost. I lose irreplaceable things all the time: we all do. I just noticed it one day, and got used to the idea of time's inexorable slide away from everything we hold onto. It sounds dire, but the future brings tides of new things in, good and bad. And I've never asked that life be painless, just that it be interesting.
17. When I was in grade school I heard the story of the Chinese Curse: "May you live in interesting times." I told the teacher that that wasn't a curse at all, and wished aloud that the "curse" be visited on me. It's tiring sometimes, but I've never much regretted it.
18. I grow twice as many herbs as flowers on my patio. Beauty is nice, but usefulness will get farther with me.
19. When I was little, nobody knew that I had really bad eyesight. I liked looking at photos of Impressionist paintings in books because I thought, "These are my people: they see the world the way I do, they understand me." Later, it turned out that I was just that blind and needed glasses. But if "Starry Night" and a few others mean more to me than they do to you, that's reasonable, right?
20. I like songs that I can dance to, sing to, laugh at, or identify with. The statistical occurrence happens in that order. I like a lot of songs that I had to decode until I understood them, because the emotions behind the writing of the song were alien to me. Hence my love of Fall Out Boy. ;) I may have nothing in common with most people, but I like them anyhow. And you. I appreciate the company.
21. I make a really bad fan. I'm fickle. I don't buy memorabilia or merchandise, I hate live music most of the time, I don't memorize things about TV shows or comics or bands, and I can't be bothered to be impressed with fame for its own sake. That being said, I make a great geek. I can and do hold conversations in movie quotes, and while my collection of graphic novels isn't that impressive to a real collector, most of my friends are understandably mystified that I ever amassed $1000 worth of anything, considering the attention span.
22. I don't like Phil Collins. Or his music, I guess I should say - there's nothing wrong with him, personally. I just can't listen to any of his music without the need to grit my teeth, always feel something is not quite right in my little universe when his music is in the background. What passes for my taste in music is totally inexplicable, even to me. Apollo commands us to know ourselves, but he can fuck off. This shit is harder than it looks.
23. I like solid colors, with contrast piping if I'm being fancy. Prints and patterns never look right on me, because somewhere in my head the default fashion setting is "Marvel Superhero". There's a reason I dress like this, and those of you who are embarrassed by it can suck it up. I LIKE being this way, occasional forays into neon and everything.
24. In college I wanted to be an art restorer. I kinda still want to, but not 'til I'm old. I think that's the kind of job I would settle down into, semi-retirement style, not the sort I'm going to spend my youth and relentless enthusiasm on.
25. I am superhumanly annoying, and superhumanly capable of getting people to forgive me. Natural talents both.