Just Exactly How Random Can Mischief Get...
Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.
This actually came off of Facebook, where I also posted it, but thought it was LJ worthy as well. I'm not tagging anyone here though.
1. I have worked for the same company since I was nineteen. That's sixteen years, for those of you who don't know how old I am. I worked full time for the company for three years, and then - due to the financial irresponsibility of two of the three partners - the company filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy, and I worked on an occasional basis for Boss Dude and his wife as they began the process of forming the new company.
During that time, I took a job at Mail Boxes Etc, which I loved, right up until I was held at gunpoint during a weekend shift at the store. I never fully recovered from that incident emotionally, and soon afterwards I left the world of retail to work at the Biomedical Research Institute of New Mexico.
That job lasted about five months, at which point I realized that I loathed working for the Federal Government. I quit BRINM and returned to working full time for Boss Dude and Boss Lady since the new company could once again afford to put me back on the payroll. That was eight years ago. Some days I want nothing more than to quit this line of work and do something completely different; but most days I love my job and I love my employers.
2. I dropped out of school in the fourth grade and didn't go back to school until my eighth grade year of junior high. The transition was hard, but I excelled in my classes and continued on to my freshman year of high school at Highland. I managed to stick with it for the first half of the first semester, and then decided that it wasn't worth the emotional trauma and dropped out. I have been working full time since the age of sixteen.
3. I recently started loving all things chocolate. I blame my boss; he keeps a bowl of chocolates on my desk for customers and our technicians, but I can't seem to keep myself from eating several pieces over the course of the day. This is not in anyway helping me to lose the final fifteen pounds of my long-term weight loss goal.
4. Regarding my weight: I used to be really skinny. Somewhere in between age sixteen and eighteen I gained /a lot/ of weight. I lost most of the weight when I was working at MBE, because I was on my feet for 10+ hours a day, and I drank half my body weight in water during the day. Also, I never ate lunch, and rarely ate breakfast. Once I started working a desk job again, all the weight came back. Last year, I became determined to get my figure back, and I have since lost almost thirty pounds. Fifteen more to go and I will be happy.
5. I'm afraid of heights, ladders, spiders, bees, and wasps. There was one incident at MBE when I was cornered behind a copy machine by a very large and aggressive katydid. A customer had to capture the insect and remove it from the store before I would come out from behind the copy machine and perform his Western Union money transfer.
6. I used to have a passion for cooking; I would spend hours watching cooking shows and reading magazines like Bon Appétit and Gourmet. I was an amazing cook for about two years, and I could hold my own when it came to Crème Brûlée and flourless chocolate cakes as well. These days I just put a frozen chicken breast in the oven, a package of steam-in-the-bag frozen veggies in the microwave, and call it dinner. Sometimes I miss the calming effect of making a basil chiffonade or tempering eggs to create silky custards, but mostly I just don't have the desire to bother with it anymore.
7. When I was seventeen, my sister and I didn't speak to each other for almost an entire year. To this day, I can't for the life of me remember what the fight was about.
8. For almost two years I refused to eat mammals.
9. One of the best friends I have ever had...moved to Canada. I'm extremely resentful that Canadaland has woo'd her away from New Mexico and I find that I still miss her every day; sometimes it hurts so much that it's hard to breathe.
10. I used to listen to a lot of Godsmack, System of a Down, and Nine Inch Nails. Aside from those bands, the only other music I listened to was what I grew up listening to: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, supplemented by whatever was playing on the radio.
Then, I met Brandon. Now all my friends tease me and call me a snooty music elitist, which is simply not true. I joke around about having edged my way into the self-proclaimed realm of music elitism, but really, that's all it is: a joke. It's a bullshit line that I throw around the same as the English Genius thing. We're all very much aware of how much I fail at the grammars, and if you were to ask me to expound on why I'm listening to Battles right now, I'd have no intelligent reply. I like the way it makes me feel? Not a very elitist answer, I know.
I don't have any understanding of atypical rhythmic structures or angular melodies, I just like the way SZ2 sounds and I get pleasure from listening to it because it reminds me of someone who still means a lot to me. I've made progress in my taste in music, yes. But really, the most 'elitist' thing I can come up with to say is that Modest Mouse has way more awesome tracks than Float On will ever be. Seriously, give White Lies, Yellow Teeth a listen sometime. ;P
11. Regarding Brandon: I miss him. He was one of my best friends, and things got all jacked up and now we're not friends, and it sucks. I hate it, and there aren't enough words to describe how awful it makes my heart feel. The other morning it was snowing and I wanted to text him with a "Yay! The first snow of the season!" because he loves the snow; but I'm not his friend anymore and I can't text him with silly random things. So I sat outside in the snow instead, smoking my cigarette and feeling really heartsick for a friendship that is no longer a part of my life. It made for a pretty crappy start to the day, lemme tell yeh.
11. Great googliemooglie. This is a lot of effing information to come up with. Who decided this questionnaire should be 25 questions long? For Pete's sake.
12. My natural hair color is a washed-out ash brown. It's boring, and I hate it, so I dye it black instead. Once, when I was fifteen, I dyed it blond. Most blue-eyed girls look great with blond hair. I just came off looking really anemic.
13. I have Social Anxiety Disorder. I can usually keep it in check, but sometimes it gets the better of me and I have really awful panic attacks which can last for hours or occasionally for several days at a time.
14. I call my circle of friends 'Monkeys' and I can't remember how that started, but now they all do it too.
15. I've been in counseling for ten months. We're just starting to talk about my childhood and it's freaking me out. I think my counselor waited all this time to get to this particular subject because she knows it's the source of all my neurosis and issues and that it's going to be long and probably ugly road once we really start down it. We've already discovered that I have no recollection of some really important details from about age four to age eleven. Oh yeah, it's going to be a hoot to start working on this part of myself. Not.
16. I am of the belief that we're all hypocrites when it comes to our relationships, the boundaries we set, and the behaviors we label as acceptable. It's all too effortless to write it out it out in black on white, to set your terms as chocolate or vanilla and expect that it's going to be easy once the line is drawn. Easy as pie. What the fuck does that even mean? Ask anyone who has actually fought through the pie crust making process and they will argue the whole 'easy' allegation. I don't want easy, and I don't want copacetic. I want it written in cerulean on sienna, I want strawberry; I want to eliminate the line altogether and then go out for a martini.
17. I have a mink coat in my closet. Every time I see it, I remember that scene in Ghostbusters II with the evil goo and the mink coat that comes alive and runs away down the streets of New York.
18. I have been kissed by seven people over the course of (almost) thirty-five years. Every one of them was drunk and/or high when they decided that their tongue should be in my mouth. I have a lot of irrational feelings when I think about this overmuch.
19. I don't comprehend the maths, and I didn't fall into the 99.961 percentile with my SAT score. In fact, I never took the SAT so I don't even have a score with which to bracket myself in the world of standardized testing. I don't know what Ubuntu is or does, or any of the other Linux distributions for that matter. I don't speak Python, Perl, or Ruby. I do all my browsing in Opera, but mostly because I like the Speed Dial feature and the fact that I can choose a color for the little tab dudes to accessorize my current state of mind.
20. I hitched a ride to Denver with a truck full of punk rockers to see a GBH/Agnostic Front show when I was twelve. I woke up the next day in a car with two guys (one who was called Wookie and had the most beautiful mohawk) whom I did not know, my sister was missing, and I had no clue where I was. They were super nice and shared their Lucky Strike cigarettes and Fritos with me, and returned me safe and sound to the exact place where the adventure had begun.
21. I hate it when people take my picture. It's like acknowledging to the world all my flaws and imperfections, all right there and now brought to us in brilliant instantaneous digital evil. Hence, my tendency to fight like a cornered chupacabra to keep anyone from taking my photograph. You see, I am not ignorant to my deficiencies; I see them everyday, and I see them with frightening clarity. Other people can see them as well; it's just that the deficiencies are skewed on account of my sparking and extraordinary skills with words. :P
Once you take my picture, the horrible truth is revealed, and there is no going back, because the fact of the matter is that I am not at all like a box of Lucky Charms with all the colorful marshmallow goodness mingling in harmony with the sweet and crunchy wheat-a-bits. No, it's not like that at all. I'm more like a box of orange flavored zinc lozenges. They sound like a good idea when you read the box, because the words are good and they say intriguing things, but once you get a taste of the reality of the situation, it's rather disappointing, with possible side effects of resentment, distaste, and long-term psychological damage.
22. Almost. There.
23. I hate going to the bank. I hate that people always stand too close and that there is invariably someone on their cell phone talking about something that really oughtn't to be discussed in public. I hate the drive through at the bank because the whole idea of plastic tubes whizzing around overhead disturbs me greatly, for reasons which I can't explain.
24. There was an artesian well in the middle of a clearing of shrubberies and brambles where I grew up. I used to spend entire afternoons there, marveling at the feel of the sand at the bottom as it filtered between my toes, and chasing water striders. There were plants that grew in the water, and someone told me that they were either watercress or water hemlock. The latter of the two, it was explained, is extremely poisonous.
After having been imparted with that information, it was commonplace for me to be found sitting on the edge of the well, with my feet dangling in the water, contemplating what it would feel like to die from eating the water plants. Interestingly enough, it turns out that watercress and water hemlock look nothing alike. The plants in question were in fact, watercress.
The point being, that I still think about death a lot, even though I'm quite terrified of it, but all my serious contemplations turn out to be watercress.
25. Frickin finally! I thought we'd never get here. I like pie.
~
This actually came off of Facebook, where I also posted it, but thought it was LJ worthy as well. I'm not tagging anyone here though.
1. I have worked for the same company since I was nineteen. That's sixteen years, for those of you who don't know how old I am. I worked full time for the company for three years, and then - due to the financial irresponsibility of two of the three partners - the company filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy, and I worked on an occasional basis for Boss Dude and his wife as they began the process of forming the new company.
During that time, I took a job at Mail Boxes Etc, which I loved, right up until I was held at gunpoint during a weekend shift at the store. I never fully recovered from that incident emotionally, and soon afterwards I left the world of retail to work at the Biomedical Research Institute of New Mexico.
That job lasted about five months, at which point I realized that I loathed working for the Federal Government. I quit BRINM and returned to working full time for Boss Dude and Boss Lady since the new company could once again afford to put me back on the payroll. That was eight years ago. Some days I want nothing more than to quit this line of work and do something completely different; but most days I love my job and I love my employers.
2. I dropped out of school in the fourth grade and didn't go back to school until my eighth grade year of junior high. The transition was hard, but I excelled in my classes and continued on to my freshman year of high school at Highland. I managed to stick with it for the first half of the first semester, and then decided that it wasn't worth the emotional trauma and dropped out. I have been working full time since the age of sixteen.
3. I recently started loving all things chocolate. I blame my boss; he keeps a bowl of chocolates on my desk for customers and our technicians, but I can't seem to keep myself from eating several pieces over the course of the day. This is not in anyway helping me to lose the final fifteen pounds of my long-term weight loss goal.
4. Regarding my weight: I used to be really skinny. Somewhere in between age sixteen and eighteen I gained /a lot/ of weight. I lost most of the weight when I was working at MBE, because I was on my feet for 10+ hours a day, and I drank half my body weight in water during the day. Also, I never ate lunch, and rarely ate breakfast. Once I started working a desk job again, all the weight came back. Last year, I became determined to get my figure back, and I have since lost almost thirty pounds. Fifteen more to go and I will be happy.
5. I'm afraid of heights, ladders, spiders, bees, and wasps. There was one incident at MBE when I was cornered behind a copy machine by a very large and aggressive katydid. A customer had to capture the insect and remove it from the store before I would come out from behind the copy machine and perform his Western Union money transfer.
6. I used to have a passion for cooking; I would spend hours watching cooking shows and reading magazines like Bon Appétit and Gourmet. I was an amazing cook for about two years, and I could hold my own when it came to Crème Brûlée and flourless chocolate cakes as well. These days I just put a frozen chicken breast in the oven, a package of steam-in-the-bag frozen veggies in the microwave, and call it dinner. Sometimes I miss the calming effect of making a basil chiffonade or tempering eggs to create silky custards, but mostly I just don't have the desire to bother with it anymore.
7. When I was seventeen, my sister and I didn't speak to each other for almost an entire year. To this day, I can't for the life of me remember what the fight was about.
8. For almost two years I refused to eat mammals.
9. One of the best friends I have ever had...moved to Canada. I'm extremely resentful that Canadaland has woo'd her away from New Mexico and I find that I still miss her every day; sometimes it hurts so much that it's hard to breathe.
10. I used to listen to a lot of Godsmack, System of a Down, and Nine Inch Nails. Aside from those bands, the only other music I listened to was what I grew up listening to: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, supplemented by whatever was playing on the radio.
Then, I met Brandon. Now all my friends tease me and call me a snooty music elitist, which is simply not true. I joke around about having edged my way into the self-proclaimed realm of music elitism, but really, that's all it is: a joke. It's a bullshit line that I throw around the same as the English Genius thing. We're all very much aware of how much I fail at the grammars, and if you were to ask me to expound on why I'm listening to Battles right now, I'd have no intelligent reply. I like the way it makes me feel? Not a very elitist answer, I know.
I don't have any understanding of atypical rhythmic structures or angular melodies, I just like the way SZ2 sounds and I get pleasure from listening to it because it reminds me of someone who still means a lot to me. I've made progress in my taste in music, yes. But really, the most 'elitist' thing I can come up with to say is that Modest Mouse has way more awesome tracks than Float On will ever be. Seriously, give White Lies, Yellow Teeth a listen sometime. ;P
11. Regarding Brandon: I miss him. He was one of my best friends, and things got all jacked up and now we're not friends, and it sucks. I hate it, and there aren't enough words to describe how awful it makes my heart feel. The other morning it was snowing and I wanted to text him with a "Yay! The first snow of the season!" because he loves the snow; but I'm not his friend anymore and I can't text him with silly random things. So I sat outside in the snow instead, smoking my cigarette and feeling really heartsick for a friendship that is no longer a part of my life. It made for a pretty crappy start to the day, lemme tell yeh.
11. Great googliemooglie. This is a lot of effing information to come up with. Who decided this questionnaire should be 25 questions long? For Pete's sake.
12. My natural hair color is a washed-out ash brown. It's boring, and I hate it, so I dye it black instead. Once, when I was fifteen, I dyed it blond. Most blue-eyed girls look great with blond hair. I just came off looking really anemic.
13. I have Social Anxiety Disorder. I can usually keep it in check, but sometimes it gets the better of me and I have really awful panic attacks which can last for hours or occasionally for several days at a time.
14. I call my circle of friends 'Monkeys' and I can't remember how that started, but now they all do it too.
15. I've been in counseling for ten months. We're just starting to talk about my childhood and it's freaking me out. I think my counselor waited all this time to get to this particular subject because she knows it's the source of all my neurosis and issues and that it's going to be long and probably ugly road once we really start down it. We've already discovered that I have no recollection of some really important details from about age four to age eleven. Oh yeah, it's going to be a hoot to start working on this part of myself. Not.
16. I am of the belief that we're all hypocrites when it comes to our relationships, the boundaries we set, and the behaviors we label as acceptable. It's all too effortless to write it out it out in black on white, to set your terms as chocolate or vanilla and expect that it's going to be easy once the line is drawn. Easy as pie. What the fuck does that even mean? Ask anyone who has actually fought through the pie crust making process and they will argue the whole 'easy' allegation. I don't want easy, and I don't want copacetic. I want it written in cerulean on sienna, I want strawberry; I want to eliminate the line altogether and then go out for a martini.
17. I have a mink coat in my closet. Every time I see it, I remember that scene in Ghostbusters II with the evil goo and the mink coat that comes alive and runs away down the streets of New York.
18. I have been kissed by seven people over the course of (almost) thirty-five years. Every one of them was drunk and/or high when they decided that their tongue should be in my mouth. I have a lot of irrational feelings when I think about this overmuch.
19. I don't comprehend the maths, and I didn't fall into the 99.961 percentile with my SAT score. In fact, I never took the SAT so I don't even have a score with which to bracket myself in the world of standardized testing. I don't know what Ubuntu is or does, or any of the other Linux distributions for that matter. I don't speak Python, Perl, or Ruby. I do all my browsing in Opera, but mostly because I like the Speed Dial feature and the fact that I can choose a color for the little tab dudes to accessorize my current state of mind.
20. I hitched a ride to Denver with a truck full of punk rockers to see a GBH/Agnostic Front show when I was twelve. I woke up the next day in a car with two guys (one who was called Wookie and had the most beautiful mohawk) whom I did not know, my sister was missing, and I had no clue where I was. They were super nice and shared their Lucky Strike cigarettes and Fritos with me, and returned me safe and sound to the exact place where the adventure had begun.
21. I hate it when people take my picture. It's like acknowledging to the world all my flaws and imperfections, all right there and now brought to us in brilliant instantaneous digital evil. Hence, my tendency to fight like a cornered chupacabra to keep anyone from taking my photograph. You see, I am not ignorant to my deficiencies; I see them everyday, and I see them with frightening clarity. Other people can see them as well; it's just that the deficiencies are skewed on account of my sparking and extraordinary skills with words. :P
Once you take my picture, the horrible truth is revealed, and there is no going back, because the fact of the matter is that I am not at all like a box of Lucky Charms with all the colorful marshmallow goodness mingling in harmony with the sweet and crunchy wheat-a-bits. No, it's not like that at all. I'm more like a box of orange flavored zinc lozenges. They sound like a good idea when you read the box, because the words are good and they say intriguing things, but once you get a taste of the reality of the situation, it's rather disappointing, with possible side effects of resentment, distaste, and long-term psychological damage.
22. Almost. There.
23. I hate going to the bank. I hate that people always stand too close and that there is invariably someone on their cell phone talking about something that really oughtn't to be discussed in public. I hate the drive through at the bank because the whole idea of plastic tubes whizzing around overhead disturbs me greatly, for reasons which I can't explain.
24. There was an artesian well in the middle of a clearing of shrubberies and brambles where I grew up. I used to spend entire afternoons there, marveling at the feel of the sand at the bottom as it filtered between my toes, and chasing water striders. There were plants that grew in the water, and someone told me that they were either watercress or water hemlock. The latter of the two, it was explained, is extremely poisonous.
After having been imparted with that information, it was commonplace for me to be found sitting on the edge of the well, with my feet dangling in the water, contemplating what it would feel like to die from eating the water plants. Interestingly enough, it turns out that watercress and water hemlock look nothing alike. The plants in question were in fact, watercress.
The point being, that I still think about death a lot, even though I'm quite terrified of it, but all my serious contemplations turn out to be watercress.
25. Frickin finally! I thought we'd never get here. I like pie.
~