Five things you may or may not know about me.

i was born the day after valentine's day, committing me to a lifetime of receiving cards that say "how lucky you are to be born on valentine's day!" -- with a caret between "on" and "valentine's" and someone scribbling in "the day after". :headdesk:

i was born a week before one of my aunt's 11th birthday. until she grew up and moved away, we always shared a birthday - at my grandmother's insistence on making things "more simple" for her. the year i turned 7, then, and sandhi was 18, half of our cake was decorated with snow white and the seven dwarves, and the other half was all grown up and gorgeous.

i have a rule that drives my preston nuts. i insist on separate days. i get a valentine's day and a birthday. :D

and i must add that for as much as we both complained about it growing up, the year i turned 24, sandhi called on my birthday to let me know she'd gotten married for the second time. :eye roll: i guess that means preston and i should get married on her birthday? lol

Just never get between me and a street penny.

That describes me, too. If we were together and both spotted one at the same time, I'd probably defer to you out of politeness, but I wouldn't want to. *grin*

Ooh, fun! :)

1. I don't drink tea or coffee (nothing against them, I just never liked the taste), and despite its deliciousness, I only rarely drink soft drink. This means that, on those rare occasions when my body encounters true caffeine, I have a disconcerting tendency to BOUNCE OFF THE WALLS.

2. I was for many years, and deep down still am, a horse nerd.

3. I have been known to eat whole rotisserie chickens in a single setting, using my hands instead of cutlery, with salt and a bottle of mayonnaise as my only condiments.

4. Whenever I do 'eeney meeney miney mo' to choose between two things, which is surprisingly often, and always using the longest possible playground version, I always choose the opposite thing to the one my finger lands on.

5. I don't drink beer. Which, despite the very long list of alcoholic and regular substances I *do* drink, is frequently viewed by other people, along with my non-consumption of tea and coffee, to mean that I am a deliberate social intransigent, when IN FACT I just don't like bitter drinks.

Re: #1 - Caffeine doesn't act like a stimulant on me. It does, in fact, make me pass out if I consume too much. One can of soda at a go is probably fine, but more than two and I'm heading into sleepy territory.

Being of the bent to be curious and interested in this type of subject... I have to ask about the candymancy. Is this along the vein of asking the bag a question, then spilling the contents looking for anomalous pieces? Otherwise, I'm at a loss what fortunes M&Ms could convey, other than you're about to eat something yummy, you should go visit a Website right away, or "ask another bag, we have nothing to say." (I'm not kidding about being interested, and I'm not knocking either the efficacy or the method; it's in my nature to be irreverent e'en in the face of the Gods themselves.)

I would guess that one could assign different answers to different colors, ask the bag a question, and draw one at random.

1. I have a number of physical and emotional issues. (PTSD, MPD/DID, OCD, Obsessive Personality (slightly different than OCD, and means I focus on things like OMG COMPUTER for easily up to 18 hours a day), Fear of sleeping in the dark, Insomnia, Social Anxiety, Phone Phobia, Arthritis in my spine, Major Depression, Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, Generalized Anxiety, etc, etc, etc. I'M OFFICIALLY A MESS!) Sometimes when I'm having to list them off for someone, I start laughing. Hysterically. Because if I don't, I'll cry.

2. I have a mom that worked three jobs trying to raise me. We were still dirt poor. I wore the same pair of broken glasses for 3 years. I got new ones for passing senior year and getting into college.

3. "all of my siblings are half-siblings, or step-siblings". I said that once to a girlfriend and she got confused. Mom was married before dad, had two kids. Dad was married before mom, had twins, but one died. They married and had me. Then they got divorced. Dad remarried and I got step-siblings. Later, mom remarried and I got more. I have no idea why this was hard for her to understand.

4. I have had the same idea for a series of novels in my head for about 7 years now. I'm afraid to write them. I'm more afraid I will write them and they'll SUCCEED! I've always been horribly terrified of success.

5. I'm obsessed with facebook clicky games. Dammit.

5. I am a creature of water. What I mean by this is that I cry at the drop of a hat, and I hate it. I often find myself internally narrating such moments as "And much to her horror and great chagrin, she started crying." It often causes people to take me less seriously. If I could figure out how to change it, I'd consider it if it was reasonable.

4. For fun and, sometimes, to attempt to route the random tears mentioned above, I look at whatever signs and words I can find and see what words and patterns I can find in them.

3. I often wish I could go back and fix mistakes I've made, but then I think about how the timeline could get screwed up in really complicated ways and I cancel the wish. Who am I to mess with time and space? No one at all.

2. I try to smile at random people in the grocery store or other such places because I think of how they could maybe go smile at someone else, and they could smile at someone after, etc.

1. I often hear snippets of melodies that remind me of other songs, or see specific facial feature structures that remind me of other people, but no one else seems to hear or see them. This makes me ponder the possibility that I am stranger than I thought I was.

Speaking of M&Ms, I more often than not can identify which color I am eating by taste. This applies to standard M&Ms. I haven't tried it with the Easter colors yet.

1. I hated the first several English Lit classes I took in college, and only took British Lit because I was chasing a girl who was taking it. She dropped the class, and once I had no reason not to pay attention, I changed my major. I wound up with a degree in Liberal Arts concentrating in English, which of course explains why I'm a professional IT techie nerd.
2. One of these days I'll get those poems published. I've been working on one long poem/story since 1989. I'm almost done, honest.
3. I have what people tell me is an impressive vocabulary, and I can't spell half of the words I know without help. My wife asks me what they mean, and I ask her how they're spelled. We're very symbiotic.
4. I turn ashen if you talk about needles, and I pass out when someone needs to draw blood. (I had a hard time getting through parts of Feed.) It's not the blood - just the needle.
5. I collect edged weapons. No one ever went to court with a "I didn't know it was sharp" defense. Besides, guns are noisy.

I love country music, too. When I tell people this, including my wife, they just give me an odd look and shake their heads. Despite living in Australia, the Kingdom of Poison and Flame I have an paralyzing fear of spiders, even huntsmen, I've studied up a little bit about them. I know they just look creepy, I know I'm way bigger than they are, I know that they're fairly slow and timid as far as spiders go, but they still freak me out beyond belief.

I have successfully shut up people who insisted that I needed to 'Go find someone' by inquiring whom they know that would be a good match for me.

I am horribly introverted but very intense. The girls that were interested in me were those that were fascinated by that.

My friends ask my advice about vehicles, small arms, and moving. IMO Georgia's choice of a .40 as her favorite pistol is excellent given their chosen turf. But anyone operating in a Level 2 or Level 1 zone would need all their guns to have some armor piercing capability.

I always expect the worst case scenario. Plan for the Zombie Apocalypse. It's not going to happen, but anything less harrowing should be easy by comparison, right?

I maintain an open mind about phenomenon not explained by the current boundaries of science. If it's real and it's internally consistent then it's explainable by science - even if we don't understand it yet.

Does #1 include yogurt too? I haven't been able to eat yogurt since I was fifteen.

I imagine you know nothing about me, except maybe that I have that little dragon shoulder puppet which you saw at Comic Con.

Let's see.

5. I cheerfully tear apart bad books (such as the Inheritance Series) on my own LJ chapter by chapter by chapter and apparently this amuses people.

4. I collect Legos. Or I say I collect Legos as an excuse to justify buying them. I especially like the castle LEGOS.

3. My family is rife with Asperger's syndrome. I have it, my mom has it, my brother has it, several people in other parts of the tree have it. My dad is OCD on the other hand. It makes dinners very interesting in the family.

2. I've lived in the same house for my entire life, except the past three years when I moved about a mile away.

1. Also a penny picker upper. And a dime. Quarter. Nickle. And last week I found a dollar bill! :D

I looooove pudding. Except tapioca. I used to love it, then Grandma called it "fish eye pudding" and I haven't had any since.

Ugh. "Country music" is neither country nor music.

My family used to get margarine all the time. When I got older, I tried real butter. I love butter.

I love canned spinach with salt. That's my favorite veggie.

http://fayanora.livejournal.com/828605.html

5. As an Aspie, I am very set in my ways about my daily rituals. However, I am peculiar for an Aspie in that these rituals will occasionally change at random for no apparent reason. It is impossible to force me to change them, and I cannot even force myself to change them. But every now and then, one of the rituals will just... change. On its own. No apparent reason. And will feel just as ingrained as though I'd been doing it that way for years.
An example: I used to be unable to get to sleep without music going. Then, for no reason I could figure out, I couldn't get to sleep if music was going. I also keep switching back and forth between needing the sound of the fan to get to sleep, and being unable to sleep if the fan is going. It's not even regulated by season: I'm just as likely to need the fan in winter as I am in the summer, and vice versa. If it's too cold for the fan, I point it away from me. But I still need the sound. And there have been times I had to suffer sweating at night in the summer because the sound of the fan was keeping me awake.
One last example: I am usually not a superstitious person, but every now and then will suddenly become very superstitious. But, not having paid much attention to other people's superstitions, these superstitions will be unusual. "The floor is lava" is one. I can't really think of any others offhand.

4. I used to be mad about hats when I was a kid. I had soooo many hats. (Make all the mad hatter jokes you like. No, really, go ahead.) My favorite was this hat I called my Captain Hat, it was blue, with a hard black brim, and had a life preserver embroidered on it. Whenever I wore it, I was Captain Al, and the house was my ship. I would get on the porch to steer the ship safely through a raging storm. Pretty funny, considering I've never learned how to swim, or even to float, and would probably sink like a stone and drown if I ever fell in a large enough body of water.

3. Speaking of which, I almost drowned once as a child. My Dad had to pull me out, I think he may have even gone after me. I don't remember the incident, I was only 2 or so, and all memory of anything before I was 7 is completely gone, or blocked off. (Seriously, high-quality memories start around my 7th birthday. Before that, not a goddamn thing. Not one single solitary memory.) Death keeps trying to get me, and I keep kicking him in the balls. I wasn't breathing when I was born, the doctors never figured out why. I was just too full of stubborn to stay dead.

2. I used to LOOOOOOVE tapioca pudding. Then one day, Grandma called it "fish eye pudding" and I haven't had any ever since.

1. I used to do some things, as a kid, just to see people's reactions:
I'd let my hair grow as long as I could, and then get it cut really short for the reactions.
While I loved coffee, a large part of why I drank it at every restaurant I could was because most waitresses would gape at me and be like "You gonna let hir drink that?" Then I'd add that I'd been drinking coffee since I was 5, which is completely true.
At Pizza Hut Book-It pizza parties, I took full advantage of the fact that I could barely taste crushed hot peppers at all and would grab a shaker of the things and just shake shake shake until my pizza was bright red. Everyone would gape at me like I was insane, but to this day those crushed red peppers have very little burn for me. (Unless you count heartburn.)
Funny story: because of this, when I got some kung pao shrimp once, Mom and Dad warned me about the peppers, which I could tell by touching were dried. Thinking they were like the crushed peppers (and that I would thus be barely able to taste them) I put a whole one in my mouth and started chewing. Oh, I could taste it alright. BOY could I taste it! I had to spit it out and drink lots of fluids, it was so hot. Mom and Dad felt vindicated, but really, from my point of view it was a complete surprise. Something I ate large amounts of in crushed form without a problem was super-hot in whole form? How was I to know!

1. I have weird medication reactions. My first experience with nitrous oxide made me cry, and then when it was all over and I was allowed to stand up, I said, "I feel very tall." When I was taking Zoloft, I couldn't eat anything sweet (not just processed sugar, either; the reaction included honey and fruit); it would turn into huge amounts of gas and make my abdomen swell up like a very painful balloon. When I was taking Prozac, my hands and feet, which normally run cold, were so hot that for three years I slept with an ice pack on my feet.

2. I like some country music, but I'm more partial to the styles called bluegrass and Americana.

3. I like jazz, but I prefer the more structured forms like Dixieland; I'm less fond of Free Jazz, although I will listen to it on occasion.

4. I have owned at least one gun since my early 20s. However, I rarely go target shooting, because I keep injuring my right wrist and arm (in non-shooting accidents, let me assure you!). I once used a gun to defend myself, although displaying it was sufficient and I did not have to actually pull the trigger. At the time, I was sure I would have shot if the person threatening me hadn't backed down; in retrospect, I don't know if I could have or not.

5. I really like getting my nails done, except for the filing. That part turns my stomach, and I have to grit my teeth to get through it. Fortunately, it doesn't last very long.

Thought of something that might be of more interest--

My lit teacher this semester had us memorize a poem and research it and the author for a semester-long project. I, being me and having decided over the summer to memorize it before the end of the year, picked Tam Lin. I sang the version done by Fairport Convention to the class. I also now have two volumes of Scottish and English Ballads checked out of the library and am seriously considering doing something with it as an honors thesis when I'm a senior.

...because dude. That's some fascinating material right there. All 305 ballads.

I think you introduced me to Tam Lin through your blog, too, so thank you! I have a new obsession.

5. I also like country music - but only female singers. I know the words to more country music from the 80s and the 90s then I care to admit.

4. It is commonly known that I loathe veggies. They are bitter to me in a way that screams 'poison' to my tastebuds, especially the ones that are supposed to be sweet. However, due to my father being out of work for much of childhood, and us subsisting on my mother's waitressing, we had a truck garden the likes of which I have not seen in suburbia. Our yard was huge - and the garden took up a goodly portion. This meant I spent summers stealing produce from the truck garden. Turns out I do like some veggies, but they have to be seriously fresh picked and raw. Like, in a "I picked this a minute ago and now I am nomming sort of way. String beans will never touch my lips 'cause they are gross, except when I just snagged one from the vine and it's still sun warm.

3. I grew up in a haunted house. I don't know what haunted it - still not sure if I believe in ghosts or not - but something evil was in that house, and it scared me. To this day, I have trouble with enclosed dark areas because of that house. I tend to be sceptical believer in wierd things because of this - once you have had all of your toys rearranged and some broken while you are sleeping in a house where no one would do that... its hard to not wonder what's out there.

2. I have just a touch of OCD. Enough that I have a ritual for making certain all my car doors are locked, the proper brakes on are, and the light off before leaving. I can't actually walk more than a block away from the car if I don't do this. If you stop me in a chore, and keep me from doing it the way I was going to do it, I can literally be frozen in place for some time as I try to get back on track and can't or frozen as I forget what I was going, and can't move on.. It's not fun, doing it to me is grounds for a very serious fight.

1. When we were in China, we were of the trying new things - I tried pea candy and thankfully realize that carrot candy was right out - and went to the local market. There were strange fruits there, and well, we liked fruit.

So we picked the strangest and biggest one they had. The staff giggled a lot, and it was very expensive (for China, the exchange rate was our friend and for the first time in my life I felt rich) and they kept shaking their heads no and giggling.

We insisted on purchasing it, and named the fruit 'Jack'. We took it home to the apartment that we were staying at - our host was a work study student who had allowed to stay in someone's apartment while they were on holiday - and put it on the counter for breakfast. We puzzled over Jack for a bit, then decided not to cut it open as we didn't have want to use the frig, and well, it had been out at room temperature at the store.

We awoke to a hideous, vile, smell. A smell that could be declared a chemical weapon. We searched the house, and eventually, noses half dead at the smell, traced the smell back to Jack.

Overnight our cute, huge fruit had become the source of the smell of the Bog of Eternal Stench.

Somehow, we decided to cut Jack open and taste the innards.

And that was our second mistake. It tasted and felt like rotting onion pudding.

When we got home, we were able to match a picture of Jack to a picture on the internet.

We had bought a Durian fruit.

It took us days to air out that apartment.

To this today, we reference Jack. No one gets it, but it always makes us giggle.

I have a fondness in my heart for pennies on the ground. My granddaddy died before I was born, but before his death, he told my grandmother that if there's a penny on the ground, he's talking to her from wherever he is. She can't walk very well anymore, so she makes me pick up the pennies we find on our travels now.

5 I love anything by Pixar.
4 I read fast. I read through The Return of the King in one day. And I read through Brian Jacques' Taggerung in one day as well.
3 I hardly ever eat sandwiches as sandwiches. My ideal sandwich is a slice of cheese and two slices of bread, and I always take them apart and eat them separately.
2 I sort M&Ms and Skittles by color before I eat them.
1 I am overly fond of taking pictures of myself with my laptop.