5 Things

I've been memed!

Man, coming up with five things about myself that I don't think I've already shared on a blog somewhere is hard. An attempt:

1. I used to be Candy Claus for the local chapter of the American Lung Association when I was in high school. I had to go to all of the rural towns in my county, dress up in a silly costume with greasepaint, and march in their holiday parades handing out Christmas Seals. Christmas Seals: not as big of a hit as Mardi Gras beads.

2. When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to daydream was that a bunch of my friends and I got locked in a house or lab or something and sealed off from the rest of the world, with our lives and interactions observed by scientists through one-way mirrors and video cameras. I so deserve royalties from Big Brother.

3. I was the biggest New Kids On The Block fan. I had a shrine of posters that took up an entire wall in the basement. My friend P. and I would ride our bikes up to Rite Aid every weekend, get the newest issues of Teen Beat or whatever, and then spend hours making the difficult decision of which new pictures had to go up on the wall and which they would replace, weighing careful considerations like whether it we should replace this picture of Donny with a better picture of Joey or whether it was better to keep the picture of Donny, even though it wasn't as good, at the risk of the wall becoming too Joey-centric.

4. I've been online for what seems like forever. We were on Q-Link when I was really little, using one of those modems where you had to put the phone into two cups. When I was in junior high, some creepy dude tried to pick me up in a chat room and I tore him a new one so bad that I got TOS'd and my whole family banned. For that, I was grounded the entire summer. I also had to write a 10 page paper on why what I did was wrong.

5. I used to earn extra money in high school by grading psychological tests. I became fascinated by the exams and would take them over and over to see if I could figure them out and became quite good at manipulating them. Grading tests wasn't a full-time job, so one summer I applied to work at Best Buy-type place, too. In order to get the job, I had to take a psychological test that measured how honest I was and how likely I was to shoplift or embezzle. I knew I could totally pwn this test if I wanted but figured that manipulating an honesty test would be bad karma so I answered truthfully. I failed.

I tag Tia (the meme-lover), Weiner, Wolfson, Teofilo, and...drumroll...SomeCallMeTim, in comments. (Muahahahaha.)

Comments

[Matt Weiner]

So how did you explain that refusing to be picked up by a creepy internet dude was wrong? Did you have to write "I will not tempt potential sinners with my feminine wickedness" 100 times?

[ac]

A guy from my high school got into a fist-fight with Donny Wahlberg on an airplane. The resulting law suit paid for his college education.

[standpipe b]

Boy band.

[standpipe b]

I want to buy them all ice cream cups with little wooden spoons. Especially the one below-left. He gets a nickel, too.

[standpipe b]

The answer is, too Joey-centric.

[standpipe b]

This is not the Nutty Buddy of my youth.

[My Alter Ego]

Nor mine, standpipe, nor mine.

[Matt Weiner]

So for one reason and another I don't want to do this at my own blog, but I can do it here.

[pro forma remark that most people don't know me at all]

1. Those of you who read my blog comments (or, ahem, my blog) probably have heard of the improvisational non-musical band I was in. But you probably don't know that we played in public at least twenty or thirty times, sometimes in other states (to which we had been invited) and occasionally getting paid! And this without me really being able to play an instrument. One time we were playing an art opening whose theme was supposed to be "extremeness" or something like that, and I left a speaker feeding back and went off to another room to play acoustic guitar with some of the other people who were there. Before too long one of the professors (it was an art faculty exhibit) asked me to turn it off. I was very proud of having out-extremed them. I wound up turning the feedback off just as one of my bandmates sat down to play the saw along with it.

2. I used to watch these Beatles cartoons religiously. Like every day, after school. In fact (this may be known) I listened to almost nothing but the Beatles till I was ten or so, from the time I started listening to music at all.

3a. Jeez, even I had forgotten that I once hosted a 44-comment thread on opening lines to albums. (Nice call on the Annette Peacock, Flannery!) I think it was an Ezsterlanche. Yes, this is lame. Let it stand in for the things that people don't know because they're secrets.

3b. Less lame: There was a period of about three or four years, as an adult, that I didn't get on an airplane.

4. I once appeared on a (possibly local) edition of Candid Camera, though I didn't know about it till it aired. I was looking at the TV in a bar, and I thought, "That guy has a purple sweatshirt that's a lot like mine." Then I realized it was me, in the produce section of the local Giant Eagle. I was off to the side, the central figure was someone else who had presumably been pranked in some way, but I don't know what. It cut to a commercial before I could get anyone else to look.

5. Since doing this -- my first meme, such as it was -- I've visited five more states.

3. In fact

[Matt Weiner]

Woops, editing error on the last paragraph. I was going to make the last one "IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DZ" but I didn't.

[teofilo]

Anyone want to take bets on how long until Tim shows up and is all, "oh, wow, I guess I didn't read all the way to the end of the post"?

[SomeCallMeTim]

In short order:

1. Shortly after college, when I was visiting home, my mother pulled me aside. Looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, she told me that she'd seen a news program about how hard it was for gay people to live happy lives because of the trauma to family life, and that it was fine with her if I was gay, and that she would absolutely still love me. I was, at the time, working up the nerve to tell her that my girlfriend and I had decided to start living together--or as I expected her to have it, "in sin."

2. My favorite remembered movie is, "Lady and the Tramp." I say "remembered" because I am unwilling to watch it again, afraid that the magic won't be there.

3. I went about half of the way through setting up a blogger blog, got irritated, and quit. I don't really know how people who blog keep up with it--I'm having trouble come up with five things in comments.

4. The first time I can remember wanting to impress a girl and knowing that that was what I wanted to do, I swore profusely. I think I was ten. Until that time, I'm not I'd sworn once in my life (at eight) on the playground and got caught at it. The girl, who was fourteen, was not impressed. In fact, I caught hell about it from people who knew the both of us even a decade later. And I still feel embarrassed about the whole thing.

5. Cheating, I suppose, but 'tis the season: I've been immoderately lucky in life, in uncountable ways, but particularly in my family and friends.

[ogged]

1 is awesome, SCMT.

[Becks]

Tim! Number 1 is indeed awesome. Something similar happened to my dad when he was about 20 -- my great-grandmother pulled him aside and asked him if he was "one of those 'funny' boys".

[ben wolfson]

I'll just do this here too.

1. I was once arrested for possession of a dangerous weapon … in an airport.

2. I sing in the shower if I think no one can hear me.

3. I listened to almost no music at all, and certainly no popular music, until I was around 17, which has given me a completely fucked up sense of the chronology of rock in the 90s.

4. I had a tumor removed from my right ear when I was three, and pneumonia in both lungs when I was two. (I asked my mom about which ear, etc, and she busted out an old baby journal thing—apparently when I was born I cried out with good volume, tone, and breath control—I shoulda been a singer after all.)

5. I wore more or less the same thing every day for three or four years (grey t-shirt, jeans). Even in college people took me to task for not wearing any color. (One guy occasionally remonstrated with me for not being able to decide if I were goth or not, or wearing too much black despite not being goth, or something like that.)

[Matt F]

Tim's #1 happened to me last year, from my mom. Complete with reassurances that "it's ok if you are". It was an awkward moment.

[Becks]

What was the weapon, Ben? (Or are you about to whip off your shirt and say "these guns!"?)

[Armsmasher]

Timbot's #1 illustrates an important truth: It's hard to break it to your parents that you're straight.

[eb]

Tim's 1 happened to me when I was 19, except for the girlfriend part.

[ben wolfson]

I've got to have some secrets, Becks.