Recently, I have been tagged by two very important people (Katie and Sybil) to post 25 things about me to my Facebook account. As any good English major, I have created a list exceeding that quantity, padded with verbose explanations that will delight and prod your sensibilities as I unfurl the stream of consciousness. Onward to your education in my very core being and to my inward theater of the absurd:
1. When I was a kid, I had a crush on Joanna Kerns (mom on Growing Pains), Julia Duffy (Stephanie on Newhart), and to a lesser extent Judith Light (Angela on Who’s the Boss). Funny that their names all start with J.
2. I have never caught a muskie but intend to remedy that as soon as possible.
3. Snakes are one of my fears, and I have been unlucky enough to have nearly stepped on a blacksnake in Arizona and had an undetermined variety of snake swim into my leg while fly fishing in the Smith River in Montana. And they say white men can’t dance.
4. I once smoked a cigarette in North Korea.
5. I am right-handed. I set up my spinning reels with the handle on the left, my baitcasters have the handle on the right, and my fly reels are set up with the handle on the right. For left-handed people, I recommend the opposite. People who disagree with me and/or have a different practice are wrong and fooling themselves, even if they catch fish with their poorly-chosen setups.
6. I have a fascination with fasteners. I replaced most of the crappy, rusting screws on my Lund boat with stainless steel ones. I hate it when people build things with crappy fasteners. Luckily, I have a mole in the Fastenal organization to feed my addiction.
7. One of my pet peeves is salespeople who know less than me about a product. They should do their homework if they want to sell me something, especially cars & trucks. Recently, a salesman, who works for a dealership I shall not name, misled me (either due to dishonesty or ignorance) about the rear-end gear ratio on my Expedition. I will not repeat the experience. He probably will.
8. I am left-eye dominant and right-handed, which pretty much blows the whole “shoot with both eyes open” thing, except when using non-magnification single-plane sighting apparatus such as a ProPoint. I think it screws up my wing-shooting, but then it may just be an excuse for being a poor shot.
9. I look lithe and statuesque in a tutu but my pirouettes and plies are very flawed. I once appeared on Halloween as a Mexican revolutionary ballerina. The tutu was recycled from a situation arising from betting with Canadians on hockey while drinking Korean soju. Tutus are surprisingly comfortable and practical garments, but I have not tried them in hunting or fishing situations. Yet.
10. I hope that my kids will grow up to be nicer and more tolerant than I am. But still be the warrior-princesses I taught them to be and kick ass when needed.
11. I admire my father for having the unique ability to care very little about possessions. He is nearly a candidate for being a Buddhist monk, as he owns very little in the way of personal stuff. He tends to keep cars for about ten years, has hunted with the same two rifles all of his life, and probably has given away far more than he has kept. I am not my father, as my garage will attest.
12. I have gone through a frightening array of hairstyles including skinhead, perm, ponytail, and all-purpose short haircut. The skinhead was especially frightening because it revealed my obvious scars from two different childhood splitting-open-my-head incidents, which in and of itself should elicit concern for me. You should also know that none of the above coiffures were in fashion when I sported them.
13. I spent a month in Korea several years ago and hung out with Buddhist monks, lecherous businessmen, progressive feminists, exploited immigrant factory laborers, and all kinds of interesting people. I was not able to drive at all during that month, so when I returned it felt very nice to open up my Thunderbird to 120 on the way home from the airport. Freedom, baby, yeah!
14. I have a huge aversion to Dodge pickups and will tell anyone who will listen not to buy them. This is a sickness based on the reality of buying two brand new ones in a row that had severe drivetrain problems. I lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 within months as I found my way back to Ford and vehicular bliss.
15. My favorite brands of random things include: Tires—BF Goodrich/Michelin, Vehicles—Ford, Bows—Mathews, Spinning Reels—Shimano, and Power Tools—Milwaukee, but they all make individual products that suck, so I try not to be a brand junkie. Awareness, my friends, awareness.
16. My favorite NASCAR driver is Matt Kenseth. I think Roush should be allowed to keep five teams. I think Earnhardt Ganassi will be a joke in the coming year and Teresa E. deserves it. I wish the Bass Pro Shops sponsorship would shift to Ryan Newman. If you disagree with me, you’re wrong. Go put on your Juan Pablo Montoya pajamas and pout, but don’t bother me while my fantasy team is winning.
17. I like to be right and spend a fair amount of effort making sure that I’m consistently right. “Right, right. You’re bloody-well right. You got a bloody right to say…” If you know the song lyrics I just quoted, you know what plays in my head.
18. I am shy in public situations overloaded with people but one-on-one you can’t shut me up. And I am prone to blogorhhea.
19. Although I am a shy, withering flower, I was a two-term faculty senate president because I had a lot of people fooled (or they were just glad someone else was willing to go to management team meetings). I always fantasized about abruptly yelling “Objection!” in one of those meetings and pounding my shoe on the table.
20. I have written and published some poetry, but that doesn’t make me a hippie. Or even an uppity mountain hippie.*
*words stolen from Buster Wants to Fish, the best Internet brodown ashram of fishing hippies ever!
21. Unlike the growing contingent of Christian bashers, I feel that my Catholicism is much more freeing than constraining. Eat that, hippies.
22. I am not really a hippie-hater but I like saying “Eat that, hippies,” (maybe because I think hippies need to eat better—they’re so skinny). My sister is somewhat of a hippie. I used to have a hippie and a cop for siblings, an interesting combination on both ends of the spectrum of fascism, but the cop has a more respectable job now that doesn’t involve throwing people in the back of cars like luggage.
23. I believe that a growing cadre of liberals (i.e. Nancy Pelosi) are the new fascists, as brown is the new black. Tolerance begins when you open your mouth, even if it is really tight from all of your Californified plastic surgeries. I should read my own words.
24. My wife’s car is called Pete because it’s a PT Cruiser and I’m so brilliantly original. Everyone in our family now talks to Pete. Pathologists would understand this progression.
25. I believe that most people impair themselves far too much with negative self-messages and resistance to reality. The remedy is self-awareness but most of us don’t tune into ourselves worth a dang, thus acting on a false sense of who we are. Stop it!
26. My favorite mythological character (I teach mythology, along with technical writing and composition) is Pandora, a beautiful figure unleashed on humanity, carrying a box of afflictions, with hope hiding in there as well. Microcosm of the human condition, I say. However, hope is more than a word on a poster. <– subtle political message. Eat that, hippies.
If you have reached this point, you know more about me than almost anyone, and you can go further your knowledge of the human condition by looking up an article on the Large Hadron Collider, or get a coffee at the Starbucks-that-used-to-be-a-Starbucks-but-now-is-something-else-because-Starbucks-tanked-due-to-the-economy-and-closed-a-bunch-of-stores. Or you can go read about cemeteries that are surrounded by Home Depot parking lots. Bye bye.
