Falling in line with the rest of the Facebooksters…
25 Random Things About Me, And I Could Care Less If You Actually Do This If You’re Tagged
1. This post is being WordPressed but gets fed into Facebook via RSS. After that, I will log onto Facebook and tag people on the cross-post. This is so that it stays on my main blog forever, because I never look at my Facebook notes, except to read comments, because everyone comments there instead of on my real blog.
2. I wrote this over the course of a few days, in order to meet my usual standards of thoughtfulness, thoroughness, randomness, interest, and entertainment. It usually takes me a couple hours to write a good blog post, which is why I haven’t really gotten back into it since college.
3. When I was a little kid, Doreen and I got baby chicks for some reason. I named mine after my best friend, Jonas, but it died within a week. (Doreen’s, more-creatively-named Chickadee, lived for many years and lived to adulthood, until one day she was mauled by the neighbor’s dog or cat. Chickadee, not Doreen.)
4. There was a period spanning 7th to 9th grade in which I gave unusually creative oral presentations at school. There was a LEGO remake of Star Wars for a video group project in geometry. Four of us made a pop-culture parody video (where we spoofed multiple TV shows) for social studies (topic: overpopulation). I interacted with a recorded on-screen version of myself, even “magically” passing items back and forth through the TV, for a solo presentation in that same class (topic: wind energy). I gave a book report entirely in a British accent, in men’s and women’s voices, for literature. And in science I performed a rap about Francium. (”My element is Francium, its symbol FR / the atomic number’s 87, that’s not bizarre / it’s the densest and heaviest alkali metal / and its radioactivity keeps it unsettled…”)
5. A group of four friends and I got in trouble in second grade for illegal sale of wares. Keeping clean desks was the fad (well, it was just fun to mark up the desk with #2 pencils and then wiping it off). So some of us got together to create the ultimate soap (a homemade concoction of other soaps, dishwasher fluids, detergents, and shampoos). We mixed it all up and came up with a name: Supercleaner! Then we sold it to our classmates for 25 cents per vial (old film canisters). We even appointed an accountant, who kept our profits in an empty Crayola box hidden inside his desk. Eventually the teachers found out, and we had to stay in at recess to clean EVERYONE’S desks. I guess the punishment fit the crime.
I bet they secretly were delighted in the idea of us being young entrepreneurs. Also, they stole our hard-earned money.
6. Near the time I first started going to school, either the beginning of kindergarten or first grade, I thought I was white. The conversation reportedly went something like this:
Mom: How was your first day at school?
Me: Everybody’s WHITE!
Mom: But what about Wesley? [The one black kid]
Me: He’s white TOO!!
Mom: Oh really? What about you?
Me: And I’M WHITE TOO!!!
See what school does, kids? It brainwashes you. And that is why I’m racist.
7. I actually am mostly racist towards Chinese people. I think it’s because I know them too well. And because they excuse their personal deficiencies with their race. For example…
8. I’m a very punctual person. I loathe the idea of “Chinese time”. But sometimes I am late. And I can’t believe I’m revealing this secret, which I’ve only ever told two people… Okay, here it is: if I’m late to something, it’s a sure sign that I don’t want to be there. I’m punctual by nature. Lateness is actually a sign of my contempt for having to be there. Lateness is me sticking it to you.
The only exception is if I’m arriving with someone. So if I show up late to something, it’s either because I don’t want to be there, or it’s the other person’s fault. If I call in advance to tell the person in charge that I’ll be late, it’s because someone is making me late and because I really want to be there. Guaranteed. If I’m late and didn’t call you… now you know why.
9. My mom forced me to sing on worship team the very first time. It was in early high school, and I really did not want to be a part of it, and could not believe she volunteered my availability and that I did not have a choice! I actually threw a tantrum and pleaded and begged, and yes, I even cried, for her to call them back and let me off the hook. I was mad at her for a while after that. God had other plans!
10. Contrary to most young people, I firmly believe that purely platonic inter-gender friendships are possible and have at least one friendship that proves it.
11. Doreen and I used to keep written lists of things the other person mistakenly said, so we could tease each other about them later. (”Before it did you did?”)
12. In college, I took an upper-division linguistics course that is required for every linguistics undergrad. Of course, as a computer science student, I took it merely as an elective. There is a term paper that every student has to write for that class, which means that probably every linguistics graduate from UCLA within the last decade has written that paper. My professor, Bruce (who supplies the voice of that name for the text-to-speech synthesis feature in the Mac OS), claimed that my analysis of Hungarian phonemes was the best paper to pass through the linguistics department in the last five years. Doreen (being a real linguistics major, and having passed through that class recently) despised me for it.
13. I am probably the proudest person imaginable. Saving this until point #13 is an example of my false humility, because this is the absolute first thing I thought of about myself but didn’t want it to be at the top.
14. I approach trust and respect in exact opposite ways. When I meet you for the first time, I trust you 100% until you break that trust. But also when I meet you, I have absolutely zero respect for you until you earn it. I guess the first part is me being naive and the second part is me being prideful. Both get me into tough situations.
15. People wrongly dislike me for being “just too talented at everything.” I’m not… the trick is that I know my strengths and weaknesses, and I play to my strengths. For example, you won’t catch me playing sports.
16. Some people think I’m a crazy driver, not because of speed, recklessness, or aggressiveness, but because of agility. It was Peter Dang who taught me to know your car’s dimensions. That way you know exactly what you can and cannot do, or where you can or cannot go. While parallel parking, in narrow lanes, or making a 3-point turn, I’ll get a lot closer to other cars, curbs, and walls than most other drivers are comfortable with, but know that it’s still clear and safe. (So for the same reason, there are other passengers who say I’m the safest driver they know). Even my driving examiner commented, “You have fast hands!”
17. In a related thought, I have always wanted to be a stunt driver.
18. I’m actually uncomfortable writing this post. In conversation, I always redirect the topic to the other person. And most people like to talk about themselves. That’s why most people don’t know much about me. It’s not because I’m a quiet or reserved person, it’s because I’ll make you talk about yourself instead of me.
19. I used to be a worry wart, all through middle school. Stress and anxiety would keep me up at night, and I’d always be scared of things going wrong. I don’t think there was a day that I didn’t go to sleep worrying about something for the next day. Then one day I read Matthew 6, and I never was anxious after that. In fact, by the end of high school I could not be more chill. College friends comment they have never seen me stressed.
20. My college roommate, Daniel, and I used to have night raves in our dorm room during finals week. Yes, just the two of us. This involved me busting out my black light (from Lynnette), strobing the room lights and flashlights manually, and pumping techno remixes of classical music (and, on one occasion, The Vienna Boys’ Choir Goes Pop. Have you heard them sing the Backstreet Boys’ “Get Down”?!?).
21. We also enjoyed watching infomercials late at night. We got VERY good at appraising infomercials. That is, now if we see a new infomercial for the first time, we’re able to say “that thing’s probably 4 payments of $39.99. But I bet they’ll slash one payment and throw in an extra blade for free.” And we’ll be right.
22. I use a different password for every online account. So I have HUNDREDS of different passwords, all a combination of over eight numbers and letters (uppercase and lowercase). How do I remember them all? I don’t. I generate them using a secret formula based on the name of the web service or website, so there’s no need to memorize it, I just apply that formula every time I need to log in somewhere.
23. I peel bananas from the “wrong” end… which is really the top, because bananas grow upside-down. The reason I do is because I despise the little black bit at the end, so if you peel from that side, you can pinch it off at the beginning. Of course, people always tell me you can peel it like a “normal” person and just pinch off the black part at the end, but I like my last bite to not have the tip ripped off.
24. I type primarily using the Dvorak keyboard layout. I am now a snail using QWERTY. People find my computer unusable because while I type on a normal keyboard, it’s remapped by Windows to use Dvorak. Visitors often say “I think you have a virus, James… your keyboard isn’t typing the right letters!”
25. Over the last three days as I put this list together, I came up with a couple of really good ones with hilarious stories behind them. Both times I was not at a computer and so I did not write them down, and now I’ve forgotten. At least this saves me a few good stories to tell you in person, though. It would have been a shame to exhaust them all here.
