And now, in a break from your regularly scheduled programming, I've been tagged by katiedoyle for this short little meme. Not one to ignore a tag, I'll probably manage to turn it into a long explanation, but, if you read me as often as I think you do, you should know this already. I am also going to try to go the extra mile and talk about things I don't think I have here before.
Figure 8
First, THE RULES:
1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don�t forget to leave them a comment telling them they�re tagged, and to read your blog.
Those are the rules, only I am a casual rule-breaker and won't tag anyone else. Mostly because I don't really have eight people to tag. I have maybe five. However, if you're reading this and want to give it a go, you will warm the cockles of my little heart. Do it for the cockles.
Commencing countdown.
1. When I was younger, I used to experience these sensations as though everything in the world was happening too slowly. The specific time I remember is when I was six or seven and I was brushing my teeth. I was brushing along as usual and suddenly a little voice in my head started to say, "No! No! This is all too slow! You should go faster. You need to go faster. Everything is too slow. Faster, faster, faster!"
I was loathe to respond to this, because, like I said, I wasn't brushing my teeth any slower than usual. It was a funny sort of conflicted feeling. It didn't exactly give me goosebumps, but more of a very light tingle. I can recall this having happened not frequently, but on and off when I was younger. At some point, it stopped happening, but I don't know when. I have no idea what it was, and it didn't seem to have any correlation to any other activity. If I had to describe what I thought being on speed must be like, that's what I would describe.
2. I went spelunking the summer after sixth grade for a science summer day camp. The day camp was probably a week long where we learned about caves and cave safety and ended with a trip to pretty much the only caves in the state. It was fantastic. If I ever had a house with a cave on the property, I would probably spend more time in the cave than the house. Sadly, I don't like cave tours, and currently live in a state with no open caves, so it's not like I get a lot of chance to exercise the interest.
3. I really hate to be wet. I went white water rafting with a group once in a trip to Montana. Everyone else was pretty much wearing swim suits, and I wore a raincoat and rainpants. I may've worn my waterproof hiking boots as well, but I can't recall now. I don't mind swimming and boating and water-related activities, but I hate being wet and cold and drippy afterwards.
4. Frequently, I will look in the mirror and be shocked to discover that's what I actually look like. My internal image of myself is quite different from how I actually look. My internal self is lithe and has a thinner, more oblong face with highly arched brows. I'm taller, and my shoulders aren't so broad. (My father once said that I could've been a decent halfback. Thanks, Dad.) Most simply, I think I look like all the women in the Waterhouse paintings.
The funny thing is, I don't actively wish to look like my internal image, because in spite of copious evidence to the contrary, some part of me continually believes that I DO look like that. I've passed by mirrors and had to double-take because I forgot what I looked like.
5. I am picky about Christmas music. Don't get me wrong, I love the stuff, I'll play it in June if I get half a chance, I'm listening to Mele Kalikimaka right now, but I won't listen to most of those "we play Christmas music from Halloween to New Year's" stations because they tend to play a wider variety of music than I want to hear. I tend to prefer your standard Bing Crosby/Nat King Cole. I don't even like Sinatra's versions, as a rule.
6. I have never seen Casablanca, Citizen Kane, any James Bond, Rocky, or The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, Fight Club, Singing in the Rain, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, The Graduate, Some Like it Hot, or The Blob. There are many more classic movies I haven't seen, but these are the ones I hear about the most often with no point of referance. Some of them, I suspect, are actually the Moby Dick's of the film industry, but given that I can't read Melville in two hours, they probably still get more time.
7. I have never been able to "empty my mind". We did an exercise in acting class where we were supposed to concentrate on a lit candle in our perfectly dark theatre (and if you know what darkness can be in a theatre, you know that's seriously dark). Anyway, the idea was that if we strayed from concentrating on the candle, we should just tell our minds to return to it.
So, there I am, looking at this candle and trying to experience it, but I'm thinking of how candles are made and the summer camp I went to where we made dip candles and, hey, CANDLE. But, through all that, I was concious of an entirely seperate line of thought underneath the candle repetitions that was trying to work out how sucessful my experiencing was actually going for me and whether there might not be better ways to clear my mind and then both lines of thought would end converging and going someplace else until I had to go back to the candle, which I was still fervently watching.
In fact, all that episode did for me was make me MORE aware of these extra thought processes that are right now typing this, lip synching to Wig in a Box, remembering Friend Sam's project about Hedwig and the Angry Inch and playing back several scenes from the film, and all this manages to go on at the same time. If you're not thinking about anything, what is going on in your mind? The Boy says he frequently thinks about nothing, and I don't know how he manages it.
8. I can't sight read music. Yes, I can read music, I can tell you keys and tempos and notes and holds, but I can't look at any sheet of music and have any real concept of what the piece actually sounds like. I have to hear it first. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to hear a piece of music and play it. I've worked out five finger versions of several television themes over the years (the most interesting one is Red Dwarf), but only after significant trial and error.
Well, there you go. Eight things you probably couldn't even have guessed about me.