Yesterday, Maggi listed me among those to whom she passed the webquery about “Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me,” and in the message she sent me about the post, she allowed that I might be cranky about such phenomena — but she was very polite about giving me an escape clause, so I’ll respond by not taking advantage of that offer.
(At this point, Margaret rolls her eyes and wonders how much more there is to know about me about which I haven’t already offered too much information online, and with good reason.)
One, echoing Maggi’s fourth point — I too am inordinately prone to vertigo; I have a hard time watching movie scenes involving heights, and I even get edgy playing Warcraft when my character is on a precipice. This affords my offspring frequent opportunities to fleer and jape at me as I cower in my seat at the movie theater, or press myself back against the couch while watching a DVD at home.
Two, I was once a bowler, both in a Sunday family “league” (a dozen or so friends and neighbors who got together every week to roll a few frames) and in the Taylor Allderdice Bowling League (wherein I headed a team whose name I don’t remember, though I recall getting the Captain Kirk Award at the end of the season, for “valiant captain, incompetent crew” because although I maintained the second-highest average in the league, the rest of my team dredged the bottom of the league, and got worse every week, so that even our handicap didn’t help us). And I was second board on the high school chess team one year, second to Dennis Fischman.
Three (I should find something more recent to mention), I started working in computer graphics in 1980 or ’81, with a PDP-11 (I think it was a PDP-11; by the way, I am not in the picture to which I linked, nor did I work with anyone who looked like either of those characters) the size of two phone booths and a custom-built camera the size of another booth.
Four (even more recent), ummm, I have a particularly heightened sensitivity to betrayal of trust — the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Bilbo tries to reclaim the Ring from Frodo knots my viscera.
Five, the first car I drove was a rusty white Toyota pick-up truck handed down from my dad in 1978. One particularly snowy day, John Markert and some accomplices not only filled in the cargo area, but went on to bury the entire vehicle in a monumental pyramid of snow. When Michael Cartwright found out that I drove a pick-up truck in college, he said “You were postmodern even back then!” but I’m not sure what he meant by that. Since then I’ve driven a Dodge Colt, a Mazda 626, a Toyota Tercel wagon, a Dodge Grand Caravan, and our present Subaru Outback. Of these, only the Tercel was bought new.
I don’ usually tag other people for this sort of thing, especially if it means extracting from them more personal information than they have already offered the whole online universe and its permanent memory. If, however, you think I might have tagged you if I’d been so inclined, by all means post a list of five and cite me as the person who tagged you. I won’t deny it.
Mom says:
Gee, even I am learning things I didn’t know! xx, Mom