Sunday, October 30, 2005

Weird and random facts

Pkchukiss has hit me with a meme, and it's just as well because I have caught a cold and was having trouble coming up with something to write about today that wasn't a great big moan about how unfair life is.

Here is the meme:

Rules of the game: Post 5 Weird and Random Facts about yourself, then at the end list the names of 5 people who are next in line to do this.

Weird and random is hard, but I've taken it to mean the first five things I think of. That's random, right? Irrelevant, anyway.

Here goes:

1. I am the Missing Link.

When I was ten a woman who was knitting a sweater for me took my measurements, and while she was doing this she chatted with my mother. After she'd finished she looked at the numbers she'd written and did a double-take.

"I shouldn't talk when I'm doing this," she laughed. "I've made a mistake. Your arms can't possibly be that long. Twenty-one inches? A little thing like you?" She scoffed at herself. "Sixteen, more like!"

She measured again. My arms were, indeed, twenty-one inches long, and the theory of evolution gained instant follower.

2. I have no ambition. I do not want to be anyone, or do anything in particular. Just being is enough for me, and doing whatever I'm doing well.

3. My father had that balding pattern where his hair receded at the sides and he was left with a vertical strip of hair down his forehead. When I was about seven I asked him why it was like that, and he told me it was a special hairstyle for clever people, and I BELIEVED HIM. For years.

4. When I was six I was a fast reader, and one day my cousin commented on how quickly my eyes moved back and forth as I was reading. For about an hour after he said this I read the same paragraph over and over, because I kept noticing my eyes and losing the plot, and for weeks afterwards his words would come back to me at odd moments and I would lose track of what I was reading. It was INSANELY IRRITATING, and I thought he'd done it deliberately because I would rather read than play with him. (This is still true, incidentally.)

5. When I was four my brother told me that if I was wearing gumboots (rubber boots) the electric fence would not give me a shock, and I believed him and touched the electric fence. I got a shock. I'm fairly sure he was right and the gumboots were at fault, but I am still mad at him for laughing. It wasn't very nice.

I don't know who to tag. How about the first five commenters?

5 comments:

BerlinBear said...

Excellent. I'll do it. I always thought the shocks on electric fences were kinda fun actually. I'll post a link when I've done it (tonight hopefully).

Faerunner said...

The electric fence shocks I got were nothing I wanted to repeat but they never hurt enough to make me afraid of the fences... in fact, there were times I'd touch the fence just to prove it was still on. :P

Maybe that explains something...

And I'm stealing a tag for this meme, because it looks like fun :)

Badaunt said...

How come everybody except me thinks that electric fence shocks are fun? FUN? Did my dad use higher voltage than in the electric fences you've encountered, I wonder? I got knocked off a gate once, when I grabbed the wire over my head to keep my balance. This was, of course, the electric fence, which went over the gate. I ended up flat on my back on the ground, and thought someone had hit me violently on the head. There was nothing fun about it AT ALL.

I'm looking forward to reading your weird and random facts, though!

Anonymous said...

I love the one about your dad. :-) My own dad is hairless smack in the middle top of his head. He used to tell me it was because his brain was too powerful for hair to grow atop it.

I believed him, too.

Still do, I think...

BerlinBear said...

There, it's finally done. (See trackbacks)