50 Things on the way to 45A little while back I saw a couple "50 Things about me" lists, from Tammy - where it started- to Opus and L.C. among others. At first I had little interest in doing it, but with a 45th birthday set to rise just before Jesus does I gave it a second thought, a quick try and most of it came tumbling out. It dropped to a trickle when I had 18 spots still open, but they eventually filled in. I tossed them randomly into open spots on a numbered list. Once on the list I didn't remove anything, and once the last spot was filled up this went on the site, warts and all.
I've tried to keep them all my own, though in several cases I read items on those other lists and thought that covered me, too, so in they went.
If leaving big things off the list is cheating, then I've certainly cheated. However few people come through here, no place on the Internet is private and everyone has enemies or has simply run afoul of cretins who wish them harm as sheer recreation.
There is no hierarchy to the items on the list, though there are a few chains of thought.
1. I take pictures in almost equal measure to preserve history and to avoid being in the shot.
2. I've never grown to like the taste of coffee, though good coffee smells wonderful.
3. I was staggeringly, falling down and then violently ill drunk once. I was eleven. That appears to have been an innoculation that's kept it from ever happening again. I suppose I have my cousins to thank for that, since they were the ones slipping greater amounts of Southern Comfort into my wine with each refill.
4. As an adult, a little alcohol goes a long way for me. I suspect the effect is largely psychosomatic.
5. I have never ridden a horse but I have ridden an elephant.
6. I was 24 before my arm was sufficiently twisted to get a driver's license.
7. Every movie I saw before the age of 24 was shown in theaters that no longer exist.
8. There's something both horrifying and surreal about how many buildings I've been in which no longer exist. It makes one feel... unnaturally persistent.
9. No, I'm not an arsonist nor am I reckless with explosives.
10. If procrastination were a religion I'd be a Cardinal and often mentioned in speculative short lists whenever the Pope's health came into question.
11. I'm prone to self-sabotage. While I've gotten better about fighting it, traditionally one of the best ways to assure I won't do something is to get me to tell people I'm going to do it.
12. My favorite hours are between midnight and 4am, as with few exceptions they feel safely apart from time, circumstance and the drudgery of reality. It's rather like those few minutes when one's in the shower. Anything seems possible. (Reality's generally waiting just beyond the sunrise or the bathroom door to deliver a kick to the teeth, though, and get things back in line.)
13. My now 16 year old son and I have for more than a year now had the same shoe size. (The same as this number.)
14. I'm an excellent improvisational cook. I almost routinely go from raw and/or frozen components to a rounded meal for four in less than an hour.
15. I have never danced.
16. I've had a car sputter, slow down and die only to find that a pool of orange flame needed to be put out in front of the engine block.
17. I catch myself laughing at jokes I heard 30 years ago. Some of them I didn't laugh at when I first heard them.
18. Associated with the previous point: I've gotten successfully through many a guilty situation because I often don't live in the present, and so am not actively listening to what someone's saying to me despite projecting a convincing appearance that the speaker has my undivided attention. I blame a combination of a father who was a naval officer and being sent to Catholic School. Appearance uber alles. I'll eventually process the information, be it a few seconds, days, months or years later. My subconscious does the processing and prioritizes it after a fashion.
19. Somewhat related to the previous point: I often ask a question and then not listen to the answer. I'm working on it, I'm working on it...
20. I am extremely non-competitive. Anything resembling trash talk comes out and my interest in playing a game drops to nearly nil.
21. I don't like to lose, but I seldom feel truly comfortable winning; it feels rude.
22. Except for a span of a year in the late 1990s, I've been collecting and reading comic books roughly since 1968.
23. I haven't had the time to organize and inventory my collection in decades. Cats, kids and space have also all gotten in the way.
24. I'm terrible with remembering the names of people I've met - even people I was around almost daily for months or even years, though I'm generally aces at remembering character names from stories I read 30 years ago.
25. The reason I'm terrible at remembering the names of actual people in my life? I seldom use people's names when speaking to them.
26. The reason I seldom use people's names when speaking to them? There's something that seems inherently rude about it, akin to pointing a finger or shining a spotlight in someone's face. I don't know... this goes back to early childhood. Maybe I was a demon in a former life and I remember the terrible power of having one's name known.
27. I have tasted beer from pale to dark, even running through the line of taps at an English pub (The Dick Turpin in Bedfordshire) and it all tastes like variations on the same bitter swill to me. I happily leave it to those who for some reason enjoy it.
28. I'm a sucker for apocalyptic tales, but it's generally a let-down if there's something at the end to "save" things and begin to turn the course of human events back towards pre-apocalypse normalcy.
29. In the years before the time and schedule predations of adulthood took hold, I used to casually and routinely walk 5, 10 or more miles to get where I wanted to go. The demands of modern, Western-world, adult living make wrecks of us.
30. Unless my sinuses are clogged or very dry I can smell fresh blood.
31. I haven't seen my father since I was 10, though we've corresponded a few times in the past decade.
32. I broke my arm when I was 7. My hand got caught in a chain link fence just before I flipped over the top. I don't remember pain, just panic as I raised my arm to see my hand facing the wrong direction. The things my poor mother had to put up with...
33. I was born in Rome, Italy. My sisters were born in Panama. My younger brother was rooked: he was born in Rhode Island.
34. I've had a front tire blow out while I was doing better than 85 in the fast lane of the PA Turnpike. I needed to replace the rim along with the tire - the latter having been reduced to evil-smelling shreds and a great gout of smoke - but other than that man & machine were unharmed.
35. If given the choice between the powers of invisibility and flight, eight times out of ten I'd choose invisibility.
36. If given a choice of any super power it would be the ability to heal and rejuvenate at will, with the stipulation that I could also use it on myself.
37. I would dearly love to have enough money to put "Money can't buy happiness" to a proper test.
38. There are very, very few days I wake up eager to face the day.
39. Most years I casually start Christmas shopping well before the end of summer.
40. Deep down I believe that joy refreshes the emotional nerve endings so that the next bad thing will really hurt.
41. Deep down I believe that for me, at least, hubris attracts disaster.
42. I do not believe in a universal solution to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. It's too much a personal, subjective thing.
43. When I was twelve I came within half an inch of having my legs shattered by the sweep of an inadvertently-formed catapault back in the woods of upstate Pennsylvania.
44. I do not believe in God, and I disbelieve the statement "There are no atheists in fox holes." I once held the hand of someone close to me who I had every reason to believe was about to die. I did not pray. (She lived anyway, btw.) Any God that would demand worship and praise and might grant favors accordingly is far too human to be Supreme, and damned frightening on top of it all. Sounds far more like Zeus or even Satan to me.
45. My 30th birthday passed without any of the popularized wrenching angst, though my 40th stung a little. Unless life's taken a major upswing by my 50th I suspect it'll crush me to the mat. If I start eyeing little red sports cars as that day approaches I hope I can count on a friend to euthenize me.
46. The woman I married (just over 6 years later) was a blind date. This is not to imply she is sight-impaired nor a piece of candied fruit, though I am not discounting either of those possibilities.
47. The first movie we saw on our first date was Halloween. (Honestly, it was the best choice at the moment.)
48. Both of my children were born prematurely. We attribute that largely to my planting seeds for kids who'll be adults well over 6' tall in a 5' 5" Polish incubator.
49. If I had to choose between living in the mountains or at the shore I'd choose the mountains.
50. One of my subtle fears is that my last thought before dying will be my finally realizing what I really wanted to be when I grew up.
Comments
First, Happy early birthday!! I hope the entire weekend is a good one for you!
And, while I won't go into great detail (I may in email, I haven't decided...;), there are a couple things (in no particular order) that I just CAN'T let lie...
I TOTALLY hate being in the picture, too. But I'm a lousy photographer. It's a curse, I tell you!
That we share that coffee thing was news, but the car fire one? It's bound for a Flashback Friday, for me. It's an experience, huh?
I used to be much better at remembering people's names, but as I've gotten older, it's failing me. I find that when I run into people I previously worked with daily for years, I'm just lost. Interestingly, on one of your subsequent points, I don't find it rude to call people by their names to their face, but my ex does. And it infuriates him. Just...interesting.
I suspect everyone would like to join you on #37. And while I'd love to have more money, that's a lesson I've already learned vicariously.
And, as for your #40, I have to say that bad things happen to make you appreciate the good things (and probably vice versa), but I can't ever say I've had the feeling that it was to make the next bad thing hurt more.
Is it a coincidence that your birthday musings are #45? For what it's worth, my experiences there are similar and I'm expecting an emotional smack-down on my 50th as well.
My ex and I met on a blind date. I refused to meet him about a half dozen times. My experience with blind dates prior to that had been pretty bad.
6' preemies sounds very, very strange to me.
I love the mountains far more than the shore as well. When you get that vacation villa, let me know.
Thanks for doing this, Mike. I never expected you would, but am pleased to know a little more about you than I did yesterday. And that's always a good thing. (And the plug is nice, too!)
But it seems a great deal like work.
Unpaid work, at that.
I was trying to remember the name of the Tom Cruise character in COLOR OF MONEY for several minutes last night. I still can't remember his girlfriend's name, or the Paul Newman character's name, although they'll come back to me. But I finally got the Tom Cruise character's name by focusing on the shirt he wears when working for the toy store -- VINCE.
Oh, the girlfriend's name is Carmen. And the Paul Newman character is... um... yeah... "Fast" Eddie Felsen. Okay. And the coke snorting pool hustler played by... um... John Turturo, that's it... is Julian.
But now I'm trying to remember the names of the two characters in "The Cold Equations" and I can't.
Well. That sucks.
Isn't this unusual for an American?
And I'm usually too lazy to go online for it.
It's been two weeks!
Thanks for the then-early birthday wishes!
I'm sure someone has a good car fire tale - one where it was welcome - but as I'm sure was the case for you it was a major crimp in the day and month. We did once have a car being totalled be an excellent thing, though. It was my wife's car, and it was beginning to act up in ways that let us know the transmission wasn't long for this world. She was doing an overnight babysitting job for a friend who worked an overnight shift, the car parked out front of the house on a side-street. A driver lost sight of everything in the early morning glare - or at least a white car up ahead - and slammed into it doing at least 35. It was a write-off, so the insurance check let us pick up a different car.
Perhaps the best I can explain the feeling of rudeness, of imposition and casting an unwelcome spotlight on someone by using his name is that it feels more extreme to me than pointing at someone while speaking to them.
Ah, you've just tricked yourself into believing you've learned a lesson concerning #37.
The point of #40 was that good things set one up in a way that make the next bad thing worse. Think of a white shirt as an invitation to every bit of schmutz in the world.
H: You will, and you have, you raging semite, you.
1. "What foul brew! How can anyone say that tastes good?!"
2. "Yeah, it tastes bad, but it helps keep me awake."
and, finally...
3."You know... there really is such a thing as a good cup of coffee."
Our culture, in more ways than one, wears people down. I'm plenty worn, but this isn't one of the areas where I changed.
C & M: Thanks for the attention!