Thursday, September 25, 2014

5 Things about me

I got tagged by Stephen Spiritcaller, Chrissy the Blesser, and Sheldon over Twitter for the 5 things meme.

1- Back in 2006? 2007? I got tagged in a meme that asked you to share 100 things about you. I typed up 75 or so things and gave up for two reasons. 1- dang it's hard to type out 100 things about yourself. 2- I read something somewhere that warned against doing the meme because you have the potential to give away important information about who you are -- Sure enough, I have protected my password plenty of times with little things that were on that list. I'm kind of glad I never published it.

2- I used to want to be a rockstar. Seriously. I self-published and made mass quantities of two tapes and one CD of music between 1990-1996 and wrote several unfinished/finished songs. The whole collection of music can be found on a series of 10 or so 90-minute tapes. I need to archive it all digitally some day, but the project seems daunting to me. I still write music from time to time.

3- I used to want to be a poet. I have a binder somewhere with several poems I wrote, but most of my poetry was better heard than read. Back around 1996 to sometime in the 2000's I started attending slams at a local book store and started winning free gift certificates at the slams. The most money I ever made as a poet was winning a college level poetry slam for a whopping $100. I rarely write poetry anymore, but someday I hope I can get back into it.

4- I was a Toastmaster for a year. If you ever want to get into public speaking, join this group. It will give you a lot of opportunities to listen to people speak and get you in front of other people. They ring a bell every time you say "um." They give you great advice. They give awards for doing a good job.  It's also pretty cheesy. I'm glad I did it, but I don't think I would want to go back and join the club a second time. The main reason I even joined was because an old acquaintance of my father talked me into it. My dad had so much respect for him, and the guy was pretty awesome. Both he and my father are passed away now. Both rocked the mic. Both were great story tellers.

5- I memorized the patterns for beating Pacman from the inside sleeve of the record "Pacman Fever" as a kid and used to be pretty awesome at the game because of it. Most of my friends seemed to die out before they even hit the apple level. I was able to get up to the ninth key level -- after you get to a point in Pacman, the game just starts giving you keys. I've forgotten all the patterns and I probably couldn't recreate the magic, but it was something as a kid that made me feel both nerdy and awesome at the same time.

I'm not going to nominate anyone because I'm pretty sure they've all been nominated! ;) Sorry it took so long for me to write this up.

Happy Dueling