I’ve been waking up tired again lately, and playing a bit too much Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for my own good, so unfortunately I can do no better on this Monday morning than to cheat with an A to Z entry.
To give credit where it’s due, by the way, I lifted this from Tyger, who scammed it from Heather, who in turn ripped it off Olei. In the print journalism world, this kind of behaviour would be called “derivative,” if not “blatant plagiarizing”; however, we’re on the internet, where we can apply a happy label like “collaborative creativity” or even just “link-sharing”.
Sometimes I love this crazy medium.
Anyway, twenty-six things you probably don’t care to know about me:
A - Act your age? Happily, yes. I have joyous blessing of being born in an age where guys in their mid-twenties are not only allowed to lounge around, play video games and write webpages, they’re actually expected to do so. Granted, they’re also expected to have a girlfriend and a decent job, so I’m almost completely covered off in this department.
Thank God I’m not in my father’s generation, by the way. Having two kids by age twenty-six? Moving across the country on a transfer, moving into a house way the hell out in the rural suburbs? Having your wife quit her job to take care of the kids, riding a train for two and a half hours a day to work? I’ll take my videogames and webpages, thanks all the same.
B - Born on what day of the week? Wednesday. Yeah, yeah, full of woe, my ass. I know kids who were born on a Friday who are anything but loving and giving, so I don’t think I can put much stock into that little ditty. And if you do, you might want to consider altering your fundamental world view to exclude poems you heard from your grandmother.
C - Chore you hate? Dusting. First of all, because I think I must shed more skin than a pit full of boa constrictors every year, since every surface in my home gets covered in it within minutes of my arrival.
Second, because I’m horribly allergic to dust, and the act of dusting kicks it all up into the air and down into my breathing passages. Seriously — I don’t need to even moisten the cloth. I can just brush the top of a table and end up inhaling 90% of the dust that was sitting on it, only to hack it up in a convenient ball of sludge a few hours later.
Third, it’s shitty work. I don’t keep many empty flat surfaces, so I have to move all my stuff around every time I have to dust. And considering how much pointless, unevenly-shaped, heavy junk I have cluttering my shelves, I consider this some kind personal insult.
D - Dad’s name? Daniel. In the Li-on’s Den!
E- Essential makeup item? I’m a straight boy, so, none. Or lip balm. That’s essential. Without lip balm, my face will split like logs on a fire within a few minutes of leaving my house.
F - Favorite actor? Vocally? Anthony Hopkins. Theatrically? Peter O’Toole. Physically? Harrison Ford. Hormonally? Rachel Weisz.
G - Gold or silver? Gold. Choosing silver is like choosing second place because winners are assholes anyway.
H - Hometown? I was born in Montreal, PQ, but I lived there for about six months. Considering how much I heard about it for the first fifteen or so years of my life, though, I figured it was more interesting to consider that my hometown than where I am now. Quebec is a very tempestuous place, politically, and Montreal is at the heart of most of the action — be they Federalist rallies, biker wars, or Referenda deciding the fate of the country.
As I got a bit older, though, I realized that I truly am Toronto at heart. The more I get to know the place around me, the more I realize that there isn’t anywhere else in Canada that I’d rather be, and the more I secretly believe that I really do live in the centre of the Canadian universe. With that kind of egotism, I can’t claim anywhere else but Toronto as my home.
I - Instruments you play? Good God, nothing. I used to play the trumpet back in school, but I’ll be God Damned if I can remember how to make a single note out of it.
I like to think I have a good ear for music, without having the capacity to contribute to it in any way. I always think of Homer singing Mary Had a Little Lamb, replacing Dees with Doos, when I consider my own musical creativity. It is simply beyond me how people can compose new or interesting melodies.
J - Job title? Team Leader. It’s one of those wonderful catch-all corporate jobs that confers all kinds of fun responsibility without any clear definition of what it is that you actually do.
“So, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a team leader!”
“Oh! Fascinating! What do you do all day?”
“I lead… uhm… a team. I’m their team leader. They made a team that needed leadership, so there I was, and–”
“Just… just stop talking right now.”
K - Kids? Good heavens, no. I’m barely above the mental age of nine as it is. I can’t imagine how I’d warp any kids I’d be raising right now.
That said, I do want to have kids eventually. Preferably boys, since I wouldn’t have the first idea of how to raise a bunch of girls — the very prospect terrifies me into incoherence.
L - Living arrangements? At home, with my family. In the basement, just to complete the stereotype for you.
There are several key reasons for this, however:
1. It’s so much cheaper than renting somewhere.
2. It’s so much easier than living with someone who may, in fact, be either Batman, an axe murderer, or an axe murderer who thinks he’s Batman.
3. Renting anywhere in Toronto is approximately as expensive as purchasing manservants from the South Pacific, so I might as well stay at home and save to buy a home instead.
M - Mom’s name? I would tell you, but she doesn’t trust this whole internet business. People track this sort of thing, you know.
N - Need… …to write more. I know that sounds stupid, but I keep telling myself I’m going to, and I keep not doing it. If I ever want to do anything more than hobbying, I need to get into better habits, and that starts with this place right here.
Besides, I have an addiction to seeing my writing in print, and inferring from my referrer logs that people are reading and enjoying it. The more often I read my own writing, the more easily I’m able to identify and eliminate disturbing trends. Most recently I reduced my use of the word “really” by 80%, and sometime soon I intend to maybe even possibly reduce sentence length by 50%.
On the bright side, that means more updates for the lot of you. On the downside, that means more weird, experimental writing like the RAW Recaps or the Ewok Retrospective.
O - Overnight hospital stays? Twice, both when I was around ten years old. I had my very first (and only, thank God) serious asthma attack of my life, conveniently at the same time as a massive doctor’s strike that crippled the health care system in Ontario. A very serious orthodox Jewish doctor came to perform a house call, taking my pulse and measuring my breathing rate, and then called ahead to the packed hospitals and got me into the emergency room right away.
It was still another four hours until I was admitted. A drunk guy tried to push his way in front of my mother in line, explaining to her and the admitting nurse that it was really a really really big emergency seriously really. The nurse watched impassively as he gestured toward the towel wrapped around his waist and explained that, uh, well, it’s just that he sort of had his, you know, his thing caught in his zipper and it was bleeding a whole lot.
The nurse looked at my mother, and then at him. She handed him a clipboard with some forms on it. “Go and fill these out,” she said.
“But–”
“I doubt it’s going anywhere. Go fill these out.”
That was the highlight. The lowlight was a tie between a corpse rolling past me on the way down to the morgue, and the kid in the room down the hall from me who had caught his leg in an auger and woke up screaming every night at exactly the same time.
P - Phobia? Drowning. I have this mutant ability to defeat all floatation devices, up to and including small watercraft. I immediately sink to the bottom of any body of water that’s deeper than I am tall, which quite obviously leads to some deep concerns about my survival.
Several times in swimming pools I have gone from losing my composure to gupling big mouthfuls of water and dropping below the surface. Drowning is so quick and smothering and horrible that I can’t help but have a horrible fear of it. In times of stress, I dream of falling below the surface of a clear lake, within sight of help, and dying there.
Q - Quote you like? My most recent favorite quote is from a Mystery Science Theatre episode, in which Ian McShane is playing an evil spy disguised as a priest: “Ahh, Mr. Jesus. You have an unfortunate habit of staying alive.”
Also, from everyone’s favorite warhawk, General George Patton: “I do not fear failure. I only fear the ’slowing up’ of the engine inside of me which is pounding, saying, ‘Keep going, someone must be on top, why not you?’”
R - Religious affiliation? None as such. Christian, roughly, though without specific denomination. I’ve been in a Church now about four times, twice for confirmations, twice for weddings. I don’t think I’ve been Baptised, and even if I have, my ignorance of it should tell you something.
I suppose you can call me a Christmas Christian, in that I believe in God and celebrate Christmas and give chocolate bunnies to people at Easter. I offer my own quiet prayers and thanks in times of trouble, and I enjoy very much the history and ceremony of the Christian faith; however, I can’t quote you much more of the Bible than anyone else, nor would I be able to give you anything but the most storybook interpretation of the Scriptures.
Occasionally I feel as though I should either get serious about my religion or else shed it entirely, but neither option appeals to me. I can’t be strident enough to preach hellfire and brimstone, and I’m not capable of abandoning the fun of it all. Best just to stick with my wrapping paper and cottontails.
S - Siblings? One, an older sister.
T - Time you wake up? I used to get up at 6 AM, so that I could go running and become a mad fit motherfucker.
Then it got cold and dark, as it does here during the wintertime, and I started to sleep in until the last possible moment. Now I’m lucky if I’m out of bed before seven-thirty, so that I can be out of the door by eight.
U - Unique talent? I can bleat like a goat surprisingly well. I mean, indistinguishable from real, actual goats. I also have an uncanny ability to remember entire scenes from my favorite television shows, which is probably what’s annihilated my normal ability to remember entire conversations I had only minutes ago.
I also dream entire television shows — original ones, mind you, not ones I’ve seen before — but since I would assume that “talent” implies things I can do on command, I doubt it applies.
V - Vegetable you refuse to eat? Squashes. I love green vegetables, which apparently everyone else despises, but I can’t stand gourds, squashes, or anything else from which you have to scoop out big handfuls of puke before eating it.
I think I probably got this aversion from watching my mom and my sister hollow out pumpkins around Hallowe’en time, and I realize that it’s totally unreasonable, but to hell with it. I’ve made it this far without having to eat that shit, so why not a few decades longer?
W - Worst habit? I do enough disgusting things away from prying eyes that do nobody the least amount of harm, so it’s best to not summarize them.
As far as acts that do affect those around me… I’d say it’s talking over people. I have a profound fear of not being able to speak when I want to, so if I feel as though the opportunity for a comment is about to pass me by, I’ll just throw something out there and hope for the best.
It’s kind of like when you’re playing baseball in the outfield, and you’ve just caught the ball. Now you have to heave it all the way the hell back into the infield, and you know that you don’t have a fucking chance of getting it anywhere close. Sure, you could flip the ball to the person next to you, who’s now looking at you anxiously and wondering when you’re going to do something, but because there’s the slim chance that you might not screw up, you huck the ball as hard as you can towards home plate and hope something good happens.
It’s just like that, except with boob jokes instead of a ball, and a deeply involved political conversation instead of a baseball game.
X - X-rays you’ve had? Once, on my lungs; once on my teeth, I think. I don’t get to the dentist too often, but I think I have dental X-rays out there.
I hope I do, come to think of it. When I spontaneously combust, I want there to be something out there to identify me other than the poor posture of my corpse.
Y - Yummy food you make? Nothing. Isn’t that disappointing? I keep thinking that if I want to eventually develop into a well-rounded person, I should learn to cook. And yet no matter how much Nigella “God She’s Hot When She Makes Food” Lawson I watch, I never seem to pick up the knack of it.
Z - Zodiac Sign? Taurus, the Bull. Stubborn, materialistic, logical, pleasure-loving, grounded. On the cusp with Gemini, so I’m also a lying bastard.