Via Gwen, a good twenty questions thing to keep me busy until the baseball game comes on, or Samar calls me and gives me something to do this afternoon.

1. Tell me something obvious about you.

I am a sarcastic person, but not mean-spirited enough to make a living out of it.

2. Tell me something about you that many don’t know.

I can’t swim. I have a mutant power that allows me to defy conventional buoyancy, despite all the laws of God and the Universe. I think the X-Men equivalent of that would be The Blob, the enormously fat guy who could control the power of inertia, but with me it’s just that I sink to the bottom of any water in which I am submerged.

If that last romantic scene in Titanic was between Kate Winslett and me, it would have gone something like this:

Kate Winslett: Oh Mike, don’t let go! Hang on for–
Me: (sploosh)

3. What is your biggest fear?

Dying. I really, really don’t want to die.

Other than that, my loved ones dying. I know this is going to mess me up fairly soon — people die, after all — but everything else you can either endure or fix, right? The dying is more or less irrevocable.

People always say that a fear of mortality is ultimately pessimistic. After all, how can you live a happy life if you’re always fixed on when it might end? I like to think, though, that if the only thing that really terrifies me is dying, then on some level I must think that I can overcome anything else.

Which, if you really think about it, is a form of confidence.

4. Do you normally go the safe route or take the short cut?

I don’t think of things this way. It’s not like every time I approach the lunch counter at work I think to myself, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– I took the fiesta sunrise egg salad wrap, and that has made all the difference.”

The thing is, there is the route along which you think you can control, and the route along which you realize there are things way, way out of your control. I think the reason a lot of people succeed on the road less travelled by is because they focus on the things they can influence, and block out everything else — when you’re in the comfort zone, you’re way more likely to just wait for the wheels to turn, even if it means that they might never actually do so.

Yes, yes, spoken like a true control freak.

5. Name one thing you want that you can’t buy with money.

The year I spent in graduate school. That’s gone forever, and oh how many times I wish I had it back.

Not that I don’t cherish the degree or whatever, just that if there was a fund I could pay into to get that year back and do it differently? Yeah, I’d be dropping a dollar in it every day.

6. What is your most treasured possession?

You know, it’s funny, but I can’t think of any one item I own that I cherish above all others. I become equally agitated and unhappy if I lose the lens cloth for my glasses as I would if I misplaced my cell phone.

I’m certain that there are probably about a thousand people out there who are all like, “OMG MY iPOD LOL I HEART it SO MUCH1!” I suppose you could say that I love my camera more than most people, God bless Canon, but do I cherish it more than anything?

Well, okay, yes.

7. What is the one thing you hate most about yourself that you do often?

Procrastinate. I put things off and I put them off, and I never get to them.

8. What is your favorite lie to tell?

“I’ll get to it later.”

9. Name something you’ve done once that you can’t wait to do again.

Drugs!

Ha ha ha ha, I am just kidding. I am high on life.

Something I’ve done once and want to do again… I would like to drink too much and pass out on the moving sidewalk at Pleasure Island in Orlando again, but this time with some of my old friends around, instead of my work friends who think I’m a raging alcoholic. My classic friends know that I am, in fact, only an occasional alcoholic.

10. Are you the jealous type?

Yeah, but not the scary-nearly-abusive kind. I don’t ask the seventy-five year-old greeter at Wal-Mart who the fuck he thinks he’s looking at when he sneaks a look at Sham, because honestly, if I were a seventy-five year-old greeter at Wal-Mart, I’d look at Sham too.

I’m more the “If Those People Are Successful, Why Can’t I Be Too?” sort of person. I’m not totally willing to spite other people for their happiness, but I rarely hesitate to wonder whether I might deserve a little slice of it too. Do I not do my best to be a good human being? Do I not offer what I can to the world, and resist my baser impulses to slay those who affront me?

And don’t be a smartass, the answer is yes, of course I do. So when I see someone who by all accounts is a raging red asshole doing well in the world, I think to myself, “Wherefore is the good fortune of assholes, and why can it not accompany me?”

11. What is the one person, place or thing you can’t say no to?

I don’t really see how you couldn’t say no to a place, unless you include someplace like Starbucks or Tim Horton’s. Even then, it’s not so much the location as the product that you can’t resist, unless you’ve got some peculiar love for the cold, awkward donut-shop atmosphere.

My problem is that I can’t say no to strangers. I am so compulsively polite that one time I actually let a complete stranger — and not a well-dressed, well-groomed polite stranger, but a dirty-clothed, bearded, sweaty-toothed maniac — into my car to drive him about four kilometers to the next major street.

“I REALLY NEED A RIDE CAN YOU GIVE ME A RIDE?” he said.

“Um,” I answered, “Sure.”

I didn’t want to seem rude. The whole time I was driving, he thanked me and said it was hard to find such nice people in the world and gee I had a really nice car you don’t often get to see the inside of nice cars like this, too bad we couldn’t just keep cruising for a while, ha ha ha.

I was so surprised that I had done what I did, flying in the face of everything that everyone tells you about picking up hitch-hikers and how they’re like buffalo hunters — killing you for your wristwatch and then throwing your body and your whole car away — that I didn’t know what else to do. When we got to the corner, I said with a few too many nerves, “Well, here you go!” and away he went.

On the other hand, a few weeks ago, I completely abandoned my friend at the mechanic’s, so that gives you an idea about my character. To strangers, I will be scrupulously polite and accomodating; the more I get to know you, the happier I am to decline you, until ultimately I am outright neglectful and abusive.

The only exception to this rule is Sham, who is more than pleased to destroy a part of my body every time I am rude to her. I therefore remain utterly courteous at all times, as I am running out of fingers and it is getting progressively difficult to type.

12. What is the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

Oh jeez, this is one of those tough questions, because on the one hand, many people have done a lot of great things for me, and on the other, this question is asking me to put down in print which one I think is my favorite.

This is a bear trap if I ever did see one, so instead I am just going to say that there are very few people in my life, in my family or my extended family, who haven’t done nice things for me, and I appreciate them all. If I ever need motivation to be a better person, I can remind myself that I need to continue to earn their generosity.

13. If you could do something crazy right now, what would it be?

Grab Sham, quit work, take all of my savings, travel around the world, and purchase a vast estate in a place where land is cheap and plentiful, and the locals are shocked to hear that there are degrees below zero.

14. When was the last time you cried?

A couple of weeks ago, when I was sick and I was running a fever of about 102 degrees. I was lying in bed and watching that mini-series about Nuremburg, starring Alec Baldwin before he got fat and Jill Hennessy before she did Crossing Jordan. Everything was fine until they decided to show the films that the US Army took as they were liberating concentration and death camps throughout Europe, and they used the actual footage in the movie.

Say what you will about crying, but scenes like those are about as good an excuse as any.

15. When was the last time you felt so good that nothing else mattered?

Is it sad to say that I can’t remember? That’s probably sad. Just ignore this.

16. Do you feel comfortable in public with no shirt on?

No, God no. And you wouldn’t feel comfortable if you saw me in public with no shirt on. Nobody would feel comfortable about that. Governments around the world would pass resolutions on how uneasy they felt, even if they didn’t quite know why. Airplanes, mistaking my bare white flesh for a landing beacon, will crash to the earth, their passengers perishing in flames or lodging massive lawsuits.

Don’t ever ask that again. It’s unholy even to consider it.

17. Name something embarrassing you did while drunk.

One time, I curled up on the moving sidewalk at Pleasure Island, DisneyWorld, and took a nap until we got to the far end. And not with friends, but with co-workers. One of whom took a picture of me.

During that same trip, I was holding beers for three people in my hands, while my camera was hanging around my neck. Because I thought I was Mr. Fantastic, I thought I could drink from one of the bottles while keeping the beer from spilling out of the other bottles. Because I am not Mr. Fantastic, the beer spilled all over me and my precious, precious Canon.

18. Name one person, past or present, with whom you’d like to spend the day.

I would have said Shakespeare, but there’s a chance that he isn’t the guy everyone says he is, and there’s a smaller chance that he didn’t even exist at all. So if you wish to spend a day with anyone, past or present, and they don’t exist, then what happens? Do you lose your wish, or does the wish spontaneously generate the person that you think they are, like on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, when historical figures are conjured out of nowhere and don’t seem at all surprised or horrified by electrical lighting, belly tops, AM/FM radio or sport utility vehicles.

19. Name one place you’ve never been and would like to go, and tell me why.

England. I’d like to go and do all the stupid Medieval Studies nerdery that I’ve always wanted to, like touring the historical sites, picking Roman mosaic out of the dirt, walking Hadrian’s wall or the plains at Salisbury, to see the monoliths that the Anglo-Saxons described as the cities of giants. Part of the problem with living in a place like Canada is that most of our recorded history is barely three hundred years old, and compared to an island whose civilized history stretches back before English was even a language, it’s practically a shopping mall.

20. What’s the story behind your online persona/name?

Mike is what everyone calls me in real life, because apparently the only ones named Michael are the angel, the baseketball player, and the musician Bolton.

I could explain Toenail Assassin, but I prefer it to remain a complex and intricate mystery.

Whew! What a workout! Twenty questions doesn’t sound like a lot, but man, it was like doing several Friday Fives in a row! Four, even!