A gift of peace, in all good faith

I usually don’t participate in memes or chain e-mails, but since this is a still a shiny new blog and I’m pretending that there might be people who don’t know me that are reading it, I’ll make an exception to the rule and go ahead and do one. This meme in particular was also done by The Wife and a friend, so I know at least two other people will check to see what I’ve written.

The object of this particular meme is to name six things things about oneself that others would consider weird or unusual. Since everything I do is completely awesome, I had to struggle to come up with anything – much less half a dozen oddities.

1) I have to chew bites of food on alternate sides of my mouth. First bite is chewed on the left side. Second bite on the right. Repeat until finished. And the last bite always has to be chewed on the right side.

2) I am completely in love with England. I’ve been all over the United States, western Europe and various points in the Caribbean, but I’d be content to spend the rest of my days in London or points thereabouts. I haven’t visited the other parts of the UK, but I’d be willing to bet they’re pretty nifty as well.

I love Doctor Who, listen to the BBC in the car and have a bottle of HP sauce in the kitchen. Every time we contemplate taking a vacation, I desperately try to find some insane airfare special that will allow us to stetch our budget to include a jaunt across the Atlantic. I would competely be on board with retiring there in the future.

The only things England doesn’t have going for it are the indigenous foodstuffs and the lack of baseball. I have serious aversion to the minty meat that they serve over there, but I could find something to tide me over. And the interweb means baseball can be had anywhere nowadays.

3) I had a hamster that was stolen by a man with a gun. Not really, but that’s what I told myself as a child apparently. I don’t even remember the hamster itself – just the empty cage sitting in our laundry room. I’m sure it died of natural causes or something else mundane, but even today when I hear the word “hamster”, I think about how a man with gun stole it in the middle of the night.

4) I have no feeling in my left index finger. I used to, but there was an incident while changing a flourescent blub a few years back. Due to another incident with a sheet of broken pane glass, I also have no feeling in my left shin.

5) I hosted a radio show that no one listened to for two years. Well, almost no one. It was a weekday 6:00-8:00 a.m. show on our crappy little student-run radio station in college.

At first, we didn’t even broadcast over the air – you had to jury-rig your stereo to pick up the signal from television cable to receive the broadcasts. Then, some time during my second semester the station ponied up the bucks for a wimpy AM transmitter that nearly covered most of main campus. Unless there was a cloud in the sky, in which case the signal was cut in half.

It was okay, because the lack of audience freed me up to do a number of things that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise – mostly criticizing the university and playing music that didn’t fit the station’s format (alternative alternative). In one memorable stunt, I challenged our men’s basketball team to go winless during conference play and they obliged, but failed to pick up their rewards – one Frito burrito from Taco Bell each.

6) My musical tastes are somewhat eclectic. I enjoy classical (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nielsen), ska (Save Ferris), angry ska (Voodoo Glow Skulls), sappy pop (Elton John), most classic rock and absolutley everything done during the 80s. Perhaps that’s not all that strange, but I was having a hard time coming up with this last one.