1) I have never, ever, in my whole life chewed a piece of gum. Seriously. This is due to a childhood fear of choking coupled with a gross gum-chomping sister. She's not so gross anymore (hi K!), but I still won't eat gum. Over time this has also manifested into a hatred of gum... if I step on a piece on a hot summer day, I am quite literally ready to hunt down the gum-dropper and beat them senseless after I clean my shoe off on their face.
2) I prefer to eat pizza with the cheese removed, again due to the childhood choking on stringy melted cheese thing. Rip that cheese off, throw some Parmesan on the remaining saucy bread, and eat it alternating with the cheese/toppings via fork. I don't do this in public because a scary looking 6'4" 285 pound man has no business eating like a toddler out in the open, but if I'm home alone, I grab me a fork and say "hello, Parmesan!".
3) I think Facebook might be the creepiest thing ever. It is sometimes sorta neat to track down people from the past, but inevitably it results in an awkward standoff where no one knows how far to take things... it is like a high school reunion but in small email doses, where everyone ends up nodding their head in cyberspace saying, "yeah, cool, sounds great... um...yeah." It is also really creepy for a grown-ass man to email some other grown ass man and ask him "wanna be friends?"
4) I hate cats. But I think I covered that before... ah yes, I did, in A Disturbing Revelation ...
5) Despite my reputation as an all around nice guy/teddybear/swell dude, sometimes I am a total prick. I don't mean to be, but sometimes I am. Like sometimes I'll talk a little shit about people behind their back. I always feel bad about it, but I still do it. I've tried to counteract this by being an asshole right out in the open, and I think it might be working.
Like today, this dude at work told a really dumb joke, and instead of fake laughing, I just looked at him, smiled, and said "dude, you're a jackass", and went back to work. I felt really good about myself after that. I think being an asshole is making me a better person.
(NOTE 1: Talking about coworkers like this guy and the One-up-ya guy is a prime example of the fact that I'm an asshole... but assholes need to let off a little hot air now and then too, even if it is a stinky habit.) (pause... wait for it... now go ahead, laugh at my fart joke.)
6) I have a documented memory disorder. I was tested in middle school because I would get great grades on most things but was just unable to memorize things. It would have been a learning disability but in order to qualify, it had to be paired with another diagnosed weakness. Everything else was pretty good, but my memory is really crappy. It was a pain in the ass throughout school, and was totally apparent in all my grades. Thinking, writing, and doing classes were b's and a's, while the "look at a squiggly under a microscope and write down 10 characteristics of that subphylla" class was a D-.
Despite this memory problem I have amazing recall for totally useless information, and I really kick-ass at Trivial Pursuit. I somehow remember that they made less than 30,000 of the CJ-8 "Scrambler" Jeeps, yet I have no idea why World War I was started. Something about the assassination of some Serbian dude named Franz Ferdinand, but that is it. My mom is a history teacher, and if she knew this she would cry. Don't tell her.
The worst part is that people ask me about the testing and whether I have short term or long term memory problems, and I just don't remember. It would be a bad joke if it weren't true.
7) I have spooky-good visual discrimination. I can't really do it like a party trick, but if someone is doing a word search, I can glance at it upside-down out of the corner of my eye from 5 feet away and see the words. They just pop out at me.
In grad school, we did this forestry lab where we had to measure a 10-acre forest plot using a compass and a chain. The method was for one person to walk in a straight line along a compass bearing (directed by another to keep a straight path), and then the third would walk from person A to person B measuring out the 166 feet (one chain), or the length of a side of a square acre. I was the runner guy... I'd head in a direction, jumping logs, dodging prickers, skirting swamps, and line myself up at what I thought was the right distance. The C person then measured the straight line (carrying the dumb end of the tape measure), and time after time, the person stopped within arm's length of me. I can also eyeball small distances and visualize things remarkably well too.
8) I've confronted many of my fears and won.
- I was really afraid of heights, so I started rock climbing.
- I was afraid of needles and blood so I started donating blood regularly.
- I was incredibly queasy about childbirth so I started watching ER regularly and made it through a 33-hour labor and C-section without hesitation.
- I grew up next door to a man who lost an arm in a motorcycle wreck so I started motorcycling.
- I was deathly afraid of medical procedures, especially lower abdominal/groin area procedures, so I ignored a muscle tear that I thought was a hernia, and lived in pretty significant pain for 18 months. I've mostly fixed the muscle tear, and have developed a brilliant coping mechanism for dealing with medical fears. It is called a vaso-vagal reaction, and it involves getting dizzy, sweating profusely, and losing vision, followed by loss of consciousness.
10) I like to eat my food evenly. Near the end of the meal, I should have one bite of each item left, and enough drink to wash it down. This is an unconscious pattern that I catch myself doing sometimes and it freaks me out a little. I do it with fast food(bite of burger, a few fries, maybe a single chicken nugget), I do it with pizza (bite of crust, bite of middle, just the right amount iof topping left), I do it with desserts (always maintain the cake to frosting ratio), and I even do it at Thanksgiving... exhausting, that meal is...
There are some exceptions, like I will sometimes eat all of an item first, especially if it is something I don't particularly like... veggies go first when mom's watching just to relieve the pressure, or hot bread out of the oven goes down the hatch fast, but more often than not, I am left with equal parts on the plate.
11) Sometimes I get really distracted, and take things way too far... I realize that my 10 minute email check has turned into two or three hours, or my Sunday night quick project turns into a major room renovation. Sometimes I even lose track of myself and realize that it is 1:31AM, I'm exhausted, and I've just finished item #11 on an 8 revelations list.
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