For Anna, with love and squalor
My niece on The Book Of The Face tagged me approximately 100,000 years ago in a meme-driven trivial tell-all viral annoyance campaign, and since I don’t know enough about Facebook to operate its inner workings with any reliability, I am responding here. The request was for 16 random facts etc. about me. If you know anything you know how much I love divulging personal information on the internet, especially the Facebook part of it, so here we go:
1. If I don’t have a pen with me I die.
2. If you don’t have a pen with you, I wonder how you manage to sustain your life force.
3. Don’t ask to borrow my pen. Or if you do, don’t think it’s weird that I hold on to the cap.
4. I have this weird thing about backpacks, camera bags, courier bags, little mesh bags for sorting, lens cases, crampon pouches, map cases, dedicated zippered passport pockets, etc. It seems to be an illness.
5. I have a lot more neckties than is strictly necessary. But I also enjoy wearing them more than is probably healthy. I know a couple of different knots. Lately I’ve been all about the double Windsor.
6. I have some certain strongly-held theories about chili.
7. I have heard that if you feed apples to a pony and do not stop, the pony will continue eating apples until it is dead. I have never tried this, sadly, but it also holds true with me and stroopwafels.
8. Swiss army knife, see #1.
9. There is a part of me that is deeply sad to think that I will never be father to a daughter; another part of me is thoroughly convinced that I already have several more children than I can handle, so, whatever.
10. I have some poems in my wallet. The wallets soften, droop, collapse, and die, but the poems abide. Some have been there since the [GHW] Bush administration. I take them out from time to time and read them on airplanes, but after so long in various wallets they are as fragile as spiderwebs and equally useful.
11. If I don’t get to see the Treasury of Atreus and the deathmask of Agamemnon and whatnot pretty soon here I am going to blow a gasket.
12. I love music but listen to almost none whatsoever ever anymore. That said, if John Peel liked it, I probably do, too.
13. Wine.
14. Magda asked me tonight how I would handle being a vegetarian. Though meat has no particularly Svengalian hold over me these days, I’m still not interested in giving it up arbitrarily.
15. I do not like sweets much at all (though see #6).
16. Once, after I had left home for good and was back for a visit, I got extremely angry with my mother for having cleared the house of some books I once owned about World War II aircraft. For some reason on that particular night I just had to look up some vital detail about the Heinkel 111. This was before the internet. Obviously.
Re: 9, I’ll do my best to help solve this vicariously. Open to all advice.
Re: 10, Are any of them good enough that you’d be willing to share with Teh Internets?
Re: 16, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_111
I hate tagging memes. Good on you for not attempting to “tag” anyone.
Comment by Erik R. — Saturday 24 January 09 @ 01.10 MST+2.00
stroopwafels: me too.
Comment by kilowatthour — Saturday 24 January 09 @ 02.31 MST+2.00
Um, I do the same thing with pens. Especially the cap thing. Because my pens are sent in bulk from Wichita and I can’t get them in Europe. I know they’re the same pen, kind of, but they’re really not. As per #9, daughters = a need for a shotgun, and I know you’re not that kinda guy.
Comment by KP — Saturday 24 January 09 @ 03.16 MST+2.00
fine tipped, right?
Comment by Jer — Saturday 24 January 09 @ 04.34 MST+2.00
You.Are.A.Freak. Now ask me, ask me!
Comment by gaoo — Sunday 25 January 09 @ 01.12 MST+2.00
I love a man in a tie.
Also love stroopwafels.
A man in a tie with stroopwafels would cause me to swoon.
Comment by VioletSky — Sunday 25 January 09 @ 03.19 MST+2.00
Erik: the poems I’m talking about are not my own. They’re a pretty predictable assortment, as a matter of fact.
I make it a point not to pass on the meme anymore.
Jer: it’s even worse than that. If I don’t have at least one Uni-Ball Vision Micro (black only, please) about my person at all times I begin to feel all askew. Like KP, I import them in large boxes from the Homeland. I think we’re down to our last two or three (pens, not boxes) and I’m beginning to panic.
VioletSky: I have never eaten stroopwafels while wearing a tie, though given how I’ve been going through them it’s probably only a matter of time.
Comment by jds — Sunday 25 January 09 @ 18.31 MST+2.00
I’ve never quite understood why we Brits call them “ties” while Americans call them “neckties”. Do you have some other kind of tie for wearing elsewhere on your body?
On second thought, don’t answer that.
Comment by simon — Monday 26 January 09 @ 14.25 MST+2.00
I HEART PENS.
I wish Matt had to wear ties more often. Maybe it is prep school nostalgia.
What is a stropwafel?
What are the poems?
Comment by Martha — Tuesday 27 January 09 @ 21.40 MST+2.00