A Third of A Hundred Things About Me

I hate these list posts. OK, I hate the idea of them, tho I actually often enjoy the posts. I vowed I would never do one. Here I am breaking that vow. It was going to be 100 items, but I'd just have to start putting in really stupid things hoping someone thought I was "whimsical." Fuck that.

I actually ran across several of these on random blogs I was surfing the other night. It is interesting how a picture of a person arises, and how different that picture might be compared to that same person answering someone else's questions. (We choose what to reveal and how to prioritize, blahblahblah.) Anyway, I don't want to be left behind the advancement of every 25-year-old single woman in the blogosphere (and, be honest, the name "wunelle" made you wonder, no?).

1. I have an irrational hatred for the tinkly sound of trickling liquid. It makes my skin crawl. And the rising-pitch sound of a glass filling up is excruciating. The worst is those radio beer commercials which feature repeated, aggressively-loud sounds of foaming beer filling a glass. I will destroy the radio if I can't quickly turn it off through normal means. Hate it, hate it, HATE it.

2. I have never been drunk. I have never taken any recreational drugs. Of any kind. I may have drunk a (one) complete beer once in junior high or high school. Since then, nothing. A sip of my wife's margarita maybe once a year.

3. I have not even the tiniest regret about this. On the contrary.

4. I am, unfortunately for my wife, I know, unable to connect sex with any kind of adventure or daring. Adventurous sex is a non-sequitur to me.

5. I have a completely pathological interface with food. This will be my undoing. I am a carb addict in the extreme. Veggies are like horrible, mutated, misshapen living things. Icky.

6. My love of Diet Coke is surely described somewhere in the DSM as pathological.

7. I have what is quite honestly perhaps the most stupefyingly amazing job ever. The space shuttle astronauts have me beat, but that's it.

8. I am temperamentally and philosophically quite different from the overwhelming majority of my coworkers. I was warned about this by my vocational counselor.

9. I have had sex with only four women.

10. I cannot recall even the mildest or most innocent same sex encounter or attraction, though I am not strongly squeamish about the idea of it. (OK, I remember a tingly feeling watching Steve Perry sing once in a video. Does that count?)

11. I've been married for nearly 20 years.

12. But not to the same woman.

13. The combination of my being a spendthrift and a machinery geek has led to my owning 25 cars and a dozen motorcycles. I have never gone more than six months after getting a new vehicle before I begin shopping for its replacement. This all profoundly chagrins my wife.

14. This stream of new vehicles seems the greatest possible use of money to me, no matter what every smart money manual says.

15. I always sit down to pee, and have done for as long as I can remember. Unless there's a urinal. Then I'm happy to stand. (See #1 perhaps? I've thought about it, but I don't think that's it.)

16. I'm a bad aim, so my wife should be happy about this (and she is)! I will go on record as saying that I think the penis generally, not just mine specifically, is a lousy aiming device--look at public bathrooms.

17. I have been unhappy with my general shape for as long as I've been aware of it. When I say I've come to accept it, I really mean that I've come to accept being disappointed.

18. I dislike money. I love the things that money gets for me--experiences and toys & gadgets and so on--but money for money's sake seems unclean to me. So many of my coworkers have management of their money as a part-time job. I want nothing to do with this (except to spend it).

19. But for my wife I would have no idea what was in my checkbook and I would be only dimly aware of my credit card balances. My wife finds my approach unacceptable, and my life is better for her care in this matter.

20. I have never checked over my pay stub, in any job no matter how much or how little I was earning. I just don't care. I was conscious of striving to get a job flying with a major airline expressly so that I would earn enough money that I would never have to think about it again.

21. This has not proven itself strictly accurate.

22. I love my wife above all things.

23. I have been quite accomplished as a drummer, even making my living at it for a few years. It was to be my vocation thru high school and into my first year or two of college.

24. However, I have been a fervent student of classical music for 20+ years now--it is my prime enthusiasm in life--and this long ago eclipsed my passion for music with drumming. I still play a bit, but not much.

25. I have no formal training in music, but I have a very good ear and an appreciation of detail that this music requires.

26. I cannot abide opera.

27. I actually listen to a lot of choral and vocal music, but I generally dislike the human voice in music. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I'm particular in the extreme about what I like in a singing voice, and those I can embrace are exceedingly small in number.

28. People I most admire / love / stand in awe of (after # 22, of course):

J.S. Bach
Abraham Lincoln
Richard Dawkins
Stephen Pinker
Virginia Woolf
Maurice Ravel

29. I've had two vasectomies and no reversals. Having my testicles shaved by a 50-year-old woman was NOT sexy. But it was better than the 45-year-old man the first time.

30. I was born a twin. My brother, Bobby, died of SIDS at four months.

31. He and I had different birthdays. I was born before midnight on June 28th, and he was born a while after midnight on June 29th.

32. My father died at age 35, when I was 6. He was unexpectedly felled by a heart attack, leaving my mother with three young children. The autopsy revealed no obvious predisposition; but it seems it was a blood clot killed him, probably a result of being a longtime smoker.

33. It took me nine years to get my four year degree.

34. I was a mediocre student, tending not to buy the books I should have and to not do the studying that was needed. I had no motivation to do well because I had no interest in what I was studying, and no desire for what any degree would get me. My motivation was chiefly that I did not want the stigma of going thru life without a degree. (Looking back, this is odd; this does not now seem something that would be likely to motivate me.)

35. I have worked as a groundskeeper, a bartender (in spite of #2), a motorcycle salesman, a taxi driver, a drummer, a school bus driver, a radio voice talent, a fast food joint assistant manager, a city bus driver, a flight instructor, a sales clerk, a computer temp and an airline pilot.

finis

(Maybe there'll be a sequel!)