tag!

I have been tagged, albeit pretty half-assedly, by Gilby. Now I have to come up with five interesting things about myself, and they all have to be interesting in a way that my parents can read. Hmmmm.

1. When I was in college I spent a semester in Madagascar. 9/11 was five days after we got there. We thought we would never get to go home. After the situation had settled down enough that the local people felt able to stop tiptoeing around us, they instead began to tell us how glad they were that real Americans were not warmongering cowboys like our president was.

2. Later in that same semester I became "involved" with a Malagasy boy. I was on the rebound from Stupidhead, I was on the complete other side of the world, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. When I left he asked for my phone number, and I gave it to him. What harm could it do, I figured. He doesn't have a phone or money anyway, but it's a nice gesture. FAMOUS LAST WORDS. Somehow he figured out how to hack into the payphones so that he could call overseas without paying for it, and began to call me several times a week, wanting to know when I was going to come back to Madagascar and marry him. The best part was that he had no concept of time zones, so all these calls were at four in the morning. The last time I heard from him was about a year ago, I think. Three week fling, three years of stalking. A word to the wise: before embarking on dalliances in foreign countries, find out first if the local culture embraces the concept of the "casual fling."

3. While Gilby may have been the seventh and eighth grade spelling bee champion, I had my budding career as a speller cut short in fourth grade, when I was unable to spell ECCLESIASTICAL. My parents maintain that it was my fault for not studying my spelling list, but I distinctly recall that my opponent only had to spell SURPRISE. I'm still bitter about it.

4. My first bike was a red and silver Huffy. I was very upset because it was a boy's bike and I wanted a pink one with streamers, but Dad laid the smack down and I went home with my manly bike. My first major crash was when I forgot how my brakes worked and ran smack into a chainlink fence at full speed. And my first long ride was when my best friend and I decided to run away; we packed a backpack full of crackers and baloney and made it probably 15 miles before we got tired and hungry (we stopped to eat the baloney after 3 or 4 miles) and called collect for a ride. 15 miles took a lot longer back then than it does now and there was a swarm of cops waiting to hear our story when we got home. Whoops.

5. I don't know how to swim. Well, I kind of do, but it's what they call "dog paddling." Which I do better than my dog, by the way. But tonight I am going to start learning how to swim for real, courtesy of Teammate Paula, who does not have a blog but who was featured in the Strib yesterday. Here is what I think about swimming:


To hell with it, I'm going to do the half-assed tagging thing too. If yer in my blogroll, yer tagged. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap with Gilby's blogroll, but if you've been tagged twice you really have no excuse. Time's a-wastin'!