April 3rd, 2007
Return of the Meme
Glorious memes, growing in strength and in number! For what was once five is now ten! Besides, I do whatever Vila tells me to, a month later or not. So without further ado… yet another Five Things About Me:
- I taught myself to read at age three, according to my parents. My mom claims to have been startled by my reading aloud the cover of a magazine at the grocery store checkout. My skills later atrophied, and from the ages of 4 to 19 I probably read fewer than fifteen books. I still have trouble keeping my eyes on the page and if there were pills that allowed me to read a book and remember anything about it a week later, I’d pay good money.
- I like to play games, and the way I play a game is this: I learn the rules of the game and the basic strategy. Then, I immediately set out to find a way to mangle, skew, mix up, undermine, or otherwise debase the way that game is played. I do not so much play games as attempt to find their limits; my style of play tends to rub up against the game’s most obscure rules and special cases. After settling on a pattern of debasement, I try to generalize it into a strategy that works against my opponents, who have since given up and moved on. This is why I play games at home, until the sun comes up, against no one in particular.
- My immune system is made out of galvanized steel, flanked with missile turrets and encircled by a hideous, alligator-filled moat. I have not had the flu in almost ten years, and aside from a few minor sniffles, I never, ever get sick. I chalk it up to a disgusting lifestyle that tests my body’s fortifications regularly.
- Language is probably my chief pleasure in life, as well as my chief pain. It is a rare moment indeed that I do not have some word swirling around my head which is either a) utterly appalling, or b) fantastically hilarious. I grieve over haphazard lingo-gunk like “empowerment” and “skill set”, and giggle over endlessly pliable profanity like “pussification” and “fuckery” (n.). The other day I was proffered a portmanteau for “blog carnival”: blarnival, and I nearly keeled over, but now I can’t stop saying it. Out loud, even. I obsess over the latest linguistic irritatants (current nemesis: “either you’re [adjective], or you’re not” and all variations thereof) and keep such close watch over my usage that I never get anything done. The downside of this obsession is that I am a horrible grammar and spelling snob, and judge everyone accordingly. Call it a coping mechanism.
- Most days I spend more hours on a computer than sleeping. This pattern of living has made me demonstrably dumber. In fact, I’m sure the two variables can be correlated. Computers are the leading cause of gawky, clumsy teenagers, and old habits die hard. We keyboard-jockeys sit still, making only negligible motions with the hand or wrist, conversing almost telepathically with the computer screen. This has been my habitat for many years, and I am of mixed mind about it. Gainful employment is a blessing, and my general state of inactivity has made me physically awkward, and yet more self-knowledgable than anyone could ever be. However, much self-knowledge is without essence; it is merely more information. So I still harbour serious dreams of taking a job filled with nothing but manual labour where my days are spent upright, pulling up quarry stones or pushing trees over, so that I might rediscover movement. Know anyone?
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(3 comments)
So it takes a meme to get you to write a blog post? Or has The Eponym become a quarterly publication? If so, you’ll need to do considerably better than that! ;-)
I prefer to think of it as a “non-winterly” publication.
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