About Me

1. I have very loud shoelaces.
2. I've had entire conversations with people who think I'm my younger brother, Paul.
3. I find alliteration charming.
4. I am NOT a pet person.
5. In a surreal moment of terror, I was once absolutely positive that I was about to be murdered (by a person who turned out to be my friend's mom).  (Read the story HERE.)
6. I sleep with a shaking alarm clock in my pillowcase (to wake me) and an audible alarm clock in the next room, set to go off 3 minutes after the Shake Awake (to make me actually get out of bed before it wakes up the whole house).
7. My older brother (Brian) and I were born in the same calendar year.
8. I once foiled a mugging using only my phenomenally commanding voice.
9. When a stranger begins saying, "Has anyone ever told you...?", I can finish the sentence for him or her.
10. Every single shirt in my closet faces to the left, but I promise I'm not obsessive.
11. If there is such as thing as an addiction to chocolate, I'm fairly certain that I qualify.
12. Over twenty years ago, a friend told me to memorize the number 965752591651711989, and I've never forgotten it. Next time you see me, ask me, and I can rattle it off in an instant.
13. I once dumped a large can of Chocolate Quik powder on my mom. (It was an accident. Really.)
14. I consider it a public service that I do NOT dance outside of my home.
15. When I was fifteen, I ate several dozen chocolate-covered mini-donuts and got more violently-ill than I had ever been. It was a very long night. I haven't eaten a chocolate-covered donut since. I don't think I ever will.  (Read the story HERE.)
16. Though I hold linguistic conventions in high regard, the J in my signature is always printed, rather than signed.
17. When eating out, I prefer going to the same restaurants and ordering the exact same thing every time.
18. I am now appalled by almost every one of the movies that I loved as a teenager.
19. I am particularly fond of the em-dash--it's my favorite punctuation mark.
20. I used to love winter. Now, I can hardly bear it.
21. I was in my mid-twenties when I first ate a fresh peach.
22. I sometimes break subjective/objective pronoun rules, ironically, because I don't want to sound like I use poor grammar.
23. I regularly have apocalyptic dreams. I sincerely hope they don't ever actually happen.
24. I can't name all of my parents' siblings, let alone the fifty bzillion cousins I have.  
25. I still don't know what Trigonometry is for.
26. I regularly cheat on my longstanding relationship with junk food.
27. As a teen, I learned that when my dad holds a full cup of Sprite over your head, "You wouldn't!" is NOT the right thing to say. (I learned, on the same day, that Sprite gets stickier and stickier over the course of a two-hour drive home.)
28. I've been out of the United States several times, but never by more than a few miles.
29. My 3rd-grade teacher, Mrs. Helms, taught us to play a few songs on the ukulele. Man, we rocked!
30. I own one bow tie, which I love because, unlike a necktie, it never flops into water fountains, paper shredders, toilets, or spaghetti. Had I the resources and a few more scoops of social audacity, I would replace ALL of my neckties with bow ties and never wear another necktie as long as I live.
31. My parents abandoned me in Las Vegas when I was five.
32. When my wife asked me if I would marry her, my answer was (and I quote) "Heck, yeah."  I'm sure I could have come up with something better if I'd have had a chance to think. The whole thing just took me by surprise, given that she was on the phone with someone else at the time.
33. I lost my hearing on my left side in my late 20s.  Because of that, I can't tell where specific sounds come from.  (This can really be disorienting at times, like when I'm crossing a street and someone, somewhere, honks their horn. Can't tell if it's directed at me, so I never know whether I'm moments from being roadkill or not.)
34. Though it often took me a long time to get to sleep when I was growing up, I now fall asleep within 3 minutes of lying down.
35. I am slowly overcoming a fear of flying. I am now fairly comfortable on relatively short flights. Anything over the ocean is out of the question.
36. It was the fourth grade spelling bee. After everyone else was eliminated, Chelsa and I battled it out through a dozen or so rounds that were too easy for either of us. Eventually, I got careless and started rattling off the answers without thinking. "C-H-I-K-E-N" lost me the bee. I haven't misspelled that word since.
37. Sometimes I wear brown shoes with a black belt. (Take that, Sneetch Police!)
38. During a Boy Scout meeting when I was a teenager, an irate leader (who shall remain nameless) slammed me up against a wall and shouted threats at me.
            I didn't deserve it.
            Seriously.
39. It is very difficult to find glasses that fit me.  The bridge of my nose apparently measures about 21 mm, and the bridge of nearly every pair of glasses on the planet is . . . well . . . smaller than 21 mm.
40. I've learned you should never underestimate an angry person's ability to accurately arc a large rock up into the air and down onto the top of your head--even when they are really far away.
41. I've done some interpreting for the Deaf, but my signing skills are at that annoying place where non-signers think you're amazing and signers think you're an idiot.
42. I recently discovered that I like pickles on salad.
43. My heart rate is slower than yours.
44. Contact lenses make my eyes bleed.
45. I like cake, but only if it's stale. 
46. I hope to eventually hunt down and destroy every childhood photo ever taken of me.
47. When I was a kid, I couldn't stand eggs.  Mom tried several different preparation/condiment approaches, but they always made me sick.  I would rather go to school hungry than eat them.  Now, I like them quite a bit, especially scrambled.  (Still hate oatmeal, though.)
48. I recently realized that I have long held three major goals in life: (1) to never wear cuff links for any reason, (2) to never own a car that I have to park far away from everyone else's, and (3) to determinedly split infinitives at every opportunity.

MOJ