25 things about me

 

 

Prompted by a Facebook chain-letter that goes as follows:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

 

1. I’m a jack-of-all-trades and seemingly a master of none. The story of my life is one of constantly starting things in the hope that I’ll be naturally fantastic at them and therefore have to expend no effort to be successful at it, which brings me to…
2. I’m extremely lazy, but fortunately if I am lazy for a long period of time I tend to freak out and become very productive for a short period of time. I hope my blog will not fall victim to my capriciousness.
3. I like to use long words (see no.2). I read a lot as a kid and for some reason I like the idea of a single word being able to encapsulate a complicated concept.
4. I am typically male in my love for useless gadgets, and spend an inordinate amount of money on them. Currently my most useless gadget is an ultraviolet light on my keychain bought for the purpose of finding rocks with luminescent properties, but mostly used to annoy people by shining a purple light in their face.
5. I am an extremely typical second son, driven forwards, backwards, to and away from my older brother.
6. I like deep blue and deep green. Recently I’ve been tending more towards green than blue. Maybe it’s living in a city.
7. For someone who likes writing, my understanding of grammar and punctuation is terrible. I’m especially bad with dialogue.
8. I used to be an enthusiastic fisherman when I was younger, and look forward to going back to that hobby when I’m older.
9. I used to be a firm cat-hater and small-dog fanboy, but after living with Courtney for so long I now like cats and I’m more interested in having a big dog as well.
10. I hate almost all forms of cardiovascular exercise, and can only stand it if I’m not really thinking about it. Karate, Capoeira, Frisbee, punching a bag, skipping (badly) and any team sport is okay with me. I hate running with the power of a thousand burning suns.
11. I was born in Windhoek, Namibia, which at the time was still a part of South Africa. Then I moved to Cape Town when I was about four years old. My mother is Dutch and my Father is German. I like to think this makes me cosmopolitan. If we hadn’t moved to South Africa, I might still be in Namibia, managing a sand farm or driving a truck.
12. I often make the same mistake twice. I studied Latin in school as a puny act of rebellion against my father. I was really bad at it. Then I took accounting as a subject in high school as an acknowledgement that my father had been right about Latin. Turns out I was really bad at that too. Ah, the teenage years. How many of us wish we could do them over again?
13. I don’t eat anything that arrived on-plate with legs, eyes, ears, noses, flippers, beaks, or feelers.
14. I used to be a really good singer before my voice broke. Now I’m a pirate.
15. I used to dream about joining a rock band and being the guy who plays the bagpipes. Unfortunately the dude from KoRn stole my idea.
16. I have a paralyzing fear of the dentist, but who doesn’t?
17. I’ve had two honest-to-god near-death experiences. Once I fell down a mountain and almost slid off the edge of a cliff and when I was very young my father saved me from being run over in Holland by shouting at me to stop. I believe I might have actually been chasing a ball across the road. Neither experience turned me into a dynamic, outgoing thrill-seeker with an insatiable zest for adventure. In my opinion, anyone who comes close to death and then seeks to replicate that feeling is asking for trouble.
18. Boxers.
19. I thought I had a talent for painting miniature figurines, but it turns out I just have a talent for sitting very still for hours and hours as life passes by outside. World of Warcraft players have the same talent.
20. After my first 10 months of living in Japan, during which I lived like a hermit in Courtney’s flat while she went out to work, I pretty much forgot how to use sarcasm. I remember now.
21. When I was eleven years old and in primary school, my love of writing was fired by the discovery of the library at school and Mr. Clements, my English teacher. For a year I answered every essay topic with a ‘gory story’, no matter what the title was supposed to be. Someone always died or was gruesomely dismembered (and then died). I used to get pretty good marks and loved reading my essays in front of the class. I’m glad Mr. Clements never saw fit to stop me. The most he ever did was question how the escaped torture victim killed one guard by strangulation and then went on to deal with the other ‘similarly’. Was the other guard happy to just stand around and wait to be strangled? I told him that the guard was particularly stupid.
22. I weight train for a number of reasons, but undoubtedly one of the strongest is that I’m short.
23. I will probably never grow up. What’s the point?
24. Something positive, something positive…I cook a mean roast.
25. I wouldn’t want to be anyone other than me.