I really don’t know why Sylvia/m has it in for me. Every time I make a resolution not to do blog memes ever again, someone I feel I can’t refuse taps me for one. And this time it was Sylvia. And you know how I feel about Sylvia.
These are the rules:
1) Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2) Share 7 facts about yourself.
3) Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
4) Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
1) I am sighing heavily right now.
2) 1/4 is my birthday. [I here pause for the polite applause to die down.] I celebrated this by going to the hospital yesterday, because I was running and had chest pains develop, and not the happy fun kind of chest pains I generally expect while running. This didn’t feel like a heart attack, really. But, well, it was chest pains. And especially as you get closer to fifty years old, there are certain medical issues that demand closer and stricter attention. For instance, I’m not all that far from the age where routine prostate checks commence. And god knows I don’t want to miss out on those because of a heart attack. So I went to the hospital. And I used a kind of privilege that people who examine privilege don’t always count among the types of privilege: I said “chest pains” and I got immediate service.
You think that’s unfair privilege? It’s not. I earned it. Get your own chest pains.
I’m fine. It was probably a muscle pull or something. My heart is in good shape, physically speaking. And I got a turkey sandwich on dry white bread out of the deal. Which was good because I was there from four p.m. until midnight. With ports in my arm just in case, and electrodes taped all over me, and sensors stuck in other places and handy brochures to read about how to control my blood pressure, and how to lower my cholesterol, and how resistance was useless and that I would be assimilated.
2) I have gotten kind of seriously into doing sudokus these days. I find it a trivial but interesting logic puzzle, and also useful in trying to control my ADD, as one of the things my form of ADD makes difficult is holding complex non-verbal arrays of information in short-term memory. Also there’s a couple good versions of it for the iPhone. I can quit any time I want to. Really. I can. I just can.
3) I have made a kind of a resolution this year not to pay attention to the inevitable criticism that will come my way when my Joshua tree book comes close to completion. I know that someone, at some point, will advance some sort of joy-killing narrative about how my book only discusses one particular desert. Well, my point of view only includes one particular desert. True, I will probably mention deserts other than the Mojave where they support my main arguments, perhaps in some sort of academic side chapter.
I just really don’t understand why this one group of bloggers of color has to be so divisive. So the book doesn’t focus on their issues. What am I supposed to do? NOT write about Joshua trees? I mean, can’t we all just get along? So I see Joshua trees as central to my life. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for a whole lot of diverse people with diverse interests to come together and have a wide-ranging discussion of Joshua trees. As long as people don’t insist on divisive discussion of their side pet issues like justice and brutality and stuff.
Cause, you know. They could get their own desert.
3a) I have been told I have a tendency to run jokes into the ground. The people who tell me that are wrong. I have a very deft, playful light hand at such things. Really.
4) I met Erdős once. I was ten, and he came to give a guest lecture at the school I attended, which was run by Hungarian exiles. It was a geek school, full of brilliant kids, and yet when he asked whether anyone knew the difference in definition between two aleph numbers, I was inexplicably the only one who raised a hand. And that was only because I’d been reading Gamow that week. He made me stand up and lauded me for knowing something I didn’t really know, and then left. I could really have used some of his amphetamines rather than the praise. Perhaps ironically, my Erdős number is approximately aleph-null.
5) When I lived in Buffalo as a teenager, I would root for the snow in late autumn. Each year there’d be that first substantial snowstorm, and I would cheer it on, watching it cover the pavement as if the sidewalk was the hated opposing team. I secretly thought of it as a victory of nature’s Countenance Divine over the dark Satanic Sidewalks or something.
I also thought it was an evil horrible capitalist sin to pull weeds out of the cracks in the sidewalk, for much the same reason.
Some of my neighbors here are likely under the impression that I still feel that way.
When I ran away from home at age 16, it was about three weeks before the Mother Of All Blizzards. We didn’t see the sidewalks until about April 1977. I was pretty glad to see them at that point.
6) Another Buffalo fact: I used to remember the date of my anniversary with my most serious Buffalo girlfriend by the convenient fact that our first date was on the weekend on which Nelson Rockefeller died. We broke up before the year was out, so my remembering our anniversary was mainly useful for making myself miserable, and then a few years later for purposes of drunk-dialing.
7) I love Lapsang Souchong tea. I know this is a minority opinion in the world. It’s my favorite tea, and yet I cannot find it in most of the stores here. Perhaps coincidentally, I started drinking it around the time Nelson Rockefeller died. Compared to good old smoky Lapsang Souchong, English breakfast tea is blase, Earl Grey cloying, Lipton useful in emergency medicine. And yet I cannot find it, and have resorted to having friends send it to me a few bags at a time from the East Coast, in a manner probably not entirely unlike the way in which Erdős scored his speed. I don’t know why I can’t find it. Well actually, I do: it’s because Americans are absolutely terrified of anything with a flavor.
I should say that there is a good source of the loose tea nearby, namely Peets, and that if I were anything less than a thoroughgoing enviro hypocrite I would prefer loose tea anyway, because of the one small tree my lifetime bagged tea habit will consume. And Peet’s loose Lapsang Souchong is good. It’s the Lagavulin of black tea. But sometimes you just need a teabag. My fellow Americans continue to cramp my style.
In conclusion, I’m supposed to tag seven people here to do this. I’m not going to. But I will ask for seven volunteers. Feel free to claim one of my tags! They’ve got approximately three times the street value of Gmail invites. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to meme in public in comments here.
Twining’s Lapsang Sou. Tea BAGS 25 to the box
Twelve American dollars
http://www.cheeseline.com/gourmet-foods/
twinings-lapsang-souchong-tea-102548.aspx
Happy Birthday. (-:
You also can obtain the Twinings from my trusted and reliable courier, allteas.com ($3.75/20 bags). http://www.allteas.com/tea-by-brand-twinings-black.html
My Irish forebearers would shudder at the thought of poultice-use-only-Lipton, tiny flower, or the entirely ersatz choices. Of course, my people believe that tea should be chewed. To dunk and remove a tea-bag: heresy!
Hooray! See that wasn’t so bad. You even got online dealers for your Lapsang Sou-crack. ;) (I’m lame; I’m a Lady Grey/Irish Breakfast girl.)
Now write about my temperate deciduous forests before I send an army of one your way with joy-killing invective. For your birthday even.
Chris, happy birthday! :-)
But wait, wait, hold up, I cannot believe you use teabags! Your wife lets you? Dude, they drop the shake at the bottom of the barrel into those things! And you need whole leaves to develop full flavor! And you can’t control strength with the bag! And, and…well, okay I’ll lighten up on the teabag fiasco, but sheesh, that was gnarly.
See, you thought the POC joy-killers would come after you for the desert exclusion, but it’s the teabags, mwahaha! Actually I really like Lapsang Sou-crack too, though I usually go for green stuff; either really good fresh leaves, or cheap jasmine; strong as hell; lidded mug on warming platform, a quarter filled with soaked leaves; good for 4 or 5 refills of boiled water. That’s how we roll, baby, Chinese ghetto style. ;-)
Take care of that ticker, bro. Here’s to a year of good fortune and beautiful moments.
But Kai, I need the teabags. For my eyelids. To calm myself. So that I can get over my jealousy of successful bloggers.
Chris: After a bday runup of chest pain, Gaimanesque winds and a lost beauty of a tree, don’t scoff at cool teabags and a doze on the antimacassar.
Here’s to more zephyrs this year.
I love the program Unisudoku, but am still irritated that, despite my ability to solve the Hard level puzzles in under 6 minutes without taking notes, I cannot solve the Very Hard puzzles. At all.
Chris,
Been there with the chest pains when it wasn’t a false alarm, and I can support the claim that it’s a good hand to hold when you show up in Emerg, if your primary interest is speed of service. Three chairs! No waiting! Still, better to learn it was Something Else.
If/when The Big One really does occur, I just hope my executors instruct the eulogists not to refer to it as a “massive” heart attack! (Unless they *want* to imagine me spinning in my grave.) I don’t have a massive heart, as far as I’m able to tell.
Second, the birthday thing. Somebody on the dear old CBC this afternoon was saying that celebratin’ the mother’s contribution in squeezing us out seemed more appropriate as a yearly ritual. YMMV, I suppose, and any Freudians in the room better just sit on their hands.
But I still think a birthday’s more of an occasion than National Marmot Day, or Save the Gay Whales For Jesus, or Provincial Ride-a-Broom Day.
The Mortality Thing bites, don’t it?
I haven’t written for a while, so I’m not sure if the register shows my current email (although I *think* it’s right).
A long-winded Happy Birthday.
Enviro-hypocrisy! Now there’s a subject for an entire thread. What are those things you cannot give up yet know make you an enviro-hypocrite? What do you do to compensate?
I’ll start—more-than-infrequent carnivorism. Compensation? I watch an episode of “Planet Earth” and say, “Hey, at least I didn’t take an hour to drown the cow!” (Reference to an alligator attack on a wildebeast ...)
I also play the “haven’t had and don’t plan to have any kids” card. Do the math and I figure my non-reproduction has a pretty big non-impact. I can jutify almost anything depending on how many generations I imagine having nipped in the bud.
PS - Happy belated birthday! Growing up in MI I, too, longed for snow. Can’t get used to these wet CA winters.