![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Half As Many Twice-as-long Things About Me
Jan. 8th, 2003 05:26 amI haven't posted much since I went to Twilight Covening in October, and had so much to write about that I couldn't. This meme got me back into the swing.
1.With my parents I have been to Cancun, Bermuda, the Grand Cayman Islands, Ireland, Italy, and Sicily.
2.By myself I have been to Greece, Scotland, Ireland, the UK, and South Africa.
3.I get the sneezes and coughs sometimes, but in my adult life I have never been bedridden by illness or injury, nor missed a day of work for other than a "mental health day" (usu. because I hadn't gotten enough sleep).
4.This month I took a prescription medication for the first time in my adult life.
5.I haven't owned a TV since I left Chicago in '96.
6.I was a popular target for ridicule in grade school. At some point I made a conscious decision not to value the social currency that was being denied me and turned my attention to other things, and stuff slid off me after that.
7.I still don't like being called "Matthew", my legal name, due to associations to those days. My name is Matt.
8.I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs. I believe all prohibition of recreational substances should be ended and that the state should invest heavily in information and treatment programs for addictions (esp. to alcohol and nicotine, which are colossal killers).
9.My parents were divorced when I was 3 (or so). I have no discernible trauma therefrom -- I was always clear that it wasn't about me, that they both loved me, and that I'd still see my dad. (Saw him two weekends a month K-12.)
10.In fact I credit some of my present-day perspicacity to growing up in two households, getting clear very early on that reality is socially constructed.
11.I spent a lot of my childhood reading fantasy and science fiction, and playing board games by myself, assigning different strategies to different players.
12.My parents were not very physically affectionate while I was growing up. I was (surprise) not a touchy-feely person either. Until second year of college that is, when I turned into a cuddlebug. I still can't really account for that.
13.Second year of college was also when I had my first sexual experiences.
14.To this day, my cuddle drive is stronger than my sex drive. I can contentedly go without sex for a lot longer than I can contentedly go without cuddles.
15.I've made love with five different people in my life, but cosominated with 15+.
16.Two of those five were emotionally/mentally abusive relationships, one incompetently so (I graduated from that one to the other).
17.I learned some deep lessons about boundaries and baggage-ownership from those relationships, and wouldn't avoid them if I had it all to do over again.
18.The first woman I ever worked up the courage to express a romantic interest in turned out to be falling for my roommate at the time. They were worried about me and the situation, but I was cool with it.
19.When saw them making out the next week... I felt good! There were two people I like a lot, getting a lot of joy from each other. How cool.
20.I've only ever felt jealousy when I've seen people get cuddles while I've been cuddle-deprived.
21.I first heard of "polyamory" when I saw alt.polyamory created in '92, knew what the word meant as soon as I saw it, and have identified as poly ever since.
22.My first experience of being in more than one romantic relationship at a time was in '02. Getting involved with someone is a rare event for me.
23.I started identifying as Pagan in my spirituality in '00. I've experienced several big shifts in consciousness through ritual in the last couple years.
24.My partner and I are planning on getting handfasted, not married. Many of the social constructions around marriage and weddings don't suit us at all, and Paganism has some commitment traditions that are very attractive to us. If we decide to have kids, we might get the piece of paper from the state, but we still wouldn't refer to ourselves as married.
25.My GRE scores were 760 Verbal, 800 Math, 800 Logic. I'm embarrassed to tell people this and thus don't -- it either makes people feel bad or registers socially as bragging. The fact that I'm including them here suggests I've gotten over this somewhat. Being smart is something I like about myself.
26.My competently abusive ex-girlfriend had higher scores than that.
27.Now that I have an iPod, I'm listening to music consistently for the first time in my life. Everything I like, on shuffle. Need more!
28.I'm a major night owl. A major introvert in college, I nonetheless cultivated a social group that tended to convene in my dorm room. This did not wear me out because people would always head off to sleep around midnight or 1am, giving me a couple hours of alone time every day.
29.I'd like to be a dad someday, if it'd make sense in my life. It's not something I have an imperative to do though. Sometimes I observe dads doing or saying stuff and I notice myself filing it away for future use, so I know my unconscious is figuring on it.
30.My primary form of transportation has been bicycle for 12 years. This shows in water aerobics -- I'm average at most moves, but my flutter kick is astonishing.
31.I park my bike under the "No bike parking or chaining to railing" sign at Davis.
32.My one allergy is to sunlight. I rash before I burn, usually. At its worst (in Cancun), my arms and legs were excruciatingly hot and I had to spend two days in the hotel room with the curtains drawn. Calamine lotion and Benadryl had no effect, and I melted lots of ice onto my limbs without much relief. Finally the hotel cook suggested vinegar, which weirdly cut the rash and left it prickly but tolerable.
33.I get my primary income from being a unix sysadmin for a textbook publisher. It's an industry that serves the mainstream education world, which is horribly backwards compared to what's possible. Children are natural learners, and we force-feed them! If I have one or more children I very seriously want them to go to Sudbury Valley School.
34.I usually can't stand listening to the radio, since the commercials are so insipid. Hence, my exposure to new music is pretty low. I need a good internet radio station.
35.I lived in Scotland in '96-'97. When I returned to the US I wanted to live in Boston, Chicago, or Seattle, and was going to spend some time in each before I settled down. I started in Boston since I could stay in my dad's top floor room for a few months while I figured myself out. Got a contract unix job at my still-current employer, started putting down roots, and never considered trying the other two.
36.When I acquired my current kitty from the cat rescue lady in JP, he was a little ball of fear and anxiety who just wanted to stuff himself into the deepest cranny he could find, all the time. I picked him because he seemed more secure and calm when he was being held. Every day I would dig him out from somewhere and walk around with him, and he'd perk up and look around and get some pets, and then go hide again. Over four years he's gotten vastly more confident, and now he's a creative goofball who even greets (slow-moving) strangers on first appearance. Yay!
37.The most important criterion for my choice of college turned out to be my feeling of connectedness with the people I met -- one of the best-made decisions in my life.
38.At some point in college, I made a decision to let myself be more expressive. I make a lot of goofy noises, gestures, and expressions when I'm relaxed, and laugh a lot.
39.I achieved Tetris Nirvana on the first version of Tetris to be available on the Mac. (Tetris Nirvana was playing indefinitely on level 9.)
40.I've collected quotations since '87. After a purge of quotes that were cute but didn't really have any personal significance, I still have over 600.
41.I suffer from writer's block. The more significant something is, the harder it is to write about. I'm only interested in writing about significant things. When people send me excellent letters, I have a terrible time writing a reply that does theirs justice. (I know it's way better to send a short, timely reply, and still rarely can.) My web-page still looks like it did when I first put it up in '94.
42.I'm a slow reader. I did a speed-reading book once and implemented its techniques, and discovered that I could keep my comprehension fairly high while thinking about what I was reading virtually not at all. I went back to slow.
43.Heat makes me lethargic. Cold wakes me up.
44.I'm working (vary occasionally) on juggling 5 balls. I can sometimes maintain a shower for a dozen throws or so, and my record is 27, but there's still far to go. It was easy to practice when I hung out with jugglers all the time in college.
45.I've never been the driver in a car accident, but I have hydroplaned. I came to a slowdown in the rain on the highway, saw I was going to bump the car ahead of me because my braking was ineffective, and turned to miss him to the side. Only my car kept going straight, since you have to be touching the road for the angle of your wheels to matter. Fortunately he let off his brakes in time and I didn't hit him after all... at which point my wheels met the road again, fully turned, and I zapped into the median.
46.I once met a guy who was making piles of money teaching empathy and congruence as business skills to businessmen. The only limitation on the growth of his program was finding good trainers. He invited me to go work for him in San Francisco, and when I said I was happy in Boston, he asked me, "What would you do differently in your life if you had a million dollars?" I gave that a good think, and my genuine reply was, "Not much!"
47.I've only ever found women romantically or sexually attractive, but only bisexuality makes sense to me. So many people I met in college were or later came out as bi that I've since realized it's become my default assumption when I meet new people.
48.I don't really have a passion for computers, I'm just good at them. So, I tend to apply heuristic rather than analytic problem-solving techniques, and usually end up successfully fixing things without understanding why the problem happened or why the fix worked. It feels more like witchcraft than engineering.
49.I used to hate programming, but now I'm finding it the funnest part of my unix job. Yay perl.
50.My post-grad trainings in counselling and massage therapy have fundamentally enhanced the way I talk to and touch people. My romantic life has improved immensely -- partly of course by dint of getting involved with the right person, but that very probably wouldn't have been possible for the person I was before I left Chicago. Meeting new people is still the perennial roadblock.
1.With my parents I have been to Cancun, Bermuda, the Grand Cayman Islands, Ireland, Italy, and Sicily.
2.By myself I have been to Greece, Scotland, Ireland, the UK, and South Africa.
3.I get the sneezes and coughs sometimes, but in my adult life I have never been bedridden by illness or injury, nor missed a day of work for other than a "mental health day" (usu. because I hadn't gotten enough sleep).
4.This month I took a prescription medication for the first time in my adult life.
5.I haven't owned a TV since I left Chicago in '96.
6.I was a popular target for ridicule in grade school. At some point I made a conscious decision not to value the social currency that was being denied me and turned my attention to other things, and stuff slid off me after that.
7.I still don't like being called "Matthew", my legal name, due to associations to those days. My name is Matt.
8.I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs. I believe all prohibition of recreational substances should be ended and that the state should invest heavily in information and treatment programs for addictions (esp. to alcohol and nicotine, which are colossal killers).
9.My parents were divorced when I was 3 (or so). I have no discernible trauma therefrom -- I was always clear that it wasn't about me, that they both loved me, and that I'd still see my dad. (Saw him two weekends a month K-12.)
10.In fact I credit some of my present-day perspicacity to growing up in two households, getting clear very early on that reality is socially constructed.
11.I spent a lot of my childhood reading fantasy and science fiction, and playing board games by myself, assigning different strategies to different players.
12.My parents were not very physically affectionate while I was growing up. I was (surprise) not a touchy-feely person either. Until second year of college that is, when I turned into a cuddlebug. I still can't really account for that.
13.Second year of college was also when I had my first sexual experiences.
14.To this day, my cuddle drive is stronger than my sex drive. I can contentedly go without sex for a lot longer than I can contentedly go without cuddles.
15.I've made love with five different people in my life, but cosominated with 15+.
16.Two of those five were emotionally/mentally abusive relationships, one incompetently so (I graduated from that one to the other).
17.I learned some deep lessons about boundaries and baggage-ownership from those relationships, and wouldn't avoid them if I had it all to do over again.
18.The first woman I ever worked up the courage to express a romantic interest in turned out to be falling for my roommate at the time. They were worried about me and the situation, but I was cool with it.
19.When saw them making out the next week... I felt good! There were two people I like a lot, getting a lot of joy from each other. How cool.
20.I've only ever felt jealousy when I've seen people get cuddles while I've been cuddle-deprived.
21.I first heard of "polyamory" when I saw alt.polyamory created in '92, knew what the word meant as soon as I saw it, and have identified as poly ever since.
22.My first experience of being in more than one romantic relationship at a time was in '02. Getting involved with someone is a rare event for me.
23.I started identifying as Pagan in my spirituality in '00. I've experienced several big shifts in consciousness through ritual in the last couple years.
24.My partner and I are planning on getting handfasted, not married. Many of the social constructions around marriage and weddings don't suit us at all, and Paganism has some commitment traditions that are very attractive to us. If we decide to have kids, we might get the piece of paper from the state, but we still wouldn't refer to ourselves as married.
25.My GRE scores were 760 Verbal, 800 Math, 800 Logic. I'm embarrassed to tell people this and thus don't -- it either makes people feel bad or registers socially as bragging. The fact that I'm including them here suggests I've gotten over this somewhat. Being smart is something I like about myself.
26.My competently abusive ex-girlfriend had higher scores than that.
27.Now that I have an iPod, I'm listening to music consistently for the first time in my life. Everything I like, on shuffle. Need more!
28.I'm a major night owl. A major introvert in college, I nonetheless cultivated a social group that tended to convene in my dorm room. This did not wear me out because people would always head off to sleep around midnight or 1am, giving me a couple hours of alone time every day.
29.I'd like to be a dad someday, if it'd make sense in my life. It's not something I have an imperative to do though. Sometimes I observe dads doing or saying stuff and I notice myself filing it away for future use, so I know my unconscious is figuring on it.
30.My primary form of transportation has been bicycle for 12 years. This shows in water aerobics -- I'm average at most moves, but my flutter kick is astonishing.
31.I park my bike under the "No bike parking or chaining to railing" sign at Davis.
32.My one allergy is to sunlight. I rash before I burn, usually. At its worst (in Cancun), my arms and legs were excruciatingly hot and I had to spend two days in the hotel room with the curtains drawn. Calamine lotion and Benadryl had no effect, and I melted lots of ice onto my limbs without much relief. Finally the hotel cook suggested vinegar, which weirdly cut the rash and left it prickly but tolerable.
33.I get my primary income from being a unix sysadmin for a textbook publisher. It's an industry that serves the mainstream education world, which is horribly backwards compared to what's possible. Children are natural learners, and we force-feed them! If I have one or more children I very seriously want them to go to Sudbury Valley School.
34.I usually can't stand listening to the radio, since the commercials are so insipid. Hence, my exposure to new music is pretty low. I need a good internet radio station.
35.I lived in Scotland in '96-'97. When I returned to the US I wanted to live in Boston, Chicago, or Seattle, and was going to spend some time in each before I settled down. I started in Boston since I could stay in my dad's top floor room for a few months while I figured myself out. Got a contract unix job at my still-current employer, started putting down roots, and never considered trying the other two.
36.When I acquired my current kitty from the cat rescue lady in JP, he was a little ball of fear and anxiety who just wanted to stuff himself into the deepest cranny he could find, all the time. I picked him because he seemed more secure and calm when he was being held. Every day I would dig him out from somewhere and walk around with him, and he'd perk up and look around and get some pets, and then go hide again. Over four years he's gotten vastly more confident, and now he's a creative goofball who even greets (slow-moving) strangers on first appearance. Yay!
37.The most important criterion for my choice of college turned out to be my feeling of connectedness with the people I met -- one of the best-made decisions in my life.
38.At some point in college, I made a decision to let myself be more expressive. I make a lot of goofy noises, gestures, and expressions when I'm relaxed, and laugh a lot.
39.I achieved Tetris Nirvana on the first version of Tetris to be available on the Mac. (Tetris Nirvana was playing indefinitely on level 9.)
40.I've collected quotations since '87. After a purge of quotes that were cute but didn't really have any personal significance, I still have over 600.
41.I suffer from writer's block. The more significant something is, the harder it is to write about. I'm only interested in writing about significant things. When people send me excellent letters, I have a terrible time writing a reply that does theirs justice. (I know it's way better to send a short, timely reply, and still rarely can.) My web-page still looks like it did when I first put it up in '94.
42.I'm a slow reader. I did a speed-reading book once and implemented its techniques, and discovered that I could keep my comprehension fairly high while thinking about what I was reading virtually not at all. I went back to slow.
43.Heat makes me lethargic. Cold wakes me up.
44.I'm working (vary occasionally) on juggling 5 balls. I can sometimes maintain a shower for a dozen throws or so, and my record is 27, but there's still far to go. It was easy to practice when I hung out with jugglers all the time in college.
45.I've never been the driver in a car accident, but I have hydroplaned. I came to a slowdown in the rain on the highway, saw I was going to bump the car ahead of me because my braking was ineffective, and turned to miss him to the side. Only my car kept going straight, since you have to be touching the road for the angle of your wheels to matter. Fortunately he let off his brakes in time and I didn't hit him after all... at which point my wheels met the road again, fully turned, and I zapped into the median.
46.I once met a guy who was making piles of money teaching empathy and congruence as business skills to businessmen. The only limitation on the growth of his program was finding good trainers. He invited me to go work for him in San Francisco, and when I said I was happy in Boston, he asked me, "What would you do differently in your life if you had a million dollars?" I gave that a good think, and my genuine reply was, "Not much!"
47.I've only ever found women romantically or sexually attractive, but only bisexuality makes sense to me. So many people I met in college were or later came out as bi that I've since realized it's become my default assumption when I meet new people.
48.I don't really have a passion for computers, I'm just good at them. So, I tend to apply heuristic rather than analytic problem-solving techniques, and usually end up successfully fixing things without understanding why the problem happened or why the fix worked. It feels more like witchcraft than engineering.
49.I used to hate programming, but now I'm finding it the funnest part of my unix job. Yay perl.
50.My post-grad trainings in counselling and massage therapy have fundamentally enhanced the way I talk to and touch people. My romantic life has improved immensely -- partly of course by dint of getting involved with the right person, but that very probably wouldn't have been possible for the person I was before I left Chicago. Meeting new people is still the perennial roadblock.
