25 things about me, as I thought of them. Modeled after a recent entry by Rich; I'm afraid my paltry effort will pale in comparison to his 100 facts, but c'est la vie. Perhaps I should have had some wine?...
I absolutely must have something to eat with coffee, like a danish or a biscuit, unless the coffee is really, really good.
I hate, hate, hate misplacing things. Little things, like mittens or hats. Or pens, or bus fare, or my wallet, or that screwdriver I need right now. It induces an apoplectic rage in me like nothing else does. Also: I'm exceptionally prone to misplacing little things, like mittens and hats, or pens, or bus fare, or... you get the idea. This is most unfortunate, because it means that I spend a lot of the winter storming around the house and cursing about where I left my @#$%ing left mitten, and how things don't just get up and walk away, so where could it possibly be, etc. Strangely, this only applies to me; I'm appropriately sympathetic and helpful when other people misplace their stuff.
I have a fist kyu in aikido. My shodan (black belt) test is coming in May.
My favourite part about doing aikido isn't the learning to throw people part; it's the being thrown part, called ukemi: the art of getting thrown really hard, and recovering such that I land with minimal impact—remember this video from the other day? Notice how the guy being thrown is cleverly not breaking his spine when he lands; he's doing something to make sure that happens. It can be subtle like that, or not-so-subtle (watch for the guys being thrown by Kenji Shimizu ca. 50 seconds in, and Gozo Shioda ca. 1'40"). I find the sensation of, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, "being thrown at the ground and missing", exhilarating.
I'm extremely good at parking vehicles in tough spots. Although it makes no sense to me, I'm told this is highly sexy.
I have a BFA in music from York University, which was the most fun I ever had going to school.
I dropped out of an MA in Composition from York University, which was the least fun I ever had going to school.
I can play the sax pretty well: I used to be professional, but I don't play anymore. It's not clear to me at this time whether that's permanent or not.
I like programming computers. Pathologically. I actually can't stop doing it. My wife says I have a problem. It was when I noticed that I was cutting grad school classes in music with one of the universally-acknowledged paragons of the field to go teach myself perl and hack on music generation algorithms, which I then never actually used for anything other than hacking on more music generation algorithms, that I started to wonder if maybe I was overlooking where my real passion lay. Luckily, and by sheer coincidence, they pay me a lot better to fiddle with computers than they ever did for my work as a musician. Also I get to work with fun, smart people all day. Who knew?
I have a secret love for totally prosaic, mundane and sappy cultural artifacts. I say "secret" because I also have a deep love for fairly marginal and avant-garde works of art, music etc. too, and when you like the latter you're supposed to look down your nose at the former. This is a habit I picked up from hanging around too many hip musician/art/cinema/dance types, with which I'm still struggling, and hope to break someday. Er, the habit, not the artsy-fartsy types. Anyway, I really do love it all, and trying to deny that hasn't worked well for me in the past.
I had an RSI (repetitive strain injury) that manifested itself as a burning sensation in the palms of my hands in the mid-to-late 90's. As a result, I couldn't type or write more than a few words at a time for a year and a half. I managed to do an entire year of university without having to write a single essay or exam. Admittedly, it was music school, so I did a lot of singing and acting electives, but still.
As a kid, I could crack all 10 of my knuckles. After the onset of the RSI, I couldn't crack any of them anymore. Now, the ability to crack my left index and middle fingers has returned, plus I've gained the ability to crack my wrists, all of which serve to dissipate musculoskeletal tension that remains from the RSI.
I've consistently been pegged a good five to ten years older than I am since I was in my teens. I believe this has largely been a matter of attitude. I was able to regularly saunter in to the LCBO store and buy myself hard liquor from the age of 14 onward, and I've never been carded.
I've been Rolfed (well, to be precise, I've been Integrated Structurally). I found it highly educational and a great all-around experience.
When I was 10, I was in a two-car collision powerful enough to shatter the windshield of the car and break my wrist when it slammed into the car door. I remember how cool my 10-year-old brain thought it was to be able to figure out that, since we were doing 60km/h and the other driver was doing 40km/h, it was like we had slammed into a brick wall at 100km/h.
The seat belt also snapped my collarbone, and as a consequence I wasn't allowed to do any water skiing at summer camp—where water skiing was the coolest thing you could do, awarded as a very special treat to kids who helped out or behaved really well—for the rest of my adolescence.
My favourite ice cream flavour is Chocolate Mousse Royale from Baskin Robbins.
I like vi. A lot. It's completely hard-coded into my brain. I find it hard to edit text in anything else, and all my shells are set up with vi keys.
I really like text-mode/command-line things. Editors, browsers, compilers... Plain text all the way. GUIs/IDEs suck.
I'm Jewish. I am both entirely at home in the culture—able to speak Hebrew fluently and to understand quite a bit of spoken Yiddish, able to recite many prayers by rote, fully comfortable walking into the middle of services in a synagogue of any denomination, and fully able to fit in on the occasions when I've visited Israel—and at the same time, highly ambivalent about what it all means, whether religion in general is a good thing, the politics around Judaism right now, especially in North America, blah blah the extreme right wing blah blah.
I am the great-grandchild of 8 people murdered in the Holocaust, the grandchild of 4 people with serious post-traumatic stress issues as a result of same, and the son of two people who undoubtedly carry around a lot of my-parents-were-survivors guilt. We don't even have a name for the various things this upbringing may have done to the backwoods of my subconscious as a result. I like to think I manage to keep an ironic and somewhat humorous distance from my neuroses, but we all have our bad days.
I can hack on my laptop with loud noises, boisterous conversation, or just about anything else going on around me. Once I'm absorbed in the work it can be very hard to pull me out. Except if you're a TV. TV always wins the battle for my attention, even if it's across the room and very small and has the sound turned off. I don't know why.
As a result, we don't have cable at our house. The TV is kept in a locked closet and only comes out on specific movie-watching (or prerecorded-TV-watching) occasions.
Despite the fact that I love to look at a well-taken picture, the fact remains that I really, really don't know what I'm doing at all when it comes to taking photographs. It's kind of sad, really.
I can fold my tongue in half width-wise and hold it that way for a long time. Be sure you want to see me doing that before you click on this.
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