In Which I Get “Tagged” and Divulge Secrets
I object to chain letters for all the same reasons you do. The pressure, the promises that never come true, the threats that might come true if I break the chain, the dollar bills or recipes or gold ingots that are supposed to arrive and never, ever do. (I desperately wanted to believe in that dollar bill pyramid scheme!)
I am also routinely the person (correctly) assumed to be the last friend on earth to answer those email questionnaires that go around taking a full personal history and ending with inane questions like “Bacon or bacon bits?”. That said, I have been “tagged” in the blogger’s version of a chain letter, which in this case is elevated from its humble and annoying history as a pain-in-the-ass Ponzi scheme by being renamed a “meme,” which is a word I can’t get enough of. Ideas spread like viruses! This, I love.
Anyway, I’m honored nonetheless to have been tagged by the fantastically smart and compulsively readable super-blogger, my pal Gretchen Rubin. Once tagged, you are to divulge five little-known facts about yourself, then tag five new bloggers. For Gretchen, and for my secret aspiration to be included in a marginally clubby bloggish enterprise, I’ll break my chain of never responding to anything remotely chain-like.
Five Little-Known Facts About Melissa Kirsch
1. Whenever I wake up from a nap, sleeping in the car/on a plane, dozing in a movie theater — basically any spell of sleep that’s shorter than a full night’s worth — I sneeze within two minutes of waking up. I’m not awake until I sneeze. I’ve never heard of this phenomenon happening to anyone else.
2. My first real job was sweeping tennis courts for under $5 an hour. With that giant broom that is about ten feet wide that you drag with your whole body like you’re a herd of oxen.
3. Whenever I don’t have a song trapped in my head, my head radio plays one of two songs that have absolutely no relevance to my life that I consciously know of: “Now That We Found Love” by Heavy D and the Boyz and “Fallin’ in Love” by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds (this could perhaps be the world’s dorkiest song…and I somehow have it encoded in my DNA). I find myself defaulting to singing these two songs to myself several times a day. I hadn’t, until searching for those links today, actually heard either song in decades. I find this hilarious.
4. The sight of the following things gross me out more than anything else on earth except for bugs: chewed pen caps, lipstick on the edge of a cup, those skinny Misty cigarettes (double gross-out if there’s lipstick on the Misty). Ew. I get chills just thinking of these things.
5. I have two birthmarks on my left torso: one looks like a bullet wound and one looks like a faint map of Europe and Asia. I am positive at least one of them is proof of royal lineage.
That took longer than I thought. But it feels good to have let it out about my head radio and the possibility that I am indeed a princess.
Tag, you’re it:
Jean Villepique
Sarah Grace McCandless
Robin Epstein
Michael Gross
Stefanie Iris Weiss
January 18th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Hey Melissa,
I’m really familiar with the Heavy D and the Boyz song only because it plays in my head too. I think the reason for this may be related to the pace at which you walk. I walk to the beat of this particular song (especially when I’m in heels and late for work) and this helps me maintain the pace…or I’m just suffering from some form of (selectively) collective insanity…
-Marsh
February 4th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Okay Melissa, better late than never - I wasn’t sure if I was meant to post my participation here or on the MySpace version of the blog, but here goes…
Five Little-Known* Facts About Sarah Grace McCandless
*Okay maybe not “little-known”, but definitely not “world-known”
1. My version of “Fear Factor” would be as follows: “You must eat this bowl of cottage cheese.” There would have to be serious money involved - I’m talking $1M+ - for me to even CONSIDER doing it.
2. I have a massive crush on Al Gore. Like giddy, grade school tee hee nervous sweaty palms crush.
3. I got my first period in 7th grade on CHRISTMAS DAY. This also happened to be the first Christmas with the “divorced parents” scenario - Mom’s on the 24th, Dad’s on the 25th. So I was with my Dad - greeeeeeeeeeeeat. I ended up Macguyver’ing something with toilet paper to get me through. There is a version of this that ended up in Grosse Pointe Girl - primarily because I DON’T KNOW HOW TO MAKE UP STORIES.
4. I was once such a chicken shit that I had my friend Carey call and pretend to be me during the summer of 1994 to quit one of the two jobs I was working at the Sunriver Resort.
5. When I was three years old, my mom caught me in the bathroom spread wide eagle with a mirror between my legs. When she asked what I was doing, I said, “Looking.” Indeed.
I’ve tagged five other blogger friends, and posted this on my blog - let the games begin!
April 27th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
[...] While I am typing this I am writing the Assignment with the rest of my brain. I am also listening to Band of Horses on noise-cancelling headphones. This is a band (of horses) that I have listened to so much lately that the music is playing in my head even when it’s not (leaving no room for my default songs, thankfully). I’m not even sure I like them (Ben & I decided they’re sort of Modest Mouse meets Arcade Fire…I’d add that they sort of have a tussle with the Decemberists somewhere in there and get their hands on some acoustic guitars too). But it doesn’t matter because I can lock out the world and blast this music that I know so well (”I know you tried, I know you’re cursed, I know your best was still your worst”) it is like the music of the spheres and it seeps into the blanks between what I’m doing (writing this blog post) and what the other part of my brain is doing (writing the Assignment). There is no room for anything else. I can write without music, but I’m more panicky. I like to have loud music to shut out other possibilities, at least when I’m starting an Assignment. [...]