Tag! You’re it!

Scooter Mac  tagged me.  It’s strange how my threshold for this sort of stuff changes over the years.  I remember when I got my first e-mail chain like this, and I was all gah-gah, thinking it’s the coolest thing since my first (snail-)mail chain letter.  I wonder how long it will be before I start shredding/deleting/otherwise ignoring these blogger-meme-taggy-things.

God … who knew I was so jaded and bitter!  Here’s to another few years of learning more about my friends.

1. I am terrified of the open water.  A river, a lake, the open ocean … they all petrify me.  I can deal with swimming pools, and in fact, I am a certified Advanced Swimmer (I went to summer camp a couple of years).  I just have a deep rooted, irrational and pervasive fear of bodies of water where I cannot see the bottom.
2. I love peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches … with cheese.
3. I slept with my high-school science teacher (after high-school, yo!)
4. When I was in middle-school, I asked my mom if I could go to the video arcade, and she said yes and handed me a couple of bucks.  I was so elated I started jumping around … and knocked over an old lady and sent her glasses flying.   Mortified doesn’t even begin to describe it.  Since then, I’ve been super-conscious of how much space I take up (I am not a small person).  A side-effect of this, I think, is that I’m much more agile than others my size.
5. I took a poll of some friends in college, all of whom, for various reasons, spoke another language.  I was trying to find the word for “love” in any language that to me actually sounded like love.  It was/is Hebrew:  Ahavah (pronounced AH-ha-VAH, if I remember correctly).

Who’s next?  I choose Kurt, Martino, Duffy,  Autumn, and Ben Forta.

Cabbage Go!

My brother John amazes me with his uncanny ability to play with words.  One of my first memories of that was when we were going to hop in a car together and head out shopping (or something), back on Guam.

There was  no K-mart on Guam back then; it’s a recent addition to the shoreline.

“Cabbage go,” he exclaimed, emphatically.

I put on my best quizzical look and responded, “What the H-E-double-hockey sticks does that mean?” (we were young back then, afraid of the H-word).

“You know?  Lettuce go! Let…us…go.”

Pure brilliance. Yesterday, I got a gift in the mail from John with this gift-tag missive.  It was shipped from Amazon.com so I didn’t know right away who it was from.  The language of the gift-tag was cryptic, too.  What clued me in to the sender was the name, “Tomassie”.  That’s my neice’s nickname, John’s daughter, Tomasa.

The Organizational structure of the Frigid Northern Cardinal Extreme deem you worthy of character for an electromagnetic asset.

 — Santa – Tomassie

Loosely translated from John-ese:

Santa and his elves from the North Pole say you’re nice and deserve this gadgety present.

Merry Christmas, John, and thanks for the gift and the fond memories!  I won’t open it until Christmas Day…I promise.