Seven (But Not the Deadly Sins)

In honor of my niece, Mackenzie, here are seven things you may or may not know about me.

1.  I have an extreme capacity for not getting tired of things.  I will get obsessed with something, like a TV show or a book series, and I will watch it or read it until there is nothing more to watch or read, and I won't get sick of it.  I could probably sit and watch endless hours of a TV marathon and be perfectly happy.  At the end, I will be sad there isn't more, and sad that I now have to find something else equally interesting.  When I finally read the Harry Potter series (with skepticism) and discovered how good the books were, and I read them non-stop.  Then I read The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which is connected.  Then I also watched all the movies.  Then I read Looking for God in Harry Potter.  I pretty much exhausted the resources.  When I was in kindergarden, I loved the John Wayne movie Rio Lobo.  For a long time I watched it every day after school, until I finally had the whole thing memorized.  I really get a lot of enjoyment out of having a good obsession now and then.

2.  When I was twelve, I thought it sounded like fun to run away from home.  I was very practical about it and planned that I would need to save about $3000 and I was going to wait til I was around sixteen years old.  I am not entirely sure what my thinking was behind wanting to do that.  I guess I thought it sounded nice to just leave, you know, just go wherever I wanted, without having a plan.  Then, of course, I planned it all out and that must have taken all the fun out of it for me because obviously I never did it.


3.  When I was sixteen I went on a mission trip to Toronto, Canada to reach out to the homeless.  The first day we were there we all went to exchange our money and then walked around downtown a bit.  My friend Scott and I decided to go up on this walkway and see if there were any homeless people up there.  I told my friend Angie where we were going, but when we came back down our group was nowhere in sight.  We were completely and utterly lost in this huge foreign city (I say foreign because we had never been there before, not because it was in Canada--even though Canada technically is foreign, I guess).  We tried asking a few people for directions, but no one seemed to have heard of the Neill-Wycik, where we were staying.  Fortunately for us, there were a bunch of moose statues all around the city, and we basically followed the ones we recognized to get back to where we needed to be.  It was really hot, and we were so hungry, and probably a little scared.  The crazy thing is that when we got back, no one seemed to have noticed that we were gone--not even Angie!


4.  The first year I was at Christ For the Nations they had a big ice storm.  The school is in Dallas, Texas.  Dallas is usually very hot, and in the winter it might get a little snow, but an ice storm was quite out of the ordinary.  Everything was covered in ice, the grass, the trees, the roads, the sidewalks...and the concrete slanting down from the freeway to the off-ramp.  It was probablly the most reckless and dangerous thing I've ever done, but some friends and I went sledding down it.  It really didn't seem dangerous at the time, because, as I mentioned, snow and ice were oddities in Dallas, which means that the drivers were all terrified, and there were only a few people even out driving.  The ones that were out braving the cold and ice were driving so slow that a turtle could have started crossing the road when a car got off onto the ramp, and safely get all the way to the other side before the car ever got there.  Still, it's the kind of thing most parents would not want their child doing, even if their child is nineteen years old.  Later, after Aaron and I were together, I found out that he had driven past us on the way to work and thought something along the lines of "Look at those idiots!" 


5.  After watching a comedy video of Anita Renfroe talking about how her grandma kept all the stuff she needed in her bra instead of a purse, I am semi-seriously considering going this route.  Without a purse, I'd have one less thing to carry, I wouldn't have to spend money on a new one, and everything I need would be close at hand all the time.  Not to mention, I'd get to see the looks on people's faces when I pull money out of my bra.


6.  If I ask people for money, they usually give it to me.  Not a lot of money, but small amounts.  In sixth grade I bought a snickers bar every day after school from the concession stand and if I didn't have the money, I would ask for it from someone else.  In eighth grade I would ask the school principal sometimes for quarters so I could get a drink out of the pop machine and he would usually give them to me.  So I guess that makes me a bum.  But a successful one :)  Now that I've written this people will probably never give me money anymore.  There's something to be said for not giving away all your secrets.


7.  I love sarcasm and wordplay, and just words in general.  I even like cheesy puns that have a double meaning, like this one, "I've been to the dentist a thousand time so I know the drill."  My most favorite movies are ones that have great lines you can quote.  I love the show House because of his sarcasm, even though I know if someone actually said to me the things he says I would hate it.  But it's funny because it's happening to someone else.  I love the silly wordy humor of Mad Libs, and I love Scrabble and crossword puzzles (just not the really hard ones!) and I like the way words sound sometimes, like "cruciverbalist" (which means "a designer or aficionado of crossword puzzles").