Randomized and Semi-Legitimized Self-Absorption

Well, the old engine is officially running on this cold London morning now that I've had my requisite bowl of Special K with berries and a cup of decaf instant coffee (shameful, I know, but pregnancy makes you do crazy things for the sake of a healthy child and I just cannot bring myself to buy decaf in coffee's proper ground form - it just seems wrong).

Thought I'd get the proverbial ball rolling with a bizarrely popular post I was introduced to by several friends on Facebook. For the sake of simplicity, we'll call it the "25 Random Things About Me" post. You're supposed to tag friends you want to know more about on yours and surprisingly I've learned an awful lot of random but, yes, insightful things about people I at one point knew kinda well but apparently no longer do.

Before I dive head-first into the dramatic reveal of the 25 random things, I should comment on the irony of my even posting this. There are two reasons why I should probably not do it:

1. As you will soon see, I have a list of retroactive posts waiting (inside my brain) to be posted so that I can put the aforementioned culinary dalliances folder on Matt's picasa to work. I should really probably start with something more appropriate like "Carrot Walnut Bread: a serendipitous waltz with God's gift to bread & pancakes - Whole Wheat Flour." But I'm not gonna.

2. My friends Kristine and Krista apparently met some guy at a DC speak easy a couple of weekends ago who, in his wise inebriated state, declared all bloggers to be "self-absorbed." Well, I can't say I totally disagree with him actually. My only hope is that perhaps this self-absorption is excused and/or mitigated when the declarations of said self-absorption take on the form of relatively unimportant (and therefore non-egotistical?!) details only people who care about you anyway will want to read? You decide.

25 Random Things about Me
*fiendish-introductory-bugle-ditty*

1. My favorite color is and always has been green. As a wee child of 3 or 4 years I boldly declared to my mother I would someday own a green house with a green car and green walls. I am still not opposed to two out of three of those things happening.

2. When I was in 4th grade at Rock Prairie Elementary, we had a playground with gravel flooring. Because I was not above occasional cartwheel or reckless flinging of my then-tinier-self off the jungle jim and onto the gravel, I always reentered the class with dusty, dirty hands. Every day I begged Mrs. Moses to allow me to wash said gravel dust off said dusty, dirty hands. Every day she said no and made me sit down, causing me to develop what I now recognize as a mild form of OCD which mostly manifests itself in an intense and compulsive need to always have clean hands.

3. I always prefer savory or sour over sweet except (apparently) when pregnant.

4. I started using the word "midget" and its contagious and self-created derivations (midgety, midgetesque, etc.) when I was 7 or 8 in reference to my little sister Carla who is now, ironically, marginally taller than me.

5. I LOVE tripe - against all odds. I especially love it in the form of the Mexican soup called Menudo (no, not the band). Not only is the texture one of my favorites, but this particular ingredient in this particular soup is a tried and true Mexican miracle cure for the world's worst hangovers (yes, better than Taco Cabana). You just can't hate anything about that.

6. My dream kitchen is the Mexican/Spanish Hacienda style kitchen out of "A Walk In The Clouds" (yes, the Keanu Reeves movie), which incidentally is also the movie I had my first (and highly traumatic) kiss at in the summer before 9th grade.

7. My first kiss was traumatic because my mom and dad were sitting in the same movie theater about 10 rows behind me and my boyfriend and saw the whole thing. I was subsequently grounded for two weeks. Thank you for that Mexican Gods of child-rearing.

8. I taught myself how to knit five years ago and only made my first legitimate creation - a green Debbie Bliss cashmerino cardigan for my unborn manchild - two weeks ago.

9. I have an olive tree in my living room and a laurel tree in my sunroom. I one day aspire to have a full-fledged orchard including (but not limited to) the following trees: lime, lemon, orange, olive, laurel, avocado, cherry, almond, fig, and hybrid orange-lemons like my grandma used to have.

10. I have, for the past 6 months or so, been eating bell peppers and cucumbers like apples. There's just something so appealing and refreshing about them.

11. I dislike cats.

12. As a child, I used to have a reoccurring dream that I was being chased in slow motion by a lion living in my mother's boss's garden. I now have the reoccurring and highly irrational paranoia that I will get stuck in a public bathroom with those stalls that have a door that goes a foot above the floor, and that a rabid lion will be on the loose looking for Brenda-flesh to devour and I will not be able to climb high enough on the wall or toilet to get away from that grizzly death.

13. Most nights I eat half a lemon (and when I say lemon, I mean lime, because I'm Mexican), salt shaker on the table next to me, one strand of lime pulp at a time. I'm not kidding. According to my dentist, this has not yet adversely affected my tooth enamel, so I'm just going to keep on keepin' on until it does.

14. I am obsessed with Dim Sum and regularly drag Matt to Chinatown for what always turns into a tribute to gluttony more than a regular meal. On that note, Happy Year of the Ox!

15. A couple of months ago (much to Matt's horror) I cursed at a Barclays bank employee after two years of pent-up frustration with their ineptitude finally released itself on an unsuspecting Indian woman at the Wandsworth branch stuck with the weekend shift. Further explanation of this may require a separate post. Stay tuned.

16. The only thing I have ever "stolen" was a couple of gummy bears from one of those Brach's Candy stands at Kroger and I felt so ashamed about it I broke down crying and confessed to it as soon as I got home.

17. My first pet was a black gerbil my uncle gave me in Mexico at the age of 3. I named him Michael Jackson.

18. I once had a dream to be in the same eating or drinking establishment with Tony Danza while living in New York. I missed out on it by five minutes in 2006 at Jake's Dilemma on the Upper West Side.

19. Before I met Matt, the only thing I really knew about Connecticut was that PT Barnum was once the Mayor of Bridgeport thanks to the 4th grade play I was part of the "Prologue Cast" (wtf is that?!) in: "The Life and Times of PT Barnum."

20. I'm not gonna lie - I like musicals. But mostly the classics like The Sound of Music, The King and I, Oklahoma, etc.

21. I once almost died from an allergic reaction and the consequent onset of anaphylactic shock after eating cajun gumbo in New Orleans. Despite this, I still cannot make myself abstain from ordering it.

22. In 4th grade a bull from the pasture behind the playground (yep, welcome to TX y'all) got loose. We were let out for recess anyway. Of course, as fate would have it, I was wearing a red jacket that day and was convinced it would maul me if I made one wrong move. No gravel-y hands that day.

23. To this day, the best birthday party I ever had was in 8th grade when I stashed a secret holding of 150 water-balloons in the backyard and brutally ambushed my guests with them while they unsuspectingly ate hot dogs and burgers in the backyard. Oh, and then my dad brought out the hose. That was the best.

24. I love eating raw garlic. It comes with the perk of good-smelling hands for the rest of the day.

25. I compulsively watch History Channel shows on World War II and the Holocaust and never get tired of them.