A while back I pondered whether to get more serious and authorial with my blog. So I have decided to begin with a bit of self-revelation. Here goes.
- I was born at an early age of humble and pious parents in the SE suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, USofA. You may diss Ohio to your heart's content, but badmouth Cleveland and you'll be in for a tongue lashing of great severity.
- I am mixed-handed (a.k.a. cross-dominant) meaning I use my right hand for some tasks and my left for others. I write with my right but eat with my left. I have dome this since childhood, and it always seemed like the natural and sensible thing to do. My mother thought it was weird (little did she know there was much more to come). I shave the right side of my face with my right hand and the left side with my left.
- I have always attended private, religiously connected schools, from 1st grade through grad school: 3 Catholic and 1 Methodist to be precise. To borrow a phrase from "Dangerous Liaisons", I have always been unalterably prejudiced in favor of convent education. One result of this is I'm college classmates with the pope (Villanova '77). The first time I had any sort of connection to a public school was in my second teaching job, which was at a state university.
- In college, one graduated summa cum laude with a 3.8 GPA or above. I had a 3.79 and had to be content with magna. Curse you freshman calculus!!! (As I recall, the pope got summa.)
- I realized I was gay in 8th grade (13 years old).
- I only like doing things I'm good at; conversely I dislike doing things I'm not good at. That seems to be the only criterion; difficulty, complexity, duration, effort, etc. have nothing to do with it.
- I've been sober since May 1986.
- I have a Vulcan Science Academy sticker on the back of my car, along with a Villanova and a Duke sticker (Duke is nominally Methodist, in case you were wondering).
- I was a Benedictine monk for 13 years.
- I spent most of my life as a ardent perfectionist (cf. 20 Nov re: kitchen towels), but being married and getting older has softened me up a bit, but I can still write an excruciatingly correct MLA-style footnote.
- I am easily intimidated by the authority of signs (except for speed limits), and get upset when I see people violating them. I am not, however, intimidated by people with authority much, and if they are unworthy persons, I will be outright defiant of them.
- Without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite musical form is the piano concerto.
- People think I have an ebullient, entertaining personality, which I suppose I do once I feel comfortable with a person or group. Put me in a crowd of strangers and I'm a complete wallflower, a timid, anonymous creature usually found in a corner.
- I have never had a hobby; I have serial obsessions. I become intensely interested in something and assiduously collect or study about it until interest passes and I move onto something else. Hence, I have a lot of collections of things: starships, rubber ducks, frig magnets, university paraphernalia, medieval bishop chess pieces, glass and stone figures of bunnies, etc. I once had a collection of 120 stuffed animal penguins, each with its own name which I knew by heart.
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