Alone and Unobserved

That’s right. I’ve been tagged for the very first time. I can see only two possible reactions:

• The fact that people are reading (and now tagging) my blog means that I’m ever closer to achieving the dream of every high-school-age freak and/or geek—POPULARITY. And, as we all know, the higher one’s blog stats are, the more one is worth as a person.
• or,
• Alone and Unobserved has been fatally tainted with populism and must be put down.

While I ponder which side of the popularity/populism divide to come down on, here are the rules, original formatting/form intact:

THE RULES

1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And my eight things:

1. I didn’t read much nonfiction until last October, when I was hired as a nonfiction reference librarian. Now I read books on costume and fashion, textbooks on New Testament contextual criticism and stylesheets and markup for fun.

   Somehow I always thought it worked the other way for nonfiction reference librarians—first the love for nonfiction, then the job. Ah, well.

2. I used to be able to play the piano. I started teaching myself from books when I was seven, and then I took lessons from the time I was fifteen until I was twenty-three. I was learning Beethoven’s Sonate Pathétique when I decided lessons and practicing took too much time, so I quit. Now I can hardly play even the simplest melodies. I’m especially bitter about it now that I’m developing multiple nerve compression syndromes in my arms and hands that may keep me from playing ever again, even if I wanted to.
3. I may have a rare-but-boring form of synesthesia. Or I may not. In any case, each letter of the alphabet and digit from 0 to 9 (along with many colors) has a distinct gender and personality for me, and the number systems, days of the week, month and year—and even the alphabet—all have three-dimensional maps associated with them.
4. I have trouble adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, which is why I was glad the only arithmetic I had to do during my master’s exam was to factor 616 into primes. Still, I managed to do it wrong—twice—while my professors looked on. (Apparently 2×38≠616. Who knew?)
5. The first course on my college transcript is an “Opera Chorus” class from 1988, when I was seven. (My sister and I were gingerbread children in the local community college production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel.) I started college full-time when I was fifteen, and finished my undergraduate degree nine years later, when I was twenty-four.
6. I’ve been writing flash fiction since my family first got a Commodore 128. Those stories probably still survive in some long-forgotten horde of 3.5-inch floppies at the Tibbitts’ family manse in Southern California. As I recall, there was one with a fountain—a DEADLY fountain!—and one with a quilt—a DEADLY quilt!—and one I ripped off from Richard Kennedy, and one I ripped off from Lloyd Alexander, and probably a hundred others I ripped off from various other unsuspecting authors. Cut me some slack, though; I was eleven. I now write flash fiction, among other things, and publish it all on my website.
7. I started making bread when I was twelve and have been baking verious delicacies ever since. My cooking skills got a major boost when I lived in Southern Italy for two years as a Mormon missionary (yes, I had religion at one point). I would schedule special appointments with the local Italian mammas so they could teach me their specialties, none of which I learned perfectly, but many of which I can make with tolerable skill to this day. Among the delicious recipes I accumulated while I was in Italy are:
   • Eggplant Parmesan
   • Tiramisù
   • Apple-Peach Crostata
   • Focaccia with Cherry Tomatoes and Garlic
   • Sauce Béchamel
   • Four-Cheese Sauce
   • Multiple varieties of tomato-based pasta sauce
   • Pasta al Forno

   I put this knowledge to good use towards the end of my stay in Italy, when I won a local dessert-making contest against a group of Italian women. If you Google my name, the first page that currently comes up is the original winning recipe. I’ll make it for you some time. Just make sure it’s strawberry season, and give me plenty of notice.

8. I can’t think coherently unless I’m walking fast AND have someone I can bounce ideas off of. This means that when I’m by myself and need to think, I pace up and down and around and talk to people who aren’t, technically, physically present. If I know you more than passingly, it is a sad near-certainty that I have had such a conversation with you, and you didn’t even know it. Furthermore, it is possible that at some point you became intransigent and the discussion devolved into a fight, which explains why I’m mysteriously out of sorts with you at the moment. I hope this doesn’t weird you out too much. I swear I’m not a freak. Never mind, no one would ever believe that. I swear I’m not an insane freak. Can we still be friends?

I’m not going to tag anyone, but feel free to leave eight-part confessionals about yourselves in the comments!