Meme

I don't usually do memes, but I got tagged by Nonlinear Girl, and since this one's an extension of what I do on this blog anyway, I present to you Six Things About The 'Stute Fish.

1. I grew up without a television. This sentence has become another source of friendly mockery in our household, as I mention it often to explain various personal eccentricities and gaps in my general cultural knowledge. I owned a working television that actually got channels for maybe a year prior to moving in with Himself in my mid-twenties, though I did have one I used as a screen for the VCR for several years. Now, of course, we have cable and netflix and TiVo and a host of other media delights, and I have gone back on a long-held "I never" and live in a house where a whole room is arranged around a large TV. I feel some ambivalence about this, but mostly I enjoy it - television where one can skip or fast-forward the commercials is a far lesser evil, methinks.
   
   
2. When at the grocery store, I put my items on the conveyor belt grouped in "food themes". The themes aren't consistent - they can be by what aisle the product comes from, what food group it is in, or what dish it will go into, but they are always themed in my head. I also get a bit OCD about how they are arranged. Um, and my grocery lists are written in the order items appear in the store layout, to the best of my knowledge. I also compulsively color-sort candies before eating. I wasn't always this anal-retentive, I swear it! Though I must confess that I have always been this odd, just in sloppier ways.
   
   
3. I've never read Chaucer, Spencer, Mann, Hegel, or Benjamin. And I've never been able to finish anything Dostoyevsky wrote other than good old Crime and Punishment. I managed to get a lit degree despite these omissions (I read lots of other things, really I did) but I feel a bit of a fraud about it. I actually lied to Himself during our courtship, in a fit of shame, and claimed to have read Benjamin. Note to self: lying to impress people only works if one does not 'fess up in a fit of honesty shortly thereafter. I am mocked about the incident to this day.
   
   
4. I once went a whole year without thoroughly mopping my kitchen floor. I think I spot-mopped it when I spilled things, and I know the dogs helped here and there - but mostly the linoleum was dark and didn't really show dirt and I didn't care enough to do more. I am not, needless to say, the clean one in my relationship, though I have gotten far more attuned to dirt and mess than I was as a bachelorette. We hire people to come in and clean for us now, once every two weeks, and our relationship is far healthier for it. Not to mention that the floors are much cleaner.
   
   
5. I read fanfiction. For those of you not in the know, fanfiction is amateur fiction based on the worlds and characters of television shows, movies, or books. The top percent of it is better-written than the bottom 90% of published genre fiction. Sturgeon's Law applies to the rest...but then again, Sturgeon's Law applies to just about everything. On the Geek Pathos scale, involvement with fanfiction is generally considered to lie somewhere between going to fan conventions and speaking fluent Klingon; this is probably in part because it is a primarily female pursuit. I don't care; I enjoy it. And I figure if my taste in movies hasn't stopped you reading this, some heavy geek cred probably won't either.
   
   
6. I've voted in every election since I turned 18. Or maybe I skipped a few "deputy fire commissioner" type things early on, but certainly for the last decade. After running a small local campaign, I realized how much hard work and effort and heart goes into even the most obscure race, and I make an effort to be at least marginally informed (some huge percentage of voters decide based solely on the candidate's official statements in the voters' pamphlet, and I try to do a bit more than that, at minimum). I've always said that if you don't vote, you've got no right to bitch. And I do so love to bitch.

If you were expecting deep and meaningful revelations, I'm sorry to disappoint. But there you go. Six things about me, and I tag no one, for I enjoy frustrating the viral spread of these things.