Twenty-Five Things Meme

This may be supposed to stay within the confines of Facebook, but I don't post anything directly to Facebook, and I don't intend to start now. I do enough typing other places online not to start up a new outlet. I was tagged by Jim Minz on this particular meme. (You may or may not be able to open that link, depending on who you are.)

So: the rules --
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

Yes to #1, no to #2; I'm not comfortable "tagging" people, particularly twenty-five of them. I'm not fond of pyramid schemes in the best of circumstances, and these are not them.

1. I got my driver's license a year early for my home state, because I spent that summer in Florida, where the driving age was lower. (And driving instructors were allowed to administer ad hoc tests, which made passing much easier than it should have been.)

2. I didn't get behind the wheel of a car for a dozen years after getting my license. Not once.

3. I've been to Paris, once, for less than forty-eight hours. I spent most of my time there in a basement conference room.

4. I once lost forty pounds on what I called the "jellybeans and ice cream" diet.

5. My high school nickname was "Psycho," given after a particularly interesting freshman-year introductory speech in a required speech class.

6. I was a serious (football) Giants fan in high school, and then a Mets fan from about 1984 through the late '90s. I haven't seen a sporting event (aside from my younger son's baseball game ) since the kids were born.

7. I do most of the laundry in my house.

8. I am the stereotypical blogger in the basement.

9. I generally enjoy mindless repetitive physical activity, like raking leaves. (Once I can get myself out of the house to do it.)

10. In college, I worked on a student security force called "Campus Patrol."

11. I can't stand most vegetables.

12. I have an arrythmatic heart and an astigmatic eye.

13. I proposed to my wife on a hay bale at the New York Renaissance Festival in the summer of 1992. (My wife is allergic to hay, which she had forgotten at the time.)

14. In college, I was in a underperforming floor-hockey team called "What The Hell Is This Bar Graph Shit!" I may still have the T-shirt somewhere.

15. I've made myself lunch and brought it to work nearly every day of the past eighteen years.

16. For a long time, that lunch was a PB&J sandwich. But, when I gave my mother-in-law a grandson, she suddenly started buying us coldcuts every week, without saying anything. More recently, I've taken over buying coldcuts myself.

17. I have at least a thousand books that I haven't read.

18. In my twenties, I sometimes had serious anxiety attacks. I once couldn't go into a restaurant while on vacation with my wife because it was "family-style" and I couldn't bear sitting at a table with strangers.

19. I coveted a floor lamp that my grandfather made from a rifle sometime in the '50s. When that grandfather died, my brother got the lamp. But now it is mine.

20. I was one of the co-founders of my junior high's D&D club, back in about 1980.

21. I once put my hand through the glass front panel of a fire extinguisher door at my high school. I can't remember what I was angry about.

22. Similarly, I've deliberately or accidentally "punched" through drywall twice at my house and twice (in my teens) at my mother's house. But my brother beat me, by doing it in his sleep once.

23. My college English thesis, "Infratextural Structures in Short American Horror Fiction," was published in Lovecraft Studies.

24. My first job out of college was with the reference publisher Gale Research, which announced that it was shutting down its New York office one month after I started there.

25. It took me nearly an hour to think of twenty-five interesting things; if I'd expected that, I never would have done this.