8 random facts meme
A while ago now, Aspazia tagged me for the 8 Random Facts Meme. The idea is for bloggers to disclose eight previously uknown facts about themselves to their readers, and then tag others. I’ll start with:
1. I don’t usually do memes. Actually, this may be implicitly known to my readers, since I haven’t posted many before. But now it’s out in the open. Boy, does that feel good.
2. I was an engineering major for a semester. Not only that, but I did two internships at the United States Naval academy, one in fluid dynamics and the other in electrical engineering. For the first one, I was preparing a module to go up in the Space Shuttle (it never did) and the second one I was evaluating some EE software on the basics of electrical circuits. This brings me to:
3. For my day job, I program in Visual Basic for the AS/400 and WRQ Reflections. That probably doesn’t mean much to most of you (it didn’t to me when I started with my company), but in a nutshell I make MS Excel and MS Access “talk” to a “green screen” and make the cursor move, enter data and scrape information from the screen. Yeah, it’s that exciting.
4. In a possible world I am an architecht / linguistics professor / comparative lit prof / marketing manager for a publishing company. Those are all careers I’ve considered over the span of my short life, the last two most seriously.
5. I am a musical eclectic with no good reason for my listening choices. Unlike a lot of people (who I admire) in my new hometown, I don’t know much about emo, indie rock or the up-and-coming latest. I listen to FM Radio and browse Rhapsody, which means I love Bach’s fugues for organ, Rage Againt the Machine, Tori Amos, The Indigo Girls, Nine Inch Nails, The Decemberists…and a guilty pleasure, Barbara Streisand.
6. I am the least musical person in my family. My mom plays the organ and piano (hence my love for Bach), my dad plays piano and can improvise a decent tune with it, and my sister also plays the piano quite well. I can bang out “Chopsticks” or the top half of a hymn (whatever those notes are called up there!) and I play guitar a little bit, but yeah…not so much with the music.
7. There is also a possible world where I am an artist. Believe it or not, before my left brain got massively overdeveloped, I was an aspiring short-story writer and painter. I took several art courses in high school where we painted on site (one of those sites was Greece, which was an amazing experience). I even got a small scholarship in art from my county…which I applied to my short-lived engineering degree. I still have my supplies, but spend my energy doing photography instead.
8. I am spending a few weeks trying to eat vegetarian. The ethical arguments for not eating meat have started to get to me, instilling severe cognitive dissonance when I eat it, especially at places like Taco Bell or restaurants where I don’t know how the animal was treated. I’ve avoided becoming vegetarian becaues 1) I like a good steak, brat or hamburger every now and then; 2) I’m afraid I’ll start on the slippery slope to a raw food, vegan, fair-trade liberal hyper-guiltified life; 3) I am unsure of whether I should include fish in my diet and 4) I wonder about the connection between vegetarianism on ethical reasons and a moderately pro-choice stance on abortion. But at least number one seems to be overcome by creative cooking…and I don’t miss meat so far.
There you have it. I won’t tag anyone else, but readers are welcome to self-disclose in the comments or their own blogs as they’d like.