Diana from The Adventures of A Write-At-Home Mom honored me with a surprise nomination for the Versatile Blogger award, which states that I must disclose seven random nuggets about myself and then nominate five other bloggers who I enjoy following. Let the nuggets begin!
1. I live in a house of animals who have serious mental issues and are conspiring to drive me insane. No, I'm not the "cat lady" but I do have two cats and a conure (medium parrot). One of the cats came with the husband, the parrot came with me, and then we adopted the second cat - a true blended family to be sure. The parrot imitates everything at the top of his lungs and likes nothing more than to laugh loudly at any funny tv show you have on, to the point that you can't hear the dialogue. Yeah, it's real funny. One of the cats wants to be fed by 4am every day and if he isn't, he expresses his displeasure but leaving a "present" from his backend on the carpet for me. Not to be outdone, the other cat appears to have explosive diarrhea once a day on the carpet when she gets stressed so I'll be adding Prozac to her daily RX protocol. If that's not enough to drive me insane, it's enough to make me wonder if maybe I'm already insane, which is a distinct possibility.
2. I am a black belt in taekwondo with experience in karate, krav maga, and muay thai. There's two parts to martial arts - the forms (or katas) and the sparring/fighting aspect. It should be no surprise to anyone who knows me that I detested forms but loved sparring. The more violence the better. As part of my black belt test, I had to break three 1-inch concrete slabs stacked on top of each other with my bare hand. I was the first female to take the test at the dojo and I had to petition the sensei to be able to do this breaking because he was old school and thought only men should break three slabs; women should only break one. As it turned out, there were five men and me testing that day - only three of the guys and me successfully broke all three slabs.
3. Another nugget of craziness related to martial arts is that while practicing breaking concrete slabs for a demonstration, I injured my right hand so badly that the ER put it in a cast. Keep in mind, I was in my mid-20s, right-handed and working in a professional career. But I was also the only female black belt in the dojo and I wanted to serve as inspiration for all the girls so the day of the demonstration, I broke the concrete slabs with my left hand. Yes, I was crazy even back then.
4. Last year was the second most terrible year in my life (so far). Not only did I lose my 39 year old best friend to pancreatic cancer, many times I felt like I was losing my mind to grief and anger, losing my grip on reality as I struggled to provide a happy, normal environment for my 4 year old, and losing my marriage due to my husband being 3500 miles away and unable/unwilling to be there emotionally and physically for me. Yet myself, my girl, and my marriage made it through and learned a lot of lessons along the way. That being said, if that was my second worst year, can you even imagine what my first must have been like?!
5. I have an aversion to talking to people on the phone. I put off phone calls like it's having teeth pulled. If it's a call to a close friend where I know it'll be a fun or short convo, then I don't have a problem. But if it's someone I don't know or with whom I'm not particularly comfortable with, I'll put it off as long as possible until putting it off starts aggravating me more than just making the damn call. I blame this completely on my mother who cannot have a phone call last shorter than 20 minutes no matter what the topic, purpose, situation, time of day, or excuses. She requires at least 60 minutes at a time and usually 58 minutes of it is her talking. This is why I call her once a week while I'm on the treadmill and as my annoyance increases so does the speed and incline of that treadmill. Ironically, I get my best cardio workouts on those days.
6. Ten years ago, my therapist at the time, who is now a great friend, told me that I was "a man trapped in a women's body". It has been one of the greatest explanations of me I've ever heard because it is spot-on and explains many of my oddities, struggles, and dichotomies.
7. Though I'm not a creative or vindictive person by nature, if you truly piss me off, I will come up with the most unique, out-of-this-world ideas for exacting my revenge. Take for instance three individuals who did everything they could to undermine me all the while acting as though they were being helpful. After a year of this bullshit, I'd had it and after some research on the internet, I sent each of them a gift wrapped, untraceable package of horse shit and dog shit. Unfortunately, this was not too long after 9/11 so they were deemed to be suspicious packages and they didn't get to actually open them. That's okay, 'cause the bomb squad blew those suckers in the middle of the downtown street which actually made me laugh harder than if they had opened the damn things. Here's a newsflash: you never want to piss off a resourceful woman.
After reading this over, I guess I can see why many of my friends and husband consider me feisty. Sometimes it just takes some reminiscing to remember that it's still there, it just comes out differently now. And with that concluding my seven nuggets of info on me, I hereby nominate the following five bloggers (three are local San Diegans, I believe) to this worthy Versatile Blogger award and look forward to their random disclosures:
Steve at Single Steve
Mariel and Jessica at Or So She Says
Maria at Mommy Melee
1 comment:
Finally getting around to reading this, and SO GLAD I did! Numbers 3 & 4 are hilarious--I can totally picture you breaking those slabs with your LEFT hand, cast on the right. That's feisty for you! And number 7, of course. I would never have the balls to do that, but I wish I did!
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