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Cringeworthy revelations

Okay, maybe not. But I hope that you all remember what happened the last time someone tapped me for a meme: the Great Bumper Sticker Brainstorm™ of 2005! Normally, I'd pretend not to read the entry in question long enough for people to forget I'd been tapped, but it is NotADayGoesByWithoutMeBlogging Month, and the longer entry I have planned probably won't be ready until after midnight, so here are 5 things that almost all of my readers will not have previously known about me:

1. Had soccer and tennis not happened during the same season while I was in high school, I was good enough as a young'un to play varsity tennis. I stopped playing regularly in jr. high, but could hit around and hold my own with most of my varsity friends, without any real practice.

2. When I was in grad school for the first go-round, I had the good fortune of a local radio station that (a) played music I liked, and (b) allowed the overnight DJs to hold call-in contests as often as the daytime crews. So, I might be the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 10th caller, but I won a bunch of music that way. To this day, the only boxed set I own is the collected works of the Clash, won in a call-in from WOXY.

3. There's more to it than this, of course, but one of the main reasons I ended up going to UTArlington for my PhD was Milan Kundera. (Mysterious...!)

4. Our house growing up bordered on a creek, and when it would flood, it would occasionally leave deceptively thick mud deposits on the bike path that parallelled it near my house. One year, in jr. high, one such patch sent me flying head over heels off the front of my bike. I tore up my hand and wrist pretty thoroughly, but rather than returning home or going to the nurse at school, I kept my hand in my sweatshirt pocket almost the whole day until I could take care of it at home. In my head at the time, it was more important to not admit that I had fallen off my bike than it was to get medical attention. The sweatshirt was dark enough that the blood didn't show.

5. Until last year, when I helped my mother clear out the house I grew up in (in anticipation of her move to a smaller place), I had kept every award, debate trophy, high school letter, etc. If I'd wanted to, I could have kept that stuff, but it was strangely liberating to part with it. I kept a few things, like yearbooks for example, but mostly, I couldn't conceive of any scenario where that stuff would be even remotely valuable to me. On the off-chance that someone someday will biographize me, I made their job a whole lot harder.

So there you are. Most of this will be news to most people. And some of it I hadn't thought about for years.

Snip, snap, snout.

Comments

It's funny. I had a similar head over heels experience, but I was walking instead of riding a bike, and it was a wayward brick instead of a patch of mud.

It still hurt though.

Hurt, yes. I still have two, very faint bike-related scars, one of which came from this episode. The other came from trying to turn sharply at the bottom of a hill through a stretch of particularly gravel-intensive road. Bike turned and stopped, Collin did not. Ouch.

cgb

Hmm. I think I know the "mystery" behind #3. It involves our friend A, no?

Collin,
The "Great Bumper Sticker Brainstorm" was absolutely hysterical! The Bostonian in me thinks "Collin Brooke, he's a wicked little critta" is by far the best! Priceless!

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