Crazy Eight for ’08 — 8 things About Me Meme

• Posted: January 10, 2008
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• Author: Christina
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• Filed under: about me
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• Tags: about me, blogging, meme, random facts

...and since this site/blog is in the early stages of its life/development, I think it's a good idea to share some random things about myself

Shashi Bel­lamkonda tagged me for this Meme, and since this site/blog is in the early stages of its life/development, I think it’s a good idea (espe­cially because I’m pretty sure most of my vis­i­tors have ven­tured here thanks to Twit­ter and thus are unfa­mil­iar with my pre­vi­ous blogs, sites, writings).

8 Ran­dom “Christina Facts”

1. I have a near-photographic mem­ory (it both intrigues/mildly freaks-out my psy­chi­a­trist) — espe­cially for infor­ma­tion I con­sider non­sen­si­cal. If I read some­thing once and find it even mildly inter­est­ing, chances are I will remem­ber that fact basi­cally for­ever. There are excep­tions, and my mem­ory is by no means per­fect — but it is freak­ishly good — espe­cially for trivial/non-sensical facts. I’m really, really good at remem­ber­ing num­bers and sta­tis­tics and dates of cer­tain events.

1. My elec­tronic obses­sion basi­cally began at birth. I remem­ber absolutely lov­ing to play/use my Fisher-Price tape recorder and this thing from Playskool that I called my “com­puter” (it wasn’t — it was a tape player that had but­tons in addi­tion to play/pause/stop that would cor­re­spond with cor­rect answers in each tape/book com­bi­na­tion. It’s hard to explain — it was cool.) at a very, very young age. I got some money from my grand­fa­ther when I was 5 and bought myself a lit­tle 5″ black and white Mag­navox mini TV/radio for my bed­room. I almost got a Nin­tendo, but dropped the hint to my par­ents that it would make a bet­ter Christ­mas gift. We did get the Nin­tendo for Christ­mas in 1988 (and my older sis­ter and I opened up the box before Christ­mas morn­ing — well, she did any­way, she was the 12 year old — by stealth­ily cut­ting the tape at the seam to check the con­tents of the sys­tem and the games), so it paid off.

2. I love research. If a topic strikes me as inter­est­ing, I love to read up on it and learn as much as I can. I call this going into “research-mode” when I become obsessed with a topic and do tons of reading/research/tests in a con­cen­trated period of time. Because of fact #1, I’m very, very for­tu­nate that I tend to retain most of this infor­ma­tion pretty much for­ever — so remain­ing cur­rent and up-to-date on a cer­tain topic doesn’t require nearly as much energy as the first obses­sive period. I would say that prob­a­bly every sin­gle thing that I con­sider myself truly pas­sion­ate about (film, tele­vi­sion, music, tech­nol­ogy, video games, polit­i­cal his­tory, etc.) has been the sub­ject of one of my “research-mode” excursions.

3. I was extra­or­di­nar­ily neat until I was about 16. Like, OCD level neat (if some­thing was out of place, I would not be able to deal). Then some­thing switched and I became a total, total slob. Like, couldn’t open my bed­room door all the way my entire senior year of high school slob. Like, had to spend three days clean­ing my apart­ment with my mom slob. Like, BAD. After the lat­est clean­ing ram­page this sum­mer, I have gone out of my way to be as neat as pos­si­ble. My apart­ment doesn’t look like a show room (my par­ents house does look like a show room 99% of the time — my mom is always con­vinced it doesn’t, but it does — it looks like a show room), but it is very tidy.

4. My dec­o­ra­tive taste is a weird blend of Pot­tery Barn and total kitsch. Like, I love to have very clean, mod­ern lines with lots of neu­tral color palettes (Pot­tery Barn, in essence — and Store­house — my favorite fur­ni­ture store ever — which is now out of busi­ness, but was amaz­ing), but I also LOVE, LOVE, LOVE kitsch. What do I mean by kitsch? I mean, Dwight K. Schrute bobble-heads from NBC’s The Office. I mean an E.T. Furby, a 7′ banana in my din­ing area and framed pro­duc­tion draw­ings from The Simp­sons and Fam­ily Guy (those are freak­ing badass). I mean spend­ing $300 to get a Clue­less poster framed above my sofa — in a way that makes it look like an actual work of art (it’s a huge dou­ble mat and the out­side mat matches my sofa to a tee).

5. I love cloth­ing and fash­ion with all of my being but I often HATE shop­ping for clothes. I think it’s because I still have asso­cia­tive mem­o­ries of the absolute hell that clothes shop­ping was in my early ado­les­cence (when I was 4’9″ and weighed 65 lbs in the 8th grade and had to shop in the children’s depart­ment to get pants — and this was before aber­crom­bie and the whole tween mar­ket that emu­lated real clothes existed).

6. I think that on prin­ci­ple, I would be a veg­e­tar­ian — but I’m sim­ply too self­ish and I like meat far too much. I did give up meat once about 5 years ago, dur­ing National Beef Steak Month — because I thought it was gross to have a month ded­i­cated to beef. I still ate chicken, but I gave up beef. I became ane­mic. My body decided to revolt against me going political.

7. I’m a habit­ual talker. That’s prob­a­bly one of my biggest social flaws — I talk far too much. I try to keep it in check — but it’s dif­fi­cult. I also speak very, very, very quickly — I actu­ally enun­ci­ate all my words — but I speak quickly nonethe­less. It’s because my brain is always run­ning a mil­lion miles a minute and I wind up speak­ing as fast as I’m think­ing. It’s one of those things that I know annoys other peo­ple, but I can’t always pre­vent myself from doing.

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