Five Things

Glenn Fleishman tags me with one of these silly little things. Alright, then. Five things most people don’t know about me.

1. I went to South Eugene High School with Glenn Fleishman (“Careful with that Axe, Eugene!”) He directed me in my role as the Postman in the drama department’s 1983 (?) production of “Out At Sea”, by Slawomir Mrozek. (Man, I hope I’m remembering that right. Did I even play the Postman? This is so hazy maybe I wasn’t in the play at all. But I certainly went to South with Glenn.)

2. I have an even vaguer recollection that Martin Hynes played Thin – the guy the other guys in the boat wanted to eat. You know Martin because he played George Lucas in George Lucas in Love. (Congrats on getting to go to Sundance, Martin.) But I’m sure of this much. I was in drama and Youth Symphony and marching band with Martin. (Martin played violin and also drums … I think?)

3. I played French Horn in junior high and high school. Never really liked it (my parent’s idea, really). I don’t care much for classical music, never grew into it, and – apart from a few John Entwhistle moments – there isn’t a lot of call for French horn in rock. (In college I played bass but never really practiced, ergo never got better. But was briefly in a band called Happy Face Lulu Farm.) My father was adamant that playing the French Horn would look good on my college applications. There is literary precedent for this in Daniel Pinkwater’s novel, Borgel [amazon]. The protagonist’s brother, Milo, “only played French horn in the high school band because things like that are supposed to look good on your college application” (p. 10). Other than that I am unlike Milo.

4. Unlike Henry Farrell, who advocates making X-mas musak sexy, I advocate making all the sexy earworms of 2006 more X-mas-y, to get them out of your head. Example: you can be walking through the mall, singing to yourself:

I’m bringing X-mas back
Them other santas don’t know how to act
I think you’re special what’s behind your back
So full of toys that big ol’ santa sack
Take ’em to the grinch!

And, from the outside, you look perfectly normal.

5. Belle and I and the kids are horribly jetlagged. It takes 2-year olds a really long time to recover from a 12 hour time change. Worse: I have temporally migrated one way, Belle and the kids the other. So I go to sleep at 8 PM and get up at 3 AM. They stay up until, like, 1 AM and sleep til noon. This results in Belle doing all the work. I predict: when she wakes up in about 8 hours, she’s going to be a bit annoyed at me about this. It does seem that I could be working a bit harder. (But I’ve also had other things that need getting done. Like writing a conference paper to deliver in a week. And blogging at 4:50 AM.)

I’m now supposed to tap 5 other people: how’z about – Tim Burke, Kip Manley, Matthew Yglesias, Jim Henley, Chris Sims.