Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 30 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 30 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.
1. As a kid I used to climb up into trees and bend the branches to make a bed, then I would take afternoon naps up there.
2. The most frequently asked question directed towards me is "How tall are you?" And I'm tired of hearing it! I'm 6'6" and yes, I know I'm tall, but I did nothing to earn it; that's the way I am. I don't go around asking how short people are. I guess I like the attention, but it just gets really old after awhile, you know?
3. The second most frequently asked question directed towards me is "Do you play basketball?" And my answer is "I played in high school, but it's not really my favorite sport." This is usually met with a polite nod from the questioner and a cessation of the conversation since they no longer find me interesting to talk to since I’m not the star basketball player they hoped I was. You might think I have a complex about my height, but I'm merely being observant about situations I find myself in frequently.
4. The hardest question for me to answer is "Where's home?"
5. When I was a kid, I found an injured baby pigeon in my yard and took care of it until it was better. I named it Tweety, and after I let it go, if I stood under a particular tree and did a bird call it would call back to me. Sometimes it would just fly onto my shoulder or head when it saw me outside.
6. To this day, I am convinced that I have some of Crocodile Dundee's skill in communicating with animals, and on the occasion will attempt to strike up conversations with squirrels that I encounter. I promise, I'm not crazy. ;)
7. I day dream a lot, and often get caught up in my own world. My dad used to send me to the local park with an exercise list for me to do in preparation for football season. When I was out there doing my exercises I would spend my breaks trying to figure out the different calls of the field birds. When I played soccer, I usually played defender, and so had many times when I wasn't directly involved in the action. I would usually start daydreaming about the princess in the latest fantasy book I was reading. Then when she was kidnapped in the story, I would get angry and vow to play the soccer game for her…many shins were kicked. It gave me extra energy…like a sort of berserk mode.
8. One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was to catch butterflies with a handmade net and put them in glass jars with breathing holes. But when they all started dying, I felt badly about it and buried them. From then on I would only keep them in jars for a few minutes so I could show my mom, then I would let them go.
9. I also went through a frog collecting phase and at one point had at least 30 frogs in my bathtub.
10. When I was one or two (my parents aren't immediately at hand for consultation to verify my age), when I had not yet learned how to walk, my black lab named Nero ran away from home, and I followed him, crawling out of the yard and around the neighborhood. My parents tell me they finally found me on my way to crawling onto a busy road. We never found Nero. =/
11. I have played tug-o-war with a lion cub and a stick. It's amazing how strong they are!
12. I have had very mixed experiences with horses. My first experience was when I was little. My dad was riding a horse with me holding on behind him. He started galloping and I fell off right into a big puddle of mud! Bad start to horses. Then, in first grade we would have show-and-tell by bringing something in a bag and choosing someone to put their hand in the bag to feel and guess what the object was. For my show-and-tell, I borrowed my sister's Barbie horse and chose the girl that I liked as my guesser - she loved horses! Later, in music class, she rewarded my efforts by pulling me into her lap and kissing me. =D I once went on a horse-back safari and we trotted along with a herd of zebra. We got quite close to a rhino, but luckily there were no mishaps that time. Then there was the time that I got tick fever after riding a horse, and was sick in bed for a week straight. And the latest incident with horses was on a horse-back tour in the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa. Our tour guide was leading the way along a narrow path near the edge of a cliff when she suddenly decided it'd be a good idea to start galloping. My sister's horse bolted after the tour guide's, and my horse also decided to race off to catch up. Now, English saddles do not have pommels like American saddles, and I had no idea how to ride a horse in a gallop. I saw my sister's horse stop up ahead and my sister fall off the saddle next to the horse. Then I was thrown over my horse's head onto the ground in front of it and watched it jump over me. Thankfully it didn't step on me. In spite of the incredible back pain and nasty bruise from the fall, along with my other experiences, one day I would like to become a fairly proficient equestrian.
13. I once got second in a spelling bee…and the word I misspelled was….'stallion'!!!! GRRRRRRR, those darn horses!
14. My first grade field trip was prematurely interrupted by a family of rhinoceros. We had to abandon our lunch on the picnic tables and then the monkeys came and stole everything before we could come back for it.
15. The late Vice President of Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo, once kissed my hand when I met him.
16. I have played the following sports for at least one season: American Football, Rugby, Soccer, Field Hockey, Basketball, long-distance running, swimming. Out of these I'd say my favorite is Rugby...followed closely by hacky sack ;D. I have never been seriously injured from any of these sports, though I'd say I have more scars from three years of rugby scrapes than from all of the other sports combined.
17. I have played guitar since I was 14, but it has not been consistent and my skills are still very mediocre. Nevertheless, I love playing!
18. In elementary school in America I once brought a bag of dried worms from Africa to class and tried to make money off of my classmates by charging them to see me eat the worms. Unfortunately the other guys in my class weren't grossed out enough by the idea and ate some themselves…no profit was made =/
19. In middle school and intermittently during high school, I would style my hair into individual spikes that covered my head. It would take me up to 30 minutes every morning for me to be satisfied that every spike was perfectly in place, and I missed the bus for school several times because of this vanity. Not proud of this fact, but I did get many compliments on my hair!
20. I am a perfectionist and I have a very critical eye for most things. However, I have come a long way in toning down my obsessive nature.
21. I eat absolutely anything and can't really think of anything I would flat out refuse. There are foods I don't enjoy very much, but I could still eat them. Although, despite my attempts at becoming Japanese, natto is just not very appealing. =/
22. Nicknames I've had over the years: Scooby, Shaggy, Jordie, Stone Cold, JC, George, Yank(ee), Big Friendly Giant (BFG), Schecter, Justin (>_<), Daniel (I don't know how they got that one), Zulu Missile, Silent Pimp (SP) <--- don't ask! ;P
23. I looooooooovvvvvvveeeeeeee reading! I love stories in any shape or form: books, video games, song lyrics, oral, paintings, whathaveyou. My favorite genre is sci-fi/fantasy. Classics and epic poetry are also tasty...
24. I want to be a writer - not just the next Tolkien and Lewis, but something different. I want my writing to be practical as well as imaginative. I want it to connect fantasy to reality so that people don't just want to live in my created world, but they want to go out into the real world and do something to change the way things are so that it might be just a bit closer to paradise. I am currently working on my first novel - naturally, a sci-fi/fantasy epic.
25. I've been in a music video - Demon Hunter's "Fading Away." It was awesome.
26. My sense of humor is very dry and quite often jokes are discovered only through convoluted and stream-of-thought reasoning, so no one but myself finds the joke funny. I am, however, quite capable of appreciating most all other types of humor; I'm just not good at making the jokes myself.
27. I am descended from Vikings, but I was born and grew up in Africa, my citizenship is American, and I secretly believe I am Asian inside.
28. Weird talents include: flipping my eyelids inside-out, double-jointed in almost all fingers, flapping my scapulae like wings. As a kid when I first figured out how to cross my eyes, I would go around claiming that I had the ability to see through objects, and I honestly believed I could…it was much later that I realized I was only seeing through an image of the object, not the object itself!
29. I have lived in 5 different countries (soon to be 6), and have gone to 9 different school systems (soon to be 10). Despite my veteran status at it, moving is still not easy for me.
30. I'm horrible at small talk because I mostly only speak to gather information or give it out. Usually I am too caught up in thinking about things and about what other people have said to think about what I should say. I guess this makes my skills of listening and observation pretty good, which helps me as a writer…I love a good description.
- This was easier than I thought it would be…brought back a lot of memories…but I only had 30 slots and embellished too much, so I'm finishing here.
