I got tagged by a blogger I really like, Steve, over at One Dad's Opinion. Thanks Steve. It seems that every single autistic friendly blogger has now been tagged by this meme, but if I find anyone who is still untagged, I will tag them. (If you blog on autism and you are not yet tagged, consider your self, as of this moment, tagged by this post.) It's kind of fun learning so many random things about people who I read all the time.
The rules:
1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.
1. I'm 44 and I've never lived in one place for more than seven years. I've lived in eight different countries and speak four different languages. Perhaps not surprisingly, I earn my living as a translator.
2. I'm an economic conservative and a social liberal, which seems to annoy both sides. Fortunately, I love a good political argument.
3. I am very fond of both chocolate and downhill skiing. Until I was about 20, I did a lot of cross-country skiing, which my parents (quasi-hippie British science profs) insisted was far superior to downhill. When I finally went downhill skiing, I realized that my parents had been systematically lying to me all through my youth. On the other hand, they were always honest with me about chocolate, teaching me that the very best chocolate was always worth the money.
4. I write fiction, but I don't try to get it published. When I was in NYC, I used to do readings. That was fun.
5. I cannot type unless my feet are up on the desk and the keyboard is in my lap, which means I could probably never work in a real office.
6. I drink about ten cups of strong tea and two cups of coffee a day, but I don't drink anything stronger than that.
7. The only TV I watch is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but I watch that every night.
8. I essentially never listen to music. Another way of phrasing that would be to say that I always listen to music. The thing is that, while I do like music, I cannot do anything else but listen while music is playing. I can't read, or work, or even do relatively simple things like washing the dishes. So usually, I just don't turn it on. My wife, on the other hand, is very fond of music and can work with it in the background. In particular, she likes They Might Be Giants, so I know the lyrics to almost all of their songs and, while in
2 comments:
This is definitely one of the most interesting 8 I have read.
First of all, what languages do you speak? I speak English (duh) and Spanish, but am very linguistically oriented. Because my brain auto-processes a lot of root words and automatically calls up related words in other latin-based languages, I find that I can read (but not speak) French and Italian.
Examples of how my strange brain works:
Spanish word "alba" means white. My mind calls up alabaster and albino.
Spanish word "papel" means paper. I think papyrus.
So on and so on. I always thought that linguistics would have been a good field for me.
My extra languages are Japanese, French and Italian. I'm the mirror image of you, in that I can't actually speak Spanish, but I can read it OK. Like you, I am also big on looking at common roots and other patterns in different languages. But I certainly never though of myself as linguistically oriented until I was about 30. As a kid I had what they called in those days a "speech impediment" and I was labeled as dyslexic. I failed every French class that I was made to sit through. Now, as I translate patents from French into Japanese, I sometimes think back to the dismay on the faces of my well meaning French teachers . If I had a time machine, the message I would give them is: don't worry too much, the world is a very odd place and lots of things can happen.
Post a Comment