CerebralDebris

My wife and friends are all doing this on facebook, and I’ll be posting it there as well, but what the heck … might as well post it to ye olde blog too.

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Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 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. I strongly dislike ketchup, even on burgers.

2. In relation to #1, I adore mustard, particularly the really powerful French kind, with which I will not only load up my burger to the point that it scares even my French wife, but in which I will then also dip my french fries. Yum!

3. I not only have ambitions of someday owning a bar, I know what it will be named, what it will look like, and have a pretty good idea of where it will be located. I am hoping to make my fortune in other industries first so that I only need the bar to break even, not provide a profit, thus maximizing the amount of cool things I can do with it, rather than having to make sure I’ve got Bud Light on tap and ten screens for football.

4. I change my mind about what I want to do for a living roughly every ten minutes, but only between a select group of careers: Owner/Principle Front-End Developer for a web startup, Fiction Author, Bar Owner (heh), Freelance Writer, Musician, and Real Estate Investor/Landlord.

5. Related: I come up with new ideas for web businesses at the rate of about one per day. This makes it difficult to stick with one.

6. Related 2: I sway violently between wanting to live in Brooklyn for the rest of my life, and never wanting to live in one city for more than five years at a time.

7. I feel like I should be closer to my family – particularly my extended family – than I am, and I feel bad about this quite frequently. But I never do much to fix it.

8. I am absolutely obsessed with Brooklyn real estate, and have Trulia.com open in a browser about 80% of the time I’m online.

9. I used to weigh 296 pounds. Now I don’t. I wish I could sell my diet and make a fortune, but I don’t think the “Have lots of stomach problems and essentially starve yourself until everyone thinks you have cancer” diet is going to sell a lot of copies.

10. Incidentally, I don’t have cancer and I’ve since returned to much more normal eating habits.

11. I do not want kids, and have never wanted kids, for as far back as I can remember. Also for as far back as I can remember, people have told me that this will change. I’m still waiting …

12. If my relatives knew how much I spend per month on coffee, they would slap me so hard that most of my teeth would fall out.

13. I once fell “up” a friend’s stairs (ie: tripped and fell forward as I headed up them) with two 32oz diet cokes from Wendy’s in my hands, and rather than spill them on my friend’s carpet, I opted to faceplant into the stairs.

14. Speaking of faceplants, when I was about ten, I got a bag stuck in the front wheel of a ten-speed bike and flew over the handlebars. I tore up half of my face, but managed to come away with it bearing only a tiny scar just underneath one nostril. The scabs peeled for months, though.

15. I dropped out of art school and failed out of a liberal arts college (essentially – put on one-year probation and never went back) before discovering this thing that normal people know as “a work ethic.”

16. If you put a box of peanut butter cups in front of me, no matter the type, I’m probably going to eat them until either they are gone, or I make myself feel queasy. I can’t help it.

17. After 31 years of telling people I don’t like onions, I’m inexplicably kinda starting to like onions. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it’ll happen with ketchup too, someday. But I doubt it.

18. I wrote a 409-page (manuscript format) novel between the ages of 11 and 15. Ten years later, the characters from that novel would be reused in the novella Voices, which you can find in the writing section. The plot’s almost entirely different, though.

19. I get so flustered when trying to speak French around my in-laws that I can inevitably only remember about six words, and I feel like a gigantic retard.

20. My two least-favorite chores are hand-washing dishes and mowing lawns. Fortunately I only have to deal with one of those, in Brooklyn, and that only occasionally.

21. I can’t decide whether the 16 year old me would be thrilled with how my life has turned out, or horrified by how much I’ve sold out to the man. The smart, funny, and beautiful French wife can’t hurt, though.

22. I’m inherently a pretty selfish person, I think. I need a lot of time to do “me” things, I have to have a lot of projects happening at once, and I need time to adapt when people spring ideas on me that differ from how I had expected something to go.

23. The only game company on the planet that I would take a job with, at this point in my life, is Valve Software.

24. I don’t really want to work 40+ hours a week for the rest of my life. At least, not 40 scheduled hours. My goal is to reach a point where I need to work less in order to cover my cost of living, while having more time for projects and traveling.

25. I am terrified of being in open water (lake, river or ocean) at a depth over my head … yet I’m completely fascinated by submarines and would absolutely buy one if I somehow got mega-rich. I’m going on my first submarine tour in Hawaii next month. I expect it will either be awesome, or signal the end of that obsession.