“Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.”
-Kierkegaard
Self examination is simultaneously the most difficult and most important aspect of enlightenment. It isn’t easy to
I suppose it’s because I don’t really like myself that much, or rather I’m afraid other people don’t like me that much so I hide behind different personas and masks. I suppose I should stop doing that.
Anyway, here are nine facts about me:
I have all three of the “dyses,”: dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia.
This most often manifests itself in making me appear only partially literate. I rely very heavily on spell checkers because of it. I have really strong spelling skills,when I recognize that a word is actually misspelled. Most of the time though, if it isn’t highlighted by squiggly lines, I can’t even process that it isn’t the word I mean it to be.
It also has the side-effect of causing me to sometimes think I am saying one word when according to everyone else I said something completely different and often nonsensical.
This can be incredibly frustrating as a writer. I have a hard time taking notes by hand. I’ve recently started making verbal notes on my cell phone. God bless technology!
When I was a little kid, I refused to be potty trained until a traumatic experience happened. I flushed my He-Man Underoos.
This is the embarrassing fact that you get for the day. I’m sharing it with you because my mom brought it up on the phone tonight. I don’t really remember what exactly spawned that conversation, but it happened. This is one of several memories that I have that aren’t really memories, but recreations in my brain from my mom telling stories about me. Other memories of this type include me learning to walk by picking up the play pen and carrying around with me. I don’t even know.
I hate reality shows unless they’re on Bravo or the Food Network
Once upon a time, I hated reality television. One of my dreams was always to become a screen writer, and the idea of unscripted television offended me. It didn’t help that the earliest reality shows were also completely garbage and everyone I knew was buying into the crap. I have to tell you Survivor, Big Brother and all that crap just bugged me and the more popular the atrocities of television became, the more I hated them.
Then I found Project Runway.
I don’t really know what the appeal of it was. I’m not a fashion expert. My sense of style is pretty much the same as it was in high school and mostly comes from an article I read in Maxim magazine. Something about this show, though, really struck a chord with me, and I’ve been watching it ever since. Somehow, that led to me watching Top Chef, and before I knew it, I was watching shows about people making cakes. I think it snowballs.
I hide my massive self loathing and insecurity behind an impenetrable layer of bravado and arrogance.
I have a giant ego. There are a handful of things that I am good at, and I tend to remind people about them. This is used as a distraction from the fact that if it isn’t in my rather small area of expertise, I’m completely useless. In fact, I have very little ability to anything useful, and my most powerful skill is bullshitting. I suppose there are professions that make a really make a great living with that, like say being president of the United States, but I’m really not good enough at self motivation to get into something like that. Besides, I’ve done way to much crazy to ever be allowed to run the government.
I’m so convinced that I got my job through nepotism that I expect to be fired Daily
About five years ago my parents went insane and decided that living in Helena, MT seemed like a brilliant idea, so they packed up there stuff and took off for parts of the country where frickin’ bears still eat out of dumpsters. This was probably the most important thing that has ever happened towards turning me into an adult, because in doing so they left me in charge of their house and somehow I ended up with my dad’s old job.
Technically I’m supposed to do things at my job, but I’m not very good at those things. I regularly tell my boss that I’m not good at those things. In fact, most of what my actual job is involves looking at thousands of little tiny numbers, which thanks to the aforementioned dyscalculia I generally don’t even recognize. I keep expecting to come in and have them say, “You’re not as good as your dad, your fired.”
Somehow I have them all fooled into believe I have a skill that no one else possess. This skill of course is the ability to google information and manipulate the interwebs. Since both of my bosses are pretty convinced that computers are a magical device that was stolen from the forges of hell, that makes me pretty indisposable around here.