Facts About Me

I guess I have to do this, 15 facts about me:
1. I once ate an entire tablespoon of 600,000 scoville hotsauce and it was the single most painful experience in my life. I was sincerely concerned that I needed to call an ambulance the pain was so bad.
2. My favorite book is the Count of Monte Cristo, and my favorite translation of it is the copy that was given to me by Marcia Reynolds forever and a day ago.
3. I once cooked a turducken, and it was delicious! It took me several days of preparation and was tons of work, but I loved every minute of it and the end result was the best of the franken meats.
4. When I was in my teens still my parents gave me my first guitar and a couple of guitar lessons. I really resented it at the time, and I was mad that they didn't understand who I was, but almost 8 years later when the circumstances were right and that guitar was still there for me to pull out and play and begin to learn with I could not have been more thankful that it had been given to me, even if it was almost a decade before I knew it was good for me. I just wish I'd been a smarter teenager.
5. My favorite regional food style used to be Mediterranean, with all the sharp tangy cheeses, fish, vinegars, textures, etc. until I visited Korea, now my favorite regional food is Korean, I didn't have a single bad meal there, no matter how cheap or how tiny the restaurant, they were all in my top 100 of my life.
6. I failed high school because I was lazy, and had to go to summer school to pass my final class in order to get my diploma.
7. When I was a child and had finished reading the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I was really mad when my dad didn't let me read the Silmarillion because it was too mature. This only bothered me more when I was old enough to just read whatever I wanted, and I realized all he had to do to stop me from reading it was let me try. Most boring book ever.
8. I think the octopus is the coolest animal on the planet, but kittens are cuter.
9. My favorite movie of all time is still The Shawshank Redemption. My very close second is Fight Club.
10. I couldn't even begin to pick a favorite song or genre, almost every style of music has produced at least one song that moved me emotionally to the very core of my being and I couldn't pick one of those emotional experiences over another.
11. I never had cable as a child, it wasn't until I was a full grown adult that I paid for it myself to get the best internet connection.
12. I used to stay up all night and read over the edge of my bed to the light of my closet, and every book was precious to me. I don't even know when I would fall asleep most nights, but the important thing is that I fell asleep reading.
13. I think a lot about how the expanding space between intergalactic bodies that lack sufficient gravitational pull to hold them together means that there is a hard limit beyond which objects projecting light will never be visible to us because the space between us is expanding faster than the speed of light. I thought the universe was pretty big before that, but now that I know this I believe it is so big that we will never comprehend its true size and will never have any way of measuring it. The words Too Far Away have never felt so final to me.
14. My favorite reading spot as a kid and young adult was nestled in the arms of the third or fourth level of branches of the tree in my front yard.
15. I started working on a podcast with a friend of mine, Sean Foley, Words Are Bullshit.