Juniorbird.com

Tired of all of those surveys made up by high school kids? (no offense). Here are questions for the people who are a little older. Copy and paste into your own note, then answer the questions. Finally, tag your friends including me, please!
1. What bill do you hate paying the most?
I hate the DWP bill the most, because so much of it goes to water the enormous lawn. You know, the mass of green grass in the middle of the desert. For style’s sake.
2. Do you miss being a child?
Tons. Voltron was awesome.
3. Chore you hate the most?
Any kind of cleaning that doesn’t take place in the kitchen is like being shanked with an unsharpened prison toothbrush.
4. Where was the last place you had a romantic dinner?
On my proposal night! It worked, too — she said yes!
5. If you could go back and change one thing what would it be?
I would’ve played team sports starting much earlier. Not that I’m good at sports, but it builds character. And I’m not enough of a character.
6. Name of your first grade teacher?
Mrs. Boyle? No, that was second grade. I actually don’t remember!
7. What do you really want to be doing right now?
I want pie. Or coconut cake. Mmm, dessert.
8. What did you want to be when you grew up?
An architect. I always liked answering the question “how do you fit all that in such a small place?”
9. How many colleges did you attend?
I went to Pomona College, which is affiliated with 4 other colleges and a graduate school of theology that are all next door. I took classes at 3 of those other colleges, which you can count either as one college or as 3. Also I took 2 summer school classes at UCLA one year. So, depending on how you count, either 1, 2, or 6.
10. Why did you choose the shirt that you have on right now?
I like being the only one in the ‘hood with Portuguese on my shirt!
11. What are your thoughts on gas prices?
Too many externalities in that market.
12. First thought when the alarm went off this morning?
Today: yay Saturday, no alarm! Yesterday: quick quick gym gym.
13. Last thought before going to sleep last night?
How did it get so late?
14. What famous person would you like to have dinner with?
I’ll take them all!
15. Have you ever crashed your vehicle?
I was a very bad teenage driver.
16. If you didn’t have to work, would you volunteer?
Yes, boredom is the enemy.
17. Get up early or sleep in?
Get up early! The gym is not so busy at 6am. And a ton seems to happen when the day starts that early.
18. What is your favorite cartoon character?
First, this question should be “who.” Second, I feel a lot like Brain lately.
20. When did you first start feeling old?
When I realized that the character of Bones on the TV show Bones is younger than me.
21. Favorite lunch meat?
Roast Beef
22. What do you get every time you go into Walmart?
Haven’t been in a decade.
23. Do you think marriage is an outdated ritual?
Nah, I think it’s gonna be awesome!
24. Favorite movie you wouldn’t want anyone to find out about?
I don’t want you to find out about it either!
25. What’s your favorite drink?
Nice, peaty Scotch.
26. Who[m] from high school would you like to run in to?
Paul Harnik and Serge Blok.
27. What radio station is your car radio tuned to right now?
That one radio station that always plays Pokerface.
28. Sopranos or Desperate Housewives?
Sopranos.
29. Worst relationship mistake that you wish you could take back?
Well, every good mistake you learn something from. I wouldn’t trade those lessons for anything.
30. Do you like the person that sits directly across from you at work?
I work from home, or, at my big current client, in an office that faces a wall. No people: just how I like it.
31. Have you ever had to use a fire extinguisher for its intended purposes?
You mean to liven up a party?
32. Last book you finished reading?
Some mystery. Reading a lot of mysteries lately.
33. Do you have a teddy bear?
I have a stuffed tiger I’ve had since I was 3 or so.
34. Do you go to church?
Nor synagogue.
35. How old are you?
Pushin’ 34.

OK, I rarely do the meme thing, but, what the heck, the first step to writing more is: writing more. So, therefore, I will write this!
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. When I was younger, I wanted to be an architect.
2. When I was much younger, I loved Legos, and would build restaurants with them, complete with dining tables, kitchens, and even the plumbing under the floor.
3. I believe in ghosts. In fact, I’ve seen ghosts.
4. The first thing I thought, when I saw this meme, was “why 25?” I know it’s a nice round number, but part of me thinks that there is a more-or-less ideal number of pieces of information to reveal in something like this, that will be little enough work that most people will do it, be long enough that most everyone will learn something new, and be short enough that nobody will have to write about crap. It’s kind of like the three strikes law: we could probably find a number or pattern of crimes past which recidivism becomes overwhelming, but instead we decide to apply the rules of baseball to crime. FAIL.
5. I don’t like responding to memes because I don’t like being told what to do. But, on the other hand, I want people to tag me in memes because of the whole attention-from-friends thing. So I guess I should respond more!
6. It’s like every 2 years I discover the “Zone system”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_system all over again!
7. I color-code everything I can. Even the towels in the kitchen are color-coded.
8. Speaking of organizing, I really like to clump things into groups of like things. Whatever number of buckets are available, I can divide the pile of things in front of me into it, and the people who look at it will agree that it makes sense.
9. Despite my bent for organizing, I’m actually quite good at coming up with original ideas. In fact, I tend to think that all creativity comes from constraints. And, by extension, those people who say they can’t be creative because society/their employer/resources limit them too much are not, in fact, creative.
10. I also believe that all progress comes from laziness. I mean, if we weren’t too lazy to do the work by brute force, we’d never have invented any tool, right?
11. This is a convenient belief for me as I also believe I’m lazy. Others take issue with this belief, but I’m sticking with it.
12. In elementary school I could do dozens and dozens of sit-ups.
13. I can be a bit superstitious. I used to have lucky boxers, a lucky rugby shirt, and more. I still try to stick to lucky numbers and the light. 13 doesn’t make me that uncomfortable, though.
14. I really regret quitting taking math classes after integral calculus. I got an A+ in that class! I think I would’ve enjoyed going further. Plus, I’m such a stats geek.
15. Speaking of, I tend to think of everything in terms of normal distributions. Where does that restaurant, person, outfit, car, political opinion fit on the distribution of like things within the population? Are there other ways we can slice things up to see different distributions — for instance, the price of food in restaurants in strip malls rather than restaurants in general, or the colors of shirts rather than of whole outfits, etc.
16. I also tend to think of luck as normally-distributed within the population, and of good- and bad-luck events as normally-distributed within the life of an individual. That means that some people are more or less lucky than average — they are in one of the tails of the distribution of population luck. However, since any one person is likely to be of neutral (average) luck, streaks of bad or good luck will tend to regress towards the mean over time. So, your luck will change, don’t you worry/you’d better watch out!
17. Since luck is distributed normally, I spend a lot more time trying to make sure I’m comfortable with the process and information I used to make a decision than the decision itself. This means that often I can be good at making a snap decision. However, if a decision gives me a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, I’ll almost always change it regardless of how I got there.
18. In junior high I desperately wanted to be able to draw comics. I copied this wizard character I saw some guy drawing and I tried to draw a series with him in it. I was foiled by my craptacular drawing ability.
19. In elementary school I wrote a science-fiction novel. I was very proud of it, and it seemed very long. In high school I found the notebook I’d written it in, and was shocked to see that it was 9 or 10 pages long.
20. In elementary school I had one of those “Kodak Disc”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_film cameras that I feel like I took shots with all the time, especially on vacation. I wonder where those shots went?
21. I was always jealous of my friend Andrew’s Walkman, since I never had one. Once, he let me listen to it for a minute — he was listening to Eye of the Tiger, and he made me give him the Walkman back before it got to the lyrics. Some time later, I saved up for a while and bought a very expensive Walkman, which I put in my locker a couple of days later, and it fell out and broke when I next opened my locker. I’d listened to it only a couple of times.
22. Either way, I have awful taste in music. I mean, I like what I listen to, but you won’t, so I’ll listen to your music, since it’s probably fine.
23. I have seen every episode of Law & Order. You can decide for yourself what that says about my taste in TV. I do, however, regret describing Bones as “cliched” and saying that the lead characters looked like a frog and a stoat. Well, the do, kind of, but I’ve decided the show is fun.
24. Once, in college, a classmate asked a small question about the Mexican Revolution, and I answered with an hour-and-a-half notes-free discussion of the politico-economic history of that conflict. I’m, uh, kind of handy at pub trivia too.
25. I grew up in a good part of Baltimore, but I remember stepping around passed-out crackheads to go to a great Thai restaurant too. It never occurred to me that was not normal. The school I took Tae Kwon Do at was in a pretty mediocre neighborhood.
Hmm, I might have to do more of this, I could come up with another 25… maybe that would make good content and break my writers’ block. Any subject matter requests?
Also: Milla, you’re it. And other people on Facebook.

I’ve been tagged to do a meme like twice before, and I always say I’ll write something for it, but then I never do. Maybe I should start. So, as much as I hate “Milla”:http://millatimes.com for tagging me,[1] well, maybe it’s good for me too. Well, good or a source of relatively free writing ideas. So, without further ado, five things that I think none of my regular readers knows about me.
# When I was in fifth grade, I carried a notebook around with me everywhere outside of school. Inside, I wrote an entire science fiction novel. It’s easy to write a novel when each chapter is less than a page and consists of entirely exposition. I guess that Isaac Asimov was my hero.
# One semester in college, I had romantic opportunities with three brunettes from Chicago; I picked just one. The next semester, I had romantic opportunities with three blondes from Massachusetts; I picked just one there as well. In fact, all through college, I only dated one girl from California. I’m not sure how that happened, and I’m particularly not sure how one semester was all about Chicago and the other all about Massachusetts.
# One day in junior high I taped _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_ off of the TV. I watched that tape over and over again on weekends until it wore out and skipped incessantly. Now, I own both versions of that move on DVD.
# I didn’t listen to music at all until 9th grade, when I got a “Kix”:http://www.kix-band.com/ tape as a gift. I think my parents got me a cheap stereo to play it on. Well, with just one tape, that sure got a lot of listening! (Fortunately I liked Kix. This was before they got a little crazy and wondered, in an article in the Sun, why they weren’t bigger than Led Zeppelin, since they were better. I guess having Poison steal your show and then get famous off it would drive anyone insane.)
# I once made out with one of my college newspaper’s photographers in the darkroom. We managed not to screw up any film processing! I was very happy, as I’d had a big crush on her for a long time, but it took me about six weeks to kiss her again, and that never did go anywhere.
You know, that wasn’t so bad; I’d even do it again for another meme. I think I’m supposed to tag somebody. Ummm…. Mary and Auros, you’re it!
fn1. I plan to get back at her by pronouncing her name “Mill-uh” rather than “Mee-la” the next time I see her.