Wild and wacky stuff!

Ow! Her Bad Mother just whacked me on the forehead with the meme stick, so now I'm compelled to tell you six weird things about me, if the concussion hasn't wiped my memory clean.

Um, where were we?

Oh. Right. Six weird things. This is surprisingly easy. Uh-oh.

1. I have been struck by lightning. Yes, that's right. The year was 1995. The location? York University. In the midst of a massive rainstorm Vampire me and Goth boyfriend were tussling over our (obviously) giant, black, Victorian style umbrella--the kind with a big long metal spike sticking out the top, kind of like, oh, I don't know, a lightning rod--when we ducked under the metal staircase at the back entrance of Curtis Lecture Hall when GRZZZZZTTZZAPP! Big blue flash of light, umbrella suddenly twenty feet away, boyfriend and self uncharacteristically circumspect and very hungry. Twenty minutes later, over panzerotto in York Lanes, we deduce that numb hands and foggy brains and, um, big blue flash and crashing noises indicated likely lightning ricochet. At least it hit the staircase first, right?

2. I appeared in an episode of Kids in the Hall. Still at York. I have an agent, and I go work occasionally as an extra. This story could be about how I played a (non-speaking) drug dealer on Top Cops, but Kids in the Hall is much cooler, non? Anyhow. Kids in the Hall. Filmed at dawn at an outdoor cafe somewhere in Rosedale. It's the 'short' where Bruce McCullough is playing a wannabe film director trying to impress a girl, and the film within a film shows two people who might meet, but never do, and Bruce-the-Character laments to the girl that he really needs a crane shot to do it right, as a crane shot pulls back on the cafe. I'm the Goth in the Siouxsie and the Banshees shirt 'drinking' and 'eating' directly behind Bruce. I saw the episode at 2am on CBS about a year later, at my summer job working nights at a group home for developmentally handicapped adults. I was folding laundry and watching TV and then I was all, "Hey, is that me on TV? Huh."

3. I have a club foot. Yup. Byron has a club foot and I was an adult before I knew that. (Q: How many English degrees do you need to get before you discover a canonical poet has the same birth defect as you? A: Three.) An evil dude in The Birth of a Nation has a club foot (Thaddeus?). And David Lynch. And Josef Goebbels. And Dudley Moore. My people, well, the world might be better off without us. Except maybe for Byron. I'm just saying. Anyhow. If you look closely (and past the swelling), you can see that left foot and right foot might as well be from different people, for all they resemble each other. And they're different sizes. Left foot: size 9. Right foot: size 7.5. Weird, eh? I mostly can't wear open toes or really delicate slip ons. Mary Janes are my friends. Boots, even better. But you'd be surprised. Also, my calves are different sizes, and my right leg has a kind of sloppy scar from the (mangled-ish) ankle-bone up to the widest part of my calf. But surprisingly few people ever notice this. This is how I learned the difference between right and left as a child: right side is small-foot side. Beat that for a mnemonic.

4. Everything--everything--makes me queasy. I get motion sickness watching Pynchon spin Miss Baby in his arms. I get motion sickness looking down to do up my seatbelt in the car. Boats? Only the horizon line is my friend. I have to sit at the front of the bus: back is burfy. And I have to face the front on the subway. Always. I will never be an astronaut.

5. I made a Cabbage Patch doll. In enrichment class. Ah, northern Ontario. So pedagogically advanced, so rich in resources for the nurturing of 'gifted' children. My fellow girl-nerds and I, from grade four to grade seven, suffered a once-every-eight-days course of enrichment sewing. I mean, Cabbage Patch dolls were all the rage. But enrichment sewing? (The boys did enrichment shop, if you were wondering.)

6. I once wrote a word processing program from scratch in BASIC. This was in high school. I was the only girl in grade 12 computer programming. Everyone else made video games, and I wrote a program that let you enter text, create and rename files, do find/replace on words or phrases, and print stuff. Seriously. I was a writer masquerading as a programmer. If we'd had the Internet, maybe I'd've programmed a blogging application :-)

7. I put sugar on my peanut butter toast. People tell me this is weird, but I find it tasty.

14. I hold myself accountable to my inner six year old. That is, I have a very clear image of myself and what I wanted at that age for myself when I became this age: in a lot of ways, six-year-old Mimi is my WWJD? Do other people do this? Think of themselves at a younger age, in the third person? As a going concern?

Phew. I'm going to tag Not So Sage, who, having eloquently described for us what is 'normal', will surely be up to the task of 'weird.' I'm also going to tag Jenifer G. at Rosebud and Papoosie Girl, because I want to know what lies under that so-reasonable demeanor ...