There's this thing going around over on Facebook. Someone posts a number of random things about him or herself, and then when anyone comments on their post, the original poster gives them a number.
As Facebook memes go, this one is kind of fun. I've learned a few things about people that I didn't know, no one is asking me to share or repost something, or post my bra color, or to send something to my 100 best friends in hopes of having my dreams come true or any of that, that I just don't ever participate in. My one exception is any message that is anti-bullying. I was bullied all through school (and some as an adult), and I'm fully willing to get the anti-bullying message out as many times as it takes to get the message across. Other than that, I'll occasionally share something that tickles my fancy, but never when someone tells me I should. I think I've probably written about how I feel about that kind of coercion before, and how much I dislike it.
However, this random thing about you meme is clever, fairly harmless, and in some cases educational. I've only got one problem with it:
After posting thirteen random things and then six more random things, I'm starting to run out of interesting stuff to post about me. I really haven't lived that interesting a life. I might have one more set in me, before I start to have to post stuff that only my mother would have thought was interesting, like the fact that as a baby, I started sleeping through the night on about my fourth night home from the hospital.
See? Not that interesting.
I suppose that I could go to the things that are only tangentially about me. Like the fact that the in-house chaplain at the hospital where my father died was Ferdinand Waldo Demara, who the film "The Great Impostor" (1961) was based on. I didn't know that until about six months after my father died, when I was thumbing through an issue of People magazine (yeah, I know), and I saw a photo of a hospital room that had the same kind of TV sets in the rooms that the hospital my dad was in did - instead of having a big TV on the wall, each bed had a small TV on a sort of scissors arm that could be folded back or folded out over the bed when the patient wanted to watch it. Turned out that the article was about Demara who, after his adventures pretending to be, well, several things that he wasn't, sorted out his life, got religion, and became a hospital chaplain. I showed the article to my mother and said, "I knew that guy had a story when I saw him walking around the hospital."
Interesting? Maybe. About me? No, not really.
But the things I posted on FB probably aren't that interesting to anyone but me, either. For example, here's the first list I posted, when I was given the number 13:
13. I blog most days.
12. I'm a native of California.
11. I have ridden an elephant.
10. I lived in a haunted house for 4.5 years.
9. In my most recent keyboarding 5-minute timed writing, I keyboarded 75 words per minute with no errors.
8. I once shared a stage, albeit briefly, with three of the original cast members of "The Brady Bunch".
7. And, speaking of TV, I've been on national television.
6. I've watched tennis live and in person on Centre Court at Wimbeldon.
5. I once attended a double feature of "Gone With the Wind" and "How the West Was Won"; including intermissions, I was in the theater for just over 8 hours.
4. I have an AS (in Social Science), an AA (in Paralegal Studies), and a BA (in Intercultural Studies).
3. Until I was 6 and a half years old, I lived across the road from the man who played John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation".
2. I remember parts of my first visit to Disneyland even though I was under 2 years old at the time.
1. Air Force One once flew over my house so low that I could not only see the lights in the windows (it was at night), but I could see the people sitting at the windows. It was very, very low.
I have no idea how interesting any of this stuff is. But, it is random, which is the actual criteria for the meme.
And here's the second list, the 6, from earlier tonight:
6) I first got my driver's license on the day after my 16th birthday (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth). So far, in the lots of years since then, I have never had a moving violation. I'm hoping to keep it that way for as many more years.
5) I was reading by the age of 3 and started checking books out of the adult section of the library when I was age 7.
4) I came within inches of having my photo in People magazine. I only know this because I recognized the people in a photo accompanying an article I was reading as the party sitting next to me at a Las Vegas show I saw once. By the way, the headliner was Kris Kristofferson, and it was a great show.
3) Speaking of going to shows, I found out - long after the fact - that I was once at the same concert attended by John Lennon. It was an Elton John concert in Los Angeles, and it was an even greater show.
2) I grew up in line-of-sight (and just about 2 or 3 miles as the crow flies) of a facility that tested rocket engines, including engines for the Apollo program that took men to the Moon. When they ran the tests it often sounded as if the mountain was going to take off, and when they did night tests the whole mountain lit up. Another part of the same facility housed an experimental nuclear reactor that was the first commercial nuclear power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown. I was just about to turn age 3 at the time.
1) Playing the 6-degrees game, I can make connections to at least 5 mass or serial killers with only one intervening link (in other words, I know someone who met each of them). Two of them are Charlie Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer. Also, in the case of Charlie, I can do this two different ways. Makes me wonder sometimes about the company I keep.
Again, quite random, but other than that, probably only of interest to me. But, they asked, I answered.
But, still, I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I get another number from somebody. I mean, since making shit up is probably not the best option.
