A friend asked me to write six things about myself that most people wouldn’t know. I’m a pretty open person, so it’s taken me a while to think up these things, but here ya go.
1. I kept up a livejournal for about a year, starting just before I moved to Florida. On it, I talked almost entirely about myself and about abstract thoughts I had in my head. Since I’m supposed to write about myself, I guess I'll hearken back to those old days, although I have rather mixed feelings about the dramatic persona I assumed while writing that journal. It allowed me to produce some of the best texts I've ever written, but at the same time it made me frequently depressed or upset, and I was often embarrassed by the emotional immaturity shown in my entries. I eventually deleted the journal for these reasons, but I archived nearly every post first. I could still zip up my history and send it to you, if you'd like. Of course, you can just read this blog if you want something more current.
2. As a related thought: from when I graduated highschool until I left for Florida - a span of about five years - my primary career goal was to become a writer. I kept several paper journals and wrote quite often, if not daily. I eventually abandoned this goal for two reasons: I didn't feel that my writing style was commercially viable, however much I liked it, and I didn't want to become jaded with writing because I loved it so much. Since moving to Michigan, I haven't been writing nearly as often. I've abandoned my writer's persona in order to lead a more sane and happy life, and this led to a lot less emotional drama and hence, a lot less to write about. No big loss, though. It’s still something I enjoy doing from time to time.
3. I've recently been discovering how much of a visual memory I have. This comes as quite a surprise to me, because most of my thoughts are about language and programming, neither of which can be considered exactly ‘visual.’ I also have a very hard time understanding visual arts. I had to study a bit of art history before I could "get" art (paintings, drawings, etc) in any meaningful way, and I'm famously bad at watching movies and TV (unless they're very surreal, they tend to make me uncomfortable.) I'm the ‘trivia guy' among my friends - I'm often found reciting all sorts of obscure and useless facts; I don't really understand how I could store all of this random information in a visual manner.
But the facts remain: I remember maps better than I remember directions, faces better than names. When I begin to create or design, ideas most often appear to me as boxes, with a general aura or feeling about what information they contain. When writing, I set these boxes up in lines, and the auras flow into each other as context and emotion. In programming, the boxes are set into 2D space, and then connect via information flows. The elbow grease comes in when deciding what meat-hook realities that those flows represent - often times, this is a direct analogue to the text I need to create. It's the process of turning pictures into words.
In my studies of writing and literature, I've been most fascinated by connotation. I'm always on the lookout for the most subtle facets of every word I read or use (although I admit that I often can't see connotations as well as other readers might.) They say a picture is worth a thousand words; I guess my search is for a word that will exactly meet the picture in my head and prove that saying wrong.
4. To switch gears a little bit, I’d like to talk about the rice cooker my sister gave me for Christmas. It's changed my fucking life. No one seems to believe me on this point. Perfectly cooked rice with no work is not something to be overlooked.
I keep containers of various rice toppings around, and whenever I'm hungry I just warm up the rice leftover in the cooker, and the topping warms in the microwave. Combine and eat. It's about as simple as a microwave dinner, while being cheaper, healthier and tastier. Every few days, I run out of cooked rice and want some new topping, so I spend about an hour making them both, and then I can sit myself down to a fresh, home-cooked meal. I buy a few ready-made toppings, too. I'm a particular fan of salsa, but beans are also good, of course. My favorite home-cooked topping is a mixed-bag stir fry, using whatever meat I have ready and some frozen vegetables. (I use frozen vegetables because fresh tend to rot before I can use them all, and they tend to be more expensive.) I've also put my leftover barbecue chicken on rice, when I was tired of eating it on bread. I’m always on the lookout for more crap that might taste good on top of rice. Mmmm.
5. If you hadn’t already gathered, I like to cook. I taught myself how when I was 19 or 20, because I was developing a taste for “fine” foods but didn’t have the money to go out and eat all the time. It was a little awkward for me at first, because cooking rarely happened in the house I grew up in. Luckily, two of my friends were teaching themselves how to cook around the same time, so we helped each other out, and continue to share food ideas to this day.
I’m very much a recipe-free cook. Many of my favorite things to make, I learned by reading a bunch of similar recipes or, occasionally, just by reading the ingredient lists on stuff at stores. (That’s how I taught myself to make taco sauce, for instance.) I think that’s the best way to learn cooking, because you learn more about what ingredients you like instead of just what dishes you like. It teaches you how to experiment. Of course, it’s very hard for me to make the same dish twice. I like that, though, because I get bored very easily.
More recently, I’ve been actively using two different recipes. The first one, which I’ve written about here before, is a recipe for Chinese roast pork. I follow that recipe because 1) I’m still very unused to working with Asian flavors, and 2) I’m making enough pork for 10+ meals, so I want to play it safe. Experimentation has the nasty side-effect of occasionally making food inedible. The other recipe is simply for pancakes. This is a recipe I came up with myself, after reading many different recipes. I’m working from a strict version of that invention because I’m experimenting with minor changes in each batch, in an effort to get consistently wonderful pancakes. I’ll write about that in more detail sometime soon.
6. It’s mostly unrelated to my previous points, but I think it’s interesting to know that I grew up in a different household than what’s considered “normal.” I try to tell all of my friends about how I grew up, but sometimes I forget. So if you didn’t know these things about my family now’s your chance to learn!
My parents were nearly forty when I was born. I am my dad’s only child, but I have a half-brother and half-sister through my mom. I never shared a roof with my brother and I only lived with my sister for about two years; they are 19 and 16 years older than me, respectively. My parents got divorced when I was about three years old. Growing up, I primarily lived with my mom, but I visited my dad almost every weekend until I was sixteen or seventeen, and he moved a few hundred miles away.
It might be a “different” upbringing, but it couldn’t have been all that bad if it still produced a person you like, right?
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I think that’s a fair enough six points. I’ve included some current stories and some history, some easily discovered things and some uncomfortably personal ones. It’s been fun, maybe I’ll do it again sometime.
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