Forgotten Beatitudes

I have been tagged for my very first blog meme thingy by the illustrious More Cowbell!  I probably shouldn’t be quite so excited about this, but your first time is always special.

It’s also usually embarrassing, sometimes painful and can leave you with emotional scarring that can last the rest of your life.

So, you know, double-edged sword.  But whatever, I’m just as giddy as a slightly hung-over, allergy-ridden person can be who accidentally melted a plastic bowl on their electric stove the previous night.
Anyway, this here little meme is called Pieces of Eight.  The rules seems very simple, except for that last one about sending the tag on out to eight other bloggers you know.  I’m not sure I actually know eight other bloggers.  This will be interesting.  Oh well, let’s impose some form on this puppy:

The Rules: 

• Post the rules, then list 8 things about yourself.
• At the end of the post, tag and link to 8 other people.
• Leave a comment at those sites, letting them know they’ve been tagged, and asking them to come read the post so they know what to do.

Seems simple enough.  Without further ado, eight things about me.

1.  I can’t cook.  As evidence, I refer you to the passing comment I made about melting a plastic bowl.  There is also a famous incident where I managed to set a kitchen on fire while trying to boil water, leading me to claim my not very useful super power is the ability to burn water.  However, I remain very hopeful that one day I will learn how to cook.  My new house has a beautiful, $3600 stove and lots of counter space, so I have an agenda.  It’s a little frustrating, though, to have to nuke everything.  Cooking is only a series of chemical reaction with a (hopefully) delicious result.  I have a degree in chemistry, so wtf?

2.  I’m learning to play the mandolin.  I already play the piano (even did it sort of professionally at one point), sing (again, in the past, people actually gave me money for it) and play a little violin and flute.  But I’ve always secretly loved bluegrass music and, after watching Amy Ray perform “Johnny RottenTail”, I decided I wanted to learn how to strum that baby guitar.  It’s very slow going, which is frustrating, as the other instruments I picked up fairly easy.  However, I was younger then.  Once I’ve mastered the mandolin, though, it’s off to the dulcimer and then the hammered dulcimer.  Wheee!

3.  My mother and father never married.  He was from Iran (half Iranian, or Persian as he evidently always insisted, and half French) and was in the states on a student visa and soccer scholarship and she decided she wanted a baby.  So she took his sperm and apparently sent him into a tizzy when she told him she was in the family way.  He insisted he couldn’t marry her and she said that was fine because she didn’t want to marry him.  My grandmother, however, was FURIOUS and her very rural upbringing came out as she immediately started calling relatives to either come and lynch this guy or make him marry her daughter.  My eldest aunt, however, was more calm about it, saying that we didn’t need to get our hands dirty, we can just get him deported and they’ll kill him for us back in Iran.  As far as I know, though, my aunt Sherry stepped in and talked everyone down, so no one got killed or deported.  To this day, though, I have still never met my father and am not sure I want to.

4.  I have allergies.  Bad ones.  As a young adult, they gave me one of those pin-prick tests where you lie on your stomach and all people to voluntarily stick like 70 needles in your back coated with different allergens.  The nurse, after poking me, said she’d come back in about five minutes to see if there was any result and that I might feel some slight itching or discomfort.  She left and in less than 30 seconds, I was in absolute hell.  I was holding on to the struts beneath the table in an effort to keep from trying to scratch my back.  To this day, it ranks as one of the most unpleasant things I have ever had happen to me.  Luckily, the nurse came back in around two minutes later (five minutes might have driven me insane), and said, “Mr. Peery, we need your OH MY GOD!”  I never found out what they needed.  I did find out that all the sites had swelled.  Like a whole bunch of swelling.  I was allergic to everything they tested, except possibly dog hair.  They couldn’t tell definitively because everything around that site was so swollen it was hard to get a reading.  So, yeah, I’m miserable pretty much the entire year.

5.  I once had a pierced nipple and a pierced ear.  Prior to the nipple piercing, I could really take or leave them in the foreplay department.  After the piercing…oh baby.

6.  I’m acrophobic, claustrophobic and agoraphobic and the confluence of these three fears made for a very interesting trip to the St. Louis Arch when I was a child.  First, long lines and lots of people started my motor running.  Then, they cram you and about four other strangers into these tiny elevator pods that go up the side of the arch to the observation area.  The pods are not only dimly lit and cramped, but they also swivel to make adjustments as they ascend.  The observation area is a single long walk with windows on either side.  You can crawl up to the windows, lying on a sort of sloped ledge, to look out, almost straight down.  My mother, not realizing how panicked I was at this point, put me on the ledge and started pointing out sites.  I, however, lost my shit and dug into the window sill with my fingernails, sweating, turning white and shaking.  They actually had to have security come and get me out of there because I had wedged my fingers into to some opening around the window and was holding on so tightly, my mother couldn’t pry me away.

7.  I can’t spell.  Never could.

8.  I know how to square dance, but haven’t gone in years.  The last time I went was on a sort of semi-date with a guy to the local Gay and Lesbian Square Dance group.  Shamefully, I must admit the only reason I went on a date with this guy was to see this group, which momentarily fascinated me.

So there’s my eight.  Now, let’s see if I can figure out eight people to send this to and still be nice like Cowbell and not use Eric since he’s done this recently…

1. David
2. Big Daddy
3. Jamie
4. North Dallas Thirty
5. Kate
6. John
7. Another John
8. Jennifer

Hehe.