Five

Tagged by Jacopo, I had to scrounge through the recesses of my mind for Five Things that I haven't revealed on my blog before. I'm afraid that rather than interesting facts, what I've come up with is "my brain is mush-here's some babble."

The problem is, having been typing away here for well over a year now - there isn't much that I've never touched on. In fact, I'm not sure there is anything new under the sun - which leads directly into my first thought...

One

I ascribe to the ecclesiastical everything is meaningless mentality when it comes to the big picture and the focus of things here on earth. This isn't to say that I don't stress about life (as the archives of this blog will tell you quite the contrary), however, when I do reach a place of peace it's because my focus is shifted away from myself. We live modestly, with modest income. We are WalMart shoppers, (should be) penny pinchers, used-car drivers. Our stress levels rise with the price of gas, of milk, of life. But, like repeating a word over and over again - to the point that it sounds like slush in your mouth and you can't quite remember what it means - life loses its meaning when you focus on it too hard. At least, it does for me. And so I lean back and look a the wide sky, at the horizon dipping over the edge of the road, at the sun setting - and I remember how small I am. How small I'd still be, even asleep on a bed made of money, in a mansion set on a hill. How small we all are.

Two

I am thin-skinned, shy and quiet - preferring to write rather than socialize, read rather than talk. I'm also loud and raucous and will approach strangers without apprehension.

I sometimes wonder if I have dual-personalities.

Three

There is something strange about me. Something that attracts strangeness. Something that made a man at an autoshop cross a busy street to give me his boss's business card as I passed by (walking to the grocery store on a lunch break) - because he wanted to meet me.

Or, a 35-ish divorcee on a cruise with his elderly father, who approached me out of the clear-blue, to thank me for my presence on the ship - even though I was married ("I'm sure everyone notices that ring right away") he wanted to be sure that I knew that I'd made his trip so much better, just by being there. Odd. (And a tad creepy, as my friend and I went on to discuss after he left...)

I've had many, many random and bizarre moments like these - and it's not because I'm cross-a-crowded-street-beautiful or stunning in a stalk-in-a-crowded-cruise-ship sort of way - it's not. I'm fairly positive that there is simply something strange about me. Perhaps it's overactive pheramones, of the weirdness variety?

In any event, as a result, I have met an assortment of strange and wonderful people, men and women, all drawn in by my apparent weirdness quotient (including my husband - who, oddly enough, captured my interest by completely ignoring me when we first met.)

Four

I'm bored with weight loss/body obsession. I feel like Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon when it comes to questions of diet or the scale - "I'm too old for this..." Bottom line: I feel good. Too good to spend more than three sentences discussing it, either here, or with people in person.

Five

I believe God speaks in unconventional ways. Through CD players and alarm clocks. Through airport ticket-tellers and checkbooks. At least, He has to me. But that's an entire other blog entry - or four or five.

And now that my first thesis draft is just about ready to be shipped off to my mentor - I've got to go research the heck out of the subject for my graduate seminar (the final requirement before I can officially graduate and begin paying back Sallie Mae.) But this was fun. Writing a post that wasn't entirely thesis-related. Hopefully I'll have time for more actual blogging in the near future...