Eight Thoughts on the Subject of Me

I can count all the times I've been tagged on two hands, so when I get one, I'm a'quick to respond. Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein tagged me with a meme, and since I am my own favorite subject (that sounds smarmily charming, but it's true), here we go.

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Wow, tag eight people? I noticed Dr. M tagged four, so we'll see. Here goes; eight random things about me.

1. I have, in my collection, nearly every figure from Palisades Toys's recent The Muppet Show series (and I'm incredibly disappointed that they stopped making them). I know I've mentioned this before, but I stopped talking to a very close friend of mine because of them. We were talking one night about how she wrote her dissertation on gender expectations in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and somehow it led to me saying I only collected one line of action figures anymore: The Muppet Show. She laughed, very loudly, and I was very hurt by it. I told her it was a struggle not to laugh at her Buffy reverence but that I'd done so out of politeness. She didn't apologize, and I didn't talk to her again for a year. And in the year since I finally spoke to her again, I haven't spoken to her again. Never laugh at a man's Muppet collection. It makes you a jerk.

2. I hate hippies. Not real hippies, who are thoughtful people like Jaquandor or Stewart Brand, but college hippies--the ones who aren't in it for real. I was down at my complex's pool last night, enjoying myself, and a bunch of hippies came down and starting jumping into the water; every time I tried to move, one of the ten of them was in my way. What had been a nice, serene atmosphere became loud, irritating, and highly pronoid. I left the pool, and so did the 12 other people who had been there when the hippies came. Here's my thing with hippies--they hate corporate people (and rightly so) for wanting to buy everything to make money off of it, but hippies feel like they're entitled to everything just because they want to use it. I've gotten into so many arguments with hippies over the years. When I was at community college, I used to buy myself breakfast from McDonald's every morning, and the same girl used to ask me for my biscuit, which I regard as the desert of the Big Breakfast. Look, you're obviously not starving, so buy your own and leave me alone. I don't have an obligation to feed you just because you saw that I have food. It's not the community's just because you didn't eat this morning. Nothing brings out the conservative in me like a hippie. Really, though, I'm a moderate with no particular interest in being a part of either party.And yet, I love hippie/arty chicks...especially if they have red hair.

3. I have a blemish on my chest right now that's so big it looks like I have three nipples. So I'm wearing a shirt in the pool. I look positively Scaramangian (take that, Splotchy!).

4. One other pool-and-nipple related bit; the poor, sweet, bronze, blond, soft, pretty, nice, smiling, Kaley Cuoco-alike girl that makes everyone sign in at the pool has no idea that she bent so far forward while checking my ID on Monday that she accidentally showed me her nipples. For, like, a whole minute. Thank you, my little cutlet.

5. There's not a day goes by that I don't watch the Disney Channel. All these years later, and I'm still Disney's bitch. And I'm actually pissed at them, because they keep showing Boy Meets World and Sister, Sister, but they stopped showing Lizzie McGuire with Hilary Duff, which is, I swear, my favorite Disney series ever (and one of my favorite shows ever). As many readers know, I am still a big fan of hers. And yes, I watch The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Hannah Montana, which are fairly dumb, but I still watch them.

6. I act out if I don't feel appreciated. When I worked at Barnes & Noble, I actually went to great pains to show them that, as a receiving manager, the constant backlog of boxes waiting to be received wasn't my fault (not enough manpower shelving books, too many returns, one of the assistant managers sitting in his office and over-ordering nearly every day because he didn't want to be on the floor working, etc.), but they demoted me anyway. I needed the job, so I stayed, but after that all I did was read magazines and comic books, take long breaks, and steal a ton of merchandise. I resented them so much for doing it that I came back as Christmas help for two Christmases and did pretty much the same thing. I only worked when people were in the back room with me. I'm a vindictive son of a bitch.

7. I think the human race is idiotic because of things like religion and war and reluctance to embrace new technology that doesn't involve Prince commercials (really, Prince, how could you?). We're one rock in billions, and people think fighting for a patch of it is a noble cause, when in the cosmic sense it's ridiculous. Why don't more people think that knowing the secrets of the universe (and more fun, figuring out what they are) is far more special and infinite and inspiring and humbling than all of the supernatural fairy tales that tell them the world is a small place and that they are a small people who can't achieve anything new? Is it the vastness that makes people afraid? And if so, why don't they conquer that fear? We don't have forever for this. Every 30 million years or so, when our galaxy passes through the place where stars are densest, there is a mass extinction that nearly wipes out all life on Earth. In our galaxy alone, there are (as I've heard it described) "four hundred thousand million" other stars, and their gravity is what releases comets into our solar system. In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter and decimated an area larger than the Earth; if it had hit us, the planet--or at least all life on it--would have been destroyed. That's what Jupiter does; protects us from comets and asteroids which pelt our system constantly. But Jupiter can't catch them all, and we passed through the danger zone a million years ago--and a million years is how long it takes a comet to reach our solar system. We know there are objects headed this way, we've even named some of them. Life is fragile, because there are dangers everywhere in that vastness. Our solar system is in a 30 million year rotation, but it's also on a course of revolving around the center of the galaxy every 250 million years. We could run into all kinds of things: gas clouds, asteroids, other stars, supernovae. Black holes, created by the collapse of a star and destroying everything around it with such intense gravity that nothing can withstand it, not even light. We'd never know a black hole was here until it was too late. There are 10 million black holes out there in our galaxy; it's now thought that that mass of light at the center of our galaxy is a black hole one million times more powerful than an average black hole; it's so powerful that it's spinning stars--STARS!--around itself at 1000 kilometers a second. It's at least two million times the mass of the sun, and it's eating everything around it. If a black hole entered our solar system, we'd be pelted by a mass of comets released from the edge of the system. Jupiter would be sucked in so quickly it would appear to evaporate. The Earth would shake as the black hole consumed our sun and ripped it apart; as we were pulled close to the sun, all life on Earth would die from the heat, if it weren't already gone. And then the Earth would literally melt and disintegrate, and then there would be nothing left but the tiny black hole, a million times smaller than our sun, so dense in gravity that it destroys everything around it.So, fighting over oil seems really important, doesn't it?

8. I'm not always so negative. I like a lot of things, I really do. I just get angry easily because cynicism and bullying and stupidity piss me off no end. But I'm a man of simple pleasures who maybe places too many expectations on himself and so enjoys things that might not be deep or meaningful, but which make me smile.

Alright, tagging. Well, of course I'm going to tag my mate Bonjourtristesse, my fellow justice Heidi Nyburg, the always-a-little-too-comfortable-talking-about-himself Peter Lynn, and the busy-but-talkative J.D. Judge. I'll stop there, because a number of the people I would tag are either busy or have already done this meme. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Splotchy points out in the comments section that answer 7 reminds him of something. And it does me, too, actually: "The Galaxy Song" from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. This lovely scene (with the full liver donor opening to set up the punchline) is my favorite moment of Python and, in a way, this song is reflective of much of my philosophy toward life. So, here it is.

Eric!