Five Things About Me (Updated)

I got tagged by Evil HR Lady to list five things you may not know about me. It's part of a long trail of people who have been tagged - I tried to find the start, but after hopping to eleven different pages, without an end in sight, I decided it would suffice to say "a really long trail". The idea is to list five things most people don't know and then pick five other people to do the same. And away he goes.

1. I have never lived on my own - from my mission, to college, to living with Mom & Dad right before I got married and moved in with Kristin, I have never lived in a house/apartment/townhouse/condo by myself. Though I am a pretty severe extrovert, and constantly need to be around people, I think that living on my own and having my own space to come home to each day would have been something fun to try. I don't feel slighted that it never happened - don't worry I'm not going to leave Kristin for a year of soul searching in some mud hut in Borneo - but would've liked to have had the experience.


2. I love new age music - It all started when I was a teenager and my Uncle Tim and Aunt Rindy introduced my family to Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast. The cassette tape was played over and over again. I obsessed, buying all his tapes: The Sky of Mind, No Blue Thing, and Nothing Above My Shoulders but the Evening. When my eighth grade French teacher assigned the class to put on a fashion show (to practice our French and appease the predominantly female class) we used a song off No Blue Thing as the background music. Thankfully, I did not have to model anything as I was the narrator. I also listened to Kitaro as a teenager (his webpage here). I have fond memories of laying on my bed, blaring his music on my boombox, and reading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green Sky series. I still have a box of new age cassette tapes that I randomly pull out and rummage through. It annoys Kristin to no end.


3. I have a blog no one knows about - actually, I have two other blogs, but one a bunch of people know about. The known blog is about my relationship with food and is called, appropriately, Oliver Food. The other one, the secret one, is a place for my private musings, rants, demonstrations of my fourth attribute, etc. Don't ask for the URL; I won't share it.


4. I am incredibly insecure - I was going over my list of five things with a friend and when I told him this one he made sure I knew that he was registering an objection. I assured him that being outgoing and insecure are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I think many people who work to project a confident air are doing so because of a particular insecurity. In a way I think this is good because I force myself to constantly look at situations to see how I can better do things, and in school it helped me earn a near 4.0. But in a way it is bad, as I tend to stress out of getting the right answer to everything, even when almost right is more than good enough.


5. I've seen neither Forrest Gump nor Titanic and do not have the desire to - I had recently returned from South America when Titanic came out, and all the girls at school always wanted to sing "Nearer My God To Thee" in church because they sing that in Titanic, and those girls annoyed me, and I mocked Celine Dion for her hitting-the-chest-while-singing shtick, and so I decided to never see the movie. On the Forrest Gump front, Kristin thinks it's a near crime and keeps saying that we need to watch it. The closest I've come is eating at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company on Maui twice.

So who are the five people I want to tag? Hmmm, the power. I think I'll go with:

• My brother Jared because he's as into blogging as I am,
• Kate because she was the first person to comment on our blog right after I received the 'tag',
• Lisa because she's always hounding Marcie about updating her blog,
• Julia because her wit never fails,
• and my lovely wife Kristin because recursion is cool.

Update: Links to the lists posted by the people I tagged: Julia, Lisa, Kate