scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

2.6.04

so at work they have this little newsletter, once a month. and every month there is a trivia question. human resources asked for three little known facts about each employee so that people could guess them - i've mentioned this before, i think.

so this month, it's me. my trivia are:

this person collects weird food and has eaten liverwurst, brains, octopus, et c.
this person's high school did not have a football team.
this person was once briefly held for questioning behind the Iron Curtain.

only nobody is guessing anything. i think my trivia are too obscure. so HR asked me for another tidbit of information to distribute via email - so somebody can guess and win the prize (free lunch at a local deli i've never particularly liked). and i'm thinking. it can't be the Shower Art from Beloit, because it quite simply can't. i'm looking at other people's trivia for ideas. i speak french, very badly, with a haitian accent. i speak hungarian even less. i'd have to decide on a favorite movie before i could list one as trivia. i am the eldest of two children? how boring is that? i am desended from nobility on one side and rebellion on the other. i am eligible for the daughters of the american revolution. i am a first-generation American. i am a (moderately lapsed) quaker. i played tympani in junior high. my high school had the best varsity fishing team in the state. i'm a Virgo, and i was born in the year of the Goat, but honestly i think astrology is bullshit. i think chicken pizza is disgusting. both my and my fiances mothers teach english, and our dads teach math. i've been to Amsterdam. i've been to Mardi Gras. once my parents drove to british columbia by mistake. i make a pretty fine lasagna. i have a kevlar canoe. i have two dogs. i have an aunt that's allergic to garlic, onions, leeks, scallions, and the rest of that whole family, and i simply can't ever let her come to my house because there's nothing, absolutely nothing, i could feed her. it was my idea to name the dog after the bar. i have 450 thread-count sheets and i think they were worth every penny. i went to boarding school, but it never seemed to matter. i'm pretty handy with a cordless drill. i'm also pretty handy with a sewing machine or a wok. i built my last computer. i like adjectives a little too much. i think i eat pizza more than is really healthy. i think emeril lagasse is a dumbass. i hit the sleep button about four or five times before getting up in the morning. i can be snarky sometimes but i hate the Gilmore Girls expressly because they're snarkier than me and i feel inferior. i can change a tire. i saw ralph nader speak in 2000 and tom robbins was right, he's still charismatic. i think the president is a dickhead. i think freud is a dickhead. but i do like hemingway.

a lot of the time, people will say things like 'I am a desendent of General Sam Houston.' but that's not about them - that has nothing to do with them, or with who they are as a person, or anything that helps anyone else know them better. but a lot of people talk about cool things their parents have done, or cool things their grandparents or even farther back have done - things they had no impact on, and that quite possibly only a minimal impact on them. What would really be more interesting would be 'I play General Sam Houston in reenactments.' dorky, but at least that would be relevant to their actual life, a decision that they made. And 'i have a passion for cooking.' Boring. and honestly, who doesn't? nobody ever likes anything unique - there's nobody who plays the trumpet on Thursdays at a smoky bar, there's nobody who's won prizes for their model trains, there's nobody who has a tattoo of their dead cat surrounded by pansies. it's unbelievable how many people think 'i really like football' is an exciting, or even vaguely enlightening, fact about who they are as human beings. how empty must your life have been to have that be one of the most interesting things about you? we have crummy trivia.

Only i'm censoring myself with this stupid newsletter - it can't be anything about sex, obviously; it can't be anything about rivers or canoeing, because there's a Crazy Person (crazy in a Very Bad Way) who goes canoeing, and he's not allowed to know that we go too. don't want it to be totally lame. don't want it to be about someone other than me (i.e., parents, ancestry, etc). i can't tell them i'm a quaker of any sort, because then i'd have time for nothing but explaining What Quakers Are for the next three months; nobody ever says anything religious. i can't tell them anything political because then they'd all hate me.

it's supposed to be something interesting, but something that people know me for. arrrrgh.

Labels: people

scrawled @ 16:31