Meme Season?

It must be the sultriness of the weather, but memes seem to be filling the air, and I for one am too lethargic for much else just at the moment. Besides, I was tagged by Laura an embarrassingly long time ago, before even getting tagged for the 5 random things (see below). Since there are an endless supply of random things floating around my life, here goes:

7 Random Things

1. I wrote my first story when I was about 6. I can’t remember what it was about, except that it involved a secret door into an imaginary universe, that the secret door was based on an actual door in my grandparents’ old farmhouse that didn’t seem to go anywhere (in retrospect, I believe it provided access to the plumbing), and that I got really frustrated with the story’s lack of originality, and didn’t finish it.

2. A couple years later I won a “young authors” prize for a different story, one about a robot. I didn’t like it at all – I shamelessly wrote what I thought the teachers wanted to see and would consider precocious, and it worked. I never really fully respected teachers after that. I also gave up writing fiction at that point.

3. I have a morbid fear of spiders. Seriously – I flip out if I get too close to one, and feel like something’s crawling on me for hours afterwards. However, bees and wasps don’t scare me in the least.

4. The first time I dyed my hair was when I was 16, while staying in a youth hostel in Lido de Jesolo, Italy with 40 other exchange students. I dyed it “plum,” and it’s been various shades between auburn and blue-black on and off ever since.

5. I walked for the first time at 9 months, but started talking very, very late. However, when I did start talking I immediately used 3-syllable words and full, grammatically correct sentences. My mother attributes this to the fact that she took me to college with her in a front pack from my earliest days. We also think the early walking may account for my inability to coordinate hands and feet – not enough practice at crawling.

6. When I was little, my best friend and I painted pictures on rocks and pieces of wood and sold them to the neighbors. It didn’t occur to me until years later that people bought them because we were cute (and only charging 10 cents), not because they needed paperweights.

7. I had braces for more than 6 years, and my bite still isn’t quite lined up right. My teeth were straight to begin with, and I wish they’d never been messed with. I think it’s annoying how braces give everyone the exact same unnaturally perfect teeth.