Number of posts = number of things about me

I read on Owlhaven’s site that a blogging tradition is that you have to write 100 things about yourself once you have made a hundred posts.

Here are mine. Skim at will.

1. This will actually mark my 107th post, thus 107 entries.
2. I don’t know when I last wrote my middle name. It is Brooks.
3. I think I do a pretty good time living in the moment. But I am also scared a lot of the time. A contradiction?
4. I used to fall in love with people and ideas quite easily. Now I just love people and ideas.
5. I used to not like that people think I look like my dad. Now I realize that he’s lucky.
6. I got new glasses just before we moved here two months ago. Now they slip off my face too easily.
7. Another thing I share with my dad – we lose weight from our faces first.
8. I can remember the phone number we had when I was 3 through 10 years old.
9. My leg has a metal rod through it from falling from a tree when I was 31 years old - twenty three years afte I first fell from a tree and broke my leg.
10. I love getting lost in strange cities, preferably while riding a bike.

11. I was 23 before I visited another country.
12. Since I was 23 I have spent about half my life living out of the US.
13. My mother-in-law may be the gutsiest woman I know. She had never left the country before she visited us in Africa two years ago and then she did it on her own.
14. We had a pinball machine growing up. It still didn’t make us the coolest family in the neighborhood – they had an Atari. (The second coolest family only had a Colekovision – sp? – but since their dad worked at a chocolate factory, they were close.)
15. The second girl I had a crush on was from Egypt but I don’t know if it was the younger or older sister that I liked.
16. I have very forgetable eye and hair color. Both are very in between.
17. I can watch gratuitous violence in movies and not have it bother me as much as one person having an affair.
18. I owned a poster of Heather Thomas.
19. Hillary Snodgrass (not joking) is the first girl I remember kissing me. In the gym. During kickball or something involving bases.
20. I wish I hadn’t left all our art in the US. We need to get something other than whiteboards and photo collages for our walls.

21. I own a vehicle in Africa in a country that I don’t know I would be allowed back in to. Anyone need a Galloper?
22. There is a store I go to where I only buy icecream and soda. They deliver gas and drinking water to our house.
23. I want to see the ruins in Greece.
24. When sharing a hotel room with people I’m not related to, I would rather sleep on the floor than share a bed.
25. I am a hotel snob and once missed the last available hotel for something like six hours while driving from Virginia to Illinois.
26. Redbird Arena is where I saw Chicago in concert when I was in high school.
27. I have seen Bob Dylan in concert as well as Peter, Paul and Mary and Paul Simon.
28. I was not impressed seeing Sting in concert. It was near the end of the tour and he seemed tired and unenthusiastic.
29. I once heard They Might Be Giants attempt a rendition of Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville
30. Christian writers impress me less when they were Christians before they became writers versus those good writers who later became Christian.

31. I visited something like 75 colleges while traveling with EIU’s Speech team.
32. Basketball was fun for me until I realized I needed to practice if I was going be any good. When everyone else got taller, I didn’t really know how to dribble, pass or shot from the outside.
33. I have never seen a John Travolta movie that I really liked.
34. The sound of rain may be my favorite.
35. Onomatopoeia is my favorite English word.
36. I can eat an entire bag, box or container of multiserving snack food – chips, cookies, candy – in one sitting. I still sometimes do.
37. I loved our foam mattress in Africa. I wake up from this one with a sore back.
38. My wife and I slept on bunkbeds for a month while we went to school in Seattle.
39. I drink tea, not coffee, with sugar but not milk unless I’m having chai.
40. My favorite authors you probably have not read are Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist and John Henry Days) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans).

41. I have not read a Truman Capote novel but should.
42. My wife looks amazing when she is intently watching something simple like the spider who lived in our yard or the kids flying kites across the street.
43. Ethiopian food gives me heartburn but I really like it.
44. I have ridden on a camel and an elephant.
45. I do not know my address or phone number from memory but I keep them in my wallet just in case.
46. The sound of two metal eating utensils scraping against each other make my teeth hurt.
47. I have given up counting the number of cavities I have.
48. I will soon give up counting the number of crowns.
49. Pajama pants are fine to wear to sleep in but only with t-shirts or sweatshirts. Pajama shirts never fit right.
50. I left all my pajama shirts in Africa.

51. I have kept in touch with nobody I graduated high school with.
52. I hardly ever sleep on airplanes or sit down in airports.
53. I scored a touchdown during the one season I played football in high school. It was in the rain, we had kicked off and I recovered the ball after a couple of fumbles. I happened to be in the right endzone.
54. My biggest acting role was as Thorin Oakenshield in a musical version of The Hobbit. That and pretending I have the least bit of a clue as to where my future is leading me...
55. I played Dungeons and Dragons while in junior high and don’t think it was a tool of the devil.
56. I own fewer tools than I would like to (like a power saw).
57. My pinewood derby car won the local tourney by going down backwards.
58. Working in the jewelry department of Walmart was my favorite part time job. I was the first in our store allowed to pierce cartilage.
59. While working at the reserve desk at Eastern’s library (that entryway with the really high ceiling with the clock), we would tilt the fan upwards and blow bubbles.
60. I once spent the night in the library and avoided detection until my way out the next morning. I just kept walking.

61. I don’t ever feel at home until I have books on a bookshelf.
62. I have won writing awards in subjects dealing with “Democracy, the Vanguard for Freedom,” cultural diversity and woman’s advocacy. I am an antiwar, white male. “I’m not a (liberal, democrat, etc or) feminist…per se…”
63. Also while in college, I sent in a series of letters to a newspaper using a pen name. They were all critical of a writer name Cassie Simpson. They were mean and petty done in the name of being funny and as a way to get attention. I shouldn’t have written them.
64. Years earlier, I got hate mail in response to a letter I wrote the Pantagraph condemning our involvement in Panama.
65. I used to really like shooting a bow and arrow at two bales of hay we set up by the tree line. I lost more arrows in the trees and the yard than made it into the hay.
66. My wife and I used to fish for bluegill in a pond so small you could throw a tennis ball across it.
67. I once rollerbladed 22 miles during the middle of the night. (To the Moore House and back from Campus House). Dumb.
68. Vegetables are only appealing to me when I’m limited in choices of what to eat and when I’ve exerted a ridiculous amount of energy and/or sweat. (Vegetarian: primative word for "can't hunt".)
69. I have friends that I worry about nearly every day because they live in tough places to be young in. Not that there are many places where it is easy to be young in...
70. I am an introvert occasionally pretending to be outgoing.

71. When done right, there are few things better than a Montecristo sandwich. The restaurant that was once EL Crackers serves a great one, batter-dipped in something sweet and sprinkled with powdered sugar.
72. I come from an amazing family filled with people who are doing great things with pretty normal lives.
73. I have had at least one solid concussion as the result of a bike accident. I may have had more but can’t recall.
74. I don’t email or write or call individuals often enough. I communicate en masse.
75. I have largely given up remembering birthdays or anniversaries. I forget too often then feel guilty about it. I want to just send random packages to people when it hits me or when I see something they’d like. But I haven’t done that yet.
76. When I had a job as a pizza delivery guy, one of my biggest fears was that I might hit a kid while delivering in one of the trailer parks that was in our area.
77. I was always good enough in track to run in the big qualifier meets but never good enough to win them.
78. When I was in top physical form, I could run a mile in under five minutes. I can’t now.
79. During my last membership at a gym, I actually gained weight even though I worked out three days a week.
80. Baby-back ribs often make me ill but I order them anyway because I love their taste and I think something primitive in me likes eating meat from a bone that I hold in my fingers.

81. I am adept at using chopsticks.
82. I have read the Bible, Torah, Book of the Jain, the Koran and the Bagvad Gita and believe I am better for it.
83. Sometimes I’m not sure that I am driven to God as much as I am driven away from all the alternatives.
84. I do better on written tests than on oral ones.
85. I will read nearly anything that is made available to me.
86. I prefer owning books to borrowing books.
87. I can’t explain how to do things on the computer very well. Usually it is easier for me to move a person aside and try a bunch of different solutions.
88. I don’t like guns but I do like shooting things on video games.
89. I have never taken a cruise and don’t really like boats all that much.
90. I no longer own dress shoes. All my shoes are brown and range from sandals to hiking boots.

91. I do, however, own a pair of white gym shoes that I have yet to wear since coming to Asia.
92. The only dress pants I wear are khaki.
93. I have never owned a motorcycle but will buy one within the next year.
94. Money only gets me nervous when other people talk about it. (Which is why I was writing this at 3 am.)
95. Empathy is the trait I feel I most clearly got from my mom and I hope it is the trait I pass down most clearly to my son.
96. I want to like tofu but really have a hard time with the texture of it. Even when eating fried tofu, I think about the texture of unfried tofu.
97. I wish we owned a charcoal grill and had a place where we could buy charcoal.
98. The right side of my body creaks more than the left side.
99. I get quieter, not louder, when I get more emotional – this is true with anger but also when I’m expressing positive emotions.
100. I sometimes write during sermons but rarely do I outline what is being said.

101. My voice was lower in high school than it is now.
102. For seven years, my locker was in between Kara Macy’s and Mary Mueller’s.
104. I don’t tell my family how much I love them nearly enough
105. I want to be a good man.
106. I can’t imagine what life would be like without my wife and son.
107. God is good to me. Always.