A Meme

I’ve been tagged with a meme by our wonderful cyber friend Larramie at Seize a Daisy. I'm afraid I won't be able to follow the rules and tag eight people because everybody I know on line has already been tagged, or tagged very recently. I'm a meme failure! Here are my eight things anyway:

1. I own every single episode of the X-Files on DVD and have watched them all multiple times.

2. I went through a phase where I read every book about serial killers that I found. I wanted to find some clue as to what made these people so different from everyone else. I never found any answers but my friends and family all told them I was creeping them out.

3. When I was 18 I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners. I’d go to houses and shampoo one room and the customer had to listen to a sales pitch. Part of the pitch involved me heading into the bedroom, stripping back the sheets and vacuuming the mattress to show the customer all the dead skin and microscopic skin mites in their bed. It got me a few sales to horrified housewives and it got me thrown out of a house once.

4. In the 5^th grade in Mrs. Helmsdorff’s class, we had to memorize the poem, Abu Ben Adhem. It’s the only poem I’ve ever memorized and I can still recite the whole thing.

5. Scott and I met through online dating. He found my profile and since he’s a painter, he was intrigued by my online screen name, ArtLover492. He later told me he loved my profile but the photo I had posted was horrible and he fully expected me to be hideous. One of the things I love about him is that he still wanted to meet. Fortunately, he said I looked nothing like the picture.

6. I went to 13 different schools between kindergarten and high school graduation. I was perpetually the new kid and was terribly insecure and self-conscious until my junior year in high school.

7. I worked at a metal stamping plant called United Shoe Machine that was known in the mill town where I lived as “The Shank Shop”. It was one of the more desirable employers in my blue collar town because the jobs were union. I “nested shanks”, ran a metal stamping machine, hung unpainted metal pieces onto hooks on a running conveyor and then removed them after the paint was sprayed on and baked (picture Lucy and Ethel in the candy making episode) and sharpened blades for Black and Decker edge trimmers.

8. I’ve grown up emotionally backwards. When I was young I was suspicious of everyone around me and was cynical about nearly everything. The older I get, the more I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Despite all of the bad things that happen in the world every day, I think most people are trying to do the best they can.