25 Random Things About Me
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009(Note: This list is cross-posted on The Facebooks)
2. I wore braces as an adult from the ages of 29 to 31. It was worth it. I’ll have to post a photo that shows how jacked my teeth used to be.
3. I’m right-handed and left-footed.
4. I often get my left and right mixed up if I don’t take a moment to think about it first.
5. I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes until the second grade.
6. I skipped the third grade.
7. I once served a one game suspension in Little League for unsportsmanlike conduct.
8. I almost always finish the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle in under an hour.
9. I can name all 39 years the Yankees won the pennant by heart.
10. I can name the winners and losers of all 43 Super Bowls by heart.
11. I have an irrational fear of bees although (maybe because?) I’ve never been stung by one.
12. I played the trumpet in junior high school and part of high school. During my sophomore year I rapidly lost interest in playing for a number of reasons. When our band marched in the 1988 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan I hadn’t even bothered to learn any of the tunes and just pretended to play.
13. I have a half-brother whom I haven’t seen in 15 years.
14. I attained Irish citizenship through descent in 2007.
15. I’m pretty sure a man who claimed to be an undercover cop in Barcelona lifted 50 euros from my wallet.
16. I once performed in an improv comedy show inside a deli.
17. When I was about nine or ten a friend of mine who lived down the street from me, Glen Baisley, wrote a short story for class that included the gruesome murders of several teachers in the elementary school we both attended. Using his tape recorder, the two of us ended up collaborating on adapting the story into a radio play that incorporated sci-fi and fantasy elements while retaining and possibly even enhancing (my memory is a little hazy here) the violence of the original story. I believe Glen played the finished product for his classmates. This was long before Columbine, in an age when expressions of homicidal fantasies by school children were deemed less threatening than they would be today.
18. I’ve walked all the way from the eastern edge of Bushwick to my home in Park Slope after midnight. It’s a cheap — if not necessarily smart — way to get an adrenaline rush.
19. I love taking long walks and have been doing it ever since high school. When I was a junior in high school there was a desk on which one or several students had penciled a list of all the places they had spotted me when I was out and about. Some of the locations were exaggerations (I had never walked all the way to Yonkers).
20. I’ve been living in Brooklyn for the last ten years even though when I first got here I thought I’d only stay a year or two before I had enough money to move to Manhattan. Now I have no desire to ever live in Manhattan (not that there’s anything wrong with people who do have a desire to live there).
21. I have convinced myself that I look pretty much the same way now as I did when I graduated from high school 19 years ago (except for the straighter teeth). I attribute this mainly to having never been married or having any children.
22. My favorite non-fiction book is The Power Broker, by Robert Caro.
23. My favorite novel is Babbit, by Sinclair Lewis.
24. I must have lost hundreds, maybe thousands, of pens and pencils when I was a kid. It seemed like I was always borrowing them from my neighbors in class. Occasionally there were no extra writing utensils to be had and I would have to resort to miming the actions of taking notes, hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice I had nothing in my hand. The ruse didn’t always work.
25. If you google the phrase “masturbating Joe Morgan” the first result returned is about me.
