'About me,' grab-bag style
A piece of my high school gym ceiling once fell and broke over my head. This was seconds after I finally, after years of swearing at myself for cringing away from every sports ball that came near me, scored a perfectly executed point in volleyball. That pretty much sums up my relationship with team sports.
If you've got an instrument and like playing the blues, I'll likely get up the nerve to sing with you.
There are no Grammys in my future
I use mirror-writing (writing right-to-left, a la Leonardo Da Vinci) in everyday life -- it's a pretty spiffy tool in all sorts of situations, not the least of which journaling on airplanes or keeping certain 'off the record' statements private in the course of documentary interviews, when it'd be good to remember them for context even if they won't be included in the finished piece.
I love turning raw data into knowledge, and cannot get enough of spreadsheets and pivot tables. Considering how the rest of my brain tends to work, it's surprising.
I actually quite like public speaking, and I'm good at it.
I've been to four Marine Corps Balls, celebrating the 'birthday' of the Marine Corps. The first was in late 2002, a few months before the Iraq war began. Watching those young guys year after year as they came and went from war…and sometimes didn't return...was strange, chilling, beautiful, ugly, harsh, and so very important to witness.
Wow. Another world.
My first four jobs were as a bookseller. Discounts are dangerous - I've got a library of around two thousand titles.
I have temporal lobe epilepsy, thankfully well-controlled.
This is my dog, Bonanza. She's gotten me out of a couple speeding tickets, keeps a sharp eye out for seals lurking in the surf break, and expects me to howl with her whenever coyotes start up. Pretty much the perfect traveling companion.
Except for her obsession with chasing skateboarders.
That can be awkward.
If there are interesting things to find on the ground -- particularly cool rocks -- I will wander around staring at that patch of frickin' ground for eight hours, I kid you not.
I am proud that I had the spark of the idea that led to Book Trust, a literacy organization enabling children in poverty to choose and purchase books every month of the school year. It is a lifechanging, joyous program, we now serve over 32,000 children in 19 states, and we're growing nationally.
I am orders of magnitude prouder that so many people believed in Book Trust and recognized its impact that it's grown far beyond anything I was able to give it, and my own 'spark' of its creation and early development is absolutely lost in the amazing bonfire that it's become.
At a Halloween party years ago, a guy told me he was pretty sure my costume was 'Crazy Dancing Girl.' I'm still not sure if it was a compliment, or if I'd been imitating Elaine from that scene in Seinfeld for a few hours and hadn't realized it. But I did keep dancing.
I am pretty goofy, overall.
Send camels!
If a place has beauty, culture, and good food -- and a lot of rough edges? I probably want to spend a lot of time there. Cairo, for instance (actually, the food is horrible, and I don't say that lightly). And Cleveland. Love them both.
If a place cannot be reached by a road, or can only be reached by hours of driving 15mph on roads that require a high-clearance vehicle, I definitely want to spend a lot of time there.
In the terms of Cy's world, I am utterly Nomado.