Seven Weird and Random Things

Thank you, Bianca Bean and Unfit Mother, for tagging me to write about seven weird, random things about me. I really didn’t feel like writing all weekend, and this jump-started me. And it was fun.

1. In junior high school, a friend and I ducked into our science teacher’s classroom to hide behind a row of desks instead of taking part in a walkout that the school was doing in protest of a racially motivated fight at the town fair. We did it not because we support racially motivated fighting, but because we didn’t want to have to sit out of softball practice. My friend is now a singer and musician in California, and I am sorely tempted to link to her right now, but I need to ask her permission first. We kept this as our deepest, darkest secret for many years. She may not be ready to be revealed.

2. As a participant in the Bay State Games for field hockey, I once ran around the field before a Red Sox game at Fenway Park carrying the Bay State Games banner—all the way around the warning track, and it was very heavy. This was very random, but as a lifelong Massachusetts resident, very surreal and exciting.

3. The bottoms of my d!rty fe@t have had 150 views on Flickr. (I hope that’s clear with the edited words–I have been getting some super-weird Googling leading to those two words.)

4. I sang “Happy Birthday” to Desmond Tutu in my neighbor’s kitchen when I was in high school. I just read this to my husband, and he said, “Look, I’m singing Happy Birthday to Desmond Tutu right now,”–and he began to sing. So, I hasten to add that Desmond Tutu was in fact sitting in the kitchen as well, in a chair in front of his birthday cake. Four of us sang, warbling out the song, and stammering over the part where you say, “deeeeear Archbishop Desmond Tutuuuuu . . . ” Town police officers were outside to provide security, but did not do a very good job, because my mother and another neighbor were hiding behind a compost area to peek in the window.

5. I read and post on college football message boards. My father and brother coach college sports.

6. When I was seven months pregnant with Martin, I got in a fight with a guy wearing a pink Izod shirt with the collar up at a football game because he was yelling rude things to the players and coaches and I told him to shut up. It ended with him saying, “Eat me!” and then I started laughing because of how weird that was, and how it didn’t even make sense.

7. From kindergarten to second grade, I was involved in research done by professors at the nearby university on how kids learn to write. In graduate school, my professor used that specific research to teach me to teach kids how to write. Photocopies of my stories and interviews with my second grade self took up its own chapter in the book that the professors wrote about their research–and that was now my textbook.

I don’t want to give anyone anything extra to do unless you want to. So, if you want to… I will not be offended if you don’t …

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