The otherwise delightful Wildly Parenthetical has tagged me with a meme. I’ve been blogging since February 2005, and to my knowledge no one has ever tagged me with a meme (I won’t count Scott Eric Kaufman’s meme experiment, since that was a strictly impersonal exercise, conducted with proper scientific controls and everything). Dammit WP – I’ve worked so hard to save myself for someone special – and you, you, you seduce me into a night of reckless conversation, and I wake up to find myself saddled within incoming links, strangers from other sites dropping in, memes – all these responsibilities and connections to other people… What happened to my carefree blogging youth?!

Even with my personal integrity spent in this way, I still maintain my methodological integrity: what do you mean, asking for eight random facts about me? The facts you’ve listed about yourself aren’t random – random would include something like pinkie circumference or eyelet colour or some other agglomeration of largely meaningless details – but every detail you’ve listed is meaningful in some way or other – which I suppose tacitly commits me to doing the same. Here goes – from the beginning then:

1. My first word was “uh-oh”. One could argue that all subsequent words have been elaborations on this basic theme.

2. Sometime before I turned 2, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. This ambition was tarnished fairly quickly, when someone used this information to try to get me to drink Tang (does this horrid stuff exist in Australia?). They said I should drink it because the astronauts did; I countered that, just because someone was an astronaut, this didn’t mean they had good taste. My response was what they used to call in Texas “being smart”. Being smart doesn’t go down well in Texas. Nevertheless, I would not drink Tang. At some point between that time and this, I seem to have settled on social theory as a means of gaining a perspective on what is happening on earth without leaving the planet.

3. Given the chance, though, I’d leave the planet in an instant. While I have little time to indulge it these days, I have a lifelong fascination with astronomy, sometimes pursued through leisure reading in astronomy and physics, sometimes pursued in a more direct wish-fulfilment way through reading science fiction. I have particular interest in authors who try to throw their readers into radically different forms of subjectivity, or to explore the potential development of very different human forms, but am sadly out-of-date in the genre. Well before I started work in history or anthropology, I acquired a sense of the provisionalness and potential mutability of our current experience by pursuing these sorts of interests.

4. I was given my first pet – a dachshund named Ginger – when I was undergoing intensive speech therapy as a young child. I decided to try some of the speech therapy techniques out on the dog. To my knowledge, she never learned to say anything, but she learned an interesting set of words. Among other things, I taught her to sneeze and yawn on command. Guests would come over, and the dog would start sneezing feverishly. This was her way of begging for food, but the guests would just look puzzled, make moves to shield their plates and, with worried looks, ask, “Is your dog coming down with something?” Then she would start yawning, and they would look even more confused.

5. My relationships to other animals have not always gone so well. Horses as a species are united in their intense and immediate dislike for me. This is a problem, growing up in Texas. I have yet to attempt to ride a horse without it trying to scrape me off against a tree, roll over on its back to wipe me off, or buck maniacally to try and dislodge me. As a consequence, I am fairly skilled at dismounting from horses. Riding them, not so much.

6. And while we’re talking about things I can’t ride: I do not know how to ride a bike. I was a peripatetic child, and had access to a bike only for one very brief period in childhood. Its brakes didn’t work. I am therefore also fairly skilled at dismounting from bikes while they are still moving. Generally right before they crash into trees. I also have some experience crashing into trees with them. I decided at one point as an adult that I really must learn how to ride a bike. Unfortunately, I was living in Arizona at the time. Every time I went out with the intention of riding, I promptly ran over a cactus spike. This gave me lots of practice lugging around bikes with flat tyres.

7. Speaking of flats: I tried to work my way through university by remodelling them. Unfortunately, the company I was working for ran into financial trouble, and couldn’t pay me for four years. This led to a steady diet of beans and rice, with the occasional splurge on a vegetable or two, for much of my undergraduate years. Then they suddenly paid me, all in a lump sum, once I’d graduated and was no longer in particular financial distress. This made it possible for me to go France, where I did a great deal of research that I then didn’t use for my MA.

8. I did, however, have coffee for the first time after arriving in France. When I returned to the US, I realised what a wise decision this had been, and promptly abandoned my European coffee habit. Melbourne has restored my faith in the possibility of excellent coffee outside of Europe, and I currently do much of my work (as well as much of my procrastination, like writing this post) in a coffee shop sporting an enormous Garden of Eden mural that depicts a process of mutual temptation. I can’t blog the contents of the other murals, this being a family site and all.

I’m meant to tag eight people now, but I decline as a matter of principle, and refer the bad karma back to WP, who has offered to accept it (you did intend that offer to apply to any and all flow-on effects from your post, didn’t you?). Although I wouldn’t mind if some of the folks who occasionally post around these parts, who haven’t been posting regularly here or on their own blogs, feel like they’ve been implicitly tagged – just so I can hear something from them. Any non-bloggers who feel the impulse could add their responses in the comments. And anyone else lurking who feels inclined…