So, something I once did on one of my old blogs, years and years ago, was to make a series of posts with 100 facts about myself, to let my readers know some stuff about me they might not otherwise know. I intend to let the facts range from the mundane to the profound, but I hope you enjoy them all. Here are the first 10:
1. Some day I want to keep homing pigeons. Pigeons are, oddly enough, one of my favorite animals. I seem to remember that my grandfather kept some, but I could be mis-remembering. I find their homing ability fascinating.
2. Painting is my stress relief. It’s one of the only things I do that takes so much concentration that I can’t really even think about anything else while I work, putting me into a nearly meditative state. On the flip side, god help you if you interrupt me – while my barriers are down in the interests of connecting with some of the deeper parts of me, it also means that I have virtually nothing holding me back from being a dick, so consider yourselves warned.
3. I started sailing when I was 12. In 1995 I took a continuing education website building class at Rice University with my dad, and found out about tall ship sail training while looking for photos of “pirate ships” on the fledgling web. I headed off on my first voyage that summer – two weeks on Lake Huron, after having spent a couple months pre-training on the Elissa, a tall ship about an hour from my parents’ house.
4. I grew up inside a city that exists entirely within the city limits of Houston. Bellaire is fully autonomous and has its own fire/police/etc, its own water/sewer system, etc. Its about 10-15min from downtown now, but was mostly cornfields when my dad grew up here. The city now stretches nearly an hour past it and surrounds it completely on all sides. It is, in fact, one of three such independent cities within Houston’s city limits!
5. I haven’t conditioned my hair in over 2 years and I only wash my hair two or three times a month. My hair is the best it has ever been. It was a little tough for the first month, but I don’t think I could ever go back now.
6. I had bronchitis for almost the entire duration of 3rd and 4th grade. I was a super active kid and completely and utterly ignored all advice about taking things easy, hence why it never really went away. It has resulted in me having not the best lungs, and a tendency toward angry tonsils.
7. In college I meticulously drew possible layouts for my dorm rooms in an attempt to optimize them as best I could. I have a notebook full of probably 50-60 drawings of them. I still do this pretty regularly when I’m trying to figure out how to best use a space, though these days I just move stuff around on my own, more often than not.
8. I wiggle my butt like a dog when I give people hugs.
9. I worked on tall ships for eight years and on modern ships for five, but still have only the most basic understanding of how to sail a sailboat. On larger ships, you have to have an understanding of how the whole thing works, but you mostly focus on getting really good at the specific role you’re given. Sailboats are quite a different creature.
10. I took piano lessons for 14 years and yet to this day I can’t read music. I have perfect pitch and always just learned by listening, and I never saw any purpose to learning to read music, and it just seemed to be a slower method to me. I understand it now, but unfortunately I lacked the perspective that age brings.