MeMe Meme: Thirteen More Things On A Thursday About Me That Are Weird

I've got a million of 'em:

1. I sing best when I'm yawning. Ask T. It always gets a laugh. It's the only time I have perfect pitch.


2. I burst into spontaneous song when confronted by opera. I hate opera. (Sorry, Rebecca, I know you wrote a truly great opera by how much I can't listen to it and how much I want to bust out in soprano.) But before you start planning to take me to Carmen (why is it always Camen?) I have a good excuse. I was conditioned early on when in 7th grade and Alfonse Lewis took some of us "disadvantaged" kids to the SF Opera House. I was overwhelmed by the extreme precision of the opening strings (of, you guessed it, Carmen) and my friends and I started laughing nervously. The opera had just begun, and I wasn't being that loud, when a woman in fur and wearing big cocktail rings slammed me upside the head so hard I saw stars on the ceiling. It hurt so bad, and there wasn't even a warning. Nor was I the loudest kid. But I was the darkest. I was mortified. It was like the conditioning scene in Clockwork Orange. I just can't listen to opera. Ever. It just represents too damned much. So I sing, loud and goofy. I'm pretty good, too. But not as good as when I'm yawning. My son still remembers opera singing when he was a toddler. Him and Mami singing goofy opera real loud in the bath.


3. I like to read cookbooks for relaxation. Bon Apetit is my favorite foodie magazine because it seems less class bound. I honor good food writers and consider them to be the true philosophers of the age.


4. I write about birds so much because they insist upon bursting into my life in the oddest ways; more so when I was young, that adolescent portal to other realms. Anyone who knew me in high school, for example, knows I had a weird thing going with birds. I've only owned one bird for one day because I placed it on the mantel over the heater -- which went on in the middle of the night. I prefer my birds in the wild. And, they probably prefer to be way away from my house.


5. I know how to catch a bird. I knew of a man, a curandero, who could catch them with his hands. I know how to catch a wild salmon in the river with my bare hands but I've never tried it.


6. I've had reoccurring prophetic dreams which have saved my life.


7. I was a sickly child and secretly identified with the aristocratic Robert Louis Stevenson.


8. I secretly believe I am Dylan Thomas's reincarnation. (but you knew that) It would serve him right.


9. I'm a bloody hermit.


10. I always end up being the one to tend to "crazy people" whether it was talking people down from bad trips or taking care of psychotics at the big peace action.


11. I love cooking for 400 people. I have a near pathological need to cook too much food. Maybe that's why I don't have dinner parties anymore. Besides the fact, I married a fellow hermit.


12. I can't keep my dishes washed or my checkbook balanced. (but you knew that)


13. I love sour cream herring and pickled onions on a blue corn chip with salsa and a cilantro leaf,

Now, do you. Like any writer, I'm nosey.