Five Things Meme

Following Litlove, Dorothy W., and Danielle, here are five things that most of you don’t know about me:

1. I skipped grade three. I gather that the current conventional wisdom is that this is a bad idea so schools rarely skip students ahead now. But I can’t say I’ve ever felt a gaping hole in my life where grade three ought to be. I never felt at a disadvantage because the majority of my classmates were a year older than me. The only time that I can recollect age becoming an issue was in university when my friends reached legal drinking age before I did. But then, that’s what fake ID is for...

2. In my early teens, my best friend and my worst enemy were twins. This state of affairs no doubt said more about the twins’ relationship with each other than about mine with either of them.

3. In high school, I was a fan of both punk and heavy metal music. I didn’t experience this as a contradiction. My thought was that if you take each of these genres to its extreme, they wrap around and blur into a similar sound. My friends of these musical persuasions disagreed, so I had to hang out with them in shifts. Fortunately a wardrobe in which black leather predominated worked well in both worlds.

4. I consider it the height of decadence (in a good way) to go alone to see a movie at the cinema in the afternoon.

5. I used to be a distance runner. My greatest ambition was to one day run the Boston Marathon. In the intervening years, recurring knee injuries have made it difficult to run at all. I have come to terms with the fact that I’m unlikely ever to run any marathon, let alone a prestigious affair like Boston that requires a qualifying time to enter. Despite this, I believe that I maintain a runner’s sensibility (although, alas, not a runner’s physique).

I was casting about for a literary connection in all this, since I do my best to stick to theme here. Then I tracked the meme back to its source and found that it did indeed have a literary genesis. The whole idea behind asking various bloggers to list five things about themselves was to collect material for writing. I must say that as I thought about aspects of myself and my experience that I could share here, it occurred to me that there was some rich material there that I haven’t yet mined for stories. Those twins for example—I really ought to write a story that features a pair of twins at odds with one another.

I'm very curious about what five things those of you who haven't yet chimed in on this meme might be inclined to share about yourself...