Eight Random Facts About TL

1.       I do not like ketchup.  For some people, not liking ketchup would be like not liking sex.  But I really dislike the stuff.  Oh, it’s nasty, I gag just thinking about it.  On or in anything.  If I am at a fast-food place and I get a cheeseburger and it has ketchup on it, I will send it back, even at McDonald’s.  I’m not a huge fan of mustard or mayonnaise on a cheeseburger, either, but while I’ll sometimes put up with mustard and mayo, I have zero tolerance for ketchup.  I don’t think there has been any ketchup in my fridge for a year and a half.

2.       My lowest grade in college was in geography.  I love geography.  I get about 90% of the geography questions in Trivial Pursuit right; I endlessly study maps and I think Google Earth is about the coolest computer application ever.  And, my geography class in college was taught by an interesting, engaging professor; I read the book religiously; I went to all my classes.  But at the end of the day, I had no idea what it was that the professor was talking about, looking for, or how he was grading his finals, and so I wound up with a C+ in a subject I thought would be an easy “A” for me.  I struggled with Spanish in college, too, but I got better grades in it than I did in that damned “physical geography for liberal arts majors” class.

3.       I forget that seven times eight is fifty-six.  You’d think that after what is approaching forty years of life, I’d have just memorized that surprisingly crucial fact.  But no, I have to figure it out in my head each time and for whatever reason, it’s difficult to do.  And I don’t have a problem with the challenges of multiplying other single-digit numbers.  I keep a calculator handy for when I need to multiply seven and eight.

4.       Birthdays don’t matter to me.  Unless you’re my wife or my parents, this likely includes you, and it certainly includes me.  I don’t care much about my own birthday, so why should anyone else’s matter, either?  Please don’t take offense – it’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that it doesn’t occur to me to celebrate the day you were born any more than it occurs to me to celebrate the anniversary of your vehicle’s registration.  I’m grateful when others take notice of my birthday, and I realize that for whatever reason, this sort of thing really matters to other people.  I try to remember my family members’ birthdays, but I have to accept that this is just one of those arbitrary things out there in the world that I’ll never be able to really understand.  I know very few of my friends’ birthdays.  It seems that the majority of my male friends were born in May, but really, that’s kind of a guess on my part.

5.       I don’t pay much attention to college football.  You’d think I would.  I know that college games are often very exciting and when I do watch one, I usually enjoy it.  Sometimes a game here or a game there catches my interest.  I tried to become a Vols van when I lived in Knoxville.  I occasionally checked in on Carson Palmer’s career at USC with more than passing interest.  I’ve had a great time every time I’ve gone to a big college game.  But I just can’t get into it at home and somehow, even when I’m surfing a sports site, NCAA Football is pretty low on my ‘click-to’ agenda.  Maybe it’s because when I was in college there, the students at UC Santa Barbara voted the football program out of existence for lack of interest.

6.       I often forget that I possess pills that can remedy my various discomforts.  I’ll get a headache or strain a muscle or suffer a sneezing fit, and it will simply never occur to me that I can just take an aspirin or two and it will make these problems either go away or at least reduced in intensity.  It’s not that I don’t feel the pain, and it’s not that I like sneezing uncontrollably, it’s not that I distrust the pills, and it’s not that I don’t know that the pills exist.  It’s just that I don’t associate my own physical sensations with the pills, and therefore I wind up enduring discomfort rather than alleviating it.

7.       I’ve seen a few human corpses, but I’ve never touched one.  Both at funerals and in evidence viewings for cases, I’ve seen dead bodies.  I suspect I’ve seen a few on the street at crime or accident scenes, but I don’t stop to find out.  I’ve never had occasion to handle human remains, though, and I’ve never actually seen anyone die.

8.       I wish more racquetball courts had survived the 1980’s.  I don’t know why racquetball went out of style; it’s a lot of fun, very competitive, and a good workout.  But now it’s associated with white guys wearing Jheri-curled mullets, cop mustaches, terry-cloth headbands, and dangerously loose dolphin shorts.  It didn’t have to be that way; racquetball is a perfectly good sport.  I don’t think there’s a racquetball court within fifty miles of my house that I might conceivably use.  If racquetball had stayed a sport that a lot of people played, I’d probably be in better shape today than I am because I haven’t found any other kind of exercise I like quite as much as it.  But as it is, my enjoyment of racquetball is not indulged nearly as often as that of, say, Sheena Easton songs or James Bond movies starring Roger Moore.