Andrew ate eight thousand

In case you're wondering, that was part of a carpet commercial I used to enjoy. And it works as a segue into yet another peek into the Sargasso Sea that is my brain. Yes, I've been tagged, so enough with the procrastinating. Time to stop all this half-assed, feckless time wasting and get down to some back-breaking, excruciating, Total Time Annihilation!

Here are the rules: • Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about him/herself. • People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. • At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. • Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So. Eight things you didn't already know about me.

Of course, I could be lazy and pretend that everyone reading this is reading my blog for the first time, whereupon I could admit that I have two children, live in Illinois, and am a cradle Episcopalian. And that would be three things already--hey, look! I'm practically half-way done!

But let's pretend I care enough to give you people some of the richer, rarer, stranger things about me.

1. I fall asleep pretty much as soon as my head hits the pillow, and sleep through the night. I never remember my dreams, and I never get up to pee. No, not even when I was pregnant.
The first thing I do upon awakening is head into the the bathroom to empty my bladder, and rabid coyotes gnawing on my calves wouldn't be able to stop me.

2. I've spent the past 10 years trying to forget most of the stuff I learned in graduate school. This is easy and enjoyable, and involves reading books and watching films I actually like, instead of books and films that other people think are important. All while drinking my beverage of choice, which very often, is alcoholic in nature. I recommend this.

3. I utterly refuse to become interested in any story that could be described as "tragic." Even "tragi-comedies" are pretty much off my radar. If I want to cry, I can just re-read the part of Little Woman where Beth dies. Works like a charm.

4. Speaking of which, by the time I finished second grade, I had read all of Louisa May Alcott's books. This means that Louisa May's ideas of what constitutes good behavior had inveigled themselves into my brain cells and imprinted themselves there when I was too young to stop them, sort of like the way a baby duck will decide that the first moving object it sees is his mother. As a consequence, I will never be as mean as I'd like to be. My friends often remark on how kind, nice, or generous I am. It's sad, but I just don't seem to be able to become consistently snarky, sarcastic, dark, or bitter.

5. I've been contributing to Mamarazzi for over a year, and still feel inadequate, mostly because I don't know who half these so-called "celebrities" are. Like "The Hoff," of whom I had never heard until his daughters released the hamburger slobbering video, or "Denise Richards," whom I confused with that woman who used to make all the aerobic tapes.

6. I am extremely put off by other people's vulgarity. But not my own.

7. My husband rakes in the dough and we have no credit card debt. Consequently I feel that I have nothing to complain about, and therefore I could get kicked out of the blogosphere any second. Since mostly people appear to blog in order to do a lot of whining, and most of the time, I don't think I have anything to whine about. This might be because of Number 5 up there, where I learned the virtue of Hard Work and Cheerfully Shouldering One's Burdens and the like, but I suspect that Louisa May Alcott herself would admit I have a pretty nice life.

8. Almost everyone I've met through the internet has been weirder in real life than you'd think they'd be, judging from their on-line personae. And incredibly talkative. And I'm sure they'd say the same about me.

I hereby tag: Babelbabe, Major Bedhead, RW, Sarah Louise, SarahO, Susie Sunshine, Suzanne, and Tut-Tut. But feel free to ignore me. I'm nice about things like this.