Five Weird Facts About Me
Sep. 1st, 2014 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseThis was a meme on Facebook that struck my fancy. Fair warning, I wrote this on a day when I was a little emotionally wobbly, and while under the influence of (one) drink, so it's a little on the personal side, but I'm posting it here anyway - partly because I know some folk here are interested in getting to know me better, and partly as proof against self-shaming.
1.) As a child, I was a social ignoramus, the weird know-it-all who was far too clever/confident for her own good and sucked at picking up on unspoken cues. (Needless to say, my school years were...difficult, to say the least.) These days, I'm very much the person people come to when they need help decoding their own or others' feelings/behavior, which ability I attribute in large part to my having to learn to speak Human as a second language - I'm good at consciously identifying and articulating influences and cues that others have only learned subconsciously.
2.) Also as a child, I often wanted Barbies or My Little Ponys - not really for their own sakes, but because other girls had them and I (rather desperately) wanted friends. My mother instead bought far higher-quality American Girl dolls, back when they were run by the Pleasant Company and had accompanying stories in discrete historical periods. I still have my Samantha doll, although my mother's Felicity doll (and a Kirsten doll she picked up sometime in the past few years) are soon going to find new homes with a pair of young girls who will hopefully enjoy and treasure them as much as we did.
3.) Aside from a little spotting here and there when switching between birth control methods, I haven't menstruated in more than a decade - hormonal BC, in addition to leveling out my mood swings, appears to stop my cycle entirely. This is approximately 128% awesome.
4.) All of the things I most want to do in life - mostly centered around performing and writing - are also the things I'm most terrified of doing, or terrified of doing mediocrely, enough that my efforts to make any progress in those fields have eventually come sputtering to a halt. I have been spending a lot of time lately meditating on the idea that it's okay to not be world-changingly amazing at everything that I do, that there's no shame in living an ordinary sort of life, and that perhaps I should take things one day at a time and be kind to myself instead of being constantly angry about how I'm lazy and stupid and wasting my many gifts and useless to myself and the world. This is...turning out to be a difficult paradigm shift.
5.) My resting heart rate, as measured in the morning prior to getting up, is usually in the 47-50 BPM range. (Right now it's 68, but I also just had a couple fingers of whiskey.) By comparison, the average ranges from 60 to 100, and Lance Armstrong somewhat famously boasted a 37 BPM heart rate. This is probably the result of good genetics as much as effort - I do an hour of yoga five or six times a week, and dash to catch a bus now and then, but am far from a trained athlete.
1.) As a child, I was a social ignoramus, the weird know-it-all who was far too clever/confident for her own good and sucked at picking up on unspoken cues. (Needless to say, my school years were...difficult, to say the least.) These days, I'm very much the person people come to when they need help decoding their own or others' feelings/behavior, which ability I attribute in large part to my having to learn to speak Human as a second language - I'm good at consciously identifying and articulating influences and cues that others have only learned subconsciously.
2.) Also as a child, I often wanted Barbies or My Little Ponys - not really for their own sakes, but because other girls had them and I (rather desperately) wanted friends. My mother instead bought far higher-quality American Girl dolls, back when they were run by the Pleasant Company and had accompanying stories in discrete historical periods. I still have my Samantha doll, although my mother's Felicity doll (and a Kirsten doll she picked up sometime in the past few years) are soon going to find new homes with a pair of young girls who will hopefully enjoy and treasure them as much as we did.
3.) Aside from a little spotting here and there when switching between birth control methods, I haven't menstruated in more than a decade - hormonal BC, in addition to leveling out my mood swings, appears to stop my cycle entirely. This is approximately 128% awesome.
4.) All of the things I most want to do in life - mostly centered around performing and writing - are also the things I'm most terrified of doing, or terrified of doing mediocrely, enough that my efforts to make any progress in those fields have eventually come sputtering to a halt. I have been spending a lot of time lately meditating on the idea that it's okay to not be world-changingly amazing at everything that I do, that there's no shame in living an ordinary sort of life, and that perhaps I should take things one day at a time and be kind to myself instead of being constantly angry about how I'm lazy and stupid and wasting my many gifts and useless to myself and the world. This is...turning out to be a difficult paradigm shift.
5.) My resting heart rate, as measured in the morning prior to getting up, is usually in the 47-50 BPM range. (Right now it's 68, but I also just had a couple fingers of whiskey.) By comparison, the average ranges from 60 to 100, and Lance Armstrong somewhat famously boasted a 37 BPM heart rate. This is probably the result of good genetics as much as effort - I do an hour of yoga five or six times a week, and dash to catch a bus now and then, but am far from a trained athlete.
