A meme stolen from tumblr, but LJ is better for conversation

[brigdh]

TELL ME AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT YOURSELF AND I WILL REPLY WITH AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT MYSELF THAT I THINK OF WHEN I READ YOURS. IT MAY BE ENTIRELY RELATED, OR ONLY RELATED IN THE WEIRDEST, BROADEST DEFINITIONS.

Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

As a child I kept goats and chickens. Every day began with milking and feeding them. I was the one who cleaned the barn and chicken house. We had goat chow (Purina sells everything,) but we also bought hay by the quarter ton. I used to cut grasses for them too, using an 18th century scythe. (That was the sort of thing that my parents had just lying around.)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's so cool! I never had a pet until my 20s, as my brother is allergic to pretty much anything with fur, and so I had to wait until I'd moved out into a place of my own.

Well, I had a pet once - a cat - for about three days, but that was how we discovered my brother was allergic, as he ended up in the emergency room having stopped breathing.

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

I LIKE NOVELS MUCH BETTER THAN SHORT STORIES, AND POETRY IS GOOD BUT ONLY IN CERTAIN MOODS. ACTUALLY HONESTLY I'D NEVER LIKED POETRY UNTIL TWO THINGS:

A) TENNYSON'S 'THE SPLENDOR FALLS ON CASTLE WALLS' FROM THE PRINCESS
B) THIS OLD POETRY BOOK MY DAD HAD. SEE, HE GOT IT FROM A FRIEND OF HIS WHO IS AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR, AND SO IT IS ACTUALLY LIKE A TEXTBOOK OF POETRY--EXCEPT IT IS THE INSTRUCTOR'S EDITION! SO IT WOULD TALK ABOUT THE MECHANICS OF POETRY (METER, FOR EXAMPLE) THEN LIST SEVERAL EXCERPTS OR WHOLE POEMS (LIKE IN THE EPIGRAPHS SECTION) AND IT WOULD THEN ASK A FEW QUESTIONS. THERE WAS A LITTLE ANSWER SECTION AT THE BACK, WHICH WAS THE BEST PART, TO ME--I GOT TO READ THE POEMS, THINK A BIT ABOUT THEM, AND THEN GET SOME INTERESTING COMMENTARY ABOUT THE POEM WHICH HELPED ME TO BETTER UNDERSTAND IT. ALSO, THIS BOOK HAD A 'BAD POETRY' SECTION SO YOU COULD MAKE YOUR OWN JUDGEMENTS ON WHAT MAKES POETRY 'GOOD'--IDK IF YOU LIKE POETRY BUT FOR 'OVERLY SENTIMENTAL' HERE IS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE BAD POEMS OF ALL TIME: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/txt/Moore/Little.Libbie.html

THAT GOT LONG I'M SORRY

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Haaaa, that poem is AMAZING. At first I thought, "sure, this is a bit cheesy, but it's not the worst thing ever written", and then I got to "choked on a piece of beef". I shouldn't laugh, but OMG.

When I was 12 or so, I wrote what I'm sure was a much more terrible poem about environmentalism, which I somehow (probably due to the evil machinations of teachers) ended up reciting to an assembly of the entire school plus parents. Thankfully, I've long since lost all copies of it and don't really remember any of the lines, and the dimness of my memory allows me to pretend the poem probably wasn't as awful as I logically know it must have been.

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

I always lose it at that line too. It is so tin-eared and unintentionally hilarious.

omg! That is both awesome and terrible. I would have died of mortification before I could recite any poetry before ANYONE, much less the whole school! Ahh!

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ha, well, I don't get stage fright, so it's only embarrassing in retrospect.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I am double-jointed and can amuse small children by contorting my fingers. I can also reach one arm over my shoulder and one up behind my back to clasp my hands together. Though maybe anyone who's reasonably flexible can do that.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I'm double-jointed, too! But only on my left thumb. I can pop it into all sorts of weird angles. Apparently it was quite disturbing when I was a baby, because it always looked broken or out of joint.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

I've never lived alone.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I never have either! I don't think that's so unusual, though, between roommates and SOs and family.

I currently live in a building that has a furniture store on the ground floor. Until a few months ago, it was a nail salon instead, and I'm very sad that they closed, because they had the cheapest prices ever ($5 manicures!) and the people were very nice.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming that since you are sorry they are gone, that the chemical smells didn't travel and/or didn't bother you. There's just something about the smells of a nail salon that are horrid to me.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

No, not at all. I don't much like the smell of nail polish up close either, but it didn't seem to travel at all. I think part of it might have been that this place didn't do gel manicures or any of the other, more chemical-type of procedures.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I rescue the roly polies that crawl into my work place. Most bugs are weird, but roly polies remind me of tiny dinosaurs or ancient creatures. I get really sad if they get stuck in the store to die or get squished. My boss finds it very weird. I also move the snails out of the driveway if it has rained so they don't get crushed by the car.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Roly polies are so cute! I've never seen one come inside a building, but I would save it too.

One time a mosquito bit me on the lower lip (while I was sleeping) and it swelled up so large it looked like someone had punched me in the mouth. I've never had a mosquito bite do that before or since, so I don't know if it was some special species of mosquito or I just happened to have a random reaction to it, but it was very odd, and sort of hard to talk.

[chiasmus.livejournal.com]

I really wish I had appreciated horseback riding (and other things) more as a kid, because now as an adult I miss it, but our horses are too old/arthritic for riding, and riding other people's horses costs money.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Riding horses would be very cool!

I am incredibly allergic to horses, to the point where if I even walk by all the carriage horses outside Central Park I start sneezing. But I still have fantasies of learning to ride (in some AU where I am not allergic and also like a Regency noblewoman or something).

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

i used to play a game with myself through my later school years where i would disassemble words in my head and partially translate them back and forth. like, gorod (city) = go + rod = idtifamily, and so on. at some point it became so automatic it started to interfere with my thinking, so i've trained myself out of it. can't recreate the trick now, weirdly.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's neat!

Some of my particular habits with reading and writing (the fact that I'm a terrible speller, the particular sorts of spelling mistakes I make, and that I don't read phonetically) have made me suspect that I might have some form of high-functioning dyslexia, but I've never actually been tested for it.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what to say. I'm French/English bilingual.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ha, it has been hard to come up with stuff!

I've studied three languages, other than my native one: French -(for several years in high school and college), Japanese (very very briefly), and Hindi (ongoing for several years now). I'm nowhere near fluent in any of them. In Japanese I only retain a few phrases like "good morning" or "that's cute". In French and Hindi, I can hold simple conversations or read texts (if they're not complicated and I have access to a dictionary). But it's been a life-long dream of mine to someday be fluent in another language, and I'm so impressed with people who can speak more than one.

[kessie.livejournal.com]

I played the Scottish bagpipes from ages 13-18! I got to all open drones (aka. the long things the, uh... droning comes out of it) and everything.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

That's so cool!

I don't play any instrument (though I wish I did). The one thing I've ever learned is to pick out "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" on a piano.

[cloudsinvenice]

Oh, good meme! I think I'll do this on my journal tomorrow too. A fact: people talk to me a lot in bus shelters and on buses and stuff like that. It's partly that people here aren't standoffish towards strangers, but I think I must also bring something out in people, because somehow I often end up hearing about their illnesses and tragedies in surprising detail. Though there was also the woman who had a son the same size as my boyfriend, and we commiserated on the near-impossibility of finding good clothes for such tall men...

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Do it! It's a fun meme.

I have that happen to me a lot, too. One of the most memorable was when I ended up going on about a 45-minute walk with some guy (we'd both been waiting for the same bus, which failed to show), who told me basically his entire life story, from his troubles with his boss and wanting to get another job, to his relationship with his brother, a fight he'd had with his mom, to how he felt like he'd never lived up to his dad's expectations.... it was very intimate for a man I've never seen before or since!