I’ve been tagged… five things you don’t know about me.

Jason tagged me, noting:

I’m sorry guys, but I’m picking you in part because I know you will think this is dumb and not respond. :-)

Little did Jason know that amongst the 5 things you didn’t know about me:

1. I secretly love interactive blog tag games like this insanely stupid one that I’m answering right now as I type this. I tend to love them because they are somewhat recursive and always navel-gazing.

2. I am fascinated with recursiveness. I love ideas that turn in on themselves in an incestuous pool of repetition with slight variations. It really makes me laugh too often. It’s the reason that I love getting into insanely futile arguments (like arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses when they come to the door, which I used to do regularly when I was a teenager), it’s why I am often an infuriatingly aggressive and argumentative person who will disagree with my friends about the silliest things just to infuriate them, and it’s why I am a big fan of M.C. Escher. I would love to someday write a book about a guy making a stop-motion animation film based on the films of Akira Kurosawa, and then make a film about that guy, and then make the stop-motion animation film, and then write a memoir of my life detailing how I wrote the book about a guy making a stop-motion animation film based on the films of Akira Kurosawa, and then made a film about that guy, and then made the stop-motion animation movie, and then for an epilogue to the book I would write about how I wrote the book. Then I would write a sequel and a prequel to that book. Then I would film the 3 books as a trilogy and write a book based on each of the films. Then I would build a time machine, fly back in time, overshoot my mark a bit and step out of my time machine long enough to give H.G. Wells the bird, then get back into my time machine, travel to Japan, meet Akira Kurosawa and convince him to make a stop-motion animation version of my future trilogy….

See what I mean? I could go on like this for hours. Who finds this amusing? I think only me. ps—LAME is my favorite MP3 encoder because LAME ain’t an MP3 encoder, but I never use it anyway.

3. I’ve made a large portion of my major life decisions by flipping a coin. I believe in chance, coincidence, chaos, and contradiction. The less sense I can make of something with my mind and the more nonsensical it is, the more I am inclined to really enjoy that thing or even believe in it. Why? Because as vain and egotistical as I can be (I admit, I think I’m great; I really am), I realize that there is a vast percentage of my life that I am not in immediate control of and that control is largely a modern day illusion.

4. I believe in God. I think God has a great sense of humor. I mean have you read the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible / Tanakh? There’s some funny stuff in there. I think I make God laugh. I think we all make God sad. I think when people think about God they do too much trying to figure out all the details, when God, being God, supersedes all boundaries and thresholds and cannot be contained by our thoughts, minds, or feeble attempts at reason.

5. I erase large tracts of my past from my memory to make room for new information. I don’t remember much from my youth. I also don’t remember much from 10 years ago. I’ve not repressed things. I’ve just not bothered to remember. I don’t reminisce. I’m not a nostalgic person. I live very in the here and now. The things I do remember I remember better than most people do. The things I have forgotten, I’ve not really forgotten, I just think of them more as if they apply to someone else, because I’m always evolving and growing and maturing, and I’m never the same person I was the day before. I’m not the introvert I was when I was young. I’m not the self-righteous person I was in high school. I’m not the rebellious kid I was in college. I’m what I’m doing right now. I’m all those people and something new, something me.

Update: I just realized I have to tag 5 more people. Here it goes: Chris, Trevor, Jason, Ryan , and Kevin. Also, Scott.