It's All Perfectly Normal

DykeWife, currently swamped with the end of the semester, tagged me with a meme. Here are the general guidelines:

"According to the rules...Each player of this game starts with the '6 Weird Things about You.' People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave a comment that says 'you are tagged' in their comments and tell them to read your blog!

Here are six odd things about ol’ GayProffy:

1. I don’t eat any type of seafood or fish. If it spends more the 50 percent of its life in water swimming, sitting, or floating, I don’t want to eat it.

Why is this case? Yeah, yeah, I know seafood is so good. Blah-blah-blah – Not to me, people.

My current working theory is that I got food poisoning at one point. Growing up in New Mexico didn’t exactly guarantee me the catch of the day. You know what I am sayin'?

From time to time, I try to eat some fish or seafood to see if I still don’t like it (usually because I am at a dinner party serving seafood and I have no choice). Each time, I realize that it makes me almost gag. It’s visceral. Blech.

All of that is not necessarily odd, but here is the wonky bit. I make the exception for processed tuna. Then again, I am not convinced it still qualifies as fish by the point it reaches the shelves.


2. Phone conversations don’t interest me. With the exception of my family or friends who live 500+ miles away, I almost never initiate a phone call.

Text messaging? Couldn’t live without it.

E-Mail? The best thing to happen to human communication in the last fifty years.

Seeing people in person? My preferred way to communicate with people. Let's meet for lunch!

Something about the phone, though, just seems like so much effort. There’s the dialing, and the ringing, and the actual talking. I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

When in high school, I remember spending hours on the phone with friends. Well, okay, friend. Somewhere along the way, though, I lost my interest in telephonic conversations. Maybe it has to do with that year in college that I worked as the telephone operator for a hospital.

3. Secretly, I think less of people who don’t know how to drive a standard-transmission car. Intellectually, I know that such a judgmental stance reflects more about my own arbitrary life experiences.

Still, I am always sizing people up in case I need a get-away driver. We live in dangerous times. I think that I saw Alberto Gonzáles lurking around my bushes the other day. Or maybe it was a pussy-cat.

Whatever the case, when shit is going down, I can’t be saddled with somebody asking me, “Why is there a third pedal in this car?” You’ve got know how to handle the stick, man. Preferably, I want somebody with double-clutching action.



I do make exceptions to this judginess: a) If you never learned to drive any car, ever. Or, b) If you learned to drive in New York or San Francisco – those two cities, and only those two cities, qualify for exemptions.

4. The gravitas thing.

5. I am much more likely to pop in a DVD of a television program that went off the air thirty years ago than watch any modern sit-com. Actually, I can’t even think of the last “current” sit-com that I saw. They aren’t making Mary Tyler Moore anymore, are they? I stopped watching that show when she cut her hair. Only long-hair Mary works for me.



Come to think of it, Ugly Betty might be the only network show that I currently watch with some regularity. Everything else appears on cable, like Battlestar Galactica. Heck, I don’t even watch the new Law and Order. Give me the old days with Jill Hennessy pretending to be Jacqueline Kennedy pretending to be an Assistant District Attorney (at least in my narrative version of the show).

Of course, watching any film or television program with me also revolves around mocking it and assessing its gender, racial, and political ramifications. At first it’s cute, but most people get really tired of it.

6. I hate opening gifts in the middle of a crowd. Don’t get me wrong, I like getting gifts. Festive wrapping also makes everything look special. There’s something about being at a party and having gifts opened. Having all eyes turn to somebody unwrapping presents makes me as squeamish as Brittany Spears shopping in a Victoria’s Secret.

Opening gifts one-on-one is fine by me. Giving and getting a gift seems so intimate to me. Somebody took the time to find an item just for you based on what that they think of you and your relationship. Shouldn’t that be shared in private? Or anonymously? What really makes me uncomfortable is how everybody else at the party secretly scrutinizes your reaction to the package just handed to you. It’s the same reason why orgies just don’t work out for me.

So, there you have it. Is it me, or do my quirks also make me seem kinda cranky? Eh – It figures.

Because I believe in free-choice and personal agency, I won’t specifically tag others. You will know if this meme is the right one for you.