Damn You, Farrago!

It seems I've been tagged. Again. I don't know if you're familiar with the process, but once tagged, you are required by law to divulge five previously unknown facts about yourself that will inform and frighten anyone foolish enough to stumble onto them. So let's get started...

1. I read a quote in the sports section of the Metro this morning that I haven't been able to figure out all day. The quote belonged to a park ranger, who was commenting on three survivors of a plane crash. He said, "If these guys were a cat with nine lives, they just used up three of them." I know he was trying to convey that they were lucky, but if the three guys were one cat? What does that mean? Why do you need three guys to make a cat? Are they forming Voltron? Could he have meant if each of the three guys were individual cats, each would have used up three of their nine lives, as if to say surviving a plane crash is so harrowing it uses up extra lives? If it was only two guys, at least you could imagine them in a two-person cat costume, like the cow costumes they make where one person is the front and one makes up the back. But three? I don't get the analogy.

2. If you go back to the beginning of this blog, it would appear that I've been blogging since November 2003. Lies! All lies! It's true that I signed up for a Blogger account on November 29, 2003, but I didn't start writing in it until nearly a year later. I think the first real post was the Arafat one the following November. And all those posts before that? Well, I wanted readers to stick around after reading the current post, so I added a whole bunch before it so they'd have something else to read, as well as give the appearance of being an established blog. So I took some of my favorite topics from threads that I'd created on a message board I used to go to, and spread them around the previous year. The dates weren't necessarily arbitrary; if I wrote something on the message board on July 24, 2004, I gave it that date on the blog.

This was dumb for any number of reasons, but two that come to mind are that when I first started blogging, the only people who read my stuff were from that message board, and had already seen all those stories. There's a 68-page thread about Joe there, but the same Joe story here barely got any comments. The second reason it was dumb is the fact that here I had the perfect opportunity to store about thirty posts for times when I either couldn't think of anything to write, or didn't have any time. And as I would later find out, those times came fairly often. Oh, If only I hadn't prematurely blown my wad!

3. I actually deliberated for about fifteen minutes as to whether or not to write that last sentence. And believe me, I'm just as disappointed with my final decision as you are.

4.The night after writing about the corpse dream, I dreamed that all my teeth fell out. Not even gradually; they just all fell out at once. I could feel my tongue going over the tender gums where my teeth used to be, and since I couldn't fly and didn't live n a castle, I was sure it couldn't be a dream. It was horrifying. But then I woke up and everything was okay. Dooped again. I hate my brain.

I'm a little afraid to go to sleep now. who knows what's in store for me tonight?

Remember the recurring dream about my grandfather? It always starts with a party at my grandparents' house, and I'd walk by the den and see him sitting in his chair. He'd start to get up to go into the next room to see what everyone is doing, but someone comes in and tells him that he can't sit with us because he's dead. He gets this really sad, disappointed look on his face and fades away. Seriously, that's like the saddest thing imaginable. Why can't I have nice, pleasant dreams? The really creepy thing is I was talking to my brother the other day and he mentioned having nearly the same dream. What the heck is that?!!

5. I never owned the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I had a friend that lived down the street that had one, so I'd go over there a lot. Most of the time, we'd play Ice Hockey. I didn't know much about the controls, and even less about hockey, but it was nonetheless really fun. One time we were going to camp out in his back yard. We had a tent and everything. Then, a little after it got dark, we heard this noise, like...mooing.

Moooooo!
Moooooooo!
MOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

We must have been around twelve years old. Certainly old enough to know that there were no cows around. But we were a little worried. We figured some neighborhood teenagers were out causing trouble, and we didn't want any part of it. You know those rowdy teenagers, always running around town mooing at everyone. So we went inside and told his parent that we heard mooing.

"Mooing?"
"Yes. Mooing."
"Are you afraid of cows?"
"No, it's just...I think we should seep inside tonight."

So we went back and got our stuff, and went up to his room. We played some more NES, then he got tired and said he was going to sleep, but I could keep playing if I wanted. I was playing Super Mario Bros. 3. I wasn't as quite as good at it as Fred Savage or his mute brother, but I was getting the hang of it. But eventually I got tired and wanted to go to sleep. Just one problem. This was the first time I'd used a Nintendo by myself, so I wasn't sure how to turn it off. I didn't want to press the wrong button and wreck the kid's Nintendo. And since I didn't really know much about them, I really thought one wrong move could erase the game or short circuit the whole thing. So I just kept playing. I think I stayed up all night, too nervous to try and shut the thing off.

Oh, and the mooing? He had two younger sisters that were twins. One of them opened up her bedroom window and started mooing into a microphone. I guess she was actually saying "OOOoooOOOO..." like she was trying to be a ghost, but it sounded like moo to us.

Anyway there's your five things. You read them. You can't unread them.