the latest meme, or 25 random things about me

1. During the day I can sit around the house, alone, for hours on end, doing nothing but thinking--and remain completely content and oblivious to the passage of time.
2. I haven't passed a single night in years without the company of at least one good friend.
3. You could substitute the word 'beer' for 'friend' in my last sentence and it'd mostly still be true, too.
4. If I could (a la that one episode of "Friends,") have a list of 5 celebrities with whom sex wouldn't count as cheating, it would consist of: Karen Orzolek, Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Erykah Badu, and both Gyllenhaal siblings simultaneously.
5. When I was of optimal Sesame Street-viewing age, those yip-yip-yip-saying, jellyfish-looking alien guys used to terrify me and make me cry whenever they came on screen.
6. Grover was my favorite Sesame Street character.
   
7. With very few exceptions (and I mean, I'm talking fiery car crash survivor-type exceptions) I think women look vastly better without makeup than with.
8. My 8 gig iPhone contains the following should-be-extremely-embarrassing songs: "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)" and "Free Your Mind" by En Vogue, "The Circle of Life" from the Lion King soundtrack, "Tomorrow" and "It's the Hard-Knock Life" from the Annie soundtrack, the Cantina Band theme from Star Wars Episode IV, and "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" by Wham.
9. Musical instruments I know how to play, in the order I learned to play them: voice, guitar, clarinet, bass, xylophone, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, drums, piano, harmonica.
   
10. If I were any member of the band Kiss, I'd...kill myself.
11. Before bed when my brothers and I were little, our mother would read us one chapter a night of The Chronicles of Narnia. There were other books and series of books, I'm sure, but the Narnia ones stand out the most in my mind, for some reason.
12. My mother beat the shit out of cancer when I was in elementary school.
13. I don't understand the point of Twitter when Facebook status updates are the same exact thing already.
14. I don't understand the point of the Tumblr blog format when most tumblr templates don't allow commenting, and most tumblr entries are just pictures of various celebrities or links to cat videos on youtube. To paraphrase Lester Bangs: 99% of what passes for blogging these days--silence is more compelling.
    
15. I would sign up to live and work on a commune in a heartbeat if internet access were guaranteed. Oh, and unlimited hot water for bathing...
    
16. I probably spend a solid 2 hours total per week manscaping even though only one person has seen me naked in the last 7 months.
17. Not only am I tired of being celibate/single, I'm tired of the endless cycle of falling in and out of love like one giant sine wave. I'm ready to plateau and stay somewhere. Or is it flatline?
18. I just want a quiet country life with a porch to play my music, relax, and be left alone to the sunset.
    
19. I was disappointed, but not surprised, that so many on the mall last Tuesday echoed boos when George W. Bush was announced. Straw man's gone, y'all. Find a new pastime.
    
20. If I were drafted into the military, most likely I'd be a C.O.
21. I don't regret not getting a business degree instead of an English one; I don't think it's a coincidence that business degrees are suffixed 'BS.'
22. I do regret that doing anything productive with said English degree is less profitable than lifeguarding.
23. My dad told me a needed a backup plan. It's rockstar.
    
24. My favorite quote is Socrates': "The unexamined life is not worth living."
25. The biggest lesson I've learned in the past year is that trying to change someone else's feelings to match your own is futile. This has applied to every human interaction I've observed or participated in all year, inexorable as gravity.