the not-so-latest meme to be all the rage on facebook

mood: rested
music: "little martha" the allman brothers band

I knew I'd get hit by it eventually: the "25 random things" meme. but ha: I'm not following the meme by spreading it around or tagging people; I figure it'll get to everyone eventually. if you are reading this, consider yourself tagged. so, without further ado...

1. I'm usually very shy. I'm always loath to meet new people, or even ask random people for something. One time I was asked to get people to sign a petition, and I didn't get one signature: I was just too afraid. I get a lot more comfortable around people I know.

2. I can be very bitter. There are just some people in the world that I have crossed paths with that just don't resonate well with me; maybe they're just the wrong kind of person (in which case I wouldn't want to know them anyway), or maybe there was a wrong somewhere in our relationship that just hasn't healed (it's usually my fault, sad to say), but there are a few people that I simply do not like, and try like the plague to avoid. Thankfully, these people are few and far between.

3. I love to learn about everything. this has kinda waned (more like refined, focused) since middle/high school, but still exists to this day. I always make an effort to learn something new, or improve on what I know, every so often. In college, this is in the form of weird elective courses like computer networking and chinese, and learning on my own, via the internet/books/tv/people, stuff like blues harmonica and crocheting.

3. I have a weird desire and knack for picking up new skills. I like to think of myself as a collector of skills and techniques. This primarily stems from my love of learning anything. Just recently (i.e. the past few years), I picked up aluminum machining, harmonica, and crocheting, while continuing to learn origami, cooking/baking, and a cappella song arranging.

4. I am a neat freak. I can't get to work at a desk or table until everything is lined up, clean, and streamlined the way I want it. When I was tasked with keeping an office/lounge clean for a semester, I could swear that I was in there every day, picking up litter, straightening up cushions, and making sure all stacks of paper were straight and perpendicular to everything, as well as vacuuming basically every week. Despite all this, however, my room is still a mess (at least I think so), because I am almost never here.

5. I never knew I was good at music until high school. I always knew that I could sing, and I did take some kid piano lessons in middle school, but I really started to grow musically when I picked up trombone. This was abandoned later, when a change of schools had me sitting in the choir, doing quite well, and never looking back. It was in choir that I found out that I had perfect pitch; all along, I though everyone had it, and was confused as to why my peers didn't.

6. I've had very few close friends all though my school years. For some reason I never made very many friends in school. Sure, I'd be acquainted with many people in my classes, and I'd sit with people that I know and like, but, for the most part, I've usually been the lone outsider, content with my relationships with my schoolwork, books, and teachers. I've never really had the experience of having close friends, the type that you hang out with every day after class. To this day, I still eat alone at lunch and struggle to make new friends. (Then again, college changes most things. And Brothers are exempt.)

7. I talk to myself a lot. I don't really notice it until I actually hear myself giving, well, myself, commands to do something. I even tell myself to stop sometimes. I suppose this is because I have a strong tendency to think aloud.

8. I lived the first seven years of my life in the Philippines. I consider those years a happy era, one in which I was surrounded by loving family, everything came easy, and I had fun just running around. The first year in the US was fun and interesting: I found out what lots of new food tasted like (and learned that I liked Pudgie's mashed potatoes and didn't like Froot Loops), what snow was like (thanks to the blizzard of 1996), and that I was labeled "one of them smart Asians" pretty early on.

9. I'm ashamed to say it, but I've never really had a real job. It's never been a goal of mine during high school to aggressively independence and pursue employment as soon as it was legally possible. My summers were spent doing random volunteer work, keeping the house clean, helping mom cook, reading, and playing lots of video games. (I remember the nights I wasted, spent playing games like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Tactics.) I aim to put a stop to this once and for all soon, hopefully this summer, if I can get get a green light for research.

10. I've always liked working with computers. It started when my family got our first computer in the late 90s, a Micron with Windows 95, 32MB RAM, a whopping 2GB of hard drive space, and a screaming fast 166MHz Pentium processor (with MMX technology!), with AOL coming in at 56kbps. It came with a huge manual that was more technical than necessary, which I found myself poring over and reading whenever I could, like it was some novel that I couldn't put down. I was pretty much in charge of being the responsible computer guy of the family, doing such "technical" things as defragging the hard drive, making sure we didn't run of hard drive space, installing things properly, and basically making sure the computer didn't die while someone else used it. This progressed to learning A+, then Cisco stuff in high school and college.

11. I have a bad habit of not reading books. I have a list somewhere of books that I should read before I die, which consists mostly of dry, slightly interesting liberal arts fodder such as the "classics" and all the books I should have read at each level in high school. However, once I actually start reading a book on that list, I get bored quite easily and just stop reading. Lately I haven't been reading any books for pleasure at all (barely any textbook reading, either, which bugs me); I believe the last book I read for pleasure was the seventh book in the Harry Potter series.

12. I blame my being fat on the United States. Before I came here, I was a skinny boy from a third-world Asian country. I remember long afternoons spent running around on my grandpa's farm, biking, climbing around, and other physical things kids do when exposed to open outdoor spaces and fresh air. Then I moved to New York City, where my parents feared for our (me and my siblings') lives whenever we walked out to the streets to and from school. As a result, this started my sedentary phase, where I grew into the rut of generic fat American kid. And here I am now, pretty much into adulthood, a hefty 200lb at 5'3". I aim to change this soon.

13. When I'm at home, I'm addicted to PBS, HGTV, and Food Network. Again, I like to learn about things. Discovery Channel and the Science Channel are sometimes flipped to when there's nothing on, but for me, it's usually PBS, HGTV, or Food Network (especially Food Network).

14. I miss cartoons, specifically Looney Tunes and Saturday morning cartoons. The stuff on TV now is crap that pale in comparison to the timelessness and sheer fun of Looney Tunes and Saturday morning cartoons. I remember the cartoons that would give kids everywhere reason to wake up ungodly early on Saturday mornings; these days, nothing can make me wake me up that early on weekends anymore, since the standard thing for students to do is to sleep in and wake up in the afternoon. It might be a sign of the times, or it might be that I'm getting old(er).

15. It might be obvious, but I'm no good at posting regularly on a blog.

16. I procrastinate like crazy, with minesweeper, sudoku, and the school newspaper as my usual poisons of choice. I usually find myself having unnecessary all-nighters because I don't get to really working until around 2am or so, which I find really troubling sometimes.

17. For some reason, I prefer not to listen to music from my collection, preferring instead to listen to the radio. And no, shuffle does not suffice. There is just a certain charm in listening to the radio, a DJ (usually with a cool radio voice) who picks out the songs for you, and not knowing what comes next. It just feels different, and is just more entertaining.

18. I'm having a hard time quelling some of my old, old habits, such as counting my steps, picking at my cuticles, picking my nose, and making sure that I end on my right foot at the top and bottom of stairs.

19. I've performed in Carnegie Hall. Twice. It should have been four times, but I wasn't available at the other two times.

20. If you don't know already, I am really into plants, gardening, and horticulture. I used to have my dorm room windowsill filled with plants (about twenty or so small-ish plants, with a couple of big-ish ones), but they are currently away with a friend, who still has them from when I had to find a caretaker for the winter break. He's currently out on medical leave, but still in the area, though I don't see him too often, much less my plants. Anyway, I learned how to garden mainly from books, the internet, and from one of my teachers from high school, who let me play around in the school greenhouse. I found I really liked it, and considered studying it in high, but then I came to RPI, where virtually anyone biology-related has some animosity for plants, preferring to concentrate on bacteria, cells, neurons, molecules, and cancer instead. Now I want to pursue it in graduate school, if I can't convince people enough to get a job as a gardener fresh out of school.

21. Once I get attached to a song, I will be inescapably stuck to it for hours and hours. I used to have an awesome 15-minute version of Free Bird that I would listen to constantly; I would waste at least an hour each day for weeks just listening to it, on repeat, back to back. It was awesome. This applies somewhat to choir songs, too. What can I say, I'm a choir geek. ^^

22. I love being outside with nature, preferably when it's cold out. If you see me around campus, I'm usually wearing flip-flops and, if it's not terribly below freezing, shorts. I've always wanted to visit, and even move to, Alaska, Scandinavia, Tierra del Fuego, Switzerland, and/or New Zealand, or pretty much anywhere with an abundance of natural beauty and cold weather. It's a wonder why I never went into the Boy Scouts, or went to college to study environmental conservation or something.

23. My favorite food in the world is soup. And maybe stew. With a good hunk of good bread. Everything else is a close second. Come to think of it, I'm not a very picky eater at all. I am a firm believer in the 5-second+ rule. I will usually eat anything, though there are a few exceptions, including offal, anything with tentacles (fried calamari is an exception), and organs (pancreas, tripe, brain and the like)(chicharron bulaklak is another exception).

24. I'm usually indecisive. Right now I'm having a hard time thinking of what to write. Whenever I have to order food, it usually takes me at least five minutes after everyone else has ordered to choose something. Although usually on the decisions that count, the right choice to make is clear (or at least, that's how it's been so far...).

25. It's taken me wayyy too long to do this meme than necessary. In actuality, it's taken me from the ides of February to finally have this list, due to work, sleeplessness, and my laptop entering its geriatric years.

so. yeah. questions? ask away.