I've never done the old blog stand by of 101 things, but, seeing as it is a day home, and I am saving money to avoid a budget crunch (damn those nice looking shirts LOL), and I am not going anywhere fast today (although happy responsible me is doing a load of washing yay), thought I would give it a crack - hopefully there are 101 things I find interesting about myself in the first place LOL -
1. I am adopted. I was fostered at four months, adopted by the same family when I was about three and a half years old. I have always known I was adopted.
2. When I was in my teens, I had a bit of contact with my birth parents. Swapping letters, photos and the like.
3. This stopped when, out of the blue, my 'brothers' rang me on the phone for my seventeenth birthday (ever heard the term white as a ghost, well yeah, that's how I was).
4. I had a nervous breakdown shortly after my seventeenth birthday. Won't go into details, but suffice to say it was a BAD nervous breakdown.
5. Now I have never thought that hearing the birth family had anything to do with that, but better safe than sorry, changed to an unlisted phone number for about the next five years, and haven't been in contact with the birth family since.
6. I kinda sorta would like to get back in touch, but I just fear that they would get all nuts about things again. Last I heard, they were based in Canberra.
7. Maybe there's an adoption agency or something where you can contact through them and they don't give personal contact details, taking and giving messages to be put through the third party - maybe that could be a way to go forward.
8. Back to the nervous breakdown - I just couldn't see my life going anywhere, so dropped out of trying in my last year at high school.
9. When my teachers convinced me to at least go through the motions of trying, I 'relapsed' on the nervous breakdown worse than originally. That would show them!
10. I look back at that year 1993 and can't recognise myself, or understand my mind set.
11. I have gone through depressed patches since, but never as bad as back then - a couple of times close, but still, even at those points, I still cannot understand 1993.
12. It took two years after that for me to even start getting my confidence back.
13. Going to London and travelling for seventeen months were the best things for my self confidence in my life.
14. I went over to the other side of the world without knowing a single soul and somehow managed to do alright for 99% of the time.
15. The other 1%, well, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
16. I wanted to stay in the UK, but my visa ran out, I was homesick (just a tad), and I wasn't going to risk any of my Brit female friendships by doing a fake marriage LOL.
17. I liked Manchester United when Cantona was playing for them, before I really got interested in football, but on getting to the UK switched my allegiance to Arsenal and Crystal Palace.
18. To cover the fact that I had put my flights home on my parent's credit card, I said to them I was going over to New York for a few days before heading up to Scotland to possibly find another job. The element of surprise when I arrived back home.
19. I had always wanted to go to New York for as long as I can remember. I eventually made it in 2002, and yes, I did go to Ground Zero.
20. My first live baseball game that I watched was the Mets v Dodgers, and for my sins, therefore I am a Mets supporter the rest of my life LOL. By the way, the Mets lost that game I watched badly.
(phew, only a fifth of the way through)
21. The first concert I went to was REM in Auckland in 1995.
22. The last concert I went to was Bruce Springstein in Ottawa in 2003.
23. I haven't seen many others, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Live - I think that's about it.
24. My favourite band at the moment is Radiohead.
25. I would love to see them in concert, but last time around, I didn't have funds to go, either to Montreal or Melbourne, damned lack of job at that stage.
26. I got badly burned with my first truly madly deeply relationship.
27. The first visit went OK, went as friends, came back as (in my mind at least) more.
28. Second trip, thirty hour travelling time, and she says it's over at the airport, five minutes after I arrive.
29. It was a very strange holiday for the week after that.
30. On returning home, I am just glad, in hindsight, that my job was challenging at that time, otherwise I could have just fallen completely apart.
31. All my major relationships have err started from contact on the internet.
32. I put that down to my real life shyness (true!), but others may have different ideas.
33. My favourite food is pizza.
34. In my current household, no one else likes it, and maybe a once every two or three month meal.
35. My favourite city that I have been to as a tourist has been Paris, followed by Saint Petersburg (Russia, not Florida).
36. I have a feeling that New York could supplant Paris in fave city stakes, but I have to visit there again to make sure.
37. I have lived in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada.
38. I love New Zealand, it is home, and I would love to live back there, but the more time I spend away from it the more I see it as a small pond at the ends of the Earth.
39. I am still making my mind up about Australia - it is growing on me.
40. I loved my times in Canada. I would probably still be there if not for a relationship crashing into the rocks and fleeing back to my family.
41. I would probably still be in the UK if I had been allowed to stay all the way back in 1998.
42. My first memory of an international news story was the space shuttle Challenger exploding on take off.
43. I really got interested in what was happening in the world around me in 1989, what with the student protests in China, the Berlin Wall falling, the short sharp ugly civil war in Romania.
44. In politics, I am right of centre when thinking New Zealand and Britain, left of centre in thoughts towards Australia and United States, and slightly, very slightly right of centre in Canadian thoughts.
45. My daily must visit websites are blogger, gmail, BBC, Guardian and New York Times.
46. My favourite sports are rugby union, cricket, ice hockey and football (soccer), in no particular order.
47. But, of course, being male, I can watch almost any sport if you sit me down in front of a TV.
48. Apart from curling.
49. I watch AFL, but I don't particularly like or understand it.
50. I had my first seizure when I was ten years old. I didn't have another for sixteen years.
51. But then I had four in an eighteen month period, including three in four months. The docs are pretty sure I'm epileptic.
52. I have scarring on my brain - apparently when I was two or three months old, I fell head first onto concrete, falling off a chair or something.
53. I was put into foster care shortly afterwards. At five months I was the weight of a newborn.
54. I am short, and I kinda sorta blame that whole first five months of my life for growing up short.
55. I sometimes fantasize about how life would have been if I had grown up to be normal male height. Hardly any woman wants to date a guy shorter than herself, and I get intimidated if a woman is too tall (about four to six inches taller than myself).
56. The nurses who looked after me before I was fostered out called me Jeremy. My (adoptive) parents preferred Paul. My birth parents had given me a very hippy name, which I won't mention here, at least at this stage.
57. I know I have short guy syndrome, needing to overachieve in other areas of my life to compensate. I often think of Napoleon taking over Europe when I am in this frame of mind.
58. I am a bit of a loner, and although friendly in a general sense, rarely open up fully to anyone.
59. I think that is a result of having three primary schools and two high schools, I never settled into the same group of friends for the term of my 'natural life'/school days.
60. Although I know they are just so Hollywood, I was/am often envious of the idealised school movies, such as American Pie etc, wondering if people actually have friends as close as that.
61. I didn't go to my first party with friends and alcohol involved until after high school had finished.
62. I more than made up for it in the next three years.
63. Being shorter and smaller body mass, I should not have tried to go drink for drink with my taller mates. Especially with spirits.
64. There were a lot of blackouts in 1995 and 1996.
65. One of which led to a sexual harrassment warning after a work party.
66. I have been terrified of showing feelings and attraction towards female workmates ever since.
67. After being in Australia for over eighteen months, I still have not got a Medicare card.
68. I tried a couple of times early on in the piece, but the Medicare staff seem to have a distrusting eye on all New Zealanders who have been in the country less than twelve months without a permanent job.
69. Apparently a job with a temping agency wasn't sufficient.
70. Since being rebuffed twice, even though I now have an honest to goodness permanent job and I have contributed to Australia's tax base for over a year, I just have procrastinated ever since.
71. Emergency care is paid for, prescriptions are at Australian rates, but everything else in the medical system is pay as you go without a Medicare card. I don't intend being sick anytime soon again though, so procrastination is the order of the day.
72. I sometimes think about becoming an Australian citizen, in a dual citizenship sense.
73. I would like to climb Mt Kilamanjaro one day.
74. I could mention movies, but I could easily make two hundred points about them myself. Suffice to say, I am a huge movie buff - I have been to the cinema twenty six times in the last twenty nine weeks.
75. Somehow I have gotten myself into the awful awful habit of going to the pictures by myself. I get to see what I want to see, but surely movies should be more social than that?
76. Another strange habit I have convinced myself of is not driving. I have never gone for my driver's license, and apart from motor racing, have never had an interest in cars at all.
77. I am a huge huge Formula One fan. If they didn't keep changing the rules, Michael Schuhmacher would be as dominant in the field as Lance Armstrong is in cycling.
78. When Schuhmacher won five (or was it six) titles in a row, he was called boring. When Lance Armstrong did seven Tour de Frances he was crowned as the best ever. Frustrating.
79. Apart from dodgems or mini race tracks, I have never gotten behind the wheel of anything - apart from to turn the car radio on perhaps.
80. I delayed my 'long term' arrival in Canada by six months because I wasn't sure whether I could deal with going straight into the teeth of winter. Flew over in April and still had over a month of winter to deal with.
81. Now I miss the snow. The salty sludge by the side of the roads and on the footpaths. The weather to wear three or more layers in.
82. Or maybe it is Canada in general I miss.
83. I can count the number of 'what if' moments I have had in my life on one, maybe two hands. Where your life could have gone down a completely different track if you had said yes instead of no, or vice versa. Leaving Canada is not one of those moments I think of in that light.
84. I do miss the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We get Letterman here in Oz, at about midnight on Channel 9, but it isn't the same.
85. I am a huge reality TV fan, but it has to be the right reality TV - Amazing Race, Survivor, American or Australian Idol. Not Fear Factor, Apprentice or basically anything else. The only made up TV show I regularly watch at the moment is Desperate Housewives.
86. I can usually find a good documentary on sometime during the night to take my attention, but not regular must sit down and watch at this time type TV.
87. I would love to write for a living - which blog writer wouldn't though. How does one break into journalism LOL?
88. I got top marks for my creative writing in high school.
89. The first music album I bought, was Wilson Phillips, on tape. I kinda cringe when I think of my music tastes in 1990 nowadays.
90. The first music video I can remember watching is 'Six Months In A Leaky Boat' by Split Enz.
91. That song was banned by the BBC because it was released during the Falklands War. Bad for morale or something.
92. I have literally thousands of photos from both my travels and general life.
93. My photo taking motto is take enough photos, surely some of them will come out alright.
94. I culled my photos into the must keep and can throw out before going to Canada. I regret that very much now, as I am going through one of my completist phases at the moment, and will have to get reprints of goodness knows how many photos to get everything aligned.
95. I am so glad I got to the Middle East before things seriously got pear shaped.
96. I am so annoyed that I slept in on Anzac morning at Gallipoli and missed the Dawn Service. One of the things I may not be able to forgive myself - but fingers crossed I will get to do it again - no, not sleep in, but wake up to go to Dawn.
97. Six weeks travelling in the Middle East, sun sun sun apart from a cold couple of weeks in Turkey - best. tan. EVER.
98. The only magazine I regularly buy at the moment is The Economist. I am a news junkie, if you hadn't already guessed. When the bombs went off in London last month, I wasn't satisfied with three different news feeds on free to air TV, I had to go online and monitor about four or five websites as well, refreshing every two minutes as I went.
99. Other magazines I have read in the past are Time, 2000AD and Mad - the last two being comics of course.
100. All I know of the Iran Contra scandal I learnt in Mad magazine LOL.
101. I love the opportunity to cook, or even to just plan meals. I can be very easily domesticated - perhaps that is one of the things I miss from Canada.
1. I am adopted. I was fostered at four months, adopted by the same family when I was about three and a half years old. I have always known I was adopted.
2. When I was in my teens, I had a bit of contact with my birth parents. Swapping letters, photos and the like.
3. This stopped when, out of the blue, my 'brothers' rang me on the phone for my seventeenth birthday (ever heard the term white as a ghost, well yeah, that's how I was).
4. I had a nervous breakdown shortly after my seventeenth birthday. Won't go into details, but suffice to say it was a BAD nervous breakdown.
5. Now I have never thought that hearing the birth family had anything to do with that, but better safe than sorry, changed to an unlisted phone number for about the next five years, and haven't been in contact with the birth family since.
6. I kinda sorta would like to get back in touch, but I just fear that they would get all nuts about things again. Last I heard, they were based in Canberra.
7. Maybe there's an adoption agency or something where you can contact through them and they don't give personal contact details, taking and giving messages to be put through the third party - maybe that could be a way to go forward.
8. Back to the nervous breakdown - I just couldn't see my life going anywhere, so dropped out of trying in my last year at high school.
9. When my teachers convinced me to at least go through the motions of trying, I 'relapsed' on the nervous breakdown worse than originally. That would show them!
10. I look back at that year 1993 and can't recognise myself, or understand my mind set.
11. I have gone through depressed patches since, but never as bad as back then - a couple of times close, but still, even at those points, I still cannot understand 1993.
12. It took two years after that for me to even start getting my confidence back.
13. Going to London and travelling for seventeen months were the best things for my self confidence in my life.
14. I went over to the other side of the world without knowing a single soul and somehow managed to do alright for 99% of the time.
15. The other 1%, well, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
16. I wanted to stay in the UK, but my visa ran out, I was homesick (just a tad), and I wasn't going to risk any of my Brit female friendships by doing a fake marriage LOL.
17. I liked Manchester United when Cantona was playing for them, before I really got interested in football, but on getting to the UK switched my allegiance to Arsenal and Crystal Palace.
18. To cover the fact that I had put my flights home on my parent's credit card, I said to them I was going over to New York for a few days before heading up to Scotland to possibly find another job. The element of surprise when I arrived back home.
19. I had always wanted to go to New York for as long as I can remember. I eventually made it in 2002, and yes, I did go to Ground Zero.
20. My first live baseball game that I watched was the Mets v Dodgers, and for my sins, therefore I am a Mets supporter the rest of my life LOL. By the way, the Mets lost that game I watched badly.
(phew, only a fifth of the way through)
21. The first concert I went to was REM in Auckland in 1995.
22. The last concert I went to was Bruce Springstein in Ottawa in 2003.
23. I haven't seen many others, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Live - I think that's about it.
24. My favourite band at the moment is Radiohead.
25. I would love to see them in concert, but last time around, I didn't have funds to go, either to Montreal or Melbourne, damned lack of job at that stage.
26. I got badly burned with my first truly madly deeply relationship.
27. The first visit went OK, went as friends, came back as (in my mind at least) more.
28. Second trip, thirty hour travelling time, and she says it's over at the airport, five minutes after I arrive.
29. It was a very strange holiday for the week after that.
30. On returning home, I am just glad, in hindsight, that my job was challenging at that time, otherwise I could have just fallen completely apart.
31. All my major relationships have err started from contact on the internet.
32. I put that down to my real life shyness (true!), but others may have different ideas.
33. My favourite food is pizza.
34. In my current household, no one else likes it, and maybe a once every two or three month meal.
35. My favourite city that I have been to as a tourist has been Paris, followed by Saint Petersburg (Russia, not Florida).
36. I have a feeling that New York could supplant Paris in fave city stakes, but I have to visit there again to make sure.
37. I have lived in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada.
38. I love New Zealand, it is home, and I would love to live back there, but the more time I spend away from it the more I see it as a small pond at the ends of the Earth.
39. I am still making my mind up about Australia - it is growing on me.
40. I loved my times in Canada. I would probably still be there if not for a relationship crashing into the rocks and fleeing back to my family.
41. I would probably still be in the UK if I had been allowed to stay all the way back in 1998.
42. My first memory of an international news story was the space shuttle Challenger exploding on take off.
43. I really got interested in what was happening in the world around me in 1989, what with the student protests in China, the Berlin Wall falling, the short sharp ugly civil war in Romania.
44. In politics, I am right of centre when thinking New Zealand and Britain, left of centre in thoughts towards Australia and United States, and slightly, very slightly right of centre in Canadian thoughts.
45. My daily must visit websites are blogger, gmail, BBC, Guardian and New York Times.
46. My favourite sports are rugby union, cricket, ice hockey and football (soccer), in no particular order.
47. But, of course, being male, I can watch almost any sport if you sit me down in front of a TV.
48. Apart from curling.
49. I watch AFL, but I don't particularly like or understand it.
50. I had my first seizure when I was ten years old. I didn't have another for sixteen years.
51. But then I had four in an eighteen month period, including three in four months. The docs are pretty sure I'm epileptic.
52. I have scarring on my brain - apparently when I was two or three months old, I fell head first onto concrete, falling off a chair or something.
53. I was put into foster care shortly afterwards. At five months I was the weight of a newborn.
54. I am short, and I kinda sorta blame that whole first five months of my life for growing up short.
55. I sometimes fantasize about how life would have been if I had grown up to be normal male height. Hardly any woman wants to date a guy shorter than herself, and I get intimidated if a woman is too tall (about four to six inches taller than myself).
56. The nurses who looked after me before I was fostered out called me Jeremy. My (adoptive) parents preferred Paul. My birth parents had given me a very hippy name, which I won't mention here, at least at this stage.
57. I know I have short guy syndrome, needing to overachieve in other areas of my life to compensate. I often think of Napoleon taking over Europe when I am in this frame of mind.
58. I am a bit of a loner, and although friendly in a general sense, rarely open up fully to anyone.
59. I think that is a result of having three primary schools and two high schools, I never settled into the same group of friends for the term of my 'natural life'/school days.
60. Although I know they are just so Hollywood, I was/am often envious of the idealised school movies, such as American Pie etc, wondering if people actually have friends as close as that.
61. I didn't go to my first party with friends and alcohol involved until after high school had finished.
62. I more than made up for it in the next three years.
63. Being shorter and smaller body mass, I should not have tried to go drink for drink with my taller mates. Especially with spirits.
64. There were a lot of blackouts in 1995 and 1996.
65. One of which led to a sexual harrassment warning after a work party.
66. I have been terrified of showing feelings and attraction towards female workmates ever since.
67. After being in Australia for over eighteen months, I still have not got a Medicare card.
68. I tried a couple of times early on in the piece, but the Medicare staff seem to have a distrusting eye on all New Zealanders who have been in the country less than twelve months without a permanent job.
69. Apparently a job with a temping agency wasn't sufficient.
70. Since being rebuffed twice, even though I now have an honest to goodness permanent job and I have contributed to Australia's tax base for over a year, I just have procrastinated ever since.
71. Emergency care is paid for, prescriptions are at Australian rates, but everything else in the medical system is pay as you go without a Medicare card. I don't intend being sick anytime soon again though, so procrastination is the order of the day.
72. I sometimes think about becoming an Australian citizen, in a dual citizenship sense.
73. I would like to climb Mt Kilamanjaro one day.
74. I could mention movies, but I could easily make two hundred points about them myself. Suffice to say, I am a huge movie buff - I have been to the cinema twenty six times in the last twenty nine weeks.
75. Somehow I have gotten myself into the awful awful habit of going to the pictures by myself. I get to see what I want to see, but surely movies should be more social than that?
76. Another strange habit I have convinced myself of is not driving. I have never gone for my driver's license, and apart from motor racing, have never had an interest in cars at all.
77. I am a huge huge Formula One fan. If they didn't keep changing the rules, Michael Schuhmacher would be as dominant in the field as Lance Armstrong is in cycling.
78. When Schuhmacher won five (or was it six) titles in a row, he was called boring. When Lance Armstrong did seven Tour de Frances he was crowned as the best ever. Frustrating.
79. Apart from dodgems or mini race tracks, I have never gotten behind the wheel of anything - apart from to turn the car radio on perhaps.
80. I delayed my 'long term' arrival in Canada by six months because I wasn't sure whether I could deal with going straight into the teeth of winter. Flew over in April and still had over a month of winter to deal with.
81. Now I miss the snow. The salty sludge by the side of the roads and on the footpaths. The weather to wear three or more layers in.
82. Or maybe it is Canada in general I miss.
83. I can count the number of 'what if' moments I have had in my life on one, maybe two hands. Where your life could have gone down a completely different track if you had said yes instead of no, or vice versa. Leaving Canada is not one of those moments I think of in that light.
84. I do miss the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We get Letterman here in Oz, at about midnight on Channel 9, but it isn't the same.
85. I am a huge reality TV fan, but it has to be the right reality TV - Amazing Race, Survivor, American or Australian Idol. Not Fear Factor, Apprentice or basically anything else. The only made up TV show I regularly watch at the moment is Desperate Housewives.
86. I can usually find a good documentary on sometime during the night to take my attention, but not regular must sit down and watch at this time type TV.
87. I would love to write for a living - which blog writer wouldn't though. How does one break into journalism LOL?
88. I got top marks for my creative writing in high school.
89. The first music album I bought, was Wilson Phillips, on tape. I kinda cringe when I think of my music tastes in 1990 nowadays.
90. The first music video I can remember watching is 'Six Months In A Leaky Boat' by Split Enz.
91. That song was banned by the BBC because it was released during the Falklands War. Bad for morale or something.
92. I have literally thousands of photos from both my travels and general life.
93. My photo taking motto is take enough photos, surely some of them will come out alright.
94. I culled my photos into the must keep and can throw out before going to Canada. I regret that very much now, as I am going through one of my completist phases at the moment, and will have to get reprints of goodness knows how many photos to get everything aligned.
95. I am so glad I got to the Middle East before things seriously got pear shaped.
96. I am so annoyed that I slept in on Anzac morning at Gallipoli and missed the Dawn Service. One of the things I may not be able to forgive myself - but fingers crossed I will get to do it again - no, not sleep in, but wake up to go to Dawn.
97. Six weeks travelling in the Middle East, sun sun sun apart from a cold couple of weeks in Turkey - best. tan. EVER.
98. The only magazine I regularly buy at the moment is The Economist. I am a news junkie, if you hadn't already guessed. When the bombs went off in London last month, I wasn't satisfied with three different news feeds on free to air TV, I had to go online and monitor about four or five websites as well, refreshing every two minutes as I went.
99. Other magazines I have read in the past are Time, 2000AD and Mad - the last two being comics of course.
100. All I know of the Iran Contra scandal I learnt in Mad magazine LOL.
101. I love the opportunity to cook, or even to just plan meals. I can be very easily domesticated - perhaps that is one of the things I miss from Canada.
No comments:
Post a Comment