Lee Herrick tagged me with the 5 things weird about you meme and I don't want to fill up the Taiwan blog with personal info so here:
Five “weird” things about me
1. I do not drive. Which is not to say that I am not capable of driving, because I do have a Texas driver’s license, and before that, a California driver’s license. Rather a serious of minor fender benders with concrete columns, parking markers, and earlier on actually rear ending someone when I was in highschool which resulted in my car being revoked, have led me to develop this terrible dependency on those who drive. My nearest and dearest friends love and tolerate me for this idiosyncracy and know the roads are a safer place without me on them. On another level, I relate a lot to Marky Mark’s character in Huckabees. Petroleum IS evil. Suffice to say, I live in cities with public transportation or I walk or I hitch rides. But this year, I am investing in driving school and breaking out of pattern - either that or getting a scooter.
2. I can not speak a word of Mandarin. This is in result of having a father with fierce allegiances to the DPP and is pro-Taiwanese independence, meaning that the kids would not grow up with the language of the oppressor, but with Taiwanese, the language of the people. I went to Chinese school for one miserable summer in which the kids, born of mainland Chinese, and the teacher, also a mainlander, ridiculed and shamed me into silence. At the end of the summer when my mother asked if I would like to continue, I said “no.” Further, Taiwanese is not the same as Mandarin to one's ear, they are completely different.
3. I have a shade of naturally auburn red hair that an elementary school teacher Ms. Juchartz loved so much she cut off a lock to take to her hairdresser to match it. This is my mother’s doing – her side of the the family had inter-relations with the Dutch and as a result, her children carry this recessive gene for red hair.
4. Sometimes in my dreams, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and His Holiness the Dalai Lama appear. I listen to what they have to say. Rinpoche once told me to leave a message on his answering machine. The fact that he is dead, didn’t really matter.
5. Two of my front teeth are fused together above the root, but not below the root. My dentists call me a medical anomaly.
