Tom tagged me with the “Eight random things about yourself” meme, so here goes:

1. I like formal wear, and probably alone among twenty-somethings in the English-speaking world, I wish it was still expected that engineers dress professionally, and that the man on the street wear a suit and a tie. I’ll always go upscale for the symphony, or if we have theater tickets, but on occasions when I decided to wear a tie to work for no good reason, I’ve been asked if I had a job interview. Since this seems like a poor career strategy, I instead strike an uneasy balance between blazers and classy business casual, and t-shirts with slogans like “I run with scissors”.

2. There are rabbits eating my lilac bushes, and they’ve left ugly scars on two of my trees. So even though it made me feel like an old, crotchety Tory, I spent some time this evening finding out if it’s okay to shoot rabbits with an air rifle inside the city limits. Anecdotal evidence from the Daily Page forum suggests that it is not okay, as does my intuition about what kind of laws we have here.

3. I remember watching the 1988 vice-presidential debate, and thinking that Dan “Potatoe” Quayle had actually won. My childhood enthusiasm for politics outweighed my ability to accurately discern and evaluate political debate: so thoroughly did Lloyd Bentsen destroy Quayle that his “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” line became one of the most famous debate quips of all time, and Quayle became a national joke. In Quayle’s defense, he never shot someone in the face and then made the guy apologize for being shot.

4. My greatest sporting accomplishment was to turn an unassisted triple play in a slow-pitch softball game (6 on the scorecard), and to then follow it up by hitting a game-ending grand slam a few innings later.

5. I’ve been to 47 states, missing only Maine, Alaska, and North Dakota. North Dakota will be added to the list this fall, when Sarah and I take a trip out to Seattle on the Empire Builder.

6. I have tens of thousands of old baseball cards boxed up in the basement. At twelve, I thought that avoiding the “Mom threw them away” fate of all those Mickey Mantles would eventually earn me some serious-to-a-12-year-old dough, but now I’m just keeping them around for the benefit of my future self and future kids. If they’re baseball fans, it will no doubt be fun to sort through the cards I thought worthy of putting into protective plastic sleeves, and see which stars pass the test of time. All those rookie cards for Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are mixed in with the Chuck Knoblauchs and Bobby Bonillas of the early 1990s.

7. I hate turning on the air conditioning, and each year I make a bet with myself to leave it off until the Fourth of July. Having made it that far, I’ll then try to keep it off for the rest of the season. It’s nice to fall asleep to the drone of a fan and the crickets chirping outside, bathed in the smug superiority that comes from hearing the neighbors’ AC units whirring all through the night, and knowing that my electric bill for the month of June was $36.

8. I would love to be a good runner, but I absolutely hate running. Every six months or so, I’ll convince myself that what people say is true: if one sticks with it long enough, running will become enjoyable. And then for three or four weeks, I’ll give it the old college try, hating every minute of it, just like I always have. It’s not a lack of athleticism; I bike and swim regularly, and can cover thirty miles a day with a backpack, but I can’t run more than a couple miles without getting winded, and I hate the entire experience (since my sister runs marathons for fun, this is extra embarrassing). But for some insane reason, I keep at it.

I’m supposed to tag eight other people, which seems like a lot, so I’ll tag Eric, Erik, Grant, Jay, Matt, Nate, Russell (consider it a subtle wish to blog more frequently), and Tee Bee.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 12:31 am, 12 July 2007 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.