cavalaxis tagged me.
Seven quirks about me:
1. Important life lessons my father taught me before the age of ten: how to make a fist properly, the text to the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, the plots to several Gilbert and Sullivan operas, how to count to ten in Welsh (and also German), the french words for various fruits, how to say 'useless information' in Latin.
2. I believe in the paranormal and second sight because I've seen examples of it in my family. My mother was predicting who was on the other end of the phone before call display existed; my grandmother predicted her own death date; I've had prophetic dreams that turned out to be true. Sadly this talent fails to work on lottery numbers or anything profitable like that.
3. Unconventional things I have been obsessed with over the past bunch of years and to a certain extent am still obsessed with now: hospitals (dates to childhood), organized crime (specifically New York prohibition era), The Epic of Gilgamesh, time travel and the physics of same, movies, Antarctica, North Korea, Bollywood and the Indian subcontinent, trains, China/Hong Kong, Alaska. There is no rhyme or reason to any of this.
4. Things I cannot do: math in my head reliably, balance a checkbook, lift and carry heavy objects, much in the way of anything delicate with my left hand, stand on one foot, most yoga poses, sit cross-legged, trigonometry, calculus, walk across bridges without panicking, stand too close to glass dividers on the second floors of malls.
5. When I was in my late teens I was in a choral singing tour of Europe for three weeks. I still remember how to sing large parts of the mass in Latin and I hate the soprano part of the Hallelujah Chorus.
6. I spent six weeks in a double leg cast with a bar between the ankles when I was eight years old (I had major surgery on both legs) and then another six weeks in the casts without the bar between the ankles. During this point in time my left leg grew and my right leg didn't so now the right leg is almost a full inch shorter than the left, and I wear GIANT CLUNKY RIGHT SHOE OF DOOM to compensate.
7. I'm double-jointed in the middle three fingers of both hands. It's kind of creepy and weird if you're not used to it.