Autoanthropology 201

Sherri posted this, which is a great idea, so I’m not sure why she chose the title she did. (Perhaps she couldn’t think of a better title.) (Yes, the original title for this post was "Strange", but after going back and rereading some of my older posts, I realized I'd done something similar and called it "Autoanthropology 101", I made the change.)

Rising to her challenge, I submit the following list of Eleven* Strange Things About Me:

1) As long as I can remember, the only way I’ve been able to get to sleep at night, regardless of how tired and shagged out I am (after a prolonged squawk) has been to tell myself stories until I drift off to sleep. Quite often, these stories feature me as the hero, and I invariably have some unbearably cool Hero Gear. At various times, I have owned vintage airplanes and car racing teams, commanded warships, and driven trains. When I was 11, my self-told bedtime stories centered around my adventures as a high school student who always drove to school in a restored World War II German half-track. There is always a girl named either Shelley or Diana, and over the years, I have saved her from a number of improbable calamities using only my lightning reflexes and my infallible instinct for survival.

When my ex-wife was pregnant with my older daughter, we attended a Lamaze class that included the self-hypnosis relaxation techniques known as Imagery. When the instructor remarked that I seemed to be picking it up pretty quickly. I said, “Yeah, I’ve been doing this since I was little.” I’m certain he didn’t believe me.

2) I have experienced telepathy a number of times. Once, during some mandatory training the Navy sent me to during the 80s, we spent an hour or so practicing Imagery relaxation techniques. The facilitator “guided” us (“Now imaaagine yourself in a peeeeaceful plaaaace…your faaavorite haaaapy plaaaace.”) through the exercise. I pictured myself in my mother’s kitchen, as she made my favorite: apple pie. At the end of the exercise, the facilitator quietly said, “Who had pie in their image? I smelled apple pie.” Years later, at the beginning of a gunnery exercise in which I’d be expected to draw upon skills I hadn’t used in years, my nervous preparations were interrupted momentarily by a clear mental image of a friend having lunch in her office, and after that, I had an overwhelming sense of confidence. We not only excelled in the exercise, as the spotter, I scored a direct hit, dropping a five-inch diameter projectile onto the top-dead-center of a tank from three miles away. When I got home, I called my friend and she greeted me with, “Oh! Hey! On Wednesday, I was having a late lunch in my office and I felt like you needed a little encouragement, so I sent you some confident thoughts…”

3) I sometimes have a hard time not blurting out movie lines that are perversely appropriate for a given situation, and sometimes the lines I don’t say strike me so funny, that I can’t stop giggling. For example, in that Lamaze class, when the instructor asked how many people have experienced the birth of a child, I so wanted to say (in a squeaky, high-pitched, Butterfly McQueen voice), “Ah don’ know nuffin’ ‘bout birfin’ no babies!”

I do the same thing with lines from Monty Python skits. We often have theoretical discussions at work that devolve into “yes-you-can-no-you-can’t” and when that happens, I have to bite my tongue to avoid saying, “Look, this isn’t an argument! It’s just contradiction! An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.” Of course, no one would get it and respond, “No, it isn’t.”

4) I am secretly an absolute freak about The Gilmore Girls. It’s not just that I like looking at Lauren Graham (which I do), it’s that the show is full of quirky characters doing insane things but somehow managing to remain true to themselves. I love the writing on this show. The dialogue is full of smart, obscure pop-culture references and the storylines are balanced and just unpredictable enough to keep me drawn in. I love that there’s at least one show on TV about smart women who don’t have to dissect things and solve crimes to be considered intelligent. Why do I feel like I have to justify this?

5) I am not so secretly freakish about The West Wing. I don’t care about the politics they espouse on the show. For Democrats, they are sometimes surprisingly conservative (take for example, the episode in which Martin Sheen, as President Jed Bartlet, justifies an attack on a Third World nation suspected of harboring terrorists and conducting an illicit WMD program by saying, “Because, in this day and age, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it to my country, what goes on in your country is very much my business.”) The writing is even better than on Gilmore Girls and I like it.

6) I have observed that guys who are arrogant assholes seem to be more attractive to women. In an effort to make myself appear more attractive, I attempted to become an arrogant asshole. I lasted one whole minute.

7) I became a vegetarian for a month. It was an unhappy time for me, but I figured it was just the diet, and was determined to stick with it until the day I drove by the In-n-Out Burger on the corner of Rosecrans and Sports Arena by mistake. (Please allow me to explain to non-Californians: In-n-Out prepares their burgers the same way they have since the Fifties, and they vent the aroma out onto the street, a Siren’s scent. It is impossible to come within 200 feet of an In-n-Out without getting hungry.) I am no longer a vegetarian.

8) I snore. I always have. When I was 8, my parents began closing my bedroom door at night so that they could sleep. In the summer, they’d have to keep the side window in their bedroom closed because the sound of my snoring would pass through my bedroom side window, echo off the neighbor’s house, and keep my parents awake. I cannot nap in public (such as on a plane or train) for fear of detecting someone’s ill-concealed smirk after I wake up.

9) I don’t so much cuss at bad drivers as scold them. The sluggard who counts to ten after the light turns green will generally earn this: “Okay, come on, Sweetheart, it’s the narrow pedal on the right. No, the RIGHT. That’s good…all the way through the intersection now.” I take a great deal of pleasure in pulling alongside the driver who blew by me and cut me off on the freeway so that he could get the next exit first, especially when I got there the same time he did without driving like a maniac.

10) I have very little of consequence in my refrigerator, and almost all of what is there is past its expiration date. I do not see the need to stock my eighteen cubic foot refrigerator when there is a 550,000 cubic foot grocery store a block away.

11) There is an added draw to the grocery store: I have a little thing going on with one of the cashiers, whom I will call FlirtatiousCutie. Whenever I see that she’s working, I go through her line…even if it means violating the Fifteen Item Rule when she’s working the Express Line (not often…see Strange Thing 10). When she’s helping the customer in line ahead of me, our eyes will meet and she’ll smile at me and lower her eyes, then go back to helping that customer wearing that little smile that belongs to me. (If you’ve seen the smile Maggie Gyllenhaal gives to the camera at the end of Secretary, you know the one: I-know-what-you’re-thinking-and-you’re-right.)

*“It’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? Put it up to eleven, exactly. One louder.