The meme that’s been spreading through the blogosphere lately has struck me, courtesy of Raph. Thus, I’m supposed to post five things that you don’t know about me (ok, some of you will probably know most or all of these) and then tag some other people.

1. I had a 13-year-old brother who died in in hunting accident when I was 15. I was carrying the gun. We were out hunting for pheasants in a field near the rural Wisconsin property I grew up on with a friend of mine, and things went very badly. Please don’t judge. We had been #1 and #2 in our hunter’s safety classes, and hunting in the Midwest as a teenager is simply a large part of the rural culture. It was a tragic accident but unfortunately, accidents happen. I stopped hunting at that point, but my dad still hunts, for instance. I have zero problem with responsible hunting. I just find animals too cute to want to kill. (I’ll happily eat a tasty animal if you’ll kill it for me though.)

2. I held the record at Cornell for most times sent to the Judicial Administrator in a semester. No idea if I still do, but I was sent seven times in a single semester as a sophomore. I was being harassed for my (then) very right-wing beliefs (they’d bust me for putting political posters up on a door, while just taking down everyone else’s posters, for instance), but to her credit, the J.A. was quite fair and never ‘convicted’ me of anything but a single drinking-while-underage charge. I was not exactly an ideal student at Cornell and not to sound hokey, but I regret not taking better advantage of the opportunities available to me there. Partying and causing political controversy were much more entertaining to me at the time than writing papers on the shifting paradigm in international relations. I did eat a Triscuit out of the same box as Carl Sagan in an astronomy class once though. That was pretty cool. I bet I ingested a flake of his skin or something. Yep. Got a little Carl in me.

3. 80s hair bands hold an unnatural, shameful fascination for me. I grew up in the 80s and as I was in high school in the late 80s, and lived in small-town/rural America, bands like Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Warrant, Bon Jovi, Cinderella, and the Whites (White Lion, Great White, Whitesnake) were a big part of my life. No, I am not proud of this, and for the most part the attraction only exists these days in the form of nostalgia, but very occasionally I’ll hear a hair band song I haven’t heard in years and I’m all ready to rock. I don’t listen to that kind of music much any more, but I’ve re-purchased almost all of the major hair band albums that I sold years ago in shame. Except Poison. Poison sucks too hard for even me to listen to.

Tivo also has standing instructions to record VH1’s “Metal Mania” for me, which is 1-3 hours of nonstop hairband video goodness. I enjoy putting it on in the background while I’m working. Just as a sidenote, the one band that was classified as a hair band that I think really holds up today is Guns n’ Roses. Appetite for Destruction is one of the greatest rock albums ever made, and Axl Rose would easily make my top 10 frontman list. Decadent, over-the-top, didn’t give a damn about tomorrow. Rock.

4. I have turned into a big pansy. This is more of a mea culpa to myself, but I bet most of you don’t know what a big pansy I’ve become. 2 years ago, I was doing full-contact kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu 4-5 times a week and riding sport bikes on the weekend. Then, I ripped a tendon in my thumb during a high-speed skiing crash which took me out of martial arts for 2 months. Just as I was getting back in, I was running down a hill on a trail through the forest, pretending I was being chased by an evil leprechaun (that kind of visualization is surprisingly motivating to me when it’s nearly dark and I’m alone in the woods) when I twisted my ankle really badly and fell. Amusingly (even to me at the time), the first thing I did after I hit the ground was look up the trail to make sure that bastard leprechaun wasn’t still after me.

Then, 3 weeks later I was riding my sportbike (Triumph Daytona 600) at Thunderhill Raceway when I crashed midway through the day (on turn #2 for anyone that happens to know the track) at about 70 mph while cornering. I came out of it almost completely unharmed aside from needing my wrist in a cast for a few weeks, but my bike was totalled. I bought a new, faster bike after that (Yamaha R6 Raven) on the theory that if only I had been going faster I could have outrun the corner, but never regained my love of riding. I finally sold it last spring after the last person I had ridden with died while riding, and I doubt I’ll ever go back.

I only recovered enough from my running injury to go back to martial arts this fall, but haven’t done so yet, and am not sure I will. I took up mountain biking in the meantime though, which I love, and am considering yoga. I can’t help but feel like on the testosterone scale, sportbikes > mountain bikes and jiujitsu/kickboxing > yoga, thus, the big pansy self-accusation. Le sigh. :(

5. I cried at Voltaire’s tomb in the Panthéon in Paris. Voltaire is one of my heroes, and when I visited his tomb a few years ago all I could hear in my heads was a quote from Will Durant’s excellent book, “The Story of Philosophy.” I’m going to quote the passage here (no longer from memory, I’m sad to say) because it still manages to bring tears to my eyes.

When the old patriarch of letters went home that evening he was almost reconciled to death. He knew that he was exhausted now; that he had used to the full that wild and marvelous energy which nature had given to him perhaps more than to any man before him. He struggled as he felt life being torn from him; but death could defeat even Voltaire. The end came on May 30, 1778.

He was refused Christian burial in Paris; but his friends set him up grimly in a carriage, and got him out of the city by pretending that he was alive. At Scellieres they found a priest who understood that rules were not made for geniuses; and the body was buried in holy ground. In 1791 the National Assembly of the triumphant Revolution forced Louis XVI to recall Voltaire’s remains to the Panthéon. The dead ashes of the great flame that had been were escorted through Paris by a procession onf 100,000 men and women, while 600,000 flanked the streets. On the funeral car were the words: “He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.” On his tombstone only three words were necessary:

Here lies Voltaire.

I will tag Tony Walsh, Steven Davis, and Brian Green.