Naomi ([info]naomikritzer) wrote,
@ 2005-02-20 14:05:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend  Next Entry
MeMeMe
Gacked from John Scalzi (who got it from LiveJournal). Ten things I've done that you probably haven't.

1. Birthed a baby while hallucinating.

2. Ditched my high school prom (with my date) to go to a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. In costume. As Brad and Janet. Brad and Janet after.

3. Climbed over a recumbant water buffalo in order to get outside to pee.

4. Watched the sun rise over the Himalayas.

5. Gotten shot in the leg with a pellet gun.

6. Watched a goat get sacrificed. Then, later that same day, eaten sacrificial goat.

7. Written a novel while being a stay-at-home parent to a new baby and a three-year-old.

8. Gone to China for dinner.

9. Learned to count to ten in Bangladeshi, in a class where I was allegedly learning French.

10. Had a house call from a doctor.

If anyone wants to know the details, circumstances, or story behind any of these, feel free to ask. (Mine aren't nearly as interesting as some I've seen. John Scalzi was a freaking guest on Oprah, for crying out loud. He got to go make fun of the stupid women who wrote The Rules.)

(4 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]porphyrin
2005-02-20 10:20 pm UTC (link)
1. Which was worse, the hallucination or the hives?

And I want to know the stories behind 3,5,8, etc. All of them, really.

(Unrelated: we toured the Longfellow/Seward area with a realtor. You live in a *wonderful* neighborhood.)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]naomikritzer
2005-02-21 02:15 am UTC (link)
The hives were worse. The hallucinations only lasted for a few hours and were mostly non-threatening and interesting. (They were the result of a dose of Ambien -- a medication I will not be taking again.)

And I totally agree about my neighborhood. It's a really great place to live.

The stories behind the ones you asked about:

#3 -- When I was a junior in college, I spent a semester in Nepal. We had a two-week homestay in a rural village, and I slept in a room in the upstairs of the barn. Three water buffalo lived in the downstairs part. Unfortunately, I usually have to get up and pee at some point during the night. This meant descending the stairs with my flashlight (or once, when my batteries died on me, by the light of my bic lighter) and going out through the barn. If the water buffalo were awake, I'd slap the one by the door on its ass and it would move out of my way. If they'd gone to sleep and were lying down, though, they wouldn't move, so I'd just climb over. It didn't seem to phase the animal in the least. There wasn't an outhouse, I'd just step away from the barn a little bit and squat.

I'll be back later with the others.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]naomikritzer
2005-02-22 04:50 am UTC (link)
#8 is quick enough to explain. Ed and I went to Hong Kong in 1997, a few months before the handover. We have a friend who was living there (he lives in Atlanta now) and invited us to stay with him, making it a much more affordable trip. It would have been expensive to do a real trip to China on that trip (and I didn't really have the vacation days) but we did decide to go up to Shenzhen just for an evening. Our friend got a restaurant recommendation, we took the train up, crossed the border (which was a pain in the ass in a "oh look, a Communist bureaucracy, what fun!" kind of way) and went to dinner. It was an amazing meal -- so good that if it had been earlier in the week, despite it being an hour train ride followed by dealing with a Communist bureaucracy, we'd have done it again, just for another one of those dinners. ::nostalgic sigh:: I can't remember what we ate, just that it was all amazingly good. The tea was very distinctive -- it looked like flower petals or potpourri or something. I asked at TeaSource once whether they had it, and described it. The owner's eyes lit up and he said, "Oh, I know just what that was. It was Twelve Treasures tea, and I've been trying for years to get my hands on some."

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]naomikritzer
2005-02-22 06:41 am UTC (link)
#5 happened while I was living in England. When I was 13, my family spent a year living in London; I attended school there. The only school in my district with space for a new student was kind of rough. Partway through the year a kid enrolled who was a fairly hard-core juvenile delinquent. He brought a pellet gun to school his first day and shot me with it. I think he fired at random into a group of girls, assuming that (a) whoever he hit would tell the other students that she'd been hit, and (b) word would spread, thus establishing him as Chief Badass of a fairly badass school.

His strategy backfired when I told my mother. (After school. I didn't tell any of the adults at the school that day.) She called the Headmaster and the boy was expelled that evening.

The administrators promised that they would keep it confidential that it was me who told. (Though everyone knew it was me who got shot, so, well...) Anyway, my Head of Year (sort of the Brit version of a grade principal) blabbed it to my entire homeroom class. Some adults are just....idiots. I don't know what she was thinking. Fortunately, I went off on an exchange program for two weeks just a couple of days later, and when I got back, everyone seemed to have forgotten about it. The badass kids I was most afraid of were presumably glad to have Potential Challenger for Chief Badass removed. I found out years afterwards that my best friend, Melanie, had gone to the Resident Chief Badass and told him not to make anything of it. Melanie was taller than any of the boys and something of a badass herself. (And her father worked as a bouncer at a bar.) So nothing came of it.

I'm still friends with Melanie; she now works for the Times of London and has been phenomenally successful at everything she's done.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(4 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…