31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 21

Last night, I pulled this carrot:




...out of this bag of "Baby-Cut Carrots":

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 20

In Rhode Island, it is illegal to feed beer to a parrot unless you are consuming a comparable amount of beer yourself.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 19

On more than one occasion, I have had groups of people with a lot of cash successfully beg me to be the bank/house/dealer so they could play blackjack. This one comes with a moral: Don't do that. The house always wins, and this particular house will feel bad that she just took all your tip money within hours of you getting it. So bad she'll buy you breakfast at McDonald's and still go home with most of your money.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 18

My original middle name was "8." I used to use it, but then I was worried people would think I was copying Jennifer 8. Lee, which I totally was not.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 17

I once semi-accidentally convinced a former Mormon that it is common practice in the Congregational (UCC) church for a person to dress in a comma suit and do a special comma dance down the aisle.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 16

8 percent of women aged 35 to 45 cite Leif Garrett as their first celebrity crush.

.002 percent of women in the same age bracket cite Leif Ericson, which is just peculiar.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 15 (also a little late)

The last thing I plagiarized was a fifth grade paper on birds and flight. I'd procrastinated writing it and had to do it early the morning it was due. I didn't copy word-for-word out of the encyclopedia, but I did copy some concepts I didn't completely understand, without taking the time to actually understand them. I was caught when my parents, who asked to read the paper, were pretty sure I didn't know what "sinews" were.

Among the things I regret about that episode are that I made my parents explain the pitfalls of intellectual dishonesty while groggy and in bed and still drinking their first cup of coffee.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 14 (a little late)

The active ingredients in duct tape and Avon's Skin So Soft are the same.

31 Days of Secrets and Lies: Day 13

I listen to right-wing talk radio a lot, and by "a lot," I mean for several minutes nearly every day.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 12

I read five advice columns regularly. I really like one of them.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 11

Former child actor Quinn Cummings of The Goodbye Girl was actually twin very small adult women.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 10

I am at the point in my seriousness in bowling where I am employing sports psychology tactics to improve my game. I cannot decide how many of the following things this is indicative of (or how I feel about them):

• I am very driven and goal-oriented
• I used to date a sports management graduate student
• I am very competitive and bowl against better bowlers than myself
• I take bowling much too seriously
• I'll try anything once
• I've been spending a lot of time around new-agey health care practitioners

Unfortunately, though said tactics often work for a frame or two, I am still pretty much an average bowler.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 9

Given a choice between a glow stick, a lit lightbulb, and a small flame, most insects will choose the one closest to your ear.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 8

I used to dream in Bible stories. Old Testament, mostly.

See?

See how much better I am about posting when I have a theme, even posts that are not tied to the theme?

Yesterday, two people shared two stories with me about the town in which I now live.

There's this.

And also this.

You know, just another day in New Hampshire.

But I bowled a 161 last night.

(Seriously, that first story is very sad. But anyone who wants to engage me in discussion on the Free Staters? That may be what the comments here are for.)

31 Days of Secrets and Lies: Day 7

Someone's pregnant!

And it's not my sister anymore.

It's not me, either.

31 Days of Secrets and Lies: Day 6

If you click on every link in my blogrolls, take the first word of the most recent post (to this posting), and rearrange those words, you'll get a secret message from me!

31 Days of Secrets and Lies: Day 5

At the advice of webcomic xkcd's hovertext, I have tried to:

• go to any entry in Wikipedia,
• click on the first link that is neither italicized nor in parentheses in the main entry
• repeat

...and doing so, one does, in fact, get to "philosophy" eventually, most of the time.

The opposite

This is neither a secret nor a lie, but it felt like it needed saying: I am not a straight man posing as a queer woman for the sake of my blog.

Unlike some people.

Yes, people, plural.

31 Days of Secrets and Lies: Day 4

I had not heard of "The Book of Mormon" as a show until after it won a Tony, and so, when a Facebook friend posted "A Mormon just believes!" as her status while watching the Tony Awards, I Googled the phrase and found that it was from "The Book of Mormon." Which I naturally took to be the actual book, and took my friend to be a Mormon, and took the whole thing to be a little strange. I still do not know whether she is a Mormon.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 3

If you put chocolate and a marshmallow between two iPhones and engage the phones in an ongoing call for half an hour, you can create a very poorly conceived s'more.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 2

Tan M&Ms were pulled in 1995 when consumer groups expressed concern that the dye used contained excessive amounts of caffeine.

31 Days of Secrets & Lies: Day 1

The guy I stole this premise from was generally the person I was most interested in impressing intellectually for at least the first year of college, and occasionally still is.

Well, hey

So much for that experiment.

We'll try again with something new, starting smaller and more hilarious. Next post.

Sorry about the obscenely long break, again. It's been a nutso few months, chockablock full of stuff that I will and will not feel comfortable posting about. The job's crazy, I'm seeing a new chiropractor (professionally, not socially), I bowl a lot, I have a new nephew, I had a minor car accident. I don't know. Stuff. Life. You know, like we all have, and some of you still manage to blog around.

So, how've you been?