So Enough About You, Let's Talk About...

Me!

I got tagged by Adjunct Whore and Tim Lacy for this meme. The rules are that:

I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog (OK, I think Adjunct Whore forgot to do this, but I read her anyway so it was a nice surprise. I suspect I will forget to do this too, and thus demonstrate again how difficult it is for me to color within the lines.)

1. Because of birth order issues, and the very large family I got adopted into as a spouse, I have three nieces, five nephews, three great nieces, and nine great-nephews. You can see this family leans towards the Y-chromosome, which is OK, because for a girl, I kind of do too. Two of the nieces and all of the nephews are roughly age peers.

2. I was a college administrator when I was in graduate school and I got fired (by a really famous, as well as famously difficult, historian) for reasons I promised not to reveal in exchange for the university not contesting my unemployment claim. Let it never be said that I am not an honorable Radical when it comes to promise-keeping. So I went on the dole, thinking of it as a federally-funded dissertation fellowship for which I had made no application and that only required going to Chinatown every two weeks, standing in line and swearing up and down that I was looking for work. Which, in a more abstract sense, I was.

3. Back in 1981, I was at Studio 54, at a party being hosted by the New York Post, and a heavily made up man in a white suit and blue eyeshadow who was standing next to me tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and said, "Excuse me sir, but I need you to step away from me so an embarassing picture will not be taken by a tabloid." It was Tony Curtis.

4. My great aunt Harriet Potter, who was a librarian in Guilford before World War II when Connecticut was a very rural state, invented the book mobile.

5. I am a first generation American on one side of my family: my maternal family is Canadian.

6. I met my first shrink at a cocktail party.

7. About ten years ago, I realized that I have had mild attention deficit disorder all my life: I break all tasks, including reading and writing, into small manageble chunks that can be accomplished in fifteen minute bursts. I think I learned to do this in the tenth grade when I found myself sitting in front of chemistry problem sets unable to function. I realized, however, that if I did them one at a time over the course of about four hours of television and/or novel reading, I could get them all done to hand in on Monday. I think my father may have had a related brain glitch, as he did not really learn to read until the fourth grade, but then had a long, successful and highly educated life as a doctor.

8. If I had my life to live over again, and could pick a fantasy job, I would become a cop and solve incredibly difficult mysteries.

OK, who to tag up? We already know so much about Gayprof.....OK, I know he already got tagged, but let's go with Combat Philosopher, and add Lesboprof, Oso Raro, Notorious, Ph.D., Horace, Neophyte, aka Mouse, Clio Bluestocking, and Sisyphus.