Navel Gazing

With a feeling that can only be described as a mixture of pride and shame, I find that I have been tagged. Why pride? Because it means that someone - Julie specifically, cares enough to ask about my life here (or, in this case, five things about me based on my blog postings from the year).

But why shame? Well, because first of all, I should be attempting to be doing paid writing and I'm not. Second of all, because I've always found these self-identification quizzes, whether in Cosmo ("What kind of shallow are you?") or on the Internet ("What sort of geological formation are you") are a bit silly: I already know what sort of geological formation I am. I'm a Tippecanoe sequence. That somebody could reach an age where they can establish their own web-presence and not know which character in Star Wars they would be is frankly something I find quite disturbing. So, the shame comes both from going back on one of only three principles I had when starting this thing (the other two were "don't use it as a tool for procrastination" and "don't mention the wife's name: she didn't sign up to become the Internet star your sure-to-be-wildly-popular musings will make her.")

So, moving along, the five things. Julie has a bit of an advantage over me, in that she's been doing this for a while longer and therefore has a full year's worth of postings, and I only have three months. So much of this will have a Bollywood-esque "flashing back to the scene you just saw" quality to it.

1) I broke my arm. Technically, that was pre-blog, but I've mentioned it a couple of times here, so it counts. What I haven't mentioned in the blog that I'm pretty sure that I should be getting some sort of physical therapy, given I've lost a not inconsiderable amount of mobility. However, all of that was worth it for the chance to hear Amynah's Mom call me a stubborn ass for waiting two weeks to seek treatment.

2) Jon visited! So did Bio-Dave, but he was only here for a day. We went many places, including Basel , where I was blown away by the sight of twenty-thousand dollar watches and St Marie aux mines where we saw one deer, ate another and saw a bat which, much to its relief, looked considerably less appetizing.

3) Amynah turned a year older and we celebrated our first anniversary. Since my own birthday pre-dated the blog as well, I won't mention it here.

4)I was published twice in Toronto's National Newspaper which was pretty cool, except that I'm not sure whether to take their disturbingly light editing as an endorsement of my style or a sign that they weren't reading it closely enough to notice that I filled it with armpit and dog-poo jokes. In either case, the experience convinced me to revise my opinion on Perfume, the movie.

5) In addition to Grasse and Basel I've managed a lot of traveling in Alsace and the surrounding region, some of which gets written up here: places like Freiberg, Offenburg, Paris (pre-blog) Manchester, London and, as of tomorrow, Cologne. So, don't get excited if I don't post for a few days.

Now, I believe it is blogging etiquette to "tag" other people so they can fill out the quiz too. Problem is, I know no other bloggers except Julie, who tagged me in the first place, and that guy who juggled at my wedding who Julie already tagged. So, in desperation, I'm left with that nice lady who left a comment here the other day. It's either her or Paul Wells, and I doubt he reads this.