In order to remind myself of the wonder that is me, here's another list of 100 Things About Me: 1. I'm not a morning person. By any stretch of the imagination. I'm not really conscious for a half-hour after I wake up. Some people find watching me during that half-hour amusing. I don't find it amusing that they find it amusing. 2. Conversely, it doesn't matter how long I sleep, it matters what time I wake up. I can sleep 10 hours from 10pm-8am and still wake up not feeling rested, but if I sleep 7 hours from 4am-11am, I wake up feeling okay. 3. I will go far out of my way for my friends. I hardly ever say no when someone asks for a favor, and I sometimes don't even need to be asked in order to do something for someone, I'll do it preemptively. 4. I was born in Brooklyn, and so was my dad. I guess the accent is kind of ingrained in me genetically. Though friends say it only comes out when I'm really drunk or really pissed. 5. I'm not a huge fan of dressing up. I love wearing jeans. I look best in dark colors like black and blue, so I tend to wear them a lot. If I were a bazillionaire, I'd still dress like Steve Jobs. 6. There are a handful of cover songs that I actually prefer to the original version. But not many. And I have little respect for bands who have to redo someone else's song in order to get famous. 7. One summer when I was a kid, my parents signed me up for this summer reading contest at a local library. I was so intent on winning and getting it done that I read all these 300 page books by Isaac Asimov. I didn't understand them that much, but I retained enough of the information that I could regurgitate the information and get credit for reading them, and I won. 8. I try to read the newspaper every day, though I hardly ever get to it in the mornings anymore. I used to read it over breakfast, but I've stopped eating breakfast. 9. I'm firmly of the opinion that it should be socially acceptable for men to have some kind of handbag. Or they need to make carpenter's jeans more popular so we can have more pockets. Women get bags to carry all their crap, but all I can put in my pockets are my wallet and my keys. What about my cell phone and my sunglasses case? 10. I'm a huge fan of people with Australian, Irish or English accents. Women with those accents automatically gain attraction points in my book. 11. I'm very audio-oriented. I love listening to people speak if they have good voices. Sometimes I feel like just telling people, "Talk to me. I don't care what you say. I just like listening to the sound of your voice." 12. I'm also very smell-oriented. I like the smell of vanilla. I also like the "fresh" kind of smell when a room's been aired out -- I don't like musty smells. 13. When I sneeze, my wrists hurt. It's the oddest thing and I don't know why it happens, but it's also damn painful. 14. I'm usually warm. I hate being warm, it makes me uncomfortable. I prefer cooler environments. There's currently a war going on at work over how cold I can get the air conditioning vs. a couple of people who are always cold and want it warmer. We still haven't found that happy medium, but I've been roasting over the past few days. 15. Until I moved to Los Angeles seven months ago, I'd never spent more than 4 weeks at a time outside the states of New York, Connecticut or Massachusetts. That's not to say I haven't traveled. I've traveled a fair amount. 16. I drink a lot of water. 17. I use a lot of pop culture references in conversations. I quote a lot of movies. My friends have gotten to realize that, and it unfortunately backfires on me sometimes when I say something funny and they ask me what movie it's from and it's just something I came up with on the spot. Like I'm incapable of being spontaneously funny? 18. I have a bad habit of saying the lines along with the characters in scenes or movies I've seen too many times. I tend to have to watch these scenes or films by myself, otherwise I annoy the hell out of people. 19. I need freedom of travel. I get a little itchy when I need to rely on others for transportation, and I need to have the option to be able to just go someplace whenever I feel like it, even if it's just to the store to pick up a couple groceries. Making it to my 16th birthday to get my driver's license was one of the longest waits of my life. 20. I grew up on Diet Coke, so I'm used to it. I much prefer its taste to that of regular Coke. Many people tell me they think I'm strange when I say this. 21. It pisses me off when people mix up they're/their/there and its/it's. It's just laziness that they never put in the effort to reinforce in their minds which goes with which. My mom's a horrible speller and makes many spelling mistakes, but she always gets those right. 22. I've never broken any bones, nor have I gone to a hospital for any other reason than to say hi to my father. I should have gone when I had my recent episode of trying to break into my own apartment but I didn't know any better, so 2 1/2 months later, the scars are still there on my knuckles and my arm. They'll probably be there forever now. 23. I procrastinate terribly, but I always get everything done by my deadlines. 24. I will always wear glasses. I can't fathom the ability to be able to touch my eyeball trying to put contacts in and take them out. I'm very squeamish about and protective of my eyes. Although my vision's about 20/600, which means I see things clearly at 20 feet that others see clearly at 600 feet. I don't wear huge thick glasses though. 25. I'm also very squeamish about and protective of my ears. 26. I'm not a big fan of confrontations, and I get a sick feeling of dread in my stomach when I get called to the carpet on something. 27. I can't stand people who are overly cute and sweet to the point of saccharin. I need to be with real people who have a bit of dirt in their personalities. 28. I have a hard time discerning whether someone's being sarcastic or is kidding with me over IM or e-mail unless they use emoticons or some other telltale method. 29. I go through sushi phases. I go for weeks when I have to have it several times a week if not once a day, then I get sick of it and can't touch it for a couple of weeks. 30. The sweetest thing anyone's ever done for me was done by a woman I dated for two years. Ironically, she was also the one who made my life an annex of Hell for most of those two years. 31. Besides summer camp, I've only shared a room with someone for one year, and that was my freshman year of college when I had a roommate. Before then and after then, I've always had a bedroom of my own. 32. I really do listen to all kinds of music. A friend saw my CD collection for the first time and asked if a schizophrenic put it together for me. My music collection is my pride and joy. 33. I've gotten two speeding tickets, and they were within a few days of each other. One was in Ohio, where I was going 90 in a 65 zone but the cop ticketed me for going 84 and it cost me $65. The aggravating part was that two days later, I was stopped in Wyoming for doing 84 (again) in a 75 zone -- only 9 miles over the speed limit, and it cost me $90. 34. I have little respect for police officers given the extent to which I've seen them bend the law. Putting on their lights to make it through an intersection when the light has turned yellow or is red, intimidating someone into speeding by riding their bumper on a two-lane highway where the poor guy can't switch lanes and then pulling them over for speeding, that kind of thing. 35. I watched, but did not understand the mass appeal of, Cool Hand Luke. 36. I have a penchant for enjoying really dumb films, like BASEketball or UHF or Dude, Where's My Car?. That's not to say I don't like intelligent films as well. 37. I have an aversion to movie theatre popcorn. I worked in a movie theatre for a summer and one of my jobs every Tuesday was to make popcorn for the week. Now that I know how it's made, I can't eat it. 38. I firmly believe that Homer Simpson can sometimes unwittingly be one of the most brilliant people on the face of the Earth. 39. I'm usually either very early or around 2 minutes late when I'm supposed to show up somewhere at an appointed time. 40. I'm fairly neat, though I'm disorganized in an organized way. When I let things go to hell on my desk or in my room, it's in specific piles of messes. But that doesn't happen too often. 41. I'm a staunch Macintosh advocate. I hate Windows with a passion. 42. I'm a bit of a gadget freak. I've always maintained that I don't grow up, my toys just get more expensive. 43. I started off in college as a computer science major. But then I learned that I had absolutely no aptitude for coding, nor did I want to sit in front of a computer for 60 hours a week writing gibberish. So I switched to the Most Useless Major On the Planet -- Psychology. Then I graduated college and have had several jobs since that have nothing to do with Psychology. 44. I don't sit Indian-style. It's not comfortable for me anymore. I sit yoga-style with one leg on top of the other. And I do that while sitting in chairs too, especially at my desk. 45. I have no idea where I got my singing and acting talent. My parents are two of the most tone-deaf and non-acting-capable people in the world. 46. I learned how to drive stickshift because the vehicles that the radio station I worked for at the time were stickshifts. The station personnel wanted someone to be able to drive the trucks back from events, and I was always the designated driver because I wasn't 21 yet. So they taught me. 47. I can't draw worth a damn. I can sketch geometric shapes pretty well though. 48. Broccoli and cauliflower are two of my least favorite things in the entire world. I hate them. And snakes too. 49. I can read while riding in a car or on a train or on a bus. Many people ask me how I can do it without getting a headache. I don't know, I just can. 50. I often associate -- and get along well with -- people who are several years older than I am. 51. I've never dated a woman my own age. They've either been a couple of years younger than me or several years older than me. 52. I once dated a woman 10 years older than me. Most people don't believe me when I say that for some reason, and I have a real hangup about women who have a hangup about age being a factor in the people they date. Most people think I'm anywhere from 3 to 6 years older than I actually am when they meet me realtime. 53. Just once -- I want to front a rock band in a big venue and feel the glory of having a huge crowd scream for me. 54. I took French in school because the 8th grade French class got to go to Quebec for a weekend. In retrospect, taking Spanish would've come in a lot more handy and I wish I'd done that instead. 55. I have an old-school original Nintendo. It still works. And I can still beat Super Mario Brothers and Contra, and I still remember the codes to get the extra lives in Contra. 56. I tend to sleep on my side or on my stomach. I have problems falling asleep on my back. So it's hard for me to sleep in cars or on planes. 57. My first concert was Van Halen. 58. I have driven in New York City -- all five boroughs -- and Long Island and lived to tell about it. There are people I know who are scared to drive in New York. I don't consider this to be an extraordinary feat, though. 59. Over the course of my life, I've had two pet rabbits and a pet mouse. They were all very distinctive in personality. To those who say "ewwww" when I say that I had a pet mouse, you never met Lewis. He was damn cute and he was smart too. I still have a particularly soft spot for rabbits and want to get one as a pet again eventually, I just feel it would be unfair to a bunny if I got one now since I'm not home enough to pay it the attention it would need and that I would want to give it. 60. My mom convinced me one year when I was a kid, since my birthday is on the first day of winter, that if we skipped that day, we wouldn't have winter and she didn't want winter so we were skipping that day. 61. For a while, I had a distinct Canadian accent. I don't know where it came from. I've never spent more than a week at a time in Canada, and I've been there only a handful of times. 62. I've never been mugged. I am grateful for that. 63. In several of my jobs, we've used AOL Instant Messenger to communicate between co-workers. A few times, I've been in the middle of an IM conversation and just got up and walked over to the person to continue the conversation realtime because I didn't see the point in having a message go from my computer to a server in Virginia and back to a machine that was less than 10 feet away from my desk. 64. New York-style thin crust pizza is the way to go. I never understood this deep-dish, thick crust stuff. 65. Yes, I've been to band camp. I was in marching band during high school and we used to hold a week of "band camp" right before school started to learn some of the basics. But it was at the school itself, not at an actual camp. Then there was the year I was drum major of the band, and I went away to drum major training at UMass. 66. I seem to be the repository for e-mail spam, and I've been getting an inordinate number of wrong-number calls to both my cell phone and my work phone. Some of those calls are the "cell phone in the pocket/purse accidentally dialed your number and hit send" so I get five minute long messages on my voicemail of nothing. 67. I have several ideas for stories. But I always lose interest after I start writing them. It's one of the reasons why I like blogging, I can write short things. 68. Sometimes I have a really short attention span and am easily distracted, sometimes I can stay riveted to something for hours. I never considered the possibility that I had ADD, and I still won't. 69. I have to make a concerted effort to concentrate on a conversation or a person when there's music playing in the background. My mind automatically tunes into the music to try and figure it out. I've been in the middle of walking with someone and I'll hear a snippet of a song and I'll stop dead wherever I am (even if I'm in the middle of a sentence) while my mind says, "Let's figure out which song it is! It sounds familiar!" My friends find this amusing. 70. I really want to go see Australia and Italy. 71. I dropped acid once by accident. The tab was on a desk I sat at in high school, and it stuck to my hand when I brushed it, though I didn't notice it until I went to bite off a cuticle and it dropped into my mouth. I spit it out and saw what it was. The world became very two-dimensional for a while. 72. I have a Curious George. He's been everywhere with me, and I've had him since I was 1. He's old enough to vote, drive, drink... everything except collect Social Security. He's sitting on top of my desk looking down on me as I write this. 73. I've gone skydiving. I have the videotape to prove it. 74. My two favorite comics of all time are "Bloom County" and "Calvin & Hobbes." I love intelligent humor. 75. I grow hair really quickly. I need to get a haircut every 4-6 weeks. And I get 5 o'clock shadow around 2 in the afternoon. I can grow a full beard in a couple days. 76. I'm quite attracted to Irish women. Red hair and green eyes, or the "Black Irish" complexion of dark eyes and dark hair, is an instant turn-on for me. I like freckles too. 77. I lived in a dorm one year in college that had a really great dryer. It made the clothes quite warm and fuzzy. So a few times, when I did my laundry, I'd try on all the shirts and pants to feel the warmth and fuzziness before I folded up the clothes and put them away. 78. My typing has been clocked at around 100 words per minute. But that's when I'm really concentrating. I usually type around 75-80. 79. I know how to very easily open those little plastic bags they give you in the produce section of the supermarket. 80. I'm a road warrior. I love being behind the wheel. There's few things in this world that are better for me than to be out on the open road on a beautiful day with some good music. 81. Until last year, I'd never been to a strip club. Then I went to three in the space of about five months. That is what unemployment and having unemployed friends will do to a man. 82. I actually have seen one of the "Girls Gone Wild" videos. I didn't buy it. I was over a friend's place and a bunch of guys there insisted my friend put his roommate's copy in the VCR so they could watch it. I guess these white upper-class preppy boys considered it porn. 83. Because my parents are technologically inept, I've had to perform tech support for them over the phone many times, especially now that I'm 3000 miles away from them. They once called me right after I'd left for college to ask me how to program the VCR and I had to explain it to them long-distance. 84. I don't have any fears about flying, not even after 9/11. My only fear about travel is that the airline will lose my luggage. I don't get tense until I get off the plane at my destination. 85. My index fingers are curved. They noticeably bend in towards my other fingers. 86. My pen of choice is a Sanford Uni-ball micro with black ink. I keep a private stock so I can resupply my desks at work and home. I get pissed when people steal my pens at work, and more than once, I have hunted down the culprit and gotten my pen back. 87. I do imitations and several accents really well. I was at a Halloween party dressed up as an Indian (from India, not a Native America) and called myself "The Bhagwan From Brooklyn," and I spoke in an Indian accent all night. At one point, I dropped the accent for a minute and told the woman I was talking to, "I'm gonna get a drink, you want anything?" Her jaw dropped to the floor and she said, "Wait... what happened to the accent? Aren't you from India?" She was probably drunk though. 88. I'm allergic to cats. I like 'em a lot and they like me a lot too, but I can't be near them for more than a couple of minutes. 89. I can use chopsticks quite well. I couldn't at all for a long time, then I went to a place in New York's Chinatown where they didn't have silverware -- hell, they didn't even speak English that well at all and we were the only Caucasians in the entire place -- and suddenly, I could use chopsticks. 90. I sometimes believe that I'm the only person in the world who's noticed that Whoopi Goldberg doesn't have any eyebrows. 91. Every permanent residence I've lived in has been less than 10 miles from either the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean. 92. The lead singer from Unwritten Law once temporarily deafened me. I was standing in the alley in back of the Palace Theatre here in L.A. waiting for my friend to introduce the band and join us backstage when the group's lead singer ran up next to me and screamed into a megaphone. I wasn't so happy. 93. I like candles. 94. I don't normally allow people to take pictures of me. I don't like seeing myself on TV or in pictures, and I don't like listening to recordings of myself singing either. I don't know why. 95. If I ever start a band, I will call it "Evil Petting Zoo." And I've also come up with potential album titles: Songs To Have A.D.D. To and Treble Without A Cause. No, you can't use them. 96. I actually like Fresca. And I can still find it in my local supermarket. 97. Someone really did once find out that I'm Jewish and then ask me where my horns were. I was not so pleased. 98. When I send IMs to people, I don't use capital letters. 99. I was conceived in Guadalajara, Mexico. My parents lived there for 4 years. 100. It took me entirely too long to come up with 100 things about me for this list.