Post 3 potentially surprising admissions about yourself or heretofore unmentioned bits of personal arcana.

2. At age 11, I sang the boy soprano solo in Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC

3. When I took the AP English test in high school and scored a 5 (highest possible), one of my essays was actually based on the movie Passage to India rather than the book (which I had not read).

ps I was also afraid of sex for quite a while.

1. When I was about seven or so, I killed, ate and tanned the hide of a big brown snake. Although I recall the event fondly, there is a part of me that feels very cruel because of it. Also, I am now a vegetarian, so that might be part of it.

2. I know far too much about Australian native fruits and veg and edible weeds in general. I have scouted for and eaten stinging nettles and coffee made from the roasted root of a thistle. I could live off the land for quite some time if I had to I think.

3. I pissed my pants in the first year of highschool because we were sent on a 20km walkathon with no fucking portaloos. Oh, yes there were drinks to quench our thirst, but no where to get rid of it later. Fucking arseholes.

I think my Dad has a vhs of a dress rehearsal somewhere. My parents are both singers but I never liked singing. I do remember getting horny over the girls I sang in youth choir with though -- it was in this desperate sort of way because there were only a couple my age, and they weren't even *that* cute, especially in the white turtlenecks they had to wear.

At one point in college, when I went through a very anxious/depressed period and started to wonder if something was wrong with me, I had a brief "maybe this means I'm gay," phase, and I actually started corresponding with a guy who had written a story for McSweeney's that involved homosexuality, and asking him questions.

2) I was on my high school's "Comedy Sportz" team with Nick Swardson, who has been on Comedy Central a few times (they show a standup show of his every so often, and he's the rollerskating hustler on "Reno 911"). That's probably not much of a surprise, as I've mentioned that a couple times on ILx already. The fucked-up thing is that when Central's team went to the state "Comedy Sportz" finals -- think "Whose Line is it Anyway"-style improv -- I contributed significantly to our crushing loss. The rules state that if you do anything that causes the audience to groan, the team has to stage an apology, and if a team member does anything particularly inappropriate or in bad taste, they get "brown bagged" -- namely they have to wear a bag over their head. I forget the nature of the scene, but one of the team members put on a blonde wig and some fake boobs and started doing something desperate and hazardous, and my reply to this was something lame like "Dolly Parton! No! You have so much to live for!" This got a groan out of the audience, so after our bit we had to stage an apology. My brilliant idea was me to sing Nirvana's "All Apologies", which would conclude with me pantomiming shooting myself. That resulted in the brown bag, and the ensuing defeat. The kicker is, I didn't even do it accurately -- I pantomimed a pistol to the temple.

3) The first time pop music ever got me in trouble was when I was in grade school -- 4th grade, I think -- and the subject was transportation. When called upon to mention an example of transportation, my reply was "Little Red Corvette". This got me a time-out.

#1 is k-rad, nate.

also:

3c. I used to have a (presexual) hard-on for girls who wore bunny-sweaters with pom-pom tails, ESPECIALLY if they were irish. these were tremendously en vogue in massachusetts in the mid '80s, and i was indulged frequently. then i switched schools (twice) and when I ended-up in providence I was pretty disappointed at the lack of tacky sweaters.

1. I am a certified open water scuba diver. I got the certification in preparation for a high school biology course where we were offered the chance to study for a couple of weeks at a marine biology university in Jamaica. Unfortunately, I haven't been scuba diving since.

2. When I was 11, my uncle (who was involved in acting) got me an appointment with a casting director who was casting for a K3vin B4c0n movie about kids at a summer camp (I had no acting aspirations, but my family and I figured it was worth a shot. And why not?). They were impressed with me and asked me to come back for a second audition.

Then the funding for the movie fell through and it was never made.

None of my school friends believed a word of this story.

Conclusion: incredibly, this puts me two degrees of separation from K3vin B4c0n.

3. My grandparents used to have a place in Miami, and we vacationed there from the time we were babies. I was a very active child and the seniors there used to fight over who got to watch over me.

There's one really cute picture of me, in a swimming pool, in the arms of a man who was in my grandparents' circle of friends.

Twenty minutes after that picture was taken, the man was dead. After posing for the pic, he left the pool, got dressed, walked a few blocks to the butcher shop, had a heart attack and died instantly.

wait, is it one degree?

the connection is me -> casting director -> KB

2.I was nearly murdered by my mom's second husband when I was 3.. he tried to drown me very slowly. I was rescued only because a friend of my grandmother's walked by, saw what was happening, and then called the police. This man had also talked about wanting to replace my blood with his. My family has been very very quiet about talking about him to me this day.. He and my mom never got formally divorced... separated at most. She still has his last name to this day -- the guy who tried to kill me when I was 3... like it's some deep dark secret that no one dare mention. Very Stephen King element in my life.

3.Reposted from the Ally = Valley! thread and also from the claims to embarrassing and minor fame stories thread:
(stretches out them old, weary, typed-out knuckles for ol' storytime...)

Allrightie, back in 1982 or 1983, my folks thought it would be "really cute" if I went on a game show. Being a fan of game shows at the time, I was quite excited. And living in westside Los Angeles, there were plenty of easily driveable opportunities to do just that. Unfortunately, there was only room for a taping of a pilot of a rehash of "The Dating Game". At that point, I became more apprehensive, but my folks goaded me into doing it, saying "Oh, come on! Didn't you always want to be in TV?"...

Don't ask me why, but given the scarce amount of participants, I somehow made it past the screening processes, being shy and socially inept for an 11-year-old and all. Fast forward to day of taping, skipping all the silly details in between..

Taping happens, blah blah. It's looking pretty obvious that Bachelor #2 (me) was obviously cast as the token "dork" bachelor, as the wishy- washiness of my answers would make Charlie Brown seem like Mr. T.

Anyway, the bachelorette. Oh yes, the wonderful little prissy princess that was the bachelorette. Keep in mind -- valley girl has struck it BIG in America as a big trend -- so out comes our little Tarzana sweetheart... introduction is made, etc. etc. etc.

Her name: Tunia Flambe.

Yes. Pronounced "Toonya Flambay"... Single hair clip, glittery shoes, fake gum chewing maneuvers and all... but with a disingenuous Tina Yothers quality to her.

I refuse to go into detail on what may still possibly be the most embarrassing moment of my life, but I do remember one of her questions to Le Bachelors: "Ok, so like we're going out getting ice cream.. and, like, this BIG DUDE, like, comes and threatens to steal me away and make me his.. would you, like,.. fight for me?"

Well, obviously, I didn't win.. that, ahem, lucky honor went to the Jason Hervey/Jason Batemen/Ricky Schroeder wannaba guy to my left. But of course, what's the staple consolation on any episode of "The Dating Game"? Right, you have to walk over, have some announcer guy bellow out a cheap 17-word bio on you, you walk over and hug the bachelorette.

Well I did that. Except that the hug was obviously too ambitious, as she slightly jerked, quickly whipped her hair back, and made a little "I'm annoyed" breathing sound, followed by "like... my hair."

The pilot never made it to TV. The next version (that would have Jeff MacGregor as the host) would actually become popular, but not mine.. which is easily the best thing to result from all of this.

That would end my fascination with valley girls for a long time to come -- until I'd realize, years later, that Moon Unit Zappa was still a cutie.

2. I won $4,600.00 on blink-and-you-missed-it VH1 game show, "Name that Video." I missed the grand prize due to my failure to recognize an REO Speedwagon video.

3. I'm missing part of my left eyelid, I have two pencil points permanently embedded in my person (face and thigh), I have a deviated septum and I suffer from the following largely insignificant maladies: Tinnitus, Benign Positional Vertigo and Oral Allergy Syndrome.

1. when i was 13, a "friend of mine" sucker punched me and knocked out my five front teeth. i had only recently gotten my braces put on and my teeth were loose from all the adjustments. they popped right out, but were dangling there from the wire (sorry for the graphic nature of the story). they put them back in (i still have all my teeth, except for the front left one which broke when i was young and is capped). i had to get 5 rootcanals. the punch resulted in me not being able to fix my underbite and when i was 19 i had to get jaw surgery. i now have a plate in my upper jaw, three screws in my chin and one in each side of my jaw. you can see them with xrays, but they don't make the airport buzzer go off.

2. when i was also in jr high, i worked at a flower shop where my mom worked. i pretty much did a lot of sweeping and cleaning. there were two girls that worked there with me, both a year older than i. we used to stay later than all the rest of the staff and they'd be really flirty and let me put my hands on their breasts. one time one of them told me to go into the bathroom with her, pulled down my pants, got on her knees, started laughing and ran out to laugh with her friend.

3. similar to kate's story, i was on a bus with my entire highschool, going to some camping trip and had to pee like a racehorse, but they wouldn't let us off. i was sitting next to a girl that i wasn't really close to, pulled a pillow over my lap and peed into a snapple bottle. i don't think she appreciated it, nor did her friends who later looked at me with disgust. when you gotta go, you gotta go.

2. I once got punched in the nose for no reason by a drunken brit

3. I had a polygraph examination yesterday

HOTT!

When I was 12 one of my parents went apeshit and bent back my thumb until it broke, resulting in me wearing a cast for a month. Now I can crack that knuckle at will. I also had 2 other fingers broken by other family members, 1 on purpose and 1 by accident.

I enjoy scavenging for valuables, I'm currently surfing net on a really nice computer with a 19" monitor worth a few hundred that came from the trash. It was thrown out because of a virus. I wiped the hard drive and installed a new OS and it works perfectly.

Well, I've no idea where or how I developed it, but I suffer from intensely violent allergy attacks in the Spring and Fall of the sneezing/sinus blitzkrieg/eyes-as-fawcets variety. I'm also allergic to apples, pears, peaches, plums, strawberries, beets and almonds (so far....there may be other things as well). After the birth of our daughter, I went to an allergist to get to the bottom of it (and see if there's any chance that our daughter might avoid the same fate). Apparently, she has a fifty percent chance of having allergies as intense as mine (my wife, conversely, has no allergies that she's aware of). The are treatments for it, but they involve --- literally -- and injection in the arm every week for two years (or something ridiculous like that), and I'm not interested in that. Gimme some kleenex and skip the fruit tray and I'll be fine.

2. I ran track and cross country in junior high. I was at the regional championship meet and I had the sudden urge to shit before the race started. I was sitting on the toilet, unable to acutally go because the stalls had no doors and I had stage fright, when the final call for the race was announced. So I pulled up my pants and ran down to the starting line, my shit basically sitting on deck at my anus. I tried to hold it in, I really did, but I was so exhausted from the run that I couldn't hold it anymore and shat my pants with maybe .25 or .50 miles to go. Luckily I was wearing short spandex type things under my shorts, so nothing fell out. My parents helped me clean up. Brave people.

3. When I was in elementary school: one day I was at home and had watched the episode of the Cosby Show where Theo gets a bag of gag gifts called "Bag O' Gags." This somehow inspired me to come up with "Bag O' Poop." So I got a paper bag, shat into it, wrote "Bag O' Poop" on it, and dropped it over the wall into my neighbor's yard. I never heard anything about it after that.

2. I was cured of this when my parents bought me an Atari and I played Space Invaders for two weeks straight. No more motor coordination problems after that.

3. When I was 13 or 14, I attended a short playwriting-for-kids workshop and impressed the teacher enough that she asked me if I'd be her assistant director on an "experimental" production of Alice in Wonderland she was doing at a local community theater. This turned out to be a very bad idea for her--I really had no aptitude for it--and it was a sort of cursed production--one of the actors died unexpectedly after we'd been rehearsing for a few weeks, and was replaced by her identical twin sister, which freaked everyone out.

2. when i walk or hike for over 15 minutes, my thighs start itching unbearably and i have to stop. i have no idea what this is about.

3. then there's my infamous band drama. i was in a huge fight with a bandmate and her boyfriend over dumb stuff that ultimately seemed to me to be about control. i became irrationally afraid of them. i feared going back to my house in case they left messages for me (her yelling, him mumbling passive-aggressively), i feared leaving in case i ran into them. i started going to therapists since my reaction was so irrational. they were all i could think/worry/talk about for weeks (months?). then i got a call at work. someone told me he killed himself with a knife in her house. and i shook with shock but wasn't actually surprised. i felt kinda relieved. maybe even more than kinda. which i guess is fucked up. but so was he. no hard feelings now. r.i.p.

2. My right ear has a worse hearing than my left. This could be fixed with an operation, but I haven't done anything about it yet because I'm afraid of operations.

3. My biggest turn-on is tummies, especially round ones. I've never had sex with a really skinny girl, and I'm not sure whether I'd enjoy it as much.

5. Among my closest friends, I've French kissed at least 4 of them, in a non-jokey manner.

Donut Christ - Blimey! Its a fucking miracle you've made it this far.

2. My phobias are: jellyfish, needles (incl. seeing girls put earrings in), heights, the phone ringing late at night, and balloons.

3. My second cousin was briefly notorious for accidentally leaving top-secret naval plans on a canal towpath.

1) I have a barely-noticeable scar on my forehead, from a car crash at the age of 10 (I wasn't driving myself). Although it's barely noticeable now, the compensation money was what got me through university.

2) My most "wow!" moment with wild animals was when a country fox, stalking its prey, crept up to within a couple of metres of me without spotting me. At the time I was standing in a wood, masturbating.

3) If you total up all my sexual partners, it comes to exactly 50% male, 50% female.

4) When I was 3, I could read well enough to be able to take a newspaper, find the TV listings and see what was on the telly, or find out when my favourite shows were on.

2. my grandmother is from new delhi. american parents, but she lived there for a good chunk of her life and so i grew up with a grandma with a bastardized sort of north indian roots and influences. i'm hungry now.

3. first record at age 7: night ranger "midnight madness" $7 at camelot music in the mall. (it was that, billy idol, purple rain, or duran duran.)

4. first grown-up book: moby dick... i was glutton for punishment. i seem to recall my parents giving us $1 for each book we read. and for some completely loony reason, i chose the monster large moby dick. i must have run out of other books. come to think of it, i don't think i ever got the money. my parents probably didn't realize that i would just go and start reading like a lunatic. "oh, watch him read a book or two a month. it'll be great!" 70 or 80 books later... "ah, we're gonna spend that money on new sneakers."

Well... it really isn't a big secret if ya think about it... plus, a the myth she's trying to spread that she is an understanding woman ... my position is this: just because you are into kissing rock star ass does not mean you're a kind person... all it means to me is that you kiss ass...

2. For all three years when I was in Junior High School, I had a chronic immune disorder that caused me to miss at least 50 days of school a year, and only attend class till noon the rest of the days. Usually I would go to school and the teacher would ask if anyone was absent and someone would say "Laura" even though I was sitting right there. The disease inexplicably and completely disappeared before I entered 9th grade.

3. I have been offered money for sex/sex-related acts on three distinct occasions in two foreign countries.

4. I have only loved two men in my life, and they had the exact same birthday.

2. I once shat myself after doing too much acid and subsequently spent two hours in a cold bath with Ice Cube's "Call up my homies and I'm aksing y'all/What court are y'all playing basketball?" going round and round in my head in a locked groove.

3. My first marriage is a testament to the amount of drinking I was doing at the time.

Ha ha ha ha. Ew no, though -- that'd mean I'd actually have to be, y'know, Meredith Ostrom. *shudders* Nonononono -- that'd be twenty billion different shades of wrong. (Besides, I'm not quite blonde or heiress-y enough to be hooked up with the Rhodester.)

that's awesome!

:) The whole family, regardless of ideology (*ahemthiswouldbebackwhenIwasstillafull-onRepub*), cheered him and his colleagues on because we were uneasy with the redistricting efforts, and because, hey, one of those guys was a relative of ours!

I have only loved two men in my life, and they had the exact same birthday.

Whoa. Freaky coincidence, Laura.

(Shuffling back to bed now....)

i was attracted to a female friend in college. i was confused by that, since i hadn't been attracted to a woman before. and nobody since.

i was on japanese tv once.

i have this weird compulsion to rub and poke at my eyes a lot. i hate it, but have trouble kicking the habit.

When I was 16 I was knocked off my bike by a car. Happily it was in a caravan site so the car was only doing about 5mph! I walked away with nary a scratch.

I have never said so much as "shit" in front of my mum. I think "crap" is the most vulgar I get with her. She used to scold me for saying "oh my god". Heh.

2. I get nosebleeds way too often, usually about once a week, unless I'm having my period or in a new climate, in which case I have them daily. I have no idea why this is but I'm pretty used to it.

3. I've mentioned this, but I've interviewed Kevin Bacon in person, making you all one degree away.

1. I am sure I cannot have a serious romantic relationship with a PC (as opposed to Mac) user. This is a very zen state of affairs, that does make sense if you think about it enough.

2. Although I am generally accepting of all races/cultures etc. I have developed a prejudice against immigrant Russian women. This comes from being the victim of Russian car insurance scams and dealing with Russian immigrant mail-order bride types. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.

3. I played Nurse Ratched in my high school's production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I know his dad!

sundar: I'm fairly confident that you play more often than I ever did--I never had that problem, my calluses gave out before my joints ever did.

milli vanilli?

2.) When I was twelve or thirteen, I wrote a really cool story about a police car going off of the side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Unfortunately, the story was interspersed with a really awful "erotic" story that I also composed. I eventually took the stories out to these rocks behind my house, stuck them into a paper milk carton, and set the whole thing on fire.

I really wish that I still had that police car story.

3.) I swear to God that I saw a website that predicted the September 11th attacks. Not in the vague Nostradamus way, but in a "planes will attack Manhatten's skyscrapers" kind of way. I tried to find the site again that very night, but it had been removed.

I'm sure you can't tell from my posts.

More of these, please.

2)My favourite holiday was an impossibly idyllic two weeks in a narrow-boat, travelling around Worcestershire and the West Midlands. The glorious weather, the locks, the weightless pace at which we drifted down the unending canals...it was both a holiday and a glimpse of that ungraspable eternity of motionlessness.

3) I used to be a mad keen ornithologist, and would go to nature reserves with my dad and brothers, binoculars in one hand, bird ID book in the other, and pick up tips from more seasoned 'twitchers'. Whenever I saw a new bird for the first time I would add it to my 'checklist', and would eagerly talk about my findings in school the next Monday. Of course, I grew up and discovered sport'n'music, but I KNOW that one day, one fine day, I shall return to birdwatching. I've still got the knack; I can still recognise almost anything someone points out to me in passing. When I was young, I thought it was all about the competitive spirit, sighting as many new birds as I could, but I now know that the real reason I loved it was the sheer joy of placing oneself within the entirely natural context of such wild, untamed creatures. I was there, with the birds, and, briefly, no mortal thought could interrupt my rapture.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), November 9th, 2005 2:09 PM. (jaymc)

haha!

2) My Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother feeds a bunch of mangy black strays on her back porch. Last year one gave birth to a litter of kittens and she took the litter and buried them alive in her back yard. I haven't been able to look at or treat her the same since.

3) At the end of seventh grade, my friend's hippie parents let us torch all of our school stuff on their gas grill. We were squirting lighter fluid out of the can and burning those synthetic-nylon zip-up binders and all kinds of unhealthy shit. I can't believe no one called the cops or fire department on us.

2) jfk, jr. (john-john) once threw me a touchdown pass in a lunchtime touch football game (we worked together)

3) a very sweet uma thurman once engaged me in conversation at a party but i was so drunk i mumbled something and slinked away :(

1. I use Pampers moist wipes on my adult ass
2. my favorite key is F#minor
3. there are 5 pumpkins in my kitchen right now

2) when I was 19 I thought it would be incredibly stylish of me to have most of my shoulder length hair cut to about an inch short, leaving 3 or 4 unevenly placed long strands, then I dyed half my hair green and the other half pink, straight down the middle. To tell the truth, I still think it was quite stylish, though it's short and green nowadays.

3) My mum is a creationist (possibly the only one outside of America) and my dad thinks the Da Vinci Code is real. Religious discussion in my house is fun fun fun!

4) (Adding a fourth seeing as everyone else seems to be putting near-death ones in.) When I was 12 I got pneumonia and nearly died, I stopped breathing completely at one point. Then all my hair fell out, which I was quite happy about as I'd always wanted really short hair but my parents wouldn't let me cut it as short as I wanted.

2. My first two crushes were on Christopher Reeve (as Superman) and Michael Jackson.

3. My family had a pet parakeet named Penny briefly when I was growing up. We didn't go out and buy her; she was very tame and landed on a hot dog my brother was eating when we were at a private beach we belonged to. That bird was probably some other person's lost pet.

Thats called sleep paralysis; it is terrifying, and quite common. I suspect the drinking is fuckin' with your REMsleep, and that can trigger an attack of paralysis off. Horrid thing to happen.

1. When I was around six or seven I did something wrong and was punished by being sent to my bedroom. I hollered downstairs to my dad a few times about having to go to the bathroom but was told not to leave. I opened my window, which was over the front porch, about the same time my friend, the neighbor girl, came over and was ringing the doorbell asking if I could come out and play. I began pissing through the screen as my mother opened the front door, shocking both of them (though, probably, less my friend).

2. A few (probably four) years later, in a different neighborhood, my friend and I coerced a girl from our neighborhood to 'join our club', which, of course, we had just made up. Expectedly, the terms were for her to show us her vagina. She told her friend, who told her mother, and just after we had cleared up dinner the doorbell rang and the girl and both sets of parents were (though not my accomplice) had arrived for a chat.

3. I haven't had a signifigant (i.e. lengthy, committed, girlfriendy) relationship with a woman who lives within 45 minutes of me.

2. when I was four or so, my foot got caught in the spokes of the back wheel of te bicycle my mother was riding along on. foot was FUCKED UP BAD. I'm OK now though.

3. I can pat head and rub stomach at the same time!

Mine too! Awesome.

2) i've been misquoted by the grauniad

3) i've been in two bands (for about 5 mins each time) with "k3l3" from bl0c p4rty

1. most of my hats are alive
2. i spoon a live rattlesnake in bed
3. i recently hacked into ilx as an admin and upped everyone's SB rating by 1. so the next time someone gets 51ed, it was my fault, and i'd do it again

1. A former Prime Minister of New Zealand once bought me a pint, tho I was unaware of his identity at the time.

Flight of the Conchords lol

xpost early lyrics for "Who do you love?"