A week ago I finally participated in the eight random things meme, but of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone— I actually posted nine things, one of which was a lie. I received many comments and e-mails with your guesses as to which one wasn’t true, and I was amused and bemused both by which ones you chose, and the reasoning behind your choices. In any case, here’s the real truth.

• I like to give everything a fair chance to impress me; subsequently I find it impossible to have favourite things, like a favourite colour or musician or food. True. Just ask Emirhan how frustrating it can be to get a preference out of me.
• Probably my most serious hobby is language study and linguistics. True. In fact, I have a couple of language-related projects going on as we speak.
• I’m the most flexible person I know. I can do all those freaky things like lying on my stomach and bringing my feet over my back to touch my ears. True. No, I won’t post the video on YouTube, you just have to take my word for it.
• I talk funny. People expect me to sound American but I just don’t. True. I got an intense amount of crap about this in university from people whose lives are apparently so devoid of actual content that they have to make fun of others in order to keep busy. Yes, you would have thought people would have grown out of that sort of nonsense after middle school, but no.
• Many years ago I was a professional opera singer. True. I was shocked and amazed at how many of you thought this was the lie, especially after I had just spent several paragraphs droning on and on about how I’d been a classically trained musician since the age of eight and classical music had been my whole life and I’d gone on to open a music school teaching, amongst other things, voice and vocal coaching. So why on earth would any of that make you think that opera was such an unlikely path for me to follow? Opera seems like a pretty obvious path to me, but you guys didn’t think so. The great majority of you thought this was the lie, but of course it wasn’t. I was an opera singer for many years.
• Up until about a year ago I couldn’t cook anything at all. I have no natural ability whatsoever in the kitchen. True. Just ask Emirhan, who has had to deal with my learning curve. One of my friends from high school thought she remembered me saying I cooked in high school, but as I pointed out in the comments, she has me confused with my mother, who is an excellent cook and whose cooking I talk about frequently.
• I grew up in one of the hottest hotspots in the United States for alien sightings and abductions, San Antonio’s Olmos Basin. True. Best-selling author Whitley Strieber, who pretty much wrecked his writing career by coming out as an abductee, is probably the most famous of the Basin abductees, but more sightings and abductions are reported from the Olmos Basin every year than from any other area in the United States except for upstate New York. And yes, I used to wander around out there alone at night, and the anecdote about getting scared by a black Lab is absolutely true.
• I find politics mind-numbing and soul-destroying, and I can’t spend more than about thirty seconds listening to political talk before I want to slit my wrists. True. In general I despise arguing, and it amazes me that if you read history books, you learn that (technology notwithstanding) politicians are pretty much still arguing about exactly the same stuff as they’ve been arguing about for hundreds of years, and yet even though it’s obvious they’ll never agree on anything, they still continue to argue until they’re blue in the face. That sort of useless talking in circles drives me crazy, and I won’t have anything to do with it.

So, that means…

• Soon after I dropped out of university I joined the armed forces in a moment of desperation about what I would do with my life. The army didn’t work out for me and I got a dishonorable discharge for reasons I can’t go into. False. My dad was in the military and he and my stepmother thought it would be a great career for me, but I knew better. But my avoiding the army had nothing to do with my hatred of politics— one of you suggested that politics and patriotism and military service go hand in hand in America, but as someone who grew up in a military town (San Antonio has several military bases), I can tell you that’s not the case, at least where I lived. Sure, there were some people I knew who deliberately made a career out of the army, but most of the people I knew who signed up did so because they’d finished high school, weren’t planning on going to college, and had no clue what to do with their lives and wanted someone else to make the decisions. Thankfully, although I also had no clue, I didn’t sign up.

So there you have it.