Since I’m posting bits from so many others for y’all to applaud or sneer at, I figure it’s only fair to put my own 25 up on the virtual dartboard:
1) When I was a little kid the only thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an astronaut. That never really changed.
2) But then I decided I’d be a physicist. Until a mercy “C” in freshman calculus. I’ve never really ever understood calculus. But I’ve never stopped being interested in science.
3) I can hum the melody and sing many of the words to Freddy the Freshman (from a 1932 Merrie Melodies cartoon) and Krakatoa Katie (from a 1945 Mighty Mouse cartoon) but as my wife will tell you, I usually can’t remember to pick up the dry cleaning. And yes, I did watch a lot of Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. And yes, the Cartoon Network is among my favorite cable channels today.
4) I never miss a real deadline. Artificial deadlines, not so much.
5) I’ve lived in Dallas for 21 years, but in my heart I still consider Miami to be “home.” Does anybody ever really feel completely at home in a place where they didn’t grow up?
6) When I was a kid, I watched two TV shows that prompted later actions: Sea Hunt, with Lloyd Bridges, was the more famous of the two. It was about scuba diving. The other show was Ripcord, which only lasted for two years. It featured skydivers. I was eventually certified in scuba. And a couple of years ago did a tandem parachute jump. Of the two, I find scuba much more satisfying.
7) My bosses and peers think I’m a very fast writer. The truth is that I generally do a lot of the writing in my head before I ever put my fingers on the keys. I often think of the scene from the movie Amadeus where Mozart is asked for the score of The Magic Flute. “Here. It’s all right here in my noodle. The rest is just scribbling. Scribbling and bibbling, bibbling and scribbling.” I’m no Mozart, but I know just what that’s like.
8) If I ever appear in Bartlett’s Quotations it will probably be for Weiss’s Law of Religious Relativism: “Every religion is crazy, by definition, to a nonbeliever. “ Meaning that those aspects of any religion that depend on faith seem nuts to someone who does not share that faith. Which is a POV that is often forgotten by a True Believer who assumes his perspective is inevitable. In a dozen years as a religion reporter, it was my most original locution, but I can hardly claim it as an original insight.
9) I would have liked to have been a food writer at some point in my career. But I’m allergic to pork (vertigo, among other unpleasantries) and I don’t drink any alcohol because I just don’t like the taste. I suppose, on reflection, that I could have worked for a Muslim publication. But those would be significant limits for a secular American food reporter.
10) I met my wife through a classified ad she put in the Dallas Observer on Valentine’s Day week, 1990. We were engaged at Week 10, married at Week 13.
11) The original page from the Observer, with her ad circled in red ink, is framed and on our dining room wall.
12) About three weeks after Marni and I met, I had an assignment to write about he then-current controversy about “cold fusion.” I turned it into a 1A love note to my new girlfriend. Here was the lede to the story: “A year after the first, incredible announcement, supporters of ‘cold fusion’ say the phenomenon is still like love: undeniably real and repeatable, but impossible to predict or explain.”
13) We were actually married twice, about six months apart. The first time by my dad, with six witnesses. The second time by a rabbi, with a party.
14) My first job at a newspaper was the worst job in journalism: Working 5:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, monitoring police scanners. But it was a fulltime job with The Miami Herald, my hometown paper.
15) My first byline was shared with Edna Buchanan, who later won a Pulitzer for beat reporting. She was the best crime reporter I’ve ever known.
16) My all-time favorite assignment was probably getting to visit Pete Seeger at his home in 2005 and enjoy his annual Strawberry Shortcake festival. I have his recipe for Strawberry Shortcake and it is wonderful.
17) A close second would be getting paid to watch the Space Shuttle Discovery take off in 1988—the first manned launch after the 1986 Challenger explosion.
18) For a mediocre guitarist like me, playing with a bunch of people is like an average cyclist getting to ride in a peloton.
19) In any group setting where questions are in order, I’m often the first one to ask something. Even my bosses know that.
20) I’m a foodie. I routinely make pizza, pie dough, pasta sauces, applesauce from scratch. And I slow-grill chicken, lamb, London broil beef. I’ve tried cooking goat and rabbit.
21) I wooed Marni with homemade waffles.
22) I’m a cyborg. Seriously.
23) In my youth I swore that wherever I ended up living would have either an ocean or mountains. I’ve lived in Dallas for 21 years, now.
24) My mother and my wife say I know everything. Mom says it with admiration, Marni not so much…1:-{)>
25) I am Thingmeister Jeffrey of BestRandomThings.com.
