Paul, at The Struggling Writer, posted this meme, and since I’ve been struggling with weblog inspiration lately, I figured I’d have a go at it as well.

1. What were you doing 10 years ago?

This time of the year, ten years ago, I was graduating from grade ten. As it’s currently 11:00pm right now, I was probably wasting away with some friends in Denny’s, drinking coffee, and whining about having to get up in the morning for my soccer match.

2. 5 things on your to-do list for tomorrow

1. Clean the apartment.
2. Try to recover from my face-mutilating sunburn.
3. Donate some old clothes.
4. Visit the farmer’s market.
5. Finish the book I’m reading.

3. What would you do if you were a billionaire?

Travel, travel, and more travel. It would be amazing to just take off, travel around the globe, spend as much time in each place as I’d like, and not have to worry about running out of money or getting back to work.

4. What are three of your bad habits?

1. I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock about five times in the morning.
2. I waste way too much time reading random articles and weblog postings while procrastinating more productive activities.
3. I spend way too much money eating out.

5. What are some snacks you enjoy?

• Potato chips are my guilty pleasure.
• Strange, smelly cheeses on crackers.
• I’ve been trying to eat more fresh fruit as a snack lately.
• Smoked almonds.
• I’m addicted to pickled beets right now. I know, I’m strange. I’ll eat them as a snack, or a side-dish, or in salads. I probably go through two jars a month.
• Anything deep-fried, really.

6. What were the last five books you read?

1. Long Way Down by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman
2. Can-Cans, Cats & Cities of Ash by Mark Twain
3. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
4. Guilty Pleasures by Laurell Hamilton
5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

I’ve unfortunately been in a huge reading slump for the last few months.

7. What are five jobs you have had?

1. Java Developer
2. Paperboy
3. Systems Analyst
4. Concession stand cashier/fry cook
5. Senior Account Executive (which is just a fancy name they gave us on front line phone support)

8. What are five places where you have lived?

1. Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada
2. Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada
3. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
4. Parksville, British Columbia, Canada
5. Puch, Salzburg, Austria

Paul also handed off this Arte Y Pico award thingie to me the other day, which was very kind of him. I’m not a huge fan of weblog awards that specify you link back to the original creator, as they’re basically a massive, viral marketing campaign for the original weblog, but I’m fully in support of providing links to weblogs you enjoy reading, so here are my five picks:

1. One Man Blogs
2. The Man Who Couldn’t Blog
3. What’s New, Pussycat?
4. Eat Alice
5. Paul Graham’s Essays

Struggling Writer passed this meme on to me several days ago, but I’ve been too busy wallowing in dental and financial self-pity to do anything productive (or blog), but here we finally go.

The rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to your blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I feel like I alluded to nearly everything remotely interesting or weird about myself in the life roadmap I did a while back, but I’ll have a go.

1. My parents are both psychiatric nurses. When I was in elementary school, my dad was working as a counselor in a detox centre and my mom as a nurse at the local jail. I took great pleasure in telling anyone who would listen that my mom was in jail and my dad was in detox.
2. When I was in my late teens, I wanted to give stand-up comedy a try. I even started to write a set. I had about a minute and a half of some of the worst observational comedy you’ve likely heard. I can’t remember any of the jokes, and I know I wrote them down somewhere, but I have no idea where.

   I lost my nerve and never did pursue that ambition, and I’d rather never see the jokes again, but I’d like to find and dispose of them as soon as possible. Once I become a famous crime-fighting novelist, I’d rather not have those popping up in the tabloids.

3. I played soccer for about fourteen years of my life, quitting when I started university. The last few years I’ve been telling myself I’ll get back in, but I never end up doing it. I’m a little worried to find out how bad I am now.
4. Other people’s interests rub off on me very easily. I’m either open-minded or a sheep, I’m not sure which, but if someone is enthusiastic about a topic or an activity, I want to become involved as well. I had to stop watching the Discovery channel in order to follow-through with my chosen degree.
5. One of my arms is longer than the other. Or my shoulders are lopsided. Or my tailer isn’t very good.
6. When I was growing up, nearly all of my friends had some strange physical party-trick they could do. One had two double-jointed elbows, another could flip his eyelids inside out, another could roll his stomach in waves. I desperately wanted a similar skill, but I couldn’t manage anything. My body just worked as intended.

   That all changed one day when I was stretching out my fingers. Someone commented that it was gross how they went back so far. I thought everyone’s fingers did that and was thrilled that I suddenly had something with which to disgust the girls on the playground. Unfortunately, I was nearly twenty when this was pointed out to me and would probably have been arrested if I had entered a playground and told the kids I had something interesting for them to see.

7. It’s 1:00am, and I just remembered that nearly my entire wardrobe is sitting wet in a washer downstairs in the closed laundry room, and I work in the morning. That’s unfortunate.

I’m not sure who has done this already, or who wants to do this, so I’m just going to list seven weblogs I enjoy. Feel free to do this if you want.

1. An Unreliable Witness
2. Schizogeny
3. Attack! of the Killer Weblog
4. Kyklops
5. Absolute Vanilla
6. The Ill Man
7. The Scottish Lemon

Amanda tagged me for a meme, and according to the universal rules of weblogging, I am hereby required to comply.

It’s a roadmap of your life, a milestone, memory or interesting fact for every year.

Age 0: Our hero is born.
Age 1: Our hero shows his genius at a young age, by teaching himself to use the potty. Rumours of him using that newly found quiet time to solve the New York Times crossword puzzles in pen are unconfirmed but likely true.
Age 2: Our hero is introduced to a new member of the family: Tigger (tee eye double grr err), a lazy orange cat with whom he will spend many an afternoon planning world domination and playing with string.
Age 3: Our hero moves into a new house, which will be his childhood home until he moves out on his own. Most of this year is spent waiting for games on his VIC-20 to load.
Age 4: Our hero is imbued with a love of fiction after his father reads The Hobbit to him.
Age 5: Our hero begins his schooling and foolishly believes the next twenty years of education will consist mainly of nap time, lunch time, play time, and art time. He also joins his first soccer team.
Age 6: Our hero is given a Nintendo and Paper Boy for his birthday. He someday dreams of being a paperboy himself.
Age 7: Our hero has to keep a journal in school. Little did he know that twenty years later he would be writing a public journal that was widely read by at least five people around the world.
Age 8: Our hero is suspended from school for the first time after flashing his entire class in a joke that wasn’t fully thought through.
Age 9: Our hero and his classmates are split into two groups in school: the wise owls, for the students with decent reading comprehension, and the ignorant lizards [possibly not the actual name - our hero’s memory is not very good], for the barely literate. In a very Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat moment, he luckily finds himself placed with the owls. This is a pivotal moment in our hero’s life, as it saved him from an early life of drug use and self hatred. It also taught him to hate those stupider than him. After meeting a computer geek friend within the wise owls, our hero spirals into a deep sea of geekdom from which he will never return.
Age 10: Our hero has his first acting gig: a baseball player in a school play who must continually hit foul balls until a song is finished, when he finally connects with a fastball for a home run. He had no speaking lines, but being greatly skilled in the art of mime, he still manages to steal the show.
Age 11: Our hero begins to play the clarinet in the school band, rocking out on Hot Cross Buns. This love lasts for but a short eight months.
Age 12: Our hero’s teacher requires the students to write a creative short story every week. He discovers that some find his stories to be humourous, decides to write a novel, and immediately begins procrastinating.
Age 13: Our hero begins high school, and when speaking his first word in front of his classmates to answer a teacher’s question, his voice breaks. This begins a long line of humiliating moments he will suffer during the next five years.
Age 14: Our hero’s French teacher tells his parents that he’s an ignorant idiot for lighting a match in class. Parents become outraged at the teacher for calling their son a name and completely forget to discipline him. Although scoring a victory at home, our hero is forced to spend the rest of that year’s French classes sitting in the desk at the very front of the room, past the teacher and tucked behind a television. He leaves this class knowing one phrase in French: est-ce que je peux aller à la toilette?
Age 15: An English teacher is somehow able to make grammar interesting, causing our hero to become a full-fledged grammar Nazi.
Age 16: Our hero decides he hates his Photography teacher, refuses to do any work, and receives his lowest grade ever: 1%. His teacher says to him, as he hands him his term review, “the only reason I gave you one percent is because the computers wouldn’t allow me to give you a zero.” Our hero feels strangely proud of this. School isn’t a main priority for our hero, as he is focusing most of his attention on the Discworld MUD, a massively multiplayer text-based game modeled after Terry Pratchett’s novels.
Age 17: Our hero’s English teacher is his Photography teacher from the previous year. This worries him deeply, as he feels he will be treated unfairly, but he finds the teacher to actually be a decent guy if you put in an effort. This makes our hero feel like a bit of a tool.
Age 18: Our hero enrolls in some random university courses and works in a few food stands around the city. He also spends too many late nights eating appetizers at Denny’s and becomes quite fat.
Age 19: After spending some time trying to decide whether to pursue an English/Philosophy degree or a Computer Science degree, our hero decides to choose the economically wise choice and begins his two year Computer Systems: Operations and Management diploma.
Age 20: Our hero finally moves out of his parent’s basement and works for eight months on Vancouver Island in a couple of technical support positions and a Java development position.
Age 21: Our hero returns to Kamloops to finish his diploma and work for a summer in a technical support position.
Age 22: Our hero begins his Bachelor of Technology and Applied Computer Science degree and works in yet another technical support position for four long months in Williams Lake.
Age 23: Our hero spends six fantastic months studying in Austria and traveling around Europe a tiny bit.
Age 24: Our hero graduates from his degree and moves to Victoria for a Java development position.
Age 25: Our hero frantically tries to think of something momentous to do before his next birthday, in case he has to write anything like this again.

Wow, that was actually a little more difficult than I thought it was going to be. Thanks Amanda, for forcing me to look at how pointless my life has been. I’m going to go sulk for a bit.

I tag anyone whose fancy has been tickled.

I’ve been spending my free time the last few days reading through the Whispers short fiction contest entries. The contest is closed now, and there are a lot of great stories posted.

Absolute Vanilla, or rather her chicken, posted a meme on her weblog and tagged the world. I figured I might as well give it a go.

Four jobs I’ve held:

1. Paper Boy - A rite of passage for many young kids. I still remember that glorious feeling when receiving the first cheque, as well as that sinking feeling after realizing soon after that paper boys are basically the sweatshop workers of the west. I quit as soon as they changed the deliver time from 5:00pm to 06:00am.
2. Concession Stand Worker - Through my high-school years, I worked at a concession stand at the hockey arena in town. The benefit of this was getting in to all the events and concerts for free. Unfortunately, I had also had to spend my teens smelling faintly of hot dogs and chocolate.
3. Technical Support Analyst
4. Java Developer - My current occupation. While not quite as delicious as the title sounds, I still really enjoy it.

Four movies I’ve watched over and over again:

1. The Indiana Jones Trilogy
2. The Goonies
3. Army of Darkness
4. Hackers - I loved this movie in my teens, despite being fully aware of how ridiculously the technology was portrayed.

Four places I’ve been:

1. London
2. Paris
3. Prague
4. Orlando

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Kamloops, BC
2. Williams Lake, BC
3. Victoria, BC
4. Puch, Austria

Four TV shows I watch:

1. Flight of the Conchords
2. Heroes
3. Spaced - Old, I know. I just found it, and it’s amazing.
4. Any cooking show hosted by Nigella Lawson - I fear I’m developing an unhealthy obsession.

Four radio shows I listen to:

1. The Mighty Boosh: The Radio Series
2. The Zone @ 91.3 - A local station in Victoria. It’s the only radio station I’ve ever come across that I enjoy. I don’t want to throttle the DJs, which is a first, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard them play Nickelback.
3. That’s pretty much it for radio…

Four things I look forward to:

1. Dinner
2. Waking up on the weekend and reading in bed
3. Seeing my friends
4. Summer

Four favourite foods:

1. Chicken Curry
2. Egg Benedict
3. Spicy Tuna Sashimi
4. Rice

Four places I’d rather be:
I’m quite happy where I am. If I’d rather be somewhere else right now, I’d probably already be there. Therefore, these are places I think I’d rather be in the near to far future.

1. Scotland
2. Japan
3. The pub
4. Egypt

Four people I e-mail regularly:
I rarely send personal e-mails these days. I either instant message, text message, or call people. So here are the last four people I e-mailed from my personal computer.

1. Jason Evans, to sent him my Reader’s Choice picks for the Whispers contest.
2. The billing department of Logjamming, to try and clear an online payment issue that’s been outstanding since last year.
3. My friend Chris, to brag about my Xbox 360 purchase.
4. My sister, to wish her a happy birthday.

Absolute Vanilla tagged me for this meme, so she’s entirely to blame for this.

Make a list of five strengths that you possess as a writer/artist. It’s not really bragging, it’s an honest assessment (forced upon you by this darn meme). Please resist the urge to enumerate your weaknesses, or even mention them in contrast to each strong point you list. Tag four other writers or artists whom you’d like to see share their strengths.

Humour
In most of what I write, humour plays some part. Whenever I daydream about publishing a novel, I can’t imagine writing a straight drama. I’m no Dave Barry, but it’s in my nature to joke around, and that leaks into any dialogue I write.

Drama
If I’m not writing something humourous, I’m probably writing something soul-smotheringly dramatic. I’m not a heavy person in life, but my flare for the dramatic tends to come out when I write. I really enjoy writing intense, mildly over-the-top scenes. It makes the prose feel poetic in a way that doesn’t really work in regularly-paced scenes.

Metaphors
I love expressing ideas or feelings, using seemingly unrelated comparisons, in ways that actually add to the reader’s understanding. I think in a fairly non-linear fashion at times, and that really helps with this. It’s incredibly satisfying to come up with a well-crafted metaphor that adds to the work.

Spelling/Grammar
I wasn’t going to include this one, but five strengths are hard to find. If you pick through my posts, you’ll see a few errors, but I’m typically quite careful. I have, on occasion, been referred to as a Grammar Nazi, but I’m okay with that. Writing is a creative process, but having a clear understanding of the supporting structure is essential. Even if you’re planning on breaking some of the rules, it’s important to understand what rules you’re breaking and why you’re breaking them.

Imagination
This is the main ingredient of every story, and it happens to be something of which I have a surplus. I’ve always had a vivid imagination. Throughout the day, I’ll have a dozen stories flash through my mind. It doesn’t take much to set it off: a pedestrian walking down the street, a headline on a newspaper, a piece of trash being blown across the road. Of course, transferring those stories from mind to computer is a different matter, but the sparks are certainly there.

I don’t really think of myself as a writer. I read books about writing, and I enjoy discussing writing, but I’m not really a part of that group. I’m no more a writer than a tourist with a video camera is a filmmaker. I just don’t write nearly enough. That’s not to say I won’t ever be a writer, but right now I’m just an admirer of the art.