Circa December 2006, a new meme started creeping around the blogosphere. It’s hard to pinpoint the originator, but it is lost in the mists of the hoary internet past. No one is willing to take ownership of the first time this game of Blog Tag was started.
It is simple: Tell five secrets about yourself and then link to five other bloggers you know and then they have to tell five things you probably don’t know about them.
And so on and so forth, propagating this to ever widening numbers of bloggers.
As an interesting variant on this meme, I’m trying it as an intra-blog game, but without the passing on of the blog tag. All authors on A.B., now present four or five secrets that you never knew or would have guessed about them. Believe them (or not)!
Andrew’s Secrets:
- I voted for Nader in 1996 (but not in 2000!)
- As a solitary freelancer, I sometimes pass the time by inventing an elaborate inner life for my cat (as a Lacanian feminist, for instance).
- In high school, my friends and I used to slide down the hills of a golf course on blocks of ice.
- (Courtesy Anna)"I have a secret about Andrew to share (more fun than sharing my own): when he was a child, he was taken by his grandma and parents to an actual Catskills hotel, where he nearly fell out of his chair laughing at the terrible comedy show, leading to warm congratulations from alter cockers at nearby tables about young Andrew’s fine sense of humor."
Anna’s Secrets:
- When I started school, the teacher called home concerned that my loud,assertive voice meant that I had a hearing problem. I do not.
- I co-directed a radio show in high school called, "Eclecticity is almost as fun as inventing words." We played everything from Alberta Hunter to the Pixies to A Tribe Called Quest. One time we received an irritated call from the public because we’d taken a smoking break while playing an 8-track Mormon public service announcement about STDs, which therefore played on a 15 minute endless loop.
- When I was 22, I moved to Italy, where I co-founded a life drawing group and volunteered at a summer camp for people with developmental disabilities. As a result, my Italian includes useful expressions like "for the 15 minute pose, I’m using watercolor on packing paper" and "please don’t go in the pool without floaties."
- In my mind, I belong to a boys club that includes Ernest Borgnine, Dr. John, and Dr. Lonnie Smith. I don’t think this would actually make for a good club in real life, but I love those guys.
- While jogging, I often compose letters in my mind to people with whom I’m no longer in touch.
Dean’s Secrets:
- Used to make beads for a living.
- Worked at Oxford University. (I would be more specific–I worked at the Bodleian Library at OU–but might that be too telling a hint?)
- Performed in a band introduced live by a popular radio DJ as "the ultimate in embarrassment rock."
- Portrayed a clothespin, the lead character in a children’s play.
- Reverse-shoplifted with friends, i.e., created fake product and smuggled it into stores.
Sujatha’s Secrets:
- I have a knack for getting things(software, computers, appliances,etc.) to work, by hook or crook, or even hairpin, on occasion. I firmly believe that there is nothing that a hairpin cannot accomplish, from the task of a box cutter to picking locks or subbing for a stiletto.
- Despite my professed fondness for classical music (Indian and Western), I do nod off to sleep after about an hour of listening to concerts. Advancing age, fatigue or boredom- you be the judge!
- If you met me at a noisy party, and I seem to nod in blissful agreement with you no matter how provocative your assertions, it’s not due to your silver tongued persuasion, but tinnitus which prevents me from hearing what you are saying in the first place.
- I’m a Buddha wannabe, in my spare time (between yelling at kids, blogging, reading and work). Try reading ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle when kids barge in on you with a gazillion requests- you can see how rapidly I will achieve Buddha-hood. Probably after the next 100 lifetimes, I guess.
- I am deathly afraid of mice and rats, ever since I thought I saw one nibbling on my toes when I napped in my grandmother’s village house as a kid. So based on the Chinese proverb reasoning from Ruchira’s cat quote( "He who dislikes the cat, was in his former life, a rat."), that might indicate that I was, in a former life, an elephant.
Ruchira’s Secrets:
- Although I am more comfortable reading and writing English, I count and do mental math in Bengali. I ascribe this to the fact that my father taught me numbers and simple arithmetic long before I was enrolled in school, using Bengali as the medium.
- Despite the fact that I don’t subscribe to any religious faith and harbor hardly any superstitions, I do believe that I may have had two separate ghostly experiences in my life. One occurred in the dark of the night while I was asleep and the other in broad day light when I was wide awake. (This one probably deserves a separate post of its own:-)
- I know very little about botany and plant care. Yet everything I plant thrives, blooms and fruits. My expert gardener friends are flummoxed by my "brown" brain and "green" thumb. ( I sometimes suspect that I may have benefited from the same dumb luck with child rearing)
- In nearly perfect health all my life, early last year I was diagnosed with a very rare autoimmune disorder, which, according to available epidemiological data, shouldn’t have afflicted me at my age. But the experts were adamant about the diagnosis and predicted that the rest of my life would be spent at the mercy of powerful immuno-suppressant drugs. However, just as mysteriously as I was struck with this possibly debilitating condition, I was "cured" by having a tooth pulled. No, it wasn’t magical thinking. It took some very rational and systematic sleuthing through medical literature by my husband and a corroboration of the findings by my dentist. (This one does deserve a post of its own, if only as a cautionary tale.)
- I am generally a thoroughly law abiding and ethical person, especially when it comes to matters of money. But in 1982 when on a trip to Bulgaria (a draconian communist nation then with a notorious prison system), I routinely changed money illegally at street corners from waiters, boat captains and other more shady characters. Those "unoffficial" currency changers offered a far more reasonable exchange rate for the Deutsche Mark than the "official" usurious government rate allowed. I must note that if caught, the offense was punishable by a steep fine and jail time as numerous notices in public places warned tourists.
Joe’s Secrets:
Accidental Blogger 
16 responses to “Bloggers’ Secrets (Sujatha)”
Quick responses here.
Andrew: So is your cat’s name Kristeva?
Anna: Two musical doctors, both terrific in their own ways. Your second secret reminds me of an episode I witnessed visiting a friend–the inimitable Richard Meltzer–while he was DJing a radio show in LA in the ’80s. It was late night or early morning and he decided to spin an EP by Wire, or so I seem to remember, a single tune comprising each side of the vinyl disk. “This one’s gonna run eighteen minutes or so,” he announced. Immediately at the close of the tune the station phone rang. One of his listeners was concerned to report that “It was seventeen minutes, thirty-five seconds.” Nothing better to do at that hour, I guess.
Sujatha: Your fix-it knack, and Ruchira’s verdant digit, are clear evidence of the effectiveness of intuition, not to be discounted a bit, even if otherwise inexplicable or counter-intuitive. And I’m with you when it comes to classical recitals, i.e., live performances. Sonically, they so far exceed the already blissful experience of recorded performances, but the social circumstances distract and ultimately wear on me.
Ruchira: Illegal transactions with waiters and boat captains? Sounds like Jean Genet to me.
Joe: I myself considered including my love for treacly pop. I kick myself every time I recall selling my Alessi Brothers records. They make Britney sound like death metal. As for number 4…really? Quite a revelation!
I should explain that I commented as I did because I thought Sujatha was going to scramble the secrets and invite us to associate them with the authors. (Who’s Dadahead? Ruchira? Sujatha? Joe?) Hence my parenthetical for my second secret and for the pithy expression of each of them. I wanted to leave out evidences of style and factual circumstances.
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Dean:
Scrambling the secrets would have been a good challenging move. Especially if Sujatha had used this incomprehensible scrambling widget.
If Monte is spayed, it is understandable that Andrew spends (involuntarily, I am sure) some of his idle time constructing a Lacanian feminist inner life for her.
I should have known that Dadahead was hiding right under my nose when I recently asked this rhetorical question.
Although none of these secrets was previously known to me, I am not surprised that Andrew charmed the alter cockers of Catskill, Sujatha fixes practically everything wih a hair pin, Anna took a cigarette break while the Mormons warned against STD, Dean played in a terrible band (the bead making did surprise me) and that Joe talks aloud to himself.
Speaking of Joe, he was a reluctant contributor to this “spill the beans” post. When I harangued him to oblige, for some reason, Joe wanted to know if I had persuaded Anna into submitting anything. I didn’t ask why he needed to know. Could it be that in a lawyerly way, he was guarding against self incrimination – namely, if Anna (the lawyer) has agreed, it may be safe to play?
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Like Dean, I thought these were going to be scrambled, too, but oh well.
As for whether I thought twice about it, the honest answer is “maybe,” since I do have some sense of responsibility to my professional identity, and also love the blissfully cerebral remove (artificial or not) created by “cerebral coffee talk” that doesn’t reference personal detail. As for whether hiding such information is lawyerly, I’d say rather the opposite. One particularly cynical piece of advice I remember from my Trial Practice class was that voire dire (the process of jury selection) could be an opportunity to win jury members to your side, and that one way of doing so is by “revealing” banal personal information. I’ve often been struck by how much small talk my job requires with opposing counsel, mediators, judges and others during the inevitable “downtime” in proceedings when discussion of the matter at hand would be inappropriate but creating or continuing a rapport makes sense. The only secrets above I would hesitate to share in professional circumstances are #2, for fear of offending Mormons/religious conservatives (and because it’s probably more culturally fringe and edgy than is really professional…though even there, anything over 15 years ago is pretty safe…FYI, Ruchira, we aired the Mormon message on purpose because we found it funny, which is even more offensive, I suppose) and #5, which is, if anything, the most embarrassingly revelatory of the bunch. I’ve revealed #1, self-deprecatingly, at work, and pieces of #3 are on my resume and were once used by someone when introducing me as a speaker. #4 would probably just confuse everyone but Dean and my husband. The good doctors are both great musicians, and some of the coolest cats alive, in my book.
I guess my rambling point is what is a secret, anyway? From the point of view of the self, I find it hard to imagine that most psychologically sound folks can wholly remove themselves from a sense of “audience” (I could return to Lacan here, but will restrain myself). From the point of view of others, without even counting government and corporate intrusions into our privacy, any of us could probably find out more about our co-bloggers that they’d rather not have compiled and republished through a simple Google search than we could obtain through polite, insistent, requests. That’s not a taunt– there’s plenty about me on the web that vaguely embarrasses me. Welcome to the internet age.
The “ultimate in embarrassment rock” (and not Weird Al? Ratt? (but I guess Ratt wasn’t embarrassed by Ratt)) is definitely one for Google. That’s awesome!
I’d like to deconstruct Andrew’s association of Monte to Lacanian identity, since this isn’t the first instance I’ve seen of it. I recently discovered him trying to curb her piggish tendencies and resulting weight gain by forcibly inducing the “mirror stage”. He’d downloaded a picture of an enormously obese cat as his laptop wallpaper, and was holding Monte on his lap, pointing to the wallpaper, and saying, “see the fat kitty, Monte? You don’t want that to be you, do you? You need to eat more moderately.” I suggested that our cat has probably reached her developmental potential, which is pure Id.
To Ruchira’s green thumb, I say only, “Booo!” I’m green with envy (pun intended). My office plants keep dying on me, and infesting my office with vermin.
I liked Dadahead, and that is a surprise. Too bad you didn’t keep that going, Joe.
I sympathize with your #3, Sujatha. I have attentional/auditory processing problems in noisy rooms, and have really gotten dinged for nodding and smiling when I hadn’t caught what the speaker was saying.
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To be honest, it didn’t even occur to me to scramble these and make them into some kind of ‘Guess who’ game. I certainly didn’t mention any intention of doing so in my emails to you, so I’m still trying to figure out where you got that idea.
I’m more of a literalist than I ever realized, so I’ll defer to the rest of you as far as coming up with devious puzzles and challenges for the readers of A.B.
I will say that it lends a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to A.B. when we are able to have all the bloggers indulge in self-indulgent navel-gazing. Which is the point of the whole exercise,anyway.
Ruchira, I tried the cloud on this post and saw an incomprehensible flurry including words like ‘joke’ and ‘circa’ in the word cloud. Strange widget, indeed!
Anna, try cactus, especially mini-pots. The only way to kill them is to water them without fail. I have one sitting on my kitchen window that has survived for 10 years with the occasional ‘when-I-remember’ teaspoon of water. Or failing that, an air fern.
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Parenthetically, you guys know that that was a lie, right? Not that I wouldn’t be happy to take credit.
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Sujatha, your literalist approach worked very well, actually. Gave us a break from our “cerebral” preoccupations and provided a much needed breather for navel gazing, as you put it. Come to think of it, if indeed you had scrambled the whole thing and made it an anonymous jumble for a “guess who” game, I am confident that I (and probably all of us) would have been able to correctly match each “secret” to its author.
Anna, I was not exaggerating about the green thumb (just as I didn’t about the two ghostly apparitions I encountered). In fact right now my front and back yards are in their full floral and fruity glory. One jalapeno pepper plant in particular is going like Barry Bonds on steroids this summer. All my friends, neighbors and my massage therapist have been generously stocked with its succulent produce. Yet after each harvesting when I go back in a couple of days, it is dangling another dozen or so glistening fruits ready for plucking. I can’t keep up with it. Any of you in need of some fresh, very hot (and salmonella free) peppers for a zesty salsa, let me know.
Also, I am more puzzled by Ernest Borgnine (of whom I know something) than by the other two.
And Joe, don’t worry – we know, we know. Now please don’t tell us that you don’t really talk aloud to yourself.
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I confess that although I suspected there might be lies among our secrets, I didn’t necessarily include Joe’s double whammy among them. But then for years I was confident “gullible” was not in the dictionary.
More uses for jalapenos: quiche, a marinade for grillables (chicken, fish, pork), corn bread…
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Seriously, Dean? That’s really funny. Although I didn’t include any lies in my own list, now I can think of some whoppers I might tell you and get away with!
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To be fair, I easily could have been Dadahead. Maybe even Fafnir. I wouldn’t put it past myself. I just happened not to be.
Sadly, all my others were true.
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Now do you all see why I added ‘Believe them (or not)’ to the post? I didn’t believe Joe, not even considering that he might be speaking the truth.
Maybe it has something to do with my mommy lie-dar, which is currently still in the near-zero failure range of the Bathtub curve, especially with a mendacious teen testing it daily.
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A hairpin subbing for a stiletto? Really? You must have excellent balance then :)
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Where did my comment go? OK, here goes:
@Sujatha: A hairpin subbing for a stiletto? Really, you’ve done that? You must have excellent balance then:)
@Ruchira: Ghost stories, please! I will only read them in the daytime, though ;)
@Andrew and @Joe: We need more secrets!
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Lekhni:
This is the stiletto I mean (absolutely essential accessory on Kerala buses, as Kochuthresiamma will definitely attest.), not the Jimmy Choo variety.
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Lekhni:
You will HAVE to read them during daylight hours. One of the two encounters was pretty blood curdling. Although I have no explanation for exactly what happened, I do know that they happened. The scary one even had corroborating witnesses.
On several occasions (particularly when I am devoid of blogging ideas) I have considered posting those two stories under the combined categories of “Random Thoughts & Idle Chatter” and “Odds But Not Ends.” But I have resisted the urge for fear of forever blowing my rationalist cover. Perhaps I should hold on to those stories as my last post on this blog – before I “disappear.” ;-)
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Note to co-bloggers:
Speaking of scrambling posts, the Wordle widget I referred to in my first comment is a random enterprise which does little to capture the essence of a text.
Instead, you guys should look at the OpinMind widget at the bottom of the left column. What scrolls through that one (some of them emanating from our own keyboards) is a far better reflection of the nature of our blog.
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I read OpinMind (never noticed the deliberate misspelling until now, though) quite often. I love little outbursts of random language, which explains why I love Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries To Go On, a lengthy poem of elegant randomness.
This latest cycle of OpinMind, though, is weirdly coursing through a series of “Listed below are links to weblogs that reference…” boilerplate, and “Post a comment” just appeared.
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