Some of you know me a little, some of you know me well. Here are some interesting (maybe?) things about me that you may or may not know.
- I love frogs. I don’t know what it is about them, but it is the running joke in our family that anything foggy is by default “Mommy’s favorite”.
- I used to be the shyest kid in the class – likely in the whole grade, and possibly in the entire school. This stuck with me pretty much into University. When I took a daring leap (which may or may not have been because of a boy) to travel overseas on an exchange program, I learned how to come out of my shell. Now, although I’m not outgoing by any means, I do teach for a living and try to be active with the kids’ PTOs.
- I ran a kids’ English school for 6 years in Japan. It started with 3 kids – a friend of my then-husband asked me to start a class. I really didn’t want to do it. I had no idea how to teach English to kids. A couple of months in, I suddenly had so many kids interested that I had to run 2 classes. Within a couple of years I was teaching 5 1-hour classes every Saturday, and eventually overflowed into weekday evenings as well. The entire town knew me as “The English Teacher” and most of the little kids called me “Mommy”.
- When I was little I wanted to be a gymnast. I took some gymnastics classes at the local YMCA when I was in elementary school and I loved it. When I got to junior high I wanted to join the gymnastics club but when I went to talk to the coach, I saw all the other girls doing flips and jumps that I couldn’t do. Discouraged, I walked away. Years later I had the gymnastics coach as my PE teacher. During the gymnastics segment of our PE class, I was goofing around on the uneven parallel bars – my favorite apparatus. The coach ran over and asked me why I had never joined the team. Apparently he didn’t have anyone on the team who could do the bars.
- I hate going through the drive-thru. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the driver’s seat or not (though it is exponentially worse as the driver). I think it stems from my chronic indecision problem. I panic when I have to decide quickly, and the menu board is always so hard to view and read when I have someone squawking though the speaker at me.
- I’m a gaming geek. I don’t like the big console games (Nintendo, Play Station, etc). I love computer RPG games. I don’t play much anymore, because I just don’t have the time, but when I was playing, I was ALWAYS playing. I loved the strategy and the teamwork of building cities, raising armies, and raging battles on enemy alliances.
- I met my partner online, but not through an online dating site. We were in an alliance together in an online game… I thought she was a guy at first, then she came out of the closet. I just shrugged. I liked the personality, and it turns out, the soul, of this person. The physical body is just part of appearance, which isn’t important to me at all.
- My son learned a lot of his English from online games. I guess that is about him and not me, but it does say something about my parenting I guess. We were in Japan, so the boys only learned English from me. And from online games. It’s amazing how much vocabulary kids pick up from games (not chatrooms at his age – I didn’t let him get into those until he was older).
- I have a brown belt in Aikido. Technically Aikido doesn’t have colored belts, so I guess I should say that I’m just one level away from earning a black belt. I haven’t practiced for years though, because there isn’t a dojo anywhere near me (2 hours is a long way to go for a martial arts class). I hope that some day, when I finally manage to get my life together and buy a house, I’ll have the space to set up mats and teach the kids.
- If I had to choose, I’d say I’m a dog person. I like cats too though. I like all animals. The best pet I’ve ever had though was my ferret. I’d have a ferret again in an instant, but it would cost me my relationship because my partner can’t stand them. That’s also why I can’t have a lizard or a bird… Too bad frogs don’t make good pets.
So in a nutshell, that is me. I guess. Or not. I guess there is always way more to anyone that we could possibly jot down into a list.