Eight Things Meme

I mentioned Thursday that I'd been tagged by Robin Brande for a meme. The rules are:

Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

I'll be cheating slightly, because I seriously don't know eight bloggers who haven't already been tagged. This meme's been around the block and back again.

With that in mind, here are my eight (kind of strange and highly eclectic) things:

1. I have a serious problem with balloons, specifically popping balloons. I'm not too fond of airbags either and avoid them whenever I can, though I'll really need to get over that eventually. I didn't have any kind of traumatic childhood experience with balloons or airbags; I just can't stand to be around them. Dropping a balloon in front of me disrupts my focus as long as it's there.

2. Similarly, I can't fully function in a room with an open door. Again, no traumatic experience involving open doors; I just hate them. The smaller the room is, the worse it gets. Related to this is my discomfort in sitting with my back to a door in a restaurant. I'm starting to think I might have a paranoid personality. =)

3. Strictly speaking, I'm not allergic to anything, but I have worse allergies than probably 80% of the world anyway, thanks to where I live. In most cases a high pollen count is in the 80s. We're routinely in the 1500s.

4. The earliest book I owned that's still on my shelf is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, the 1994 HarperCollins printing. I also have the 1995 first Scholastic printing as part of a box set I bought, but I kept the first copy too because the cover's cooler. That's the only book that I currently own two copies of.

5. The Chronicles of Narnia caused a bit of a stir with my least favorite teacher from elementary school, the one from second-grade. Once I'd received the box set, I'd started bringing them to school and reading them really quickly, and one day at the beginning of Self-Selected Reading time, my teacher pulled me aside and said, "Miri, I know you like to look at the pictures, but you really need to go find books you can read." The next week I took all seven Accellerated Reader tests and made 100% on each one. She didn't like me too much after that.

6. To the best of my knowledge, the fastest I've ever read a book of substantial length was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in eight hours. Suffice it to say there was nothing else to do.

7. My idea of a perfect vacation includes either a huge mall or a quiet beach. Eclectic, right? The only common denominator is books. Either I'll be reading a book on the beach or browsing a mall bookstore. Relatedly, I went to this Beta Club convention in middle school, and instead of eating at the venue, everyone was bussed over to the huge mall nearby. They let us loose in the mall, the only conditions being that we get something to eat and stay in groups of four or more. While most groups went to the trendy stores like American Eagle and Hollister, my group spent an incredibly pleasant hour and a half reading manga in the bookstore. I'd already watched all fifty-one episodes of the anime Fullmetal Alchemist, but after being stared at by the first volume of the manga for an hour as I started reading something else, I finally caved and bought it. I now own all twelve of them currently released in English.

8. I'm partial to Joe Muggs (the Books-A-Million cafe) for frozen coffee drinks, but for straight-up coffee, Burger King takes the cake. Why? No idea. But it's good coffee.

This is where I would tag people, but as I mentioned before, I really don't know anyone who hasn't been tagged yet. If you're reading this and haven't done it yet, consider yourself tagged.