(no subject)

[benchilada]

Right, it appears to me that I've chosen mamagaea 's Five Questions this time.
It appears that way because it's true.

1. How many toys do you own (actual number)?

I wish I had an exact number for you. :(
I'd put it at somewhere above 125 and under 250. There will be new shots of my new toy shelves soon, but those just hold the ones that I currently feel like making weird-ass diorama scenes out of. There are a bunch more upstairs in Rubbermaids.
Somebody remind me to do the office pics soon.

2. How many books do you own (actual number)?

So far tallied? THIS MANY. For the most fun, click on COVER VIEW and DISPLAY 100 per page. There are probably about fifty more that I haven't included for various reasons, usually lack of ISBN and lack of time to build the records from scratch.

3. What is the most awkward situation your Tourette's has ever landed you?

Good question.

The best one I can think of right now was during a college Shakespeare class. For our final project (the Professor believed in diversified teaching methods) we actually had to find partners and act out a scene from one of Shakey's plays. I think I was 18 or 19 at the time, and had only been diagnosed with Tourette's at age 17. As such, my medication was still being adjusted, and I wasn't on a particularly good one.

One very odd thing about TS is that everybody seems to have something that they can do just fine, even when their symptoms are bad. There are pro basketball players with it and even neurosurgeons. Some part of our brain manages to shut off the ticcing while we're doing that thing. One of those things, for me, is acting or public speaking, so I figured I'd be cool that night.

The event was held at a professor’s house, where he didn’t ask how old you were if you grabbed a beer. I’d had a bad day with Tourette’s all day but now it was beyond bad. I couldn’t speak to him or classmates, the words just wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t stop my hip spasms and my head was jerking back and to the right nonstop. I felt like the most ridiculous spastic ever. And for once, performing the scene only killed about half or two-thirds of my symptoms. And as soon as I was done? Back again.

 

Spent all semester looking forward to this night, and I couldn’t talk to people or even sit next to them for fear of making them uncomfortable.

4. What is the funniest situation your Tourette's has ever landed you?

It’s done a lot of things, but not many of them are traditional sort of funny. One of my favorites, though, is how Sara and I used to have an antique bread plate on our bathroom sink, and we put our bar of soap on it. I really dislike soap scum leftover stuff that you always get under a bar, so I decided to use some hot water to scrub the soap off.

Halfway through the washing my right hand decided that the best course of action would be to, sans warning, throw the plate like a Frisbee into the bathtub, where it broke into four pieces.

We left the four pieces on the sink to repair them later. A week after that, I knocked something out of the cabinet and it fell on the pieces, multiplying their total by about ten. Sara wouldn’t let me blame that one on Tourette’s. J

5. Tell me the story of Ben and Sara (how you met through the wedding)

In a weird way that only I would decide to do it...

 
Invited to the residence hall cafeteria by friend Clarissa to meet her friends Jennifer Keene and Sara Gorecki, then they asked me to come by their room a day or two later, then we talked for hours, then I realized that the cool Bohemian girl was the same girl that I’d always identified in the hallways as “The Girl With The Hats Who’s Always Smiling,” then we did some more hanging out, then I wouldn’t do anything too heavy with her because she was drunk on Blackberry Schnapps, and she got me to smoke cloves, which led me to smoke regular cigarettes, but I didn't care, and then she came and visited me over the summer in a house with no air conditioning during a VERY hot summer and we had one of those kinda-mostly-break-up things but when we realized that we were talking to each other on the phone for so long that she'd start falling asleep but not wanting to hang up it was cool and we totally got together again, then I stayed in the residence hall but she moved into an apartment with Clarissa and friend Jaime and then I stayed there mostly with her and cleaned their dishes and I stayed up late with her while she did her art projects and oh I forgot that our first date was seeing BRAIN CANDY in the now-gone Co-Ed Theatre, and that I asked her if I could kiss her after we watched WILLY WONKA on the dorm bed, so then I sublet her apartment from her over the summer, and then we moved into an apartment with Clarissa, and we were in the same bedroom because we’re sinners, and then she got me a cat called Isis and the cat had been taken away from her mother at about 2 weeks, maybe less, and then shut in a closet a lot by her first owner’s roommates, so she grew up a bit weird, and Sara didn't like cats, so she said she wouldn’t clean up after cat, or feed cat, or play with cat, and that night cat fell asleep on Sara’s lap, and we could barely connect to the internet in that apartment, because it was about 1997, and I hung around places like alt.music.nin and rec.arts.drwho and we did more art and we had barbecues, and then I graduated and Sara didn’t yet because she was a year behind me and we lived in a shotgun apartment and realized that we had a lot of stuff, and there were roaches there but they mostly went away eventually, and it was the second place in a row where the original boiler in the building broke and it was so freaking cold, but then we moved into a cool house that had been divided into apartments, and we even fixed it up a bit, and Sara hand-painted the kitchen tile with a way cooler pattern because she’s such a kickass artist, and our bedroom had no insulation, so there was a lot of body heat stuff going on, and we were there for three years, and two of our neighbors in the building got married after meeting each other there and now they have a child and we became friends with Jay, aka the basement troll, and then after three years we decided that we’d go and do something stupid, like buy a house, because we’d already been together for so long, and we’d bought a car, and so we totally bought the cutest house ever and it turns out that there was more work needed on it than we thought, but we don’t care, and then we totally got married and I love the hell out of her  and it's been eleven years together and she’s the best thing since sliced…hell, since slicing was invented.

 *gasp*

Got your own questions? Ask.

b