Jen has posted yet another meme over at her LiveJournal that I have decided to appropriate for my own uses. I sense a pattern developing here, in which Jen finds the meme and I follow her lead… I’m such a clone.

Anyway, this time the drill is, as the title up there suggests, to post ten weird and random facts about yourself, a task that is considerably more difficult than you might think at first. It’s taken me all afternoon to think of enough things that are sufficiently “weird” and/or “random” to be included, and I’m still not entirely sure the items I’ve chosen qualify. You be the judge:

1. When a restaurant serves me an orange wedge as garnish with a meal, I eat the whole thing, including the peel.
2. I still live in the house in which I grew up.
3. I have a picture of an antique wooden speedboat on my divider wall at work.
4. I used to be ambidextrous but The Man forced me into choosing one hand or the other. True story: when I was in kindergarten, school administrators told my mother they thought I might be retarded because I kept trying to use both hands instead of settling down and picking one or the other. They put me in the dreaded resource classes and exposed me to electrical shocks until I became monodextrous. Okay, they didn’t really shock me, but they did force me to choose. For the record, I turned out left-handed… but I still feel more comfortable throwing a ball with my right hand.
5. I have a fine collection of Hawaiian shirts, probably a dozen or so at least, all with different prints.
6. The only thing I remember from my college Italian-language classes is how to say “bite me.”
7. I like antique radios, the big old wooden ones like Grandma had.
8. I’ve been known to dip my french fries in mustard and tartar sauce. Not at the same time, of course; that would be gross.
9. I can make the my jaw pop the same way most people can crack their knuckles.
10. Once upon a time, I was pretty good at cracking a bullwhip.