This was tough. I mean, in two years or so of blog writing I’ve long since exhausted the small store of even moderately interesting things about me that I’m willing to reveal publicly (and even the things I'm not aren't that interesting). I know, I know, there’s probably no one out there who’s read every single post, and if they have, they’re lying comatose under a desk right now, but it’s not that fun for me if my five things are things you could already know. So here’s five things that you might not know unless I’m forgetting that I’ve already mentioned them:
- When I was 30, I found out I had a long-lost brother. Just like in a soap opera, only not, because I hadn’t started to date him and he wasn’t my evil twin. (And no, not the brother I keep mentioning, though as a kid I wished he would get long lost. Kidding - love ya, bro!).
- I co-owned a $500 car years before I got my drivers license or even ever got behind a steering wheel. As part of a government program for university students, I lived in a tiny town in the French part - the isolated, in the middle of the lonely forest part - of New Brunswick for a year helping teach English. My roommate and I were going stircrazy, and there was only one bus a day to the outside world, so we bought the cheapest car we could find that was still legal (I think). We frequently took our poor little duct-taped Pontiac Phoenix across the border to Caribou, Maine to see English movies, and travelled around the province a bit, and to PEI, and the roommate/chauffeur used it to commute to work. It lasted for the half year or so we needed it and died a dignified death. I learned to drive about five years later.
- When I lived in Mexico City, I dated the nephew of the governor of Chiapas. OK, that in itself isn’t all that interesting, but the fact that I lived in Mexico City for two years is probably one of my more interesting claims, but because I’ve mentioned it several times here, I needed a fresh angle. I had no solid reason for taking off and living there, but I'd always wanted to live in a foreign country, my time in New Brunswick felt like a taste of it but not quite foreign enough, and it seemed like a good time in my life to do something daring. I pretty much spun a globe and picked Mexico (at least, that's how they'd film it in the movie of my life). Oh, the guy? He was sweet, and it ended amicably - no state police involved.
- Until I was in high school, my only trip outside of Alberta and BC was to Newton, Kansas. I was about seven, and it was a family reunion of my paternal grandmother’s family. I remember my brother found the shed exoskeleton of some gross bug and wore it around, my second cousins five times removed or whatever tried to scare me with stories of tornadoes (because Kansas meant the Wizard of Oz to me), and not much else. And still, a love of travel was born.
I was best man at a friend's wedding. I got to wear a snazzy three-piece suit and everything, and it was sooo much more comfortable than the maid of honour dress I wore at another friend's wedding. The other groomsmen were a male friend of the groom and one of the happy couple's dogs (another was a bridesmaid). The poor guy got ribbed that he wasn't man enough to beat out a woman, but at least he was a notch above a dog.
