Every so often, I make the mistake of thinking my life is a quiz show, a spy novel or some weird hybrid of the two, and start memorizing obscure and pointless facts about myself in case I’m ever asked to prove my identity at gunpoint. This probably says more about my psyche than is, in fact, comfortable, but nonetheless, I persist, forcibly recalling odd moments from primary school, ancient thoughts, uncomfortable memories and utterly useless trivia against inevitable necessity. Such as:
– The longest a song has ever been stuck in my head is six consecutive days. The year was 1999, and the song was Every Morning by Sugar Ray, who practically no-one has heard from since.
– My three pet mice were called Pippi, Minnie and Maxi.
– When my late Aunt Barbara dropped by our house when I was eight and nobody heard the bell, my mother and I were watching White Fang.
– I used to have an invisible friend called Bad Girl, who inexplicably spoke in an American accent and whose sole function was to orchestrate whatever bad things happened to my toys in the course of a game.
– At my primary school, we’d collect handfuls of placid, pretty-looking, green-and-yellow insects, which we called Banana Bugs, and spiky seed pods, which we called bommyknockers. Not for any special reason. They were just cool.
– For several years growing up, I was convinced that the horse in the poster by my bed moved once a night, and that if I saw this happen, I’d fall asleep within five minutes. (Yeah, I’ve always been crazy.)
– I stopped believing in Santa after I received a pair of rollerbades in my Santa stocking that I’d already found in the top of mum’s cupboard. After feeling momentarily disappointed, my reaction was to tell my best friend at the first available opportunity, thereby (unintentionally) ruining her Christmas.
– I’ve never broken a bone, but I’ve sprained my ankles about five times all told, and my shouders make a decidedly unhealthy crunching noise whenever I roll them.
– The first time I ever listened to the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, I had to pause the CD after the phrase ‘they were stuck in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”‘ because I was laughing too hard, and continued to do so for the next half-hour.
…and so on.
shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows 