The Wild Things of God

Tagged! 5 Weird Things/Habits

OK, I’ve been tagged by friend and fellow blogger Darrell in a cybergame that goes like this:

The first player of this game starts with “5 weird things/habits about yourself.” In the end you need to choose 5 people to be tagged and list their names. The people who get tagged need to write a blog about their 5 weird things/habits, as well as state this rule clearly, then tag 5 more victims. Don’t forget to leave your victim a comment that says “you’re tagged!” in their comments and tell them to read your blog.

Hard to limit myself to just five, but here they are:

1. I burst into song at the drop of a hat. Any hat. Perhaps I was raised on too many musicals as a youngster. I thought it would be cool if people spontaneously burst into singing to express themselves in real life; I started doing it, and haven’t stopped.

2. It’s virtually gone now, but milk used to taste colors to me. Yes, you read that right. Especially during my undergrad years, I tasted milk on a spectrum of yellow-to-blue. Fresh milk was yellow (meaning delicious!) and less fresh milk moved into the blue zone. Stale was dark blue, and sour, black. Also, skim milk tended to taste just a tad bluer, or less yellow, than whole milk, no matter how fresh it was.

I learned that this cross-sensory perception is called synesthesia. Apparently many composers have it. Olivier Messiaen wrote about composing “stain-glass window chords,” Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov heard specific musical keys as colors. Music-color synesthesia might have helped during those years, as I was a composition major. But noooooo, I got milk-color!

3. I used to save my pennies, then Scotch-tape together in short stacks of five or ten. Then I’d carry them in my pocket to spend them as ordinary change. When a cashier was suprised to be handed one of those mini-rolls, I explained “it’s a fat nickle (or dime),” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. (Most of them didn’t like this.)
4. Anagrams. I love them, but there are no anagrams for Jon Zuck. However, “Jon Meyer Zuck” converts to:

MERE COZY JUNK and
ZEN MUCKER JOY.

5. I love alternate writing systems. I developed the first computer font for an alternative English alphabet known variously as the Second Shaw alphabet, or Quickscript, or the Read Alphabet. Here’s a copy of the Lord’s Prayer in that font:

I also developed my own personal shorthand. It’s a mixture of Gregg, Quickscript, and my own stuff.

Be it known to all, that on this 30th day of July, in this the year of our Lord 2006, I do hereby tag:
Ryan, Zach, Julie, Bob, and Meredith