Tagged

I have been tagged by The Visitor. Cool! I have never been tagged before. I have been asked to state nine things about myself, wierd or otherwise, and then tag six others by leaving a comment on their blogs. So here goes:

• I am prone to obscure physical injuries. For instance, I once tore the cartilage in my knee just by standing up too quickly at my desk. I am very into exercise, but keep having to stop due to injury, which is very frustrating. This may be genetic, as my mother is the same. I think that, in a harsher environment, my family would have been winnowed out of the gene pool.

• I consistently fancy men who are both intelligent and funny. If they are loyal and passionate as well, I am a goner.

• The men I have loved have generally fallen into one of two main types: tall, dark and largely silent (like the Big Dude) or small, blonde, chatty and just a teensy bit girly (usually bisexual).

• I find it much easier to do things I don't want to do, to endure things that can't be cured, if I get to complain a lot. The Big Dude tells me I would find some of our struggles easier if I didn't dwell on them so much. I find the opposite is true: when I stop complaining, my capacity to put up with problems definitely shrinks. Because I know this is not my most attractive trait, I try to confine my complaints to this blog, so my blog ends up reading like it is written by my evil twin, who says things I can't say in real life. I never seem to mind other people complaining about their lives - in fact, it usually cheers me up!

• I have a somewhat compulsive side to my nature. Not in an OCD kind of way, but I am good at throwing myself fully into things or abstaining altogether - particularly the first. I am not so good at the golden middle way. If I gave free reign to this aspect of my personality, I would be at least one or more of the following: an alcoholic, a workaholic, a perfectionist, a compulsive eater, a sex addict, a fitness fanatic, a religious nut.

• I am a little bit anal. Even though I know that life is messy and contradictory, I crave order. I tidy up every night before I go to bed, just so that I can have that moment when everything is in its place. Then I breathe a sigh of relief. I keep doing this, even though I know the cause is hopeless, with a toddler in the house.

• I am monogamous, even though I don’t really believe in monogamy and my sex life is not good, because my partner is monogamous . Despite my lack of faith in monogamy, I was secretly shocked when some friends of mine formed a kind of sex ring in which they were all having sex with each other, because it involved such stable couples. I was confident that their relationships would explode. Theirs didn’t. Mine did.

• I am a worrier and I think too much. When I have a problem, even when I know it probably can’t be fixed, I can’t seem to leave it alone. I worry at it like a cat with a mouse. It does make me a good bureaucrat, though, because I feel compelled to work at problems and am not easy deterred.

• Even though spirituality is very important to me, I hardly ever pray in the conventional sense. I think this may be because I am angry at God. When I am in a context where people are asking forgiveness from God, I often ask myself who will forgive God for all the suffering I see around me.

An additional fact that most of the women I know think is wierder than any of these things:

• During my ridiculously long 42 hour labour with the Little Dude, I did not yell, swear or curse my partner. I sang and hummed through the contractions. This was not because I disapproved of any of those other options (whatever gets you through it, right?) and I am not sure why it helped. It may have been because I had been through so much to have a child that it seemed wrong not to celebrate. It may have been just that my urge to sing has always come from a very deep place. I feel most like myself when I am singing.

Okay, so who will I tag?

Digger, Dewdrop, Trueself, Satan, Mu Ling, and LePhare, please consider yourselves tagged!