Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Screaming Memes, or...

Nuthin' but the truth...

I'm not much of a meme'er these days. Several friends have sent memes around in recent weeks and I've promised to respond, but I never seem to get to them. Also, because of my strange ability to attract Crazy Ass Blog Stalkers (or CABS), I'm a little reluctant to share more personal information than I already spew forth out here. I can just imagine someone reaching out and saying, "You like Toblerone? I *love* Toblerone! I'm gonna send you a case! We should be sisters!"

EEK.

However, in the interest of making sure my friends don't think I'm ignoring them, I've come up with a combination meme response. This meme has elements of several friendly tags I've gotten and yet provides would-be CABbieS (or should that be CABieS - like rabies?) with no useful information.

Here goes.

Below are five odd things you might not know about me.

Four of them are completely true.

Guess which one isn't:

1. As soon as I learned to walk, I started turning my toes under my feet and running on the tops of my toes. This made some of my siblings want to hurl. Somewhere, this bizarre form of conveyance is documented in an old family movie, in which I run through our yard in New Jersey, on the tops of my toes, carrying a very large dead fish and chasing my screaming relatives.

2. I have eaten chocolate covered cockroaches. They were in a lovely presentation box from Vietnam. My friend's father was a congressman, and he brought them back from a fact-finding trip to Southeast Asia in the waning days of the war. He bought them as a joke. He should not have left them in the kitchen for a slumber party of second grade girls to find.

They were like chocolate-covered Aplets or Cotlets.

Except they had exo-skeletons.

President Nixon called during that slumber party. Before we got my friend's dad on the phone, we passed it around and talked to him while we ate the roaches.

3. On a business trip to Armenia, I sneaked over the border into Turkey with an Armenian Orthodox priest, so we could get a closer look at Mt. Ararat. We did not see Noah's Ark.

Or a Yeti.

Or Leonard Nimoy.

But a city official in Yerevan did show me his massive UFO photo portfolio. He claimed they hovered outside the balcony of his office during city council meetings. His name was Wolfgang (the Armenian guy, not the alien.) Unusual name for an Armenian dude.

4. Two friends and I accidentally ended up as extras in a Soviet science fiction film called "The Blue-Green Alien" (working title, I assume.) We were lounging on a Black Sea beach when the film crew arrived and repeatedly filmed a man in a suit walking into the sea. Someone asked us to all look to the sky and point. We did, while saying things in English like, "You see anything? Nope? Me neither! I feel stupid!"

I am not thrilled that my (likely) one and only performance on the big screen was in a swimsuit.

Maybe I can find the filmmakers and have them pay for my therapy.

5. I once purchased the most gorgeous, enormous, sweet strawberries from a roadside berry patch in the outskirts of Moscow and brought them back to my office for everyone to enjoy. That night, I saw on the news that the patch where I bought the berries was the location of a Stalin-era mass grave. My supersized berries had been growing in Soylent Fucking Green.

I got to work the next day and dumped the berries as quickly as possible before they were all eaten by my unsuspecting colleagues.

I didn't eat strawberries for a loooong time after that.

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Well, there you go. Enjoy. Leave a comment and tell me which story you think doesn't ring completely true.

This is fun.

And now, there is warm laundry in the dryer waiting for me. Aloha, mah peeps.

15 comments:

Sasquatch said...

I think the laundry is fake.

Merujo said...

You better hope the laundry story is true because at some point tomorrow you'll be in the car with me.

Anonymous said...

I can see all of these things being true, but since I'll take your word that one is false, I'll guess #2, da crunch cockroaches & Nixon. Politicial Disclaimer: There is no intented relationship between the use of the words "cockroaches" and "Nixon" in the same sentence.

Unknown said...

Hmmm - I think I know about a few of them so that might disqualify me BUT I would say the chocolate covered cockroaches is false - even back then I doubt Nixon made his own phone calls :-)

Heather Meadows said...

I'm going to guess #5 is fake, but my guess isn't based on any knowledge of history or geography or trivia. It's just that the writing's different; I don't feel the same ring of "whoa, can you believe this actually happened to me?"

J.M. Tewkesbury said...

I gotta go with Nixon. If that one was true, a tape recording of his conversation with a houseful of squealing seven year-olds would have been part of the Watergate tapes.

suze said...

I've totally talked to Nixon while eating Cockroaches too! We could be best friends *squee*.

;)

Seriously though, I think that any and all of the above could be true, but I'm going with #1, because where would you get a giant fish in Jersey?

New Dad said...

Hmmm. I think it is a trick question and all five are true. But my lovely wife--the little redheaded girl--also thinks the Nixon part of story #2 puts it over the top.

Anonymous said...

Nixon.

Chuck said...

Hey, at least you weren't sunbathing on a topless beach or something when they were filming that movie...

I have no idea which one is not true. Your life has been so dramatic I can't pick,

Anonymous said...

Funny - I forgot to put my answer - and it never would have been the Nixon one. I'm thinking the least fantastic of these stories is the one to be false - so I go with #1.

paulnojustpaul said...

You like Toblerone? I love Toblerone! ...

:-)

I'm going with door number three.

Anonymous said...

I have to go with Nixon & the Cockroaches as well. No one could make up the other stuff.
In the morning I will share a cup of coffee no, make that a large mug of coffee, with you in spirit since we don't know each other and we live 3,000 miles apart and I don't want to sound like a total CAB (you love coffee/I love coffee too!!)so until the a.m. hours pacific standard time for me
adios

Merujo said...

Heh heh heh - well, unless you find my phone number and call me at 6 a.m. my time on a Sunday to ask why I'm not responding to your comments, you're definitely not in CABS territory! :)

Anonymous said...

My random, uneducated guess is #1. Why would anyone want to run that way? :P