6 more examples of my weirdness

I got tagged for this meme from Chelsie of Book Lover Reviews:

1) You link back to the person who tagged you.

2) Post these rules on your blog.

3) Share six unimportant things about yourself.

4) Tag six random people at the end of your entry.

5) Let the tagged people know by leaving a comment on their blogs.

I’ve done it before, but I’m going to do it partially again. I’m not going to tag anyone this time, just say that whoever wants to play should play. And I’ll happily list my six things with the reason why being my first thing.

1. I guess I’m a masochist, but I like to tell embarrassing stories and weird little factoids about myself. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m sorta proud of my awkward youth.
   
   
2. I fully embraced my weirdness in sixth grade when my best friend at the time and I created the Weirdo religion. My little brother and one other friend joined. We created scrolls out of construction paper that told the story of our religion. We wrote the story in indecipherable hieroglyphic-like characters (I was also obsessed with Ancient Egypt at the time) and didn’t even bother to learn the language we’d created, so it was pretty much gobbledygook . However I’m going to venture a guess that our religion still probably made more sense than Scientology.
   
   
3. Religion is one of the many things that made me feel like an outsider as a kid. I was not raised religiously. Other kids told me I was going to hell because I wasn’t baptized. When we went to weddings and stuff, I was excluded from communion, which annoyed me because I wanted crackers and juice, too. My mom was Catholic and my dad was Lutheran and instead of picking one, I guess they just decided we’d be nothing. One thing that probably factored into that decision was the fact that my dad was a Marxist when I was born and therefore Atheist. But when we moved to Oak Park, a family from Kansas moved across the street from us at the same time with a daughter a year older than me and a son a year old than my brother. Of course our families became friends. The dad was a Mennonite pastor and for some reason we started going to church with them even though my dad was still Marxist and therefore should have been Atheist., but I think my dad is just extremely religiously confused because now he has converted to Judaism, but still celebrates Christmas… This is why I’m glad I’m not religiously inclined because it seems to lead to a lot of guilt and confusion. Anyway, when we started going to the Mennonite church, I was excited to be a part of something, plus it meant I got to hang out with my neighbor friend. However I quickly learned that church is pretty boring. Not to mention every time we went my mom and I fought about my clothes. No ripped jeans (uh, hello, Mom, it’s 1989, ripped jeans are really cool!) and I was obsessed with wearing hats, which are apparently not ok in church either. Then there was Sunday school. An extra day of school? Yeah, I didn’t like that. I used to ditch it and hang out in the church bathroom and read. I know, what a rebel!
   
   
4. Along with my obsession with hats, I also loved huge, bizarre earrings. My favorites included wooden zebra earrings, multi-colored uninflated balloon earrings, fluorescent blue lightning bolts, and these dangly playing card earrings. Seriously can you tell I got my ears pierced in the late 80s or what? Also the earrings were often so heavy that the first holes in my ears are stretched out and I don’t think I have to worry about them closing ever. I’ll go for a few years at a time without wearing earrings in them. Now I have 13 holes and I just wear boring hoops and studs. My ten year-old self would hate me.
   
   
5. I was really self –conscious about being small as a kid. My parent’s nickname for me was Mouse and I freakin’ hated it. I as the shortest, scrawniest kid in my class except for this girl who was a gymnast. I felt like her gymnastic talent justified her lack of size, but me, though I tried to be a gymnast I was pretty much an uncoordinated short kid. I just wanted to grow a few inches and blend in with everyone else. Ironically, now that I’m pretty much average size, I wish I was smaller. Now, I don’t like being average at anything and I feel like I was cuter when I was smaller. Sigh.
   
   
6. I saw professional wrestling this weekend. Yep, like Wrestlemania type wrestling except on a smaller local scale. I’d never seen wrestling before even on TV because when I was a kid my parents were pretty adamant about not letting us watch violent stuff and wrestling and GI Joe were on that list. Their hippie influence rubbed off on me and by the time I was old enough to decide on my own programming, I was not interested at all wrestling, thinking of it as silly play violence. But my regular writing workshop partner Jenny is writing a book about a girl wrestler and I was curious about her character’s world, so when Jenny invited me to an AAW match this Saturday at the Berwyn Eagle’s Lodge, I decided to give it a go. It was only 12 bucks after all and my boyfriend liked wrestling a lot in high school so I thought he would enjoy it, too.
   
   I still don’t really know what to make of it. I was entertained, but I kept stepping back and mentally noting: “you are being entertained by guys pummeling each other, hitting each other with ladders, sprawling their opponent out on a table and leaping from great heights on to them, etc.” But I was entertained and this was despite the fact that half the time I had no idea who the bad guy was supposed to be or who I should be rooting for and Jenny’s root for the more attractive one only worked when there was a semi-attractive guy out there. Ultimately, after talking about the experience my best friend whose husband and friends were really into wrestling so she knows all about it, we determined that wrestling is like a violent soap opera for dudes (well, mostly for dudes, actually there was a pretty large female contingent there). It’s not really my thing (probably largely due to what was instilled in my by my parents because during the particularly violent parts and the chants of “Holy shit” and other profanity, I really wanted to cover the eyes and ears of all the little kids there), but that won’t stop me from tagging along with Jenny every now and then just for the bizarre experience.