List Day: Five Random BU Facts

1) Some people find the sound of jingling dog tags comforting. It annoys the poop out of me, though. Sometimes I ask the dog in question why s/he can't just sit in one place and pretend to be a topiary, but I never get a reply beyond the jingling. I have been known to use Scotch tape to tape tags together when dogsitting.

2) When I am deep in thought at the computer, I will subconsciously suck on the front of my undershirt. I hypothesize that there must be some hidden thought-nutrients in the cotton which my body is craving, the same way you crave an orange when you're lacking in Vitamin C. When I was a kid I used to clean my teeth with my undershirt, resulting in one very smelly undershirt. Now, I just leave a toothbrush at work.

3) My bladder is smaller than a two-year-old's and if I break the seal after drinking a lot, I will probably be peeing every fifteen minutes for the rest of the day. This forces me to forgo drinking at all when I take road trips. As a senior in high school, I had to go into D.C. for an interview at PEPCO for a computer science internship. Since I wanted to make a good impression and not be distracted, I ducked into a B. Dalton's bookstore in Northwest to pee immediately before arriving at PEPCO. What they didn't tell me beforehand was that all applicants had to take a drug test immediately upon arriving in the building. I spent fifteen minutes in the druggie bathroom with the pee-cup lady guarding the door before admitting defeat and submitting a sample cup that was barely 1/8th full. Yes, I just discussed wee-wee in a public forum.

4) If I am a guest at someone's home and use the bathroom, I will always peek behind the shower curtain to make sure there are no ghosts or serial killers back there before I go about my business. If a crazy knife-wielding lunatic is about to kill me, I'd rather he take me down standing up than on the pot. I do not want to be Elvis in my obituary.

5) When I was an entering freshman at Tech in my "eager, innocent, college-will-be-very-rewarding" phase, I sent little personalized e-mails to my CS professors before classes started, introducing myself and saying that I was looking forward to their classes (this can be found in the dictionary under "sucking up"). Only one of the professors replied, incidentally the teacher of a ridiculously boring computer science theory class which I attended religiously and napped in for the rest of the semester. Often times I would nap right on the aisle and hear him walking past me as he talked about binary subtraction or some other hogwash. On the final day before exams, he called out the names of people who had A's in the class (making them exempt from the exam) and finally matched my name and face to the e-mail. He gave me the most malevolent look I'd ever seen. In my fifth year, I sent him a note apologizing for sleeping through his class and invited him to my music recital to show that actually put forth a lot of effort in the major I cared about. He did not reply, or attend.

New LOST tonight!