Tagged

So, I’m tagged by Mithra. Yeah, yeah, I know, it is a teenager thing to do, and I constantly position myself as too old and numb for such stuff. But, silly, gentle emotions overtake snobbishness, when you’ve some idle time and your snobbery is getting you nowhere.

Rules:
1. Players start with 5 random facts about themselves. The random facts must be both deeply philosophical and flatly ludicrous at once. (As a leeway, what the player says need not be random or factual as such.)
2. Those who are tagged must behave like nice people. They should post these rules, modifying them suitably if necessary, and their 5 random facts. They must not think of this as a teenager’s activity. Life’s all about such innocent fun (even if you’re in your late-20s, obsessed with more important things like the original identities of bloggers and blog-commenters, or in 30s and completely bald).
3. Players should tag 3 other people and notify them they have been tagged. (If they don’t feel like doing this, there’s another alternative: they should post 10 random facts instead of 5.)


Random facts about me:

1. Much as I project myself like someone who’s spontaneously absurdist in nature as far as life and such stuff go, I am deeply confused myself. Is the essence ananda or dukka, I kept asking myself and a dumbstruck friend for a few days when those two fancy words caught my eyes recently. Now, you tell me. Ananda ‘va, dukka ‘va?

2. I’ve this thing with wrappers of the things of the kind I cherish (and cinema tickets too). That is, I cherish things with their wrappers. So, even when I take off the polythene wrapper of a DVD I bought, I do that so carefully that I don’t tear it up more than just necessary, I keep the polythene wrapper safely in the shelf. I’ve the polythene wrappers of almost all the CDs and DVDs in my reasonably huge collection. (I even plan to revisit them sometime.)

3. Maths was my favourite subject at school and college (closely followed by history). When I was a little kid, I was fascinated to no end with numbers and patterns in them. A vintage example I remember is this: Exponents of 2 all miss being perfect numbers by 1. (Another favourite musing was this: While 5-times-5 was 25, 4-times-6 was 24.) I used to think I was special.

4. Until quite recently, I thought ‘vulnerable’ is an adjective used mostly in a derogatory sense!

5. In the past year or so, I’ve acquired this absolutely strange habit. Whenever I am writing something – a post, or, at times, even a comment, I search the web for various strings of continuous words (closed in double quotes) in what I’ve written to see if I am employing the words and expressions the right way, and get a precise idea of how expressions and figures-of-speech are being used as against how they must be used. Of course, the result of this is mostly nothing. (I did this a couple of times, even for this post. My grammar is bad alright, but this is too cumbersome an effort for nothing.)


I tag:
1. ‘I’ thambi; because, he’s jobless. (And, I could blackmail him to respond to the tag, by threatening to refuse to co-write the poignant story of a single Tamil boy who suddenly falls in love with a girl whom he last saw many years ago, that I’ve developed.)
2. Inlivenout; because, I think she’s basically a nice person. (She doesn’t have a blog anymore, so she can use my comment space. But, how do I notify her?)
3. Chenthil; because, I want to see an older and wiser man take up this thing so that I’ll stand naturally vindicated.