Making it Up As I Go

My cousin just started blogging, and got tagged with a meme. (Can I just say that since I found out that they’re not really memes in the true sense of the word, it drives me crazy to hear them called that? They’re surveys for goodness sake! Anyway.) In her hilarious way, she’s spent like a week, and three posts, answering the challenge, and she finally got along to tagging other people. I’m one of those people.

Now the only reason that I’m doing this is because she didn’t call it a meme, instead she called it, and I quote, “some sort of blog chainmail thing” and “game of tag” that “I am sure… started off as fun and games, but now it has become a stitch in my side, inevitably it will end in someone getting hurt or losing an eye.”

So- 5 weird or obscure things about me. Since this is a reading blog, I will endeavor to make them all have something to do with reading.

1. I learned how to read when I was 2. Honestly. Ask my mom. It was thanks to Sesame Street, and the first word I ever read was Mail. Or Exit. I don’t remember now which was first, but they were right in close succession. When you ask my mom about me being 2 you can ask her which one was first. We were staying in a hotel in England, and walking down the hallway, and I pointed at the word (mail or exit) and said, “That says mail (or exit).” Then I pointed at the other one, and read it too.

2. I got the chicken pox when I was eight or so, and my mom gave me The Secret Garden to read. I started to read it in an oatmeal bath that was all yellowy and gross, and when, on the first page, I read that little Mary Lennox’s “face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another”, I threw the book across the bathroom and refused to read it. Now it’s one of my favorite books.

3. When I was ten or so I read a book called The Dollhouse Murders. It completely freaked me out and I was scared for months. A while later (like a year or so) I started to remember vague pieces of it, and finally pieced together what book it had been. I had completely blocked it out of my memory, and the fact that I could have forgotten it so completly scared me more than the book itself had.

4. I have 373 graphic novels on my bookshelf, in alphabetical order by author or artist, depending on which I associate with the book.

5. The book that I have owned the longest (I think) is a hardcover copy of Little Women that was given to me for Christmas when I was seven by a friend of the family. It has a clear plastic dust jacket with a little tear in it. I read it right after I got it, and couldn’t understand why Jo didn’t pick Laurie and instead went off with an old man. It wasn’t until I saw the film version years later that I realized that in my seven year old brain, Jo was about 15 instead of however old she actually is.

I’m not tagging anyone else, if you want to do it, go for it.