Variations on a meme by Haydn

Some sort of meme going on. Alma passed it to me. It involves getting five words that remind the meme-giver of you, upon which you have to expand.

1. Tomatoes

I like that this reminds Alma of me, given that it's a well-known fact that I hate tomatoes. Well, to be clear, I hate unadorned tomatoes - I can't abide by the taste, and I find the skin and seeds pretty gross. In general I'm rarely a huge fan of things that try to mix sweet and savory, and the basic taste of a tomato steps too far into "sweet" territory without going far enough to just be a fruit. And the basic taste frankly makes me ill. Now, you puree the crap out of it, throw in some spices and pour it over pasta (or onto a pizza, or whatever), and I'm there. But pull it off the vine and I'm walking in the other direction.

2. New Jersey

Earlier in our relationship, Alma caught me "woo"-ing a few times when New Jersey was mentioned on television, and started prodding me to do so whenever it came up and I didn't say anything. I always viewed Chicago as a home away from home when I was growing up and certainly rushed back here when I got the chance, but I'm missing New Jersey more than I probably expected I would. It's made worse by the fact that I have no reason to go back anymore, given that I no longer have family there, and so that mild longing has been allowed to fester; I haven't set foot in the state since 2004. It's to the point where I've been strongly considering going to my 10th high school reunion - which I'm assuming will be sometime next year - just to give me a reason to have some Toro Loco salsa and a Millburn Deli sandwich, and drive down Scotland Road again.

3. Geography

It's kinda my thing. I don't really have much explanation for this one - for whatever reason, I was fascinated by globes and maps as a kid, reading the world atlas and various Hagstrom street maps of local New Jersey counties compulsively. (I have such fond memories of those Hagstrom street atlases of the late 80s that a few years ago I found some on eBay and considered going after them until I realized that would be completely insane.) I still know all the world capitals even though I haven't studied in years. (For that matter, I really never studied - at some point in grade school I just realized I had absorbed them by sheer osmosis, and then I periodically tested myself, looking up any I couldn't recall. I still recall the woman at my Irish homestay eyeing me suspiciously when she "caught" us in her library - because I wanted to find an encyclopedia to look up the capital of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which I had realized I couldn't remember at the time. Kingstown, btw. I think that's the last time I even forgot one, and that was the summer of 1996.) I can be distracted by a book of maps for hours at a time. I like thinking about traveling to new places almost as much as actually being in those places, because the on-paper aspect of geography is so enticing to me. I realized on my walk yesterday that I even love just seeing street signs at intersections, because I like making the connections in my head. Yes, it's weird. On the other hand, Alma has to love this, because she is not good with directions and now she never has to worry about it.

4. Lift

AKA the greatest soda in existence. My obsession began in New Zealand in the summer of 2000; I'm a huge lemonade fan, but I don't think I'd ever had a sparkling lemon soda at that point, or at least not a mass-market one. (San Pellegrino Limonata - which I probably hadn't had at that point anyway - is good but frankly a little too strong for regular consumption.) I drank a lot of it on that trip (and its Pepsi counterpart Solo), but back in the US... nothing. For years it was my holy grail. Sunkist Lemonade was the only thing that came close and it only seemed to be sold in Minnesota for three months a year. Alma once got me a couple cans of Lift via a friend of hers who knew of an Australian import store near her hometown in Arkansas, and that was a big thrill, but getting them regularly was impossible. Jewel for a while had Club Lemon in a British import section, but that seems to have gone by the wayside and it's not the same as Lift anyway. Suddenly, around six months ago, I wandered into a Jewel in Lincoln Square and... Sunkist Lemonade. All of a sudden it's gone national, or at least it's fully penetrated the Chicago area. But it's not quite the same - Sunkist has caffeine and so isn't an all-hours drink, and anyway I'm not 17 anymore and trying to drink little to no pop. But the legend of Lift lives on, and if I ever get back to New Zealand like I want to, I'm sure I'll have a few cans for old times' sake.

5. Neuropsychology

As of right now, I'm thinking this is my future career. I hadn't necessarily conceived it from the start, but one of my reasons for getting into psychology in the first place was my interest in knowing why people think and behave how they do, and it's only a short step from there to the root cause (or at least a primary root cause): activity in the brain. Many of the deficits are frankly just immensely compelling, although it's not like all neuro patients are going to have aphasia or anterograde amnesia or Capgras delusion. But the connections in the brain are mysterious and fascinating - it's said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor, but we might know more about either of those than we do concretely about how the brain works, thanks to plasticity, tangled cortical networks, and hundreds of millions of neurons that don't behave identically for any two people. It's not a puzzle any one person can solve in a lifetime, but I'm willing to take the tiniest crack at trying.

So that's me, or a few things anyway. If you want five nouns that remind me of you, post in the comments. Alternately, don't.

The one about Ebbets Field

There's an interview meme going around that I caught in Greg's blog. The rules are supposed to involve posting interview questions for anyone who wants to be interviewed in the comments (they are then to post their answers in their own blogs), but I don't know that I've got much interest in continuing it to that end, although if you beg I might try just so as not to seem like a bad memer. But anyway, Greg's questions and my answers mean a free entry, so here you go:

1. What generally-observed US holiday could you do without, and why?
I'm not sure whether this question asks about federal holidays or just ones that the entire nation takes note of. If the latter, I know it's an easy target, but I think Valentine's Day is stupid; really, it goes along with Mother's and Father's Days as well - a holiday made up to sell greeting cards and crappy gifts by suggesting that on this day you take time out to recognize someone you should have been recognizing the entire rest of the year anyway. Valentine's Day earns the fewest points thanks to the added bonus of endless loathsome jewelry ads. Of course, hating on V-Day has become so clichéd that the greeting card companies have started making cards just for people who hate it, so I guess this was too easy an answer. But it still sucks, and I'm not just saying that because it means I have to buy Alma two presents in five days, heh. As for federal holidays, they provide the bulk of my time off work these days, so I'd keep them all and add a few more while I was at it.

2. What was the last movie that made you weepy?
I cry at movies a lot, which is probably not the sort of thing I should be admitting, but it happens to be true. I could answer this question one of two ways too: the last movie I watched, period, or the last movie I watched for the first time that made me cry at it? It's possible that the latter goes all the way back to when I saw Hotel Rwanda in the theater (and I bawled at that one, holy shit). The last movie that I cried at, period, was probably the end of Field of Dreams.

3. What did you ever collect, if anything?
I tried collecting many, many things over the years. I'm not sure why I had such a zeal for it - I guess I just liked having different varieties of stuff. I collected stamps for a little while but that was almost a perfunctory interest as the classic "thing to collect;" I went more for coins and baseball cards. The coins are probably in a box in Maryland; the cards are actually all here in Chicago with me, putting the "crap" into "craphole" where my room is concerned. I also collected business cards as a kid (no idea how that one got started, except that I think I liked finding people who had interesting raised designs and stuff on theirs, and I recall being overly excited that the Staples in West Orange had a machine on the premises which would make you a single custom-text business card for a dollar; mine read "Robert Flaxman, Geography Whiz," which tells you something of how much of an unbelievable tool the 10-year-old me was), but that petered out once I got old enough to realize it was stupid. Then of course I most infamously collected soda cans.

4. Most Americans think soccer is boring. Why are they wrong?
This is a complaint I have not just about soccer, but about sports in general, and that is that most Americans think that sports are boring unless they feature a lot of points. I'm not sure where this idea came from; people of the past certainly seem to have appreciated great defensive struggles, pitchers' duels, things like that - the very fact that Jack Morris is considered a solid Hall of Fame candidate is almost entirely attributable to Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, for example. Yet unless someone turns in a no-hitter or goes ten innings, a 1-0 game is almost always derided as a snoozefest by the casual fan. Perhaps this is why I like baseball as well; the mercurial nature of the scoring means you can't ever really stop watching, and the relative rarity of it makes the scoring so much more interesting. Certainly this isn't true of something like basketball, where you can pretty much tune in for the final ten minutes only and do just fine. So tell me how that's more exciting than being on edge the whole game because something might happen?

The other major reason is that Americans hate ties. Heck, hockey had to do away with them entirely just to get people interested again. But ties can be fantastic drama, especially in tournaments. Of the three most exciting games I've watched in my life, two ended in a draw - Manchester City and Aston Villa in the 2006 FA Cup and US vs. Italy in the 2006 World Cup. (The third game, for the record: US 3-2 Portugal in 2002.)

The fact is, soccer is an incredible, sprawling game that at its best is full of brilliant moves, canny passing, and outstanding finishes. But it doesn't need to have seven or eight outstanding finishes a game to be exciting - half that many is more than enough. Plus there'll be plenty of shots to go "Oh!" at, and even before that, it's exciting just watching plays develop. Outside of just gameplay, soccer features some of the most interesting tournaments in any sport (World Cup, FA Cup), as well as regular international competition, which is pretty sweet. Baseball's still my favorite sport, but I think soccer has pretty much staked its claim to the #2 spot.

5. Was it always the Beatles? Who came before in young Flaxman's heart?
Considering I've been a Beatles fan since the age of 6 or so, I'd have to say no one. The LPs that vied for supremacy on the living room turntable at the Flaxman house were, for what seems in my memory like several years, pretty much just the following three: Sgt. Pepper's, The Rascals Greatest Hits, and Morrison Hotel by the Doors. There were probably others on occasion, but those dominated the player, or at least seem to have in retrospect. Still, I recall being particularly entranced by Sgt. Pepper's, and why not: for a kid, that cover is an incredible amount of stimulus, and this being the LP, there was even the back of the sleeve off which I could read all the words. Oddly enough, we didn't have most of the albums for a long time; on the third floor, where most of my dad's LP collection was housed, we had Abbey Road - which in retrospect it took me a shocking amount of time to find and listen to - and we had virtually nothing on CD at first (well, 1988, that's not that big a shock), accumulating the bulk of the catalog over the years as I got older and ever more interested in the Beatles, leading to the various birthday countdowns. Today of course I personally own every British LP (on CD), which leads to stuff like this, though somewhat ironically the Beatles make up a much smaller percentage of the music I listen to these days than they probably have at any point prior, and in fact I believe I tried to make another top 40 2-CD countdown for my parents in 2005 and just got tired of it after the first 20. Which doesn't mean the Beatles aren't the best band ever, just that you can't listen to one band that much for that long and not get a little worn out on them for a while.