There's a lot of the whole tagging thing going around, that "List Six Weird Things About You." Nobody's actually tagged me for it, but I figure what the hell, I'll do it anyway.

Besides, it sounds like the name of an old school John Cusack movie. "Six Weird Things About You." Might have to write a story about that. Hm.

Okay.

#1: I am, by nature, almost completely nocturnal. Daytime just doesn't feel right to me. There's an old expression, believe it's from either Spain or Mexico, that says "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go about in the noonday sun." And some base part of my lizard-brain agrees. Even if I slept 8 or 10 hours last night, between like, 1 PM and 8 PM, my body just wants to shut down entirely.

I guess that's not terribly weird. In theory, evolution wise, it makes sense that a proportion of the population would have inverted circadian rhythms; someone to keep a lookout at night, basically. I'm sure that's not an original notion, either.

#2: Once upon a time, I was under the influence of a Harmlessness Curse. Yes, it's very true. Most of my friends were girls, back in the high school days. Granted, since I'm a writer and (used to be, anyway) artist, I had more in common with them than the teenage guys who were all about the testosterone.

But yes: I hung with the girls. And I think they habitually forgot that I was a guy. Which doesn't make sense- I'm very obviously male and I'm very obviously straight. Although maybe I just confused them by understanding that at least once every 28 days, a man's life is considerably more pleasant and peaceful than a woman's.

Nowadays most people, guy and girl alike, just think I'm weird and creepy or something. Oh well. Brings me to...

#3: I'm a hermit. People irritate me. In large gatherings, people frighten me.

It's not that I'm antisocial, but... I'm vaguely empathic. Not claiming it's any sort of power or psychic thing or whatever, but I tend to pick up on other peoples' feelings very quickly and easily and it gets real old real fast to not be able to tell if the mood you're in is your own or someone else's. And that was a horrid run-on sentence.

#4: I read cereal boxes. Especially if they have some kind of comic or puzzle or something on the back. I guess it comes from a youth of Happy Meals from McDonalds; I was the sort of kid that had to stare at every side, including the bottom, for quite a while after I got the box, and I took no few glances at the inside as well just to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

#5: Possibly related to #4, but I have difficulty making lists. It's not like I can't organize things, that's not what I'm getting at. What I mean is, I have a hard time making lists that are just items in a neat row. I feel a need to tell a story when I write, and invariably I end up making comments and stuff after the items I mark down. If I'm not careful, they become paragraphs, and a list of things I might need for my computer becomes a letter about what I need, why I need it, and how I think I might go about installing it. Likewise with grocery lists.

#6: I've been writing since I could hold a crayon, but I've finished exactly two stories since high school. I am incapable of finishing things, it seems.

...Okay, #6 isn't nearly weird enough, so here's a bonus, we'll call it 6.5: I have this tendency to tell the same stories over and over again; not just the glory days, but things that happened in more recent years. "Yeah, this one time, ____ and I went and did this, and man, that was..." I'm going to be one of those old men that never shuts up, I can see this now. I guess this is part of the reason why #6 is so strange: if I can relive events from my life so repetitively, you'd think I could just... borrow it, write it down, voila, have a story, right?

Nah, nothing is ever that ruddy simple.

So anyway, there. Six Weird Things. G'night.

--Hawk