26.11.07

That Old Chestnut AKA Tagged, Been I Have

Seven interesting things about me? It's more than a slight stretch, and would be so much easier if I had to name interesting things that happened to people I know (which include, among other things: near-arrests, Fear and Loathing episodes in Hampi, and getting driven down a road at 40mph...while hanging on for dear life to the bonnet of the car), but here goes anyway.
1. My favourite smell in the world is wet dust- to the uninitiated, it's the one that comes after summer, when the ground has been all but baked dry, with about an inch of dust everywhere. And then it starts raining. I've never been able to put a name to the smell that comes off those first raindrops hitting the ground and sending the dust flying before soaking it (and this is rain that means business, not a wussy little drizzle), but I settled for wet dust, because it smells the same way when the plants at college get watered on a hot day. There's nothing quite like it.
2. I have a tattoo. I quite like having it, even if it looks like a child drew it with a marker pen. And in the twenty-four hours after I first got it, I had to wear a bandage over the spot, which led to a lot of people asking me what happened. Nosey idiots thought I'd slit my wrist, you see.
3. I also have a weakness for fallen leaves that look like they're dry enough to be crunchy, and have no qualms about going slightly out of my way to stamp on them. Even if I do look around first to make sure that no one I know is watching.
4. Ditto puddles of rainwater- the bigger, the better . Some of them just beg to be stamped in (of course, we do go and clean ourselves up afterwards), which spells doom for pretty shoes. The last time I did it with a couple of friends, we ended up splashing so much water around that when I got back to my room to change, I found bits of grass in my hair.
5. Fantasy movies are a bit of a weak spot for me- no matter how much I moan and groan about how I'm sure it'll never match up to the book, I always get suckered into watching the lot. Though I'm quite excited about the movie version of Northern Lights that'll be out this December- His Dark Materials is one of my favourite series of books ever, and they seem to have got the casting of Lyra absolutely perfect. Ok, enough with the movie plug..
6. I'd be more likely to choose my soap, shampoo and moisturiser on the basis of how they smell than because of whatever they promise to do. That logic has worked fairly well for me so far, I don't intend to abandon it now.
7. I know this isn't really about me, but- one of my ex-classmates from school swindled a bank out of a whole lot of money. This got into the papers when I was starting my last year of school (at a different school), and given that the girl in question had dropped out of my old school several years earlier, the news that she could speak eleven languages and had successfully impersonated a senior adoption society executive to get the money, while the police chased her across four states for the better part of a year, was nothing short of staggering. And we only got to know who it was because one of the local papers printed her name and the name of her former school- not something that's usually done, given that she was seventeen at the time of her arrest. The ultimate kicker is that she happens to have the same name as my best friend (who was in another school altogether, and never knew her at all) - who got slightly freaked out by the fact that a lot of people were calling her up asking if she'd been robbing banks.

11 comments:

WendyB said...

Wow! #7 is amazing!

Yohan said...

Yeah number 7 is quite a humdinger.

You'd like Boston in the autumn. Puddles, leaves and such. (I'm not one for puddles though. I never have galoshes, and I hate wet feet). That earth smell is weak in cities here though. In India there's more earth available.

Can't say there's a single fantasy movie I was happy with. Unless Star Wars counts.

(I like that you refer to the movie as "Northern Lights". It's increasingly hard to find books with the original title.)

Teresa said...

Crunching leaves is almost too good of a pleasure. Swindling banks, that is so cool; it's like the sophisticated way of breaking the law.

disktop said...

Catch me if you can?

Perakath said...

I can so imagine you going out of your way to stamp on crunchy leaves :)

tags are supposed to be passed on, methinks...

Rebecca, A Clothes Horse said...

What is your tattoo of?
It's really interesting you like the smell of wet dust. I like the scent in the air right before it rains or storms--you can sense it and smell it.

Blue Floppy Hat said...

Yohan: Earth smells a little like it's putrefying when it rains- at least to me, anyway- it's very different from wet dust. I was rather disappointed to find that the film version is called The Golden Compass, though. It just seems wrong.
The Clothes Horse: It's three small stars outlined in black ink just under my left wrist. Rather blurry, but I like it.
disktop: Aye, aye, sir :)
Teresa: It's a doozy of a story, though. We knew she was a bit crazy in school, but no one quite thought she'd do anything like that..
Perakath: I passed on the tag, in private.

discotheque confusion said...

wet dust?
Quite frankly I just start sneezing at the smell of dust!
but if you live in afghanistan I expect it smells somewhat exotic in comparrison to the dust under my bed!..

Blue Floppy Hat said...

Oh no...I don't really live in Afghanistan. It's just that if you end up clicking on the country list when you want to edit your profile, Blogger doesn't give me the option of simply not declaring where exactly I am.

Anonymous said...

Preserving the air of mystery eh?


Did you delete a post? The one about Victoria Beckham?

Meg said...

I've always wanted a wrist tattoo (tiny gecko or a line from an eecummings poem).

The classmate thing is cool in a criminal way. She was 17 and that's an achievement whichever way you look at it!

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