Okay, okay...

...I've been tagged; by Isaiah first, then by Jon.

Changing the toilet paper roll is apparently an overly great effort. I will leave the new roll sitting on top of the empty one for days. So will my roommate... there's about 1/4 roll sitting on top of the empty one right now. Sooner or later I will cave, or she will. It's not like this is incredibly difficult... but it's become habitual.

One of my hobbies is chinchilla breeding. I can't say what insights into life this has yielded, but it pleases me to have pretty furry critters around. (Thirteen, if you must know; five were born here.) I tell people that I think of them as livestock, but wonder if that's what I really think. In many ways I do. Sometime last week I found a dead kit (and a live one) in one of the cages; losing animals is an accepted risk, but it was still icky to clean up; the mess was more bothersome than the death. (Oddly, it was triplets - I found the last running around on the floor the following morning.) Nor is it fun to try to find and clean wounds on a beaten-up adult, but these things happen... I still sobbed at the vet when I had to put him down; he was too sweet to deserve this. I don't know. Many days it's just another chore, and a very long-term game. But they are cute, endearing, and gorgeous. And there is something about holding the kits, these tiny furry quivering bits of life, and playing with the adults.

I'm afraid of strangers. If I must approach a stranger, email is the way to go. I don't like calling strangers, and I like walking up and introducing myself even less. Suffering builds character; the anticipation is worse than actually doing it. So I suck it up and go. The funny thing here is that my job forces me to call people I don't know, on occasion. Worse yet, my part-time job (leading paddling trips on the Chicago River) requires me to talk with and instruct large groups of people I don't know, and to do so with confidence. And I do.

My brain appears to have too much processing power. If something is semi-troubling to me, it'll eat away at the back of my mind while I am *trying* to do something productive. This has been particularly problematic for the last couple of weeks (except it ended Monday and I don't remember what the problem was, but started writing this entry before then), so I have to throw it a bone, metaphorically speaking - so that I'm mulling over something worthwhile, like construction methods for low-income housing, because it's truly unneccessary to let a couple of other things (which shall go unnamed) bother me.

I am apparently a cultural/racial chameleon. An absurd number of Jews have asked me if I am Jewish, or been surprised to learn that I am not (as when I might mention celebrating Easter, for example). Other guesses have been assorted Mediterranean (greek, hispanic, turkish), and once, asian... by an asian.

I reserve the right to tag others, later - if I feel like it.