Tagged again, on a Friday night

The Supreme Overlord of All Things Mannion has tagged me with a blog-meme, and since I can't resist the siren-call of these things, here goes.

Question number 1: What are three of the stupidest things you've done in your life.

Hoo-boy. Leading off with a guided tour of instances when I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque? What a harsh meme this is!

1. Back in fall of 2000, we moved from the Southern Tier to Buffalo so The Wife could start a new job and so I could look for one. One day I applied at The Store (a different location from the one I work in now) and at a pharmaceutical telesales company. The telesales company called me and set up an interview, which I aced; then they offered me the job. I wasn't terribly excited about the job, but I needed one and I was enticed after working six years in the restaurant business at the prospect of a day job at a desk.

One day after I accepted the telesales position, The Store called to offer an interview. Since I'd already accepted a job and since it paid one dollar more an hour, I never returned their call.

Bottom line: I sucked at the telesales job and I hated the telesales job (although I did work with some very nice people there), and I eventually got canned from the telesales job in a combination of factors involving their downsizing a few operations and my sucking at their job. Two months later, The Wife's company offered her the promotion that sparked our six-month Syracuse adventure, so I would have quit the telesales job anyway; but it would have been better if I'd already been working at The Store because then I would have been able to transfer to one of The Store's Syracuse locations. As it was, another eighteen months or so would elapse before I would finally be hired at The Store, in which time I would apply there no fewer than five times.

(And one of my current co-workers, who has become one of the dearest friends I have ever had, was working at that other location of The Store at the time that I ignored their call for an interview. So there's a person who could have been enriching my life over three years before I actually met her. Ugh.)

2. More prosaic, this one: While I was in college, my school replaced its thirty-year old tiny music building and even tinier art-department building with a beautiful Fine Arts Center befitting the growth of both departments. That new building, which took shape over my sophomore year, provided lots of amusement in its construction phase, because when you're a college student and you're bored and you've had a few drinks, a nearby construction site might as well be the island where Lorelei and the sirens live.

(My friend Chris probably knows where this is going, since he was there.)

Anyway, at one point during the construction, there was a large section of the first floor which had not yet been finished, beneath which the cavernous space of the basement opened up. Spanning one part of that big hole that was the future basement was a big-ass steel beam that extended outward probably two hundred feet or so, and then hung a right-angle to the still-unfinished recital hall. This beam stood probably fifteen feet or so above the basement floor (I don't recall if the floor had been poured at that point, or if it was dirt.) I took it into my head to walk this beam, since it was quite easily walked, being six-inches or so wide.

Well, this started to feel like a bad idea about fifty feet out, and it became a dead-certain bad idea at the halfway point. I have decent balance, but if memory serves, while I wasn't actually drunk I wasn't entirely sober, either. The hardest part was making the jump from the beam to the safety of the recital hall, which was itself at an awkward angle. And through it all, Chris is making the most of an opportunity to laugh at me doing something dumb. Harumph.

3. Five or six years ago I allowed my weight to balloon to unhealthy proportions, which required lots of effort to pare back down. I'm still overweight (and my current habits, while not as disastrous as the ones that I had back then, still need some taming), but not nearly as bad as back then.

Question number 2: At the current moment, who has the most influence on your life?

No contest. It's Little Quinn. (Newer readers, see the links in the sidebar under "Notable Dispatches" for what life with Little Quinn has been like so far.) What sometimes scares me is that I still can't always tell whether his influence has been, overall, good or bad.

Question number 3: If you were given a time machine that functioned, and you were allowed to only pick up to five people to dine with, who would you pick?

I generally don't like questions like this, because while I'm sure the five people I'd pick are people I personally would like to talk to, I'm not entirely sure they'd make an interesting dinner party together. Unless we're talking five separate dinners in which I get to eat with these folks alone. But:

1. Jesus of Nazareth, but only if I can get his thoughts on how Christianity today reflects what he actually taught. I have a feeling he'd have some frank things to say on the subject.

2. Hector Berlioz. By all accounts, Berlioz was quite the wit and was a keen conversationalist, and his temperament was pretty close to mine, from what I've read over the years that I've adored his music. Plus, I'd love to be able to play for him one of my recordings of the complete Les Troyens, because Berlioz himself never heard his masterpiece performed in its entirety.

3. J.R.R. Tolkien. In truth, I'd probably just cower at his feet and shout "I'm not worthy!" over and over again, which I'm pretty sure would creep Tolkien out, but still, hearing thoughts on the formation of Middle Earth from his own lips would, I suspect, be absolutely fascinating.

4. Genghis Khan. But only if he'd promise to not kill me and set my town on fire. (Seriously. Here's a historical figure who might have changed the course of Western civilization immeasurably had factors not dictated that his conquests stop where they did.)

5. Michael Curtiz. This man directed some of my favorite movies ever, and he was hilariously bad at speaking English. When he finally won an Oscar after being nominated many times, he said, "Always a bridesmaid, never a mother." And during filming of Casablanca, he turned to a stagehand and demanded that the set include a poodle. So when the stagehand dutifully fetched a poodle, Curtiz said, "What do I want with a dog? I said a poodle of water!" Or, when on another set he needed some riderless horses to enter the frame, he directed: "Bring on the empty horses!" (David Niven loved that one so much that he used it as a title for a memoir of his. And speaking of David Niven, I bet he'd be fun to eat with.)

Question number 4: If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

You mean, I can't wish myself Spiderman's powers or for a working lightsaber or anything like that? Where's the fun in that?!

1. OK, this one kind of hurts to admit, but I'd wish for Steven Spielberg to direct The Phantom Menace, and I'd have the script reworked by Frank Darabont before filming. I wouldn't make any changes at all to the story itself, or to the production design at all, but even I must admit that this film's dialogue is the most clunky of all the Star Wars films, and since so much in the film depends on the kid (whose performance I've always liked), I'd put this one in the hands of Spielberg, who has never failed to get a good performance out of any kid with whom he's worked.

2. I'd wish for the University at Buffalo's Amherst campus to be relocated to Buffalo's East Side.

3. I'd roll back the NFL clock to the Bills' Super Bowl years, but I'd have Wade Philips as the defensive coordinator. I've always felt that the "Bend but don't break", less-than-physical style of Walt Corey's defenses during those years was the real main culprit in the team's loss of four consecutive Super Bowls. Consider: in two of the four years the Bills went to the Super Bowl, they fielded the NFL's second-to-last ranked defensive unit, and this despite the presence of players like Bruce Smith, Cornelius Bennett, and Darryl Talley. A more physical unit would have beaten the Giants and probably contained the Cowboys. (I do admit that the Bills had no chance whatsoever against the Redskins, whose 1991 team is probably the best team I've ever watched. Man, they were good. They went 14-2, with one of those two losses being one of those meaningless regular season finales after they've sewn up home-field advantage, and their two losses were by a combined five points. That was an awesome friggin' football team.)

Question number 5: Someone is visiting your hometown/place where you live a the moment. Name two things you regret your city not having, and two things people should avoid.

Geez, now I gotta Buffalo-bash. Forgive me!

I regret that Buffalo has no real Chinatown, and thus no restaurant that serves dim sum in the real way of having the dishes wheeled around on carts. I also regret that Buffalo currently has no top-flight children's museum, like Rochester does.

Two things to avoid? Hmmmm. Well, I'd avoid the Walden Galleria mall, because malls these days have the same stores everywhere. I first realized this about ten years ago when The Wife and I (before she was The Wife) took a few days off to travel to Pittsburgh for a weekend, and we went to a mall there -- and found the exact same set of stores that we always saw at the Galleria. That was when I first started recognizing the homogenization of American retail.

I'd also avoid the Rath County Building, unless my guests are toting two dozen rotten eggs apiece. If that were the case, the Rath Building would be Stop Number One.

Question number 6: Name one event that has changed your life.

Well, childbirth and marriage are too obvious, aren't they? So, I suppose, would be seeing Star Wars for the first time.

At some point in the summer of 1993, I went to the library in the Southern Tier town where I lived and glanced through the new books. I saw a novel by an author with a French-sounding name, and I thought the cover was just beautiful: it had mountains and soldiers and a castle and a guy playing a harp and a woman with an owl sitting upon her shoulder. I checked the book out, read the first chapter, and then never finished it for some reason (I think a trip interrupted my reading). While I didn't get back to that particular book by that particular author for another year or two, a seed was planted. The book was A Song for Arbonne, and the author was Guy Gavriel Kay. (The cover in question can be viewed here.)

Later I read Tigana, and then The Fionavar Tapestry...and I've never missed a GGK book since. As far as I am concerned, he is supreme among living authors. Reading GGK, though, made me aware that fantasy can go beyond endless quests for magical talismans by plucky stableboys who turn out to be royal descendents.

Question number 7: Is not a question. It's a command. Tag five other people.

Gladly! It seems to me that a married couple answering the same set of questions might be cool, so Scott and Kim are hereby tagged. The Triple Pundit also seems a bit untagged lately, so I'm now un-untagging her. Since he'll probably answer the questions anyway, I might as well give John an official tag (even though he's taking a hiatus that one hopes will be short). And finally, since the Dead Parrots are always interesting, whichever one of them (or all of them!) wishes to take this one up is thusly Tag'd.

Whew.