mandarine

Charlotte says that the Queen o’ Memes might have me beheaded if I did not obey the tagging. So here are seven weird things (picked almost at random) about me.

I hardly ever get angry. This is generally a great asset when working with children (including my own progeny), as I can very well act angry and adapt my apparent anger to the situation long before I actually lose my temper. However, I am not 100% anger-proof. I remember losing my temper once on my youngest nephew (who is a worldwide specialist at turning apparently sane people into howling harpies). I was probably the scareder of the two, as I am not myself used to being angry (while he is used to people being angry at him). Next time, as soon as I feel the slightest urge to start yelling, I’ll run for the door.

I hardly ever get emotional. I’ve seen people cry when parting, cry at weddings, cry at the end of a movie, cry when cross. I can’t do that. Sometimes I wonder whether I would cry if someone dearest to me died. The closest I get to crying is with the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (the part where the orchestra plays a whole phrase on a single chord), or the flute & cello duet in Dvorák’s Cello Concerto. If you could mix such music with a convincing political speech, a good plea, or a brilliant logical demonstration, you might see me cry.

I never feel hungry. I have already written about this in my article about fasting. This was a new (re)discovery at the time. I have repeatedly checked this fact since then, and I am positive: I can skip dinner and then breakfast, and eat only a salad for lunch, and still my body does not complain, and I am not running towards the fridge. I tend to check more often if there’s chocolate left, though.

I am a sluggish driver. When I was nineteen, on the morning I took my driving test, there had been an ice storm. The whole region was glistening under a 5mm slippery icing. I took my test nonetheless, but it was too slippery to go beyond second gear (yes, I can handle a stick-shift). That’s lucky, because the examiner would have seen how slow a driver I am. And the older I get, the slower I go. In the early years, I had my eyes on the meter to make sure the needle was always exactly superimposed with the speed limit, just as if I was landing an aircraft. This was a dangerous driving habit, as it would occupy my eyes, brains and foot just to ensure a very stiff cruise control function. But it made for an average speed at least 20% below that of fellow French drivers. With the introduction of automated speed cameras, French driving habits have changed dramatically, and the average speed has sharply declined. And so has mine, now a good 20 km/h below the speed limit. I do 110 kph on a motorway, and hardly 70 kph on a straight country road. On the winding roads around where I live, I am seldom above 50 kph. And this driving is so soothing that I find myself slowing down insensibly. Until my co-pilot tells me that she’d be there faster walking.

I am an early riser. I love to be up a 6 in the morning, and have two whole hours to myself while everybody else is still asleep. Unfortunately, I do need a lot of sleep. For me, the ideal night is 9:30 - 6:00. Knowing that the kid is seldom asleep before 9:00, that does not leave a lot of “big people’s time”. The other handicap is that I cannot sleep late. If I go to bed at 2:00, all I will have is four miserable hours of sleep. Maybe that’s a reason why I hate parties.

My brain is on constant overdrive. Everything in life is a puzzle that I must solve, a phenomenon I must explain, a mental note I must take. I have a thousand ideas a day, most of which are plain stupid. You can find the funniest absurd ideas there. Occasionally, there is a nugget which makes it to ‘good idea’ status. The problem is: where I work, people want me to file patents on some of these ideas; turning an idea into a patent is akin to dissecting an eyeball: it loses much of its appeal.

I am a master in casuistic reasoning. I could probably be a lawyer, as I am always very good at playing Devil’s advocate. It takes a forewarned public not to think me a dangerous extremist when I pull the yarn of some twisted logical reasoning. There are always two sides to one truth, and you can count on me for finding the other side.

To wrap things up

I am a cold-blooded, heartless, ascetic, slow, antisocial, raving, and immoral freak. You’re lucky I do not live down your street (but can you be sure of that?)

How would you feel if you were invited to have tea with friends, and the host, after having done all the talking for half an hour, then turning to the guests for feedback, receives each comment with a mere: “OK, next comment, please”, and then “all right, thank you, what was I saying,…” and carries on? How would you feel if you were attending a lecture by some specialist you absolutely love, and the lecturer leaves the room during the Q&A session, leaving you and your co-lecturees to discuss between yourselves?

In real life, I love to squeeze remarks into a discussion when I feel comfortable with the subject and the people, and if my wittily pertinent attempts meet with indifference, I will soon stop trying and leave the discussion on the first occasion. This is exactly how I feel when I visit blogs in which the author does not reply to comments. I am under the impression that the commenting feature is enabled simply for the sake of freedom of speech. I do agree that few comments are ever written in a way that calls for a reply, but when utter silence follows the comments section, it makes me doubt there’s somebody on the other end of the line.

In short, I just wished to explain that I find it hard to keep up with first-person blogs in which comments never or seldom get a reply. I’ll pick just two examples: the QC report (good thing she’s no reader of mine). Q’s writing is fabulous. I found the blog totally addictive. But when I decided I’d “de-lurk” and give commenting a try, I found my initiative as effective as (pardon the vulgar French expression) peeing in a cello. A couple of posts later I deleted the entry from my feedreader. In fact, I’d probably still be a fanatic reader if comments had been turned off altogether, clearly signifying that this was more like an online book and less like a group of friends. The same happened with Tim’s Mother Tongue Annoyances.

Knowing that my blog-reading time is not stretchable to infinity, you will understand I’d rather spend some time with people who are friendly and act friendly, than with people whose friendliness I can’t assess. Now because I am a fervent observer of the ‘do as you would be done by’ principle, I try to answer all comments here, lest I should lose a single reader. Obviously, this is more work for me, but I must confess I like commenting so much that I love an opportunity to comment on any blog, including mine.

P.S. there is something I have to ask: do you come back to read my replies to your comments (I personally keep coming back compulsively until I get a reply whenever I comment on someone else’s blog) or should I drop the practice because I am the only one who cares?

You may by now know that I am very fond of audio-books in general, and of free audio-books in particular. Among those, I have a clear preference towards the public-domain audio-books which the LibriVox volunteers offer as unconditional gifts to the whole world and all future generations.

What you do not know is that I have come to worship one specific LibriVox voice. Warm and crystalline at the same time, this voice is the ideal bedside storytelling mother’s. If I’d been born to an English-speaking family, my dreams of being read Peter Pan, Narnia or Harry Potter to would feature that very voice.

My greatest luck is that I have had the privilege to edit some of the recordings in which this dream voice had been preciously collected, for subsequent release on LibriVox. Even if it was easy work (there are hardly any bits that need to be edited out), I am proud to have contributed to these priceless presents for humanity.

Dear Cori, I am in love with your voice.

A century ago, Emily asked us to think of ten compliments we received throughout our life.

Warning, severe boasting ahead. [more]

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I have been flattered with three awards recently: the thinking blogger award (by Emily and Lorelle) and Liz’s SOB.

I now start a month of bragging-free writing diet. Anyone catching me bragging (even covertly) gets to decide the theme of my next post.

Blogs are the perfect place to show one’s best traits and hide the rest. I am concerned that mandarine is gradually painting a deceptive portrait of me. I am not Mr Nice. I try to be. But I fail. Here is why.

Below are five major flaws of mine. Not the make-believe double-edged semi-flaws that are custom-made for job-interviews, but real inexcusable flaws. The ones that will make me burn in hell.

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Today, I finished reading all of Emily’s Telecommuter Talk. Ever since I found her blog, I knew I would have to read all of it sooner or later. Here is why: when Emily writes about something, anything at all really, she writes a story. Emily’s blog is not a journal: it is a collection of short stories. You won’t ever find a Telecommuter Talk entry like: ‘Today I hurt my little finger in a door’, no. Instead you will find a small drama about impossible love between doors and fingers, where knobs and hinges are characters with a personality of their own, where creaking door memories meet creaking joints fears. A story strewn with gems of psychology insight, peculiar personal philosophy, or obsessive-compulsive views. A story embroidered on a marvellous fabric woven from skillful language and dyed with colorful wit. I do not know if she’s real of if she’s just a storybook character invented by a skillful writer (maybe Hobs and Dorothy can testify in this respect), but I can tell you the skillful writer has me gripped.
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‘For as long as we both shall live’: how long might this be? To back up Litlove’s recent illustration of this question, let me point out that a couple of centuries ago, people who had survived to the age of marriage could reasonably expect to live until 40. This means that roughly half the people died before that age. Therefore, the probability that someone would stay married to the same person for more than 20 years was at most one in four. Nowadays, the probability that both husband and wife
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