Thirty Things

Back in February and March, I took five of my Leftovers posts in a row to go through Twenty-Five Odd Facts and Figures You May or May Not Already Know About Me. Of course, no one has just twenty-five things about them and I found it difficult to narrow my life down to just that. So after much internal debate, I’ve decided to present Things 26 through 30 out of 25.

26. I have one tiny, minor, little OCD type quirk. When I’m at work in the kitchen and following a recipe, I have to go down the entire ingredient list again with each new ingredient. For example, if the recipe calls for: eggs, milk, bananas, chocolate chips, corn syrup, and Froot Loops, then I read it like this: eggs; eggs, milk; eggs, milk, bananas; eggs, milk, bananas, chocolate chips; and so on. I’d love to be able to finish one ingredient and move right on to the next. It would save me so much time.

27. I used to have a really great memory. Friends and fans alike never ran short of amazement at what my head could store. Everything from calendar dates to license plates, I was a regular Rain Man, with the one exception that I knew a new car costs more than a hundred dollars. But all that’s gone now and I’m definitely blaming years of Cheez-It overdosing.

Some time last year I decided to memorize pi out to as many places as I could manage. I made it to 107 places and that lasted a few weeks. Then I stopped thinking about it and it all went away again. I can now go this far without thinking: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288. After that I pause a while and can then come up with 419716939937510 … then I’ll drop a few and eventually find my way back out to the 100th digit or so. I find it fascinating that there are holes in the sequence but then I can pick it right back up later on down the chain.

However, I’m sure most of you find this much less fascinating and have already moved on to #28, so I’ll just shut up now.

28. Someone once asked me, “If you could meet any person in the whole wide world, living or dead, real or fictional, for just an hour, who would it be?” I replied without hesitation: “Me … when I’m eighty years old.” I’d somehow have Future Charlie rent a time machine, travel back to now, bring me a copy of Grey’s Sports Almanac, and let me know all the stupid things to avoid between now and then. My biggest worry? Future Charlie asking me, “Why oh why did you spend so much time on that stupid blog?!”

29. I used to have a really great memory. Friends and fans alike never ran short of amazement at what my head could store. Everything from calendar dates to license plates, I was a regular Rain Man, with the one exception that I knew a new car costs more than a hundred dollars. But all that’s gone now and I’m definitely blaming years of Cheez-It overdosing.

30. Along with my memory, I’m also slowly losing my only other superpower: my ability to stay up late. And enjoy it. I remember a time when going to bed the same day I woke up was considered an extremely early turn-in. Now I greatly look forward to those evenings I turn in around 9:30. Before I know it I’ll be eating dinner at four in the afternoon and planning vacations to Branson, MO.

Well! Now that I’ve broken the Twenty-Five Count Barrier, who knows how far this string of posts could go? Forty things? Sixty things? Maybe even 107. We’ll see how many of you hang on that long!