25 More Things

So, I don't have much else to say these days on a personal front.  Those of you in the know, well....you're pretty much in the know, not much else to really dig into.  Or so you think.  I've decided to do that lameass 25 things thing from Facebook again.  Here's 25 things you probably wouldn't (or maybe you would for all I know) guess about Yang.

1.  I secretly want to have one more good all out brawl with someone before I get too old to do so anymore.  (at least too old to win).

2.  I'm not nearly as much of a porn monkey as much of what I write here might lead you to think. 

3.  I've become politically more and more against extreme ideologues of any political or social stripe.

4.  I much prefer non-fiction books to fiction, owning currently a 6 to 1 ratio of non-fiction to fiction books, and previously probably a 30 to 1 ratio.  I guess there's just too much to know that is as interesting as any fictitious thing (though that wouldn't explain my tv habits).

5.  I've never in my life gotten solidly good sleep for any sustainable length of time (at least not since childhood).  I don't mean I've never gotten a good night or even week's sleep, rather I mean I've never been able to maintain a regular sleep schedule, mainly because I'm a night owl.

6.  I wince every time I hear someone say they never knew what depression or unhappiness was like before they were 18.  It's a bizarre statement to me that is so alien as to make me wonder what planet these people are from.

7.  I try not to have more than one major show a night I'm really into on tv, though I may watch more tv than that on a given night.  I try to resist such things, though I often fail.  As of now, I have roughly 4 major shows a week I'm into.  Maybe 5.  To that, I spit upon hulu's temptations.

8.  I found it hard to come up with 25 random facts about myself in the first go round, and now that I'm 8 spots into this one, it's absolutely painful.  What does that say about me?

9.  I started fighting in karate when I was 10.  By 11, I had gained my first knock out (and those matches weren't even like that.  You were just supposed to win on points.).

10.  I played football for one year in 9th grade.  I was, of all things, an offensive and defensive lineman.  Defensively, I was awful, as I was too small to see where the ball was going.  I switched to linebacker and did much better.  Offensively, I was so small for a linemen (or a football player at all) that it shocked everyone that I was effective as a starter.

11.  I don't mind bureaucracy as long as the bureaucratic system in play realizes it and doesn't try to moralize about the process.  For instance, I detested teachers that gave busy work and then claimed it was somehow a personal failing of the students because they didn't like to do it.  There's a lot of that in the world.

12.  When I was 19, I was in a severe car crash.  The entire car was literally crushed and destroyed except for the tiny space that surrounded my body after flipping several times over. I walked away without a scratch.  The turn where I lost control is still known as "Dead Man's Curve" to all my friends.

13.   When I was in my first graduate program, there was a period where I got up to working out for 5 hours a day, once or twice even reaching 6 hours a day.  I would run or swim for an hour in the morning.  Do free weights or nautilus for 45 minutes in the afternoon.  15 minutes of stomach work.  An hour of alternating running and walking.  And then I'd go to water polo practice for two hours straight of continuous speedy swimming.  After all that, I wasn't as ripped as you might guess.  (I've got more muscle definition now after only working out for an hour and a half a day, but I eat better now too).

14.  I detest when people say they "like all kinds of music.  Anything on the radio really."  This means you really like nothing but hearing droning crap of whatever ilk is being pushed that week.  It also means you have no soul (in the religious or James Brown sense).

15.  I've never had a truly bad roommate, which is strange, because I've had a lot of roommates.  There was this thing with one my girlfriend's friends that lived with us once, but it was so bad from the beginning, that it's hard to even consider her a roommate in any conventional sense.  And, for the most part, she stayed out of the way anyway.

16.  I could never be an alcoholic.  I don't have the stomach for it.  Even in college, my drinking stories are all "one night" stories, because literally I never drank 2 days in a row or even more than than at least 4 days between drinking, and that doesn't mean getting blasted either.  

17.  After I broke up with a girl I dated for 6 years, I started to drink wine with all my evening meals to become more "refined and cultured."  In hindsight, this seems like a REALLY stupid idea and the it fizzled out after about 6 months.  However, for health benefits, I drink some red wine with meals ever other day now.  Cultured AND healthy.  Awwww yeah.

18.  I'm all about subtext.  Whenever someone speaks, I'm not only listening to the content, but am just as much paying attention to why they're saying it at that particular moment.  I find the subtext often says more than the content.  Example: once I was doing therapy with a room full of prisoners.  The discussion was on how to better themselves and avoid returning to jail.  I let them ramble for 45 minutes on how messed up, corrupt and against them the system was and at the end of it, I asked them all this question:  Why are you telling me all this?  One of them smiled and answered:  We're giving you reasons it's useless to try so we don't even have to try and better ourselves.  That's subtext.

19.  My nickname is Yang with variants being, Super Yang, Lil Yang, and Superlilyang.  My friend started calling me this because I used to say the phrase,  "That guy's talking a lot of yang" a lot.  The name has kind of stuck and the only variant that annoys me is the one from my mother when she would call me Yang Man.  It's wrong for parents to call their children by nicknames, especially lameass variants.

20.  One of my friends and his wife first had sex together while I was in the room passed out.

21.  I think one of the key notifiers that you are getting older is when kids start making fun of the music of the kids that made fun of the music you listened to.   Because I was a bit more eclectic and harder edged because of my subculture, this has been less true of me than it has been of others not in that subculture.  But it's still been true.

22.  I once worked in a clinic that had a ton of men and women employees.  We were having a giant staff meeting and I jokingly walked in and said, "Konichiwa, bitches!"  I hadn't realized that none of the men in the office had made it to the meeting yet, meaning I had called a room full of nothing but women "bitches."  Oops.

23.  I'm a photoshop savant.  Or maybe I'm just a photoshop idiot.  Whichever works for you.

24.  I once moved residences 7 times in 2 years.  I now REALLY hate moving.

25.  Every year at the murder mystery party I host for my girlfriend, it turns out that our friend Becca did it.  If it turns out she did it again this year, I'm declaring it a sign that she has lain with the horned one.