That makes me envious. I have to drive all the time, and I really dislike it.
I didn’t learn to drive till I was in my 30s, I passed my test first time aged 34.
I’m 6’2"
I have [UK] size 6 feet (US size 9?)
I have waist length hair
I own and watch The Phantom Menace because I like it…
I can change the tyres on my car and know how to check the oil and refill the windscreen wash thingy
I’m fairly computer literate [self taught]
I taught my friend how to use her computer
I never wear make-up
I only have 3 pairs of shoes (I have lots of bags tho’)
It takes me a max of 15 minutes to get ready to go out
I like Brussels Sprouts
I collect the boxed sets of Stargate SG-1 DVDs
I was always able to set the timer on any VCR I’ve had
Up till a few weeks ago my mobile was sans camera
I was born “dead” and revieved by the mid-wife
I was born at home
I can do that Vulcan hand sign thing with both hands
I fancy bald or red haired men
I don’t drink Guinness
I laugh at men’s jokes
I don’t have that vaccination scar on my upper arm that most people my age have - although I have had the appropriate vaccination
I have a tattoo on my buh-tocks
I have never had a permanent job
I run my own message board
I sold sliced meat to Noel Redding
I think Vin Diesel can act
I flipped the finger at the Queen once when I lived in Scotland (well the driver of her Land Rover which nearly flattened me)
What is your opinion on all of the high school massacres blamed on bullying?
What kind of language? Can you teach me a few words?
Design video games as a hobby? Are you able to play them? Have you tried to put your hobby to use as an occupation?
See, I am in an interracial marriage also, but it is more accepted here in South Florida. It is rare that you see Asian men with white skinned women. Does it cause you any problems?
Have you ever read up on this? What kind of hallucinations do you have? Did you take a lot of acid in your younger years?
Do you have any problems being a black woman in your field?
You seem to have accomplished a lot despite this. How do you think you accomplished so much when a lot of others in your situation seem to go in the opposite direction?
I’m both a practicing Catholic and an open lesbian.
I love math and arts and crafts.
I sleep in a closet.
I, too, am a Catholic, although like most Catholics do not practice all of what they preach. As an open lesbian, how are you treated by the Church?
Sleep in a closet?
I’m a pretty serious ballerina, which is sort of unusual at my age. Most kids quit around 8 and once they hit their teens, they think it’s too late to start.
I’m fairly “straightedge” in that I don’t smoke, do drugs, drink, have sex, etc. This is unusual in my school, at least.
I weigh 82 lb at 5’4. That gives me a BMI of 14.4 when normal is 18 or so.
I don’t have, and don’t want, a boyfriend.
I have a three and a half octave vocal range. I’m a section floater in choir. I’m the only one who has to have all the parts down pat in case I have to switch from soprano to alto or second.
I’m younger than most of my class. Fifteen and a junior in high school (11th grade) and I won’t turn sixteen til almost May.
Equal parts luck and being stuborn. There are times when I feel like I can relate to others and trust people, and then there are times when I feel like there is this huge thing between me and everyone else.
Sadly, my brother is someone who went “the opposite direction.” Drugs, alcohol, abusive toward his girlfriends, etc. I feel like I should do something, but realise that, like me, he has to find his own way.
I am a fanatical Bonanza fan.
I am painfully shy in real life. I can barely carry on a conversation.
I read cookbooks. Not for recipes, really. Just because I enjoy them.
I live on a hobby farm and raise free range ducks, free range heritage-breed turkeys, and naturally grown pigs. This is in addition to my full time job in the Quality Assurance laboratory for a large regional brewery.
I sing all the time, but am a terrible singer. I just wander around the house singing about whatever I see. I don’t do this when we have guests , so I wonder if everyone secretly does this but only when alone?
I am an avid gardener and I love canning and preserving fruits and vegetables and homemade soups and such, not a typically male pursuit.
I play the saxophone and the banjo.
I am usually reading at least 2, but often as many as 5, books at the same time. Not as strange here but among “normal” society it seems an oddity.
I drink brandy Manhattans.
Okay, here’s my list:
My mother was psychotic
My father was an alcoholic
I have anxiety disorder (probably from being raised by a psychotic mom and alcoholic dad)
Not only am I Baha’i, but I’m the only Baha’i I know who’s married to an atheist
I’ve had more than a dozen surgeries for kidney stone removal
I’ve known my husband since middle school, although I didn’t like him until I was 22.
I’ve had weight loss surgery.
When I lived in the Baltimore area, I did a 3-year stint as a phone sex operator. I’m getting back into the biz, probably this coming Monday
A freakish portion of my brain is devoted to song lyrics
If I think of more later, I’ll toss 'em in.
[momentary hijack after reading OP]
Wow, check out that train wreck in the polyamorous-with-children thread! (I am childless and hadn’t read it since very early in its lifespan). I should go start a GD thread.
[/hijack]
OK, onward to the question at hand. I’m different in so many ways I suspect most folks can’t help but think I’m doing it on purpose. You know, compensating for feelings of blandness by cultivating eccentricities so as to become “interesting”.
After nearly a decade of SDMB (an environment that’s pretty friendly to atypical people), I’ve got a pretty good handle on which differences merely put me in the good company of a sizable minority of other folks and which ones make me really unusual. In descending order, then:
a) I’m an anarchist. Seriously. I have the really oddball political perspective that says it is practical and possible to have an organized society — one with trains in it and they run on time and everything, not a nonsociety of chaos and violence — without it depending on a structure of authority where some people have formal power over other people, and where the coercion and punishment of subordinate people by those with the authority over them is a fundamental principle of establishing and maintaining social order and control. I have organizational plans for implementation and everything, and, meanwhile, as a political perspective it organizes my attitudes towards everyday politics and social issues and whatnot, just as more orthodox political perspectives do. It’s genuinely weird — even on this board, the overwhelming response whenever it comes up is for folks to dismiss it out of hand and to get very defensive on the subject.
b) I’m a heterosexual sissy. My term for it. A gender dysphoriac of sorts, similar in a lot of ways to transsexual (M2F) folk, except that I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong body. Just stuck on the wrong planet. If you can imagine a planet where all the generalizations and loose approximations about behavior and personality differences between the sexes were reversed, mirror-image, that would be the right planet, or at least closer by many orders of magnitude than this one. I got gay-bashed by homophobes as a kid and teenager, and still hit more subtle forms of homophobia as an adult. One part of it that’s caused a lot of problems for me is the “sexual initiative” thingie: imagine a fairly personable and at least medium-cute woman saying “I could certainly take the sexual initiative with a guy-stranger I found attractive, whether just to bed him or to haul him in closer for consideration as boyfriend-material, but I’d need to feel secure in the notion that he found me appealing and attractive and wasn’t likely to react with contempt or hostility or anything…and while I could see myself doing that, I can’t see myself taking the initiative more often than guys do with me in general, I need to feel attractive and desirable or I would feel pathetic, kind of, like begging, and I wouldn’t feel confident enough about the outcome if I didn’t have that general sense that men find me desirable, you know?” Does this hypothetical She sound like someone you could relate to? Well, I’m “Her”, except with the genders all reversed, and it sure has made me feel like a Martian during times when I’ve been sexually uninvolved. Go back and reread it, I think you’ll see what I mean.
c) I’m religious, or spiritual, but nothing name-brand, no dogma, no beliefs that one is supposed to believe “by faith without question”. Just my parsing of my own experiences and insights, my way of making sense of them, which happens to overlap in enough significant ways with the content and subject areas of major religions for me to use words like “God” and “prayer”. Sometimes I say “neo-pagan”, sometimes “Western Unorthodox”, sometimes “Roll Yer Own Spirituality”. But in the sense that anyone who understands what they are talking about ought to be able to describe it in different words, I can speak of these things (and often do) without using such words, and outside of this board at least I find that I’m far more often in alignment with the thinking of agnostics and atheists than with the overwhelming majority of religious folk.
d) I have psych diagnoses of “paranoid schizophrenic” (& “with delusions of grandeur” tacked on at least once), and “manic depressive” (now known as “bipolar disorder”). Before any such diagnosis, I used to go to see “counselors” and “therapists” (not psychiatrists), my relaitonship towards which had moved towards skeptical and mistrustful, and once this escalated to the involvement of actual psychiatrists, rapidly from skeptical and mistrustful to hostile and inimical. I don’t take pysch meds, don’t see shrinks except across the table in political, usually adversarial settings, generally prefer to accept and keep and cope with the mental and emotional conditions they call “illness” and not seek a “cure” for them, and I’m a participant in the movement for civil rights protection and advocacy for mental patients loosely known as the mental patients liberation movement / consumers-survivors-expatients’ movement / “schizzy libbers”.
e) I’m into radical feminism as political social theory, the way some lefties are into marxism. A lot of it dovetails with personal and with other political stuff, see items a and b above. Rad Fem is the major political visionary theory of our lifetime.
f) I’m not polygamous in the “in-practice” sense of being currently involved in multiple ongoing relationships and/or involved with someone else who has other ongoing sexual-romantic relationships, although that seems like a reasonable outcome that I am in no way opposed to. I find the whole mongamy-exclusivity-jealousy thing weird and incomprehensible. I can understand loving someone and being fearful that they might not love you back, or might leave, or might decide that their relationship with you has more negatives than positives and should come to an end; and in a minor, ancillary sort of way I can see how them getting seriously involved with someone who isn’t you could make any of those things more likely, or could just eat up a lot of their time and energy, but it seems almost infinitely more likely that being selfishly possessive, belligerently jealous and trying to prevent them from following their heart would precipitate such results, aside from which perhaps they really would be happier with someone else and aren’t just wrong in thinking so, and so if you love them how can you defend imposing such restrictions on them? And that’s not even as of yet touching upon things like being suspicious, tossing around accusations, harboring mistrust and resentment based on suspected liaisons with others, and so on. I really just don’t get it at all. If I walk in on my girlfriend and she’s under the covers with some other guy, first reaction is going to be “Oops, sorry, I’ll come back later”, and the reaction later on is going to be “I really hope you changed the sheets, was it good, is he nice, what do you want for supper?”
If that is a US size 9, you can borrow some of my shoes, if you like flip-flops, Birkenstocks, Tevas, or comfort mocs from Lands End or LL Bean 
I’m 5’3", but I almost never wear high heels.
Me neither. The last time I wore make-up was for my wedding in 2003. The last time before that that I wore makeup was for my senior class picture in 1992. Somebody from one of the many, many “nails” places around here tried to grab me at a mall once (how do so many nails places stay in business?). I just said no, and didn’t bother explaining that the last time I did anything with my nails other than cut them when they break, GHW Bush was in the White House…
If I do wear makeup, it tends to change color on me. Foundation turns a brownish color, and lipstick turns kind of bluish. It doesn’t seem to matter what color or brand of makeup it is. I have always wondered what it is about my skin chemistry that might cause that…
Me too! But only fresh ones, never frozen, and only lightly cooked (not overcooked like most people do them). You can get Brussels sprouts on the stalk at markets in the Bay Area in the fall, and those are wonderful.
I like pretty much any hair configuration on men, including bald, as long as they don’t spend more time on their hair than I do (and I don’t spend much).
I like chest hair on men, and back hair.
I don’t like big muscles on men. Give me a nice fat or skinny geek instead… mmm…
I communicate with Mr. Neville by squeaking sometimes. There are happy squeaks, sad/anxious squeaks, and in-between squeaks. He will “squeak” my nose by touching the end of it, and I will squeak and he can tell what kind of mood I’m in.
One of my goals in life is to have to think about money as little as humanly possible.
I have a degree in math, but I’m terrible at doing arithmetic in my head, and hate doing it. That’s not actually that unusual (the skill sets for the higher-level math-major classes are totally different than those for lower-level math classes- being a math major is all about doing proofs, not arithmetic), but most non-math-majors think it is.
I majored in astronomy, physics, and math, yet my verbal SAT scores were a fair bit higher than my math SATs. Unlike most science majors, my verbal GRE scores weren’t a lot lower than my math ones.
Oh, and for all the non-drivers- not only did I not learn to drive until I was 23, I am terrible at any kind of spatial thinking (I can’t say if a space between cars is X number of car lengths, or can’t usually tell if something’s going to fit into a box until I try to put it in). Also, I was scared to death of driving as a teenager (I still have nightmares in which I’m in a car accident or drive off a cliff, even though the only car accident I’ve been in was pretty minor). I had to learn things like parallel parking a little differently than other people do, and to this day I avoid close maneuvers with my car, but I managed to learn to drive (and commute 30 miles each way to work every day, on busy freeways). If I can do it, you probably can too.
I can certainly understand that people desperate enough are capable off a massacre, I’d say its also part off there character in a way. Personally I hate losing control off my emotions and actions, I’ve never got drunk, never got into a serious fight and the number off times I actually yelled at people can be counted on one hand (against my little brother, he knows how to ‘push my buttons’). If you don’t have that kind off emotional control (which is a way off self defence) you can just lose it completely. My mother probably said it best, she said that I would put all my fear deep inside me in a little box and basically forget about them. That box never disappears however unless you deal with it, by now I think I dealt with it. But if you can’t than the box will be full at some point and explode.
I’ve warned people in the past that even though I might not ever get real mad, if they push long and hard enough I don’t know what I would do. At one point my little brother was teasing and annoying me all day long (he saw this back than as a ‘game’) at one point something just snapped and I kicked him twice. This is something I would never do, but if I snap against someone else I don’t know if they would survive it (I love my little brother).
Did you skip a grade, or did it just fall into place this way? My son skipped a grade and I always wonder how it will effect him later in his high school years.
Do you sell the animals for food or is it just what you say it is, a hobby?
Do you think your past led you to this at all? ALSO, how much money do you make doing this? What happens if someone does not pay their phone bill? Does anyone (employees, not customers) ever really get into it?
Wow! Do you just totally walk around feeling out of place?
Yeah.
I don’t think it has much of anything to do with my past. I actually think I’m pretty well adjusted about it.
If a customer doesn’t pay their bill, that’s the company’s problem, not mine. When I lived near Baltimore, I was an employee of the company. If you’re an employee of Wal Mart and a customer’s check bounces, you still get paid for selling them the stuff. In my new gig (probably starting this weekend), I’ll be an independent contractor, but I’ll get paid by the company, by the minute.
The company I worked for before, I made $8.00 an hour, plus bonuses. My bonuses were based on my number of requests, and I averaged a total of about $13.00 an hour. This was more than 10 years ago. Not too shabby for a very low overhead job.
As for “getting into it”, well, like everyone else, I have certain things that trip my trigger. If I was doing one of those fantasies, sometimes I got into it, yeah. I also read, recently, about a case in Florida (Sarasota, I think) where a phone sex operator sued her company for workmen’s comp, saying she sustained carpal tunnel syndrome from masturbating up to seven times per shift! The case settled before it got to court, for an undisclosed sum. :eek: She said she was told to do whatever it took to keep the customer on the line, and if she was excited, they stayed on the line longer. I say, if she’s not good at faking excited, maybe she should look for another line of work!
I don’t think I could do it as a career, and I’m not even sure I’d want to. Since I don’t know nearly enough programming, I just use programs like Multimedia Fusion.
Once I reached Algebra in 8th grade, my math ability went down the tubes. Besides geometry, I struggled with math all through high school, barely passing. I always did much better in english classes, and writing came to me much more easily. I took the physics AP and got a 2, while I passed APs like English Lit, History, and Government. On the SAT my verbal and math scores were exactly the same, on the SAT II my math score was by far the lowest. So now in college I’m about to graduate as an astrophysics major. Somehow.
All glory to the God of Partial Credit! I usually would make an algebraic or arithmetic mistake somewhere in a test problem of any complexity, but fortunately I got partial credit for the stuff I did do right. 
I was in a calculus class for a few weeks where that wasn’t the case. After the first quiz, on which I got 0/5, I transferred to another section of the class taught by the same professor. A few days later, I got 100% on the first test (on the same material as the quiz I had gotten 0/5 from the first professor).
That’s just more evidence supporting Tiresias’ claim that it’s up to nine times more fun to be a woman than a man. The cat can take a lot more punishment than the bishop, so to speak.
I would imagine the company could have responded with some kind of counter-suit about her admitting to diddling around on the job. Citing it as a “performance enhancing technique” that was therefore job-related doesn’t seem like a good argument, otherwise people could be blowing coke on their desks at lunchtime and then suing the company for a bad trip.
I got my Master’s degree by flunking out of college.
I don’t miss people. If someone exits my life for a time or forever, it is very, very unusual for me to feel sad because their not around.
I’m working on my third novel, but I’m not a writer. I have no intention of publishing, I just do it for fun. My third novel will have been almost entirely written at the bar.
I’m so shy w/ women that I literally cannot dream about them.
I can tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue.
I know the secret to invisibility.
I can count to 1,024 on my fingers.
I’m a dictionary snob.
I can make a flute out of a drinking straw, but I can’t play fer shit.
I know what a mercury switch is for.
I worked at a funeral home, and I once lost control of a gurney and rolled a body in a hospital parking lot. I also know how they embalm infants. And that there is almost nothing funnier than a clown in a funeral home.
I can move my hands in opposite circles at the same time.
I’m mentioned in an end note in a book on logic.