30 Random Things About Me (Blog TAG)

I was tagged by Amy over at Eyeshadow Addict to do this 30 Random Things About Me tag. In the past, you may recall that I did the 50 Random Facts About Me tag, as well as the Thirteen Questions tag, both of which I hope taught you a thing or two (or thirteen or fifty) about moi.

But as a living, breathing, writer-slash-person, I can always come up with more ways to talk about myself. AND I'M 'BOUT TO, 'cause there are (clearly) about to be 30 more Bailey facts heading your way. Yes, yours.

LEGGO!

1. I'm terrrrrible at finishing books. There are an untold number of 66%-read books under my belt.

2. I feel compelled to wash my hands after anytime I touch a dog or cat.

3. I'm convinced that walking heavy on my heels all my life has given me horrible calf strength and no butt muscles to speak of. This isn't a scientific assessment, just a strong feeling I have. I've been trying to increase my squats for the last month or so, because Beyoncé says they work.

4. I don't own a smartphone. I had to cancel the data plan on my Blackberry when I moved to Canada, and replaced the 'Berry with a Samsung Bright Side, which sucks completely. Don't buy one.

5. My older sister Mallory and I saw the movie The Witches (based on the book by Roald Dahl) in the theater when it came out in 1990 (when I was either 5 or 6), and can still vividly remember our parents having to take us out of the movie theater crying because we were TERRIFIED. It was during the scene wherein the witches all remove their human masks and reveal their hideous witch faces.  If you haven't seen The Witches, just take a look at this screenshot and tell me YOU COULD HAVE HANDLED IT at age 5!

6. Once while attempting to slice a granola bar in half for a customer, I sliced into my own hand with a serrated knife at a cafe I worked at. I still have the scar. The customer did not care.

7. David and I met while working at that very cafe. (Whattup Esselon?!)

8. My eyes are very sensitive to sunlight - my grandmother recently told me they always had been, even when I was a very little girl. You can catch me squintin' on a sunny or hazy day.

9. The only time I've ever dyed my hair was with a temporary box-color back in 2006, but it was too subtle a change for anyone to even notice the difference.

10. I truly do miss Dunkin Donuts coffee products and always make a point to get myself a coffee or Coffee Coolata as soon as I can whenever I'm back in Massachusetts. Mmm....

11. I got my first real job at age 13, simply because I wanted to work. It was at an indoor skating arena in Pittsfield called The Arena, and the owner was a friend of my mother's, which explains how I was able to get a job at such a young age (pretty sure you're not legally supposed to be able to work in Massachusetts until you are 14, but my 14th birthday was about 2 months after I started working there, so WHATEVA). I believe the minimum wage at that time was about $5.25/hr. #BigChips.

12. Every weekday morning for breakfast, I eat a banana, coffee, and 2 pieces of whole wheat toast with peanut butter. On weekends, I prefer eggs/bacon.

13. My piercings are as follows:  A nose (ring) piercing (age 18), a belly button (bar) piercing (age 16), and pierced ears (age probably 5?). By the way, I've heard mutterings that belly piercings are supposed to be some sort of an embarrassment to women nowadays - like they're a stain to remind us of our rebellious youth - but I must have missed that memo. I'm not embarrassed by mine at all. Not yet anyway! Same goes for my nose ring - I've always loved it and have (thus far) never regretted getting it done.

14. I love camping out in tents. Even when I know that my night of sleep will be horrible, I just love sleeping outside in a tent. Especially if it's with David :)

15. I hiked to the summit of Mt. St. Helens in the spring of 2012. It was one of the most challenging things I've ever done in my life - physically and mentally. Unfortunately... there was no view at the summit because it was white-out conditions:

.  the summit!  I SWEAR!  .

16. Sometimes I go a year or more between haircuts of any kind. I just don't feel compelled to go and do it! My last haircut was in June (yes, of 2013), and scheduling an appointment for a cut had been on my to-do list for over a month before I finally made one this weekend. My appointment is on Thursday... wish me luck!

17. My first concert was the No Doubt Tragic Kingdom Tour in 1996. It was awesome.

18. I was in a high school production of the musical Titanic my senior year (2002). If you're not familiar with this play, you ought to be. It's not based on the movie.

19. Speaking of theater - I love live theater, but I don't go see it very often anymore.

20. This is going to sound a little wacky, but for a very long time I believed that boys must not have feelings. I struggled with boys (and girls... but mostly boys) being really mean to me throughout elementary and middle school, and when I tried to defend myself against them by being mean back, it just never seemed to have an impact on them. It really seemed to me that they must just not have feelings. This irrational idea became kind of engrained in me, to the point where even to this day sometimes I will say something insensitive to Dave or to a male friend (something I'd never say to a female friend), just because my blind assumption is that it won't hurt their feelings because they don't have feelings the same way I do. Can anyone else relate to this??

21. I've been working full time for the same company for a little over 6 years now.

22. I included a bundle of Boston channels in my Canadian cable package, so I still get to watch Boston news and weather :)

23. I am an avid apartment singer. I always have been and only minutely care what my neighbors think of that.

24. I just finished reading Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns).

25. YouTube videos are mostly my entertainment of choice - I watch them more often than I watch television. Some of my current favorites are Miranda Sings, LeighAnnSays, Flula, Jenna Marbles, MissGlamorazzi, and cutepolish.

26. When I was younger, the trolls in Earnest Scared Stupid scared me so much that it impacted my sleeping.

27. Using my right index fingernail, I compulsively pick at the side of my right thumb... and kind of always have. There's usually a cut or broken skin of some sort in that spot. #Sexy.

28. At age 8, somehow the rubber backing of one of those super cheap plastic earrings became lodged inside my ear lobe. Just take a moment to think about that... the rubber back had basically grown into my ear. I had to have surgery to remove it, and I can still remember how frightened I was as they were about to put me under anesthesia. I have a vivid memory of my Dad being there with me (in hospital scrubs) as I fought back against them putting the anesthesia mask to my face. The good news is, as a bi-product of getting a minor surgery as an 8-year-old, I received an AWESOME "feel better" present from my aunt Dee - a big stuffed Max (the dog from The Little Mermaid!).

29. I severed my ACL playing soccer in 10th grade (2000) and had to have surgery to repair it. I'm still paranoid to this day that the repair isn't going to hold!

30. I have a somewhat irrational fear of slipping on things. You'll probably either crack up or want to smack me if you catch me trying to walk up an icy hill in the winter or cross the street on a rainy day.

Ok, now I'm exhausted. I hope you've made it this far - and that you've enjoyed learning a bit more about me!

Thanks Amy for tagging me - and now I tag all of YOU to participate in this tag as well. If you don't blog, share a random thing about yourself below in a comment :)

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50 Random Facts About Me (Blog TAG)

There was another fun TAG going around YouTube that I wanted in on - this time it's the 50 Random Facts About Me TAG, so GET YOUR FACES READY FOR SOME FACTS Y'ALL.

1. Hip hop/R&B is my favorite type of music and has been for the vast majority of my life.

2.  When I was younger I had a real history of falling head over heels in love with boys and staying in love with them for years. My apologies to BJ, Cole, Danny, Mike and Aaron. You probably could have done without my stalker advances from the years 1989-1999.

3. I had my nose pierced in Spring of 2003, so I've had my nose ring for 10 years now!

4. I have two middle names.

5. I still have the teddy bear that I received from my parents the day I was born. His name is Erving and he comes with me everytime I move. I even had him at UMass with me all throughout undergrad.

6.  David and I have been dating since September of 2007.

7. I come from an enormous family! My dad is one of thirteen children so I have (at last count) 24 first cousins on that side of the family alone. My mom is one of four children, and I've got 11 first cousins on that side.  And then of course many of my first cousins have children themselves (who I believe - please correct me if I'm wrong  - are my first cousins, once removed). I have literally lost count of these particular kin - there could be any number of them floating around. I myself am the second oldest of four children.

8. When we'd get into fights when I was younger, I'd scratch my older sister's arms with my fingernails and make her bleed. I feel very bad about this now. Sorry Mallory, I love you!

9. Dave and I have lived together in 5 apartments since September of 2008.

10.  I've lived in 9 different apartments since September 2004

11.  I played on travel soccer teams almost every single year between fifth grade and twelfth grade.

12.  I made my high school's varsity soccer team as a freshman...

13. ... I'm not actually that great at soccer, I was just a pretty fast runner.

14. I CANNOT CANNOT CANNOT stand the taste of olives! If one single olive has made it onto a plate, it ruins the entire dish for me. Olives are most definitely my most hated food.

15. Ever since sixth grade, I've had a tendency to faint and have fainted about 15 times in my life. (Coincidentally, I even just fainted again a few nights ago.) Most of the faintings have come right after a "medical scare" (whether it's a cut on my thumb or an injured back or a torn ACL).

16. I quit the JV basketball team in 10th grade because I couldn't stand the humiliation of my inability to make a layup. My speed meant that I was often by myself on a breakaway sprint towards the basket... and being by yourself at the end of a basketball court and missing your layup is embarrassing enough. But have it happen over and over and over and over and over again... and you may start feeling like maybe basketball isn't your sport. I did, however, start keeping stats for our JV/Varsity girls basketball teams after I quit playing, so I got to travel to all the games anyway.  :)

17. I went to college at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and graduated magna cum laude in 2006 with a degree in Communications. I have no intentions of going to grad school.

18. My first CD ever was CrazySexyCool by TLC, and I think it was an excellent first CD to own.

19. I was always very, very good at understanding and remembering lyrics to songs. I'm so good at it that it doesn't impress me when other people are. At all. So, don't brag to me that you can remember all the words to a song, because I will tell you that I can remember all the words to ALL THE SONGS, EVER.

20. I was voted Most Dramatic in high school.

21. I was also hysterically voted second runner up prom queen my senior year in high school. This was not something I campaigned for and still cracks me up to this day.

22.  I wear a size 8 or 8.5 shoe.

23.  I'm 5'4.5" but I tell everyone that I'm 5'5".

24.  Canada is the only country in which I've ever used my passport.

25.  I'm a very fast typist, but I'm not sure if that's very impressive in this day and age?

26.  I had my belly button pierced shortly after my 16th birthday.

27.  I'm not a very strong swimmer.

28.  I don't like even numbers and sometimes take steps to avoid them or actively make biased choices against them. My favorite numbers are 13, 3, and 21.

29.  I ran track in high school - the 4x100 relay, 100m, 200m, occasional 400m (death) and occasional high jump. Track made me feel so incredibly anxious before every race that it made me want to vom.

30. I've jumped into Crater Lake in Oregon (see the left side of my blog header for photo proof) and it was cold. As. Shit.

31. I remember when my little sister Markie came home from the hospital as a newborn, when I was 7 years old. I have a memory of sneaking into her room to pick her up out of her cradle and hold her when no adults were watching. Don't worry, I was very careful.

32. My favorite ice cream flavor is mint chocolate chip and has been for as long as I can remember.

33. I don't like dogs (or really any pets). Contrary to VERY popular belief, this does NOT make me a bad or evil person.

34. I wore braces on my teeth for 3 years, 4 months and 5 days. I got them during the spring of fifth grade, had them allllll throughout middle school, and didn't get them removed until the summer between 8th and 9th grade. No one else has worn braces for this long.  No one. I used to have a huuuuge gap between my two front teeth and when I first got my braces, kids made fun of me saying that it looked like "a bridge over the Grand Canyon."

35. I was once part of a group of a dozen or so girls who dressed up and performed the "King of New York" song/dance from Newsies in a high school talent show.

36. I'm not a vegetarian but I don't like eating meat or poultry. It really weirds me out and I have to try really hard not to think about it while I'm eating it. It's not an animal welfare thing for me, so much as it just really gives me the weirds to think about the fact that what I'm eating used to be alive.

37. I'm a Scorpio. And you know what that means.

38.  I loooooooooove ice cream. So much so that when I cut it out of my diet, I drop weight.

39. I very rarely drink alcohol. I've always gotten bad hangovers quite easily so I eventually just began avoiding alcohol. I swear it's not because I am a bad time or that I don't like fun. Please see point #45.

40. At one point when I was in elementary school, my mother purchased an electronic device called a TV Allowance which made it so that none of us could turn on the TV unless we punched in our unique 4-digit code. As soon as we turned on the television, our weekly TV allowance of FOUR hours (that's four hours a week!!) began counting down. When our four hours were up, the TV would simply shut off. Fahk.

41. My parents blocked MTV from our television when we were growing up. This meant that if you were scrolling through the channels, it would skip over Channel 23 (MTV). However, if you just typed in the numbers 2-3, you'd still get to MTV just fine.

42. I took Italian classes from 9th grade through my freshman year at UMass. I can understand the language decently but have a very hard time speaking it properly. #FuckVerbConjugations.

43. I'm completely embarrassed of singing in front of people, in any sort of a serious context.

44.  Despite that above fear, I have performed singing in school talent shows twice before. Once was in 7th or 8th grade and it was a total bomb because the microphone wasn't working when it was handed to me so I decided on the freaking fly to sing without the microphone. So naturally, no one except the front row could hear me... but I could hear the entire audience of kids laughing at me loud and clear! #Ouch. The second time, in 11th grade, was much more fun, as my friend Jamie and I performed a parody song we'd written of Britney Spears' Oops I Did It Again. Our performance even included back-up dancing "skanks" and featured my older sister coming onstage in an astronaut costume at one point. You can only imagine that it was epic. (The "King of New York" performance from fact #35 was not live singing; we lip-synched over that track.)

45. Once in college, I successfully funneled an entire 40oz. There is a video of this somewhere. I was instantly hammered. There was definitely vomit later that night. I do not regret it.

46.  I wrote lots of stories in elementary school and wrote tons of songs in middle school (complete with melodies and CD cover designs... not kidding).

47.  I get motion sickness on everythinnnng: cars, boats, buses, elevators, carnival rides, planes. YOU FREAKING NAME IT.

48. I currently own 111 nail polishes. This does not include top/base coats.

49. My older sister and I shared a dorm room my sophomore year in college. For some reason we didn't think this was a bad idea at the time. It was.

50. I once made it a project to turn all of my notebook doodles from one college semester into one massive collage:

It was a ton of fun to think of all of these! I hope you've learned something here today. Or 50 somethings. Since this is a TAG, I'm tagging the following bloggers to tackle this topic too:

Lauren @ Much Ado About Somethin'
Emily @ Osborne || My Life in Words
Angie @ Angie's Boblog

Even if you're not one of the above tagged bloggers, I would seriously love to hear one random fact about you in the comments below!

Why My Blog is Called "aka Bailey"

Maybe you're wondering. Maybe you're not.

Maybe you just KNOW EVERYTHING ALREADY. GAWD, WHY ARE YOU EVEN READING??

For anyone curious from whence the blog name "aka Bailey" came, this shit's for you.

The name is sort of two-fold, because I am a writer and I prefer EVERYTHING to have layers. Onions, metaphors, inside jokes, outfits, haircuts, dip - give them to me with all of the layers.

Firstly and chiefly, my initials are B.A.K.A. Yes, I was blessed with two middle names and I'm not even afraid who knows it. I love both of them, but quite often just go by the "A" because most formal documents only allow space for one middle initial. Seems quite narrow-minded of them but hey, if we're saving paper and ink by only allowing space for one middle initial, then I suppose I'm down. (You know how much I support living green.) I've digressed.

So if you're with me here, you might see how I got all clever and took my "Bailey A.K.A." and flipped it to be "A.K.A. Bailey" instead. It just seemed like a waste not to spotlight this colloquialism, since it's IN my name, for god's sake.

Now this is a very little known fact, but "A.K.A." generally stands for "Also Known As."  Enter the second layer of this two-fold blog name!

It's meant to signify that I am a combination of many interests and influences that all describe one me. You'll see a bit of what I mean if you look closely at the header that's up at the top of my blog: nail painter, sister, artist, spell-checker, traveler, hip hop head, writer, doodler, eater, laugher, fitness lover, girlfriend, hiker... just to name a few thannnnngs that you could call me. To name a few more: Bail $, Blizz, Bleezy, Bay-Bay (or Bébé, depending on who is doing the spelling), Crunky, Poo (I don't want to talk about that last one... and this is the censored version of that nickname).

Or... as I'm also known... just "Bailey."

So there you go. I hope that was thrilling for you. How did you come up with YOUR blog name? I'd love to know!

ALSO - hear ye, hear ye - I finally made a Facebook page for my blog! GO LIKE IT OR I WILL DESTROY YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, ok?  :)

>> Facebook.com/akaBaileyBlog  (aka Where All the Cool Kids Are Hanging Out) <<