I always hang in a buffalo stance. I do the dive every time I dance. - July 29th, 2006

Via stemargal:

1. Are you named after anyone? If so, explain.
Raggedy Andy. Even as my mom and dad were rounding up my sister to head to the hospital for my graduation from fetality, they had no idea what I'd be named. Sarah, seeing some dolls on her bed as she passed by the bedroom on the way out, said, "Hey, Mom, if it's a boy can we name him Andy?" It's Andrew on the birth certificate so I'd have a professional-sounding option available.

2. Do you have your children's names picked out already?
No. That would be selfish since I don't have a breeding mate yet.

3. If you were born a member of the opposite sex what would your name have been?
Unknown. But my sister would have been Grover if she'd been a boy. That was my dad's idea. My mom didn't care since she knew it would be a girl[1].

4. If you could re-name yourself what name would you pick and why?
Sergeant. Come on, you know you'd do it, too. Maybe Archduke. Or I could add a number to it and tell everyone that the 3 is silent. It's an appealing idea to add an exclamation point and not have it be silent. "Hi, my name is AnBANGdy."

5. Are there any mispronunciations/typos that people do w/ your name constantly?
They pronounce my last name "Row-lin." These are the same people who have no problem pronouncing Rollins correctly. Maybe this is why an equal number of people tack an S on the end of my name.


[1] In other news, she wasn't sure which gender I'd be. Take from that what you will.

My plan today is to clean and organize my apartment. "Get her." That's my whole plan. I'm currently kind of unmotivated, as evidenced by the fact that I'm dicking around on Livejournal. Ah think mo' crank Pandora and do the dishes, then make coffee and drink a bunch of it. If I can get myself bouncing randomly off the walls fast enough, I can just grab something when I hit it and let it go again when I ricochet over to where it's supposed to go. Ever gone into a very small room with a tiled floor and hucked a superball into the corner as hard as you could? Yeah.

I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in.

Some weird places I've been:

1. Inside a WWII coastal defense bunker in Pacifica, CA on Milagra Ridge. While I was growing up, every now and then someone would manage to get the huge steel doors open and hiking passers by would go inside and ooh and ahh. There was thirty years of graffiti, still sparse since it was open so seldom, and the remnants of small fires (charred blankets, marks on the walls). Some of the larger and more difficult to remove things still remained, like parts of the old generator and such. One time it was me and my friends who opened it. We went through a lot of hacksaw blades sawing away at the hinges. It's now welded shut so thoroughly that you'd need a generator or a ton of batteries for your cordless grinder to get inside. There's also a decommissioned Nike missile site nearby, evidenced from above only by a slab of concrete and the access hatch. I popped the welds once on that hatch with a woodsplitting wedge and a five-pound sledgehammer and went down with some friends, though I'd been down before with my dad and sister before it had gotten welded. You could still see the undersides of the twenty foot long steel doors, though the missile rack was gone. You had to climb down a 15 or 20 foot ladder to get down to the main concrete floor, and though there were steel grate stairs heading down yet further near the ladder, the lower part was flooded. It was so still and the water so clear that it was a little difficult to see exactly where the water level began. The funny thing about that site is that it was active in my lifetime: a neighbor farther up my hill with a view of the site from his kitchen reports having seen (through binoculars) the rack, loaded with missiles, come up and pivot to where it was pointing at his house. The doors are covered in concrete now and the hatch is very thoroughly welded.

2. The office of the president of the Cleveland branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. The moving company I worked for in the summer of my Junior year of college had the contract to move the contents of the building, floor by floor, to a nearby secondary office and back again as each floor of the main building got renovated. I was there when the president's desk, a giant cherry monstrosity, got moved back in. That office had twenty foot ceilings and it was frigging huge. It's not on the tour.

3. The top of Seoul Tower in Seoul, South Korea. That's not so weird since anyone in Seoul with a few wan can get up there, but it's still a bit neat. At the time, for security reasons, you weren't allowed to even bring a camera up there, much less take pictures. I had one of those little clamps-onto-a-110-film-cartridge cameras on me that I'd forgotten about. I was not arrested.

4. Some steam tunnels underneath the quad on CWRU's campus. It was a relatively short tunnel—I never got into the main complex, which I hear is very extensive.

5. The stage of Severance Hall, where the Cleveland Orchestra plays. A friend of mine had found a window that got left unlocked at night and we snuck in. I plucked the cello and fondled some other instruments. We toured pretty much the entire building, basement to roof.

Does anyone else think that John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change" needs to be shot in the ankles?

I guess it isn't awful, but it's turning into one of those "fifteen times a day for three months" songs.