8 things = excuse to start blogging

I have a lot of stuff to blog about that has happened in the past month or so, but I will save it for another post.  Right now, I will respond to the meme that Grumpator has tagged me with to get me to blog again.

This meme asks the blogger, i.e., me, to list 8 random things about himself.  Here we go:

1. I actually have very traditional ideas about marriage, in a sense.  I am 100% for legal marriage equality, of course, but beyond that my notions of wedlock are pretty conservative.  I think that marriage should, ideally, be permanent and monogamous.  Of course, there are times when divorce is warranted.  However, I think most divorces could be avoided if people actually got to know each other thoroughly before getting married and then didn't give up when things got challenging after getting married.
2. I used to own a coffin.  How I ended up with the coffin is fairly inconsequential. However, how I got rid of it is much more interesting. I sold it to an acquaintance I had not seen for a number of years previous.  He offered to take it off my hands and I accepted his offer, not really having enough space for it anymore.  Later, I remembered how I had met him years earlier: we had met at a Halloween party where he was dressed as death.
3. I am not usually squeamish about watching gory movies or surgical procedures on Discovery Health. One thing that I do get squeamish about, however, is feet. I cannot look at foot injuries of any kind. I think this is because my step-brother shot me in the foot with a BB gun when I was a kid.
4. I share my birthday, August 30th, with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and John Peel.  I share it with many other celebrities but I feel a particular affinity for these two figures. Shelley because we both have unusual dreams and Peel because we share a passion for discovering new music.
5. The first album I purchased with my own money was Cosmic Thing by The B-52's.
6. My elementary school classified me as mentally retarded because I had severe speech and coordination problems and had lots of trouble socializing with peers. To this day, I don't know exactly why.  I was tested for autism but it was eliminated as a possible diagnosis. My mother told me many years later that I had been diagnosed with a form of epilepsy due to absence seizures, but she later denied ever saying it. I don't think I'll ever know the truth about my medical history.  In any case, I overcame most of these obstacles, though I'm still rather clumsy.
7. I have a pronounced suprainiac fossa, a skull feature not generally found in modern humans. Homo neanderthalensis had suprainiac fossae but not as large as mine.  My Fossil Hominids professors were baffled by it.
8. Every time I shave, I think about the episode of Diff'rent Strokes in which Arnold buys a defective toy train.  I have no idea how that association got started but it persists to this day.

I'm not tagging anyone because I don't know who's reading my blog anymore.  If you do read this, please feel free to continue the meme and send me a link.

I will have more later, I promise.