A No Bullshi#$#Look at Who I am

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Earlier last week Corbett Barr wrote a post at Think Traffic about how much you need to reveal about yourself online to be authentic and transparent. It definitely set off a great discussion and inspired me to give all of you a no bullshi#$3 look at who I am as a person.  Corbett even wrote his own post about this where he revealed 33 thicngs you might not have known about him.  So let’s get started:

18 Completely Random Things About Me

Fu#$#d up Situations: I think for anybody who is a close friend of mine it’s a known fact that I’ll probably put your life in danger at least once. You guys know who you are. It’s never intentional and usually it makes for a great story. My Tijuana high speed car-chase is absolutely a true story and over the years my friends have shared it even with their friends. Of course, my friend in the story continually adds new details that didn’t actually happen every time we tell this story to anybody.

No Filters: I have a tendency to speak my mind and don’t usually filter conversations. In certain moments this can get me in real trouble (like using four letter expletives around 3 year old kids). Fortunately since my closest friends have had kids, I’ve been a bit better about this since I don’t want their kids to be screwed up.  But, if I’m around adults, you can pretty much assume I’ll say whatever I’m thinking.

Selfishness: To be honest I’m pretty damn selfish. One of my friends called me out on it so I figured I’d just write about it. Apparently, this is a trait of people who are Aries. I don’t know anything about that. All I know is I will blow off almost anything if the surf is good. While I will accommodate people to some degree, if you choose somewhere to eat that I absolutely hate, I will let you know. Once I went to dinner at a family friend’s house in India and they served an Indian dish called idli and sambar, which I’ve hated since I was a kid, so I didn’t even eat.   When my sister was born, many people came and brought her gifts. One of my parent’s friends’ was nice enough to bring some cookies and I said “I don’t want these stupid biscuits, I want a real gift.”

My friends Mean The World to Me: On the flip side of all this selfishness is that my friends mean the world to me. They’re like family to me. I even have a list of friends who a girl I’d marry would have to meet and all of them would have to give a thumbs up. If even one person on the list said, no I’d see it as a red flag because I trust these people so much.

Dating/Relationships: The same friend who told me I could be selfish also said that I never write about my dating life. Well, that’s because there isn’t a whole hell of alot to write about. You want the honest truth? For some reason this has been a struggle for me for a good amount of my life. It’s not like I don’t know how to talk to people. I guess it’s just that chemistry hasn’t been there with alot of people. All of my interest in self improvement has primarily been driven by desire to get some consistency around this part of my life.

I’ve never been in love. I told my past two girlfriends that I loved them, but I knew with the first few months of dating both of them that I never had any intention of marrying either one of them. So, I guess you could say I’m kind of fu#$#d up. Last week I wrote about the the difference between settling and settling down and in these two cases I didn’t really do a good job of making that distinction.

When I was a kid I used to be absolutely terrified of swimming lessons. Every time my mom would take me to the pool for lessons, I would cry. Talk about irony. I still can’t swim worth shi#$3 which probably sounds insane to most of you. I learned that when my leash came undone and I had to swim 200 yards to shore to get my board.

If I don’t marry and Indian girl then I’ll only have to invite 500 people I don’t know to my wedding. If I do, then we’re looking at 1000 people: her parent’s friends and my parent’s friends.  Indian weddings are also notoriously long. Imagine losing focus at your own wedding because of ADHD. (this is kind of a joke).

Redheads in Red Dresses: I don’t know why but I think when a girl with red hair is hot, she’s ridiculously hot. Add a red dress to that and I fee like that’s a woman who should be the center of attention in any room. If you know any, let me know.

I don’t do anything half-assed: If I’m into something, I’m usually obsessed with it. If you have been reading my blog for a while, that should be obvious to you. This tends to be useful in some areas and harmful in others. Fortunately at this point my life it’s taking a much more useful form.

I have a highly addictive personality: This kind of goes along with obsession. I have an extremely addictive personality and if I find that something makes me feel really good (i.e. riding waves) it will be something that becomes an endless pursuit in my life.  When I was younger this manifested in more self-destructive ways.

I’m impulsive as hell: My parents don’t know this, at least they didn’t until now. But I once went to Amsterdam for a 3 day weekend on a whim. I just saw a ticket on sale and bought it and left 3 days later. When my mom asked why I had a replacement passport I made some story.

I’m an adrenaline junkie: I thrive off of high adrenaline activities, hence the reason I probably got so hooked on surfing. I’ve been skydiving and I’ll probably do it again. It’s likely I’ll bungee jump, go hang gliding and try out a few other things. I might draw the line at base jumping.

I went to 9 different schools before 10th grade. Since I grew up all over the world I ended up in  different schools multiple times when I was growing up.  Oddly enough, 7 of those schools were all in the 7 years we lived in Texas. The year I entered eight grade they finally combined 6th, 7th, and 8th grade into one school.

I’ve always had roommates. I actually have always had roommates out of choice. I don’t like living alone. Even if I had a ton of money I would probably still want a roommate. I think that being completely alone would drive me absolutely nuts.

I have uncanny memory for useless information. Strangely this has never come in handy in my academic life. I have a tendency to remember names, details and other completely random things people tell me about themselves. In fact I can remember things people told me a year ago if I’ve only met them once. I guess the only really useful this has taught me is how to get free drinks and get treated like a VIP.

I suck at Math for an Indian Person: Everybody thinks Indians are good at math. Not me. I actually got a higher verbal score on my GMAT than I did on my math.  In fact I was happy to never take another math class again after my sophomore year in college.

I’m scared to death of holding newborn babies. My friend’s recently had a baby boy and I went to see him. He was 4 weeks old and adorable. When my friend asked me if I wanted to hold him, I said no. I think they’re so small that you could break them so that freaks me out.  It’s likely this stems from an incident when I was younger where i pulled my 6 week old sister out of her crib and brought her into the kitchen to my mom, while holding her like a loaf of bread. My mom freaked out, but luckily didn’t yell because she didn’t want to freak me out and cause me to drop my sister.

In the spirit of authenticity and transparency I thought I should let you guys get to know me a bit better.

I want to ask you to do something over the next 2-3 weeks. I want you to write your own version of a  post where you tell us a bunch of things about yourself that we might not have known.  Then share it on twitter with the hashtag #gettoknowme. Let’s see if we can’t start a small movement. If you actually do this after we get lots of posts written I’ll do a roundup of them all. Also, let’s share each other’s posts on twitter and see if we can’t drive a bunch of new visits to each other’s blogs.

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