100-Something Facts

100-Something Facts About Me

1. My real first name consists of too many vowels that American people find hard to pronounce.
2. I am a Philippine citizen and carry a Philippine passport.
3. I am 26 years old as of July 2008.
4. I’ve spent almost a total of twelve years living outside of my native country.
5. I speak four languages (Tagalog, English, Japanese, German) and know useful phrases from three more (Czech, Spanish, Hungarian).
6. I know how to do my laundry, iron my clothes, cook, and other kinds of housework.
7. I never go out of the house in short pants.
8. I always put on hair gel whenever I go out.
9. I love eaus de toilette but I cannot bring all of them since that is a duty-free violation.
10. I get drunk easily, especially with wine.
11. My celebrity crushes are Uma Thurman and Scarlett Johannson.
12. My lips peel easily so I always use lip balm.
13. I am a fan of Stephen King.
14. I have read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey before I graduated from high school.
15. I also have read James Joyce’s Ulysses before I graduated from college.
16. I have a BA degree in Linguistics.
17. I am currently taking my PhD in Linguistics.
18. I attended 6 schools from first grade to senior high school.
19. I am addicted to oysters, be it fresh or smoked, canned or bottled.
20. I also love marinated artichokes, which my sister hates.
21. I’ve been to 17 countries so far: The Philippines, USA, Japan, Guam, Qatar, Austria, Greece, Italy, The Vatican City, Taiwan, The Czech Republic, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Denmark, Hungary and Slovakia.
22. I tried to be a feminist, but it contradicted with my biological nature.
23. I wanted to study music, composition in particular, but the College of Music did not accept me when I was a freshman in college.
24. My name can be googled and results ranging from classical music MIDI to high school essay contests to academic papers can be found.
25. I used to record MIDI files of classical music and posted them in the Internet.
26. I won a high school English essay writing contest in Japan.
27. I also won fourth place at an English speech contest in Japan.
28. Because of the speech contest, I rode the Shinkansen (the Japanese high-speed bullet train) alone from Osaka to Tokyo when I was 15.
29. I experienced communal bathing in the nude in Japanese hot springs.
30. I have my name written in an academic reference book as one of the names in the Acknowledgements.
31. I wear glasses and have been using three sets so far.
32. I always feel excited whenever I fly.
33. I was a witness at a car accident in Vienna.
34. I had a time when I was afraid of wearing rings for fear that they might get stuck in my fingers and they would have to chop my finger off.
35. I started playing the piano when I was 13 and started writing music at 15.
36. I wrote two violin sonatas, various string quartets, numerous piano solo pieces, and was working on my third violin sonata and an orchestral piece, but somehow I couldn’t find time to continue it.
37. I was the pianist for the high school choir when I was in Japan.
38. I was addicted to video games for a while in fifth grade, and almost got myself kicked out of school because of it.
39. I am never spontaneous and always a planned person.
40. I am single, currently.
41. I wrote the graduation song for my senior high school but they decided not to use it.
42. I still cannot solve a Rubik cube.
43. I know the longest word in the English language; I memorized it from Guinness.
44. I have never attended a live musical performance by a pop artist. The only ones I attended were classical symphonies.
45. I love modern art, and my favorite painter is Salvador Dali.
46. I can touch the back of my forearm with the thumb from the same side.
47. I translated The Cranberries’ Zombie into Tagalog and it became popular in my seventh grade class.
48. I am a fan of female rockers, like Garbage, Lacuna Coil, No Doubt, and The Cranberries.
49. I have oily skin, and I used to have a pack of oil blotting paper with me all the time.
50. Six years ago I used to wear only black all the time.
51. I work better under pressure.
52. I always find airline food disgusting, but still enjoy the occasion.
53. I am good with maps and rarely do I ever get lost.
54. I am a fan of Tim Burton movies.
55. And also Johnny Depp movies.
56. I find a short boy-cut hairdo in women sexy.
57. I had a crush with a fellow passenger in an Olympic Airways flight from Vienna to Athens but I never even knew her name.
58. I always make the stupid mistake of drinking beer while in-flight.
59. I always shout to relieve myself of the embarrassment when I remember embarrassing moments in the past.
60. I suck in math but not in symbolic and formal logic.
61. In high school, I made a home-made insecticide made from the juice of a native plant that was supposed to kill cockroaches and submitted it as a science project, but it didn’t work.
62. I always add up the numbers of the license plates of cars.
63. I made a mistake while playing Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Sonata in the one-and-only piano recital I performed in.
64. I read a couple of banned books, such as D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
65. I devised a formula for friendship and love.
66. I also devised a theory of relative control.
67. I always hit my toes against something hard.
68. The toenail of my right pinkie is smaller than my left, because I chipped it off when I hit it some years ago.
69. In a bout of miscommunication, I accidentally asked a salesperson in Osaka to try a garment for me.
70. I want to go to Bogota, Istanbul, and Lhasa before I die.
71. I wish I took French or Spanish as a minor in undergrad instead of German, because there are plenty of countries who use those languages as a lingua franca. Thus I could study their minority languages.
72. I used to have a phobia for dogs.
73. There are seven photos, six cards, two bandages, and three pieces of paper in my wallet.
74. I almost got mugged once in Manila.
75. I keep three active e-mail accounts.
76. I have the ability to mix and match colors of different shades and hues.
77. I have around thirty-something neckties.
78. I want to marry someone whose native language is not English nor Tagalog.
79. I want to have one child with the woman I marry.
80. I want my child to learn my language (Tagalog) and my wife’s language (to be announced) with the same degree of fluency.
81. I get depressed when I don’t have anything to do.
82. The back of my head is flat.
83. I cut my hair once a month.
84. I tried to be a vegetarian but stopped after a year.
85. I need to find time for exercise.
86. I am a high-achiever.
87. I rarely experience failure.
88. And because of that I sometimes think that my upbringing is unbalanced.
89. Sometimes I feel my circumstances are too good to be true.
90. I was able to thwart attempts of bullying in Japan.
91. I had a classmate in high school who committed suicide.
92. Of my classmates in sixth grade elementary school, only four guys including me, are not yet married.
93. Two of my close buddies are already married and have a family.
94. I climbed two volcanoes, both in South America.
95. I have straddled the Northern and Southern Hemispheres at the same time.
96. I hitched a ride from an indigenous Andean native.
97. I was trapped in an elevator for a full hour in an Ecuadorian Basilica.
98. I was interviewed by Ecuadorian public radio in Quito, while descending from the peak of Rucu Pichincha.
99. I trekked and explored the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, alone.
100. Together with a French woman and a Hungarian man, we explored a Quechua rural town, bought food from a Quechua lady, and made home-cooked dinner in the deep mountains of the Andes.
101. I bar-hopped and got drunk so bad I wasn't able to go home, something which is rare for me.
102. I crossed an international border by foot twice.
103. I am contented with how my life turned out to be so far.
104. I have a Chinese nickname.
105. I am never superstitious.
106. I value knowledge more than anything.
107. I believe that patience is a virtue.
108. I wish men could live more than 70 or 80.