Leesa Barnes has tagged me for the “Five Things Meme,” where bloggers spill their guts by telling you five things about themselves that you probably didn’t know.

Here are my five:

1) In May/June 2003 I took a cross-country trip with my sister, starting in Phoenix (I had driven from San Francisco to Phoenix on my own) and finishing in Boston. The journey covered 4,741 miles took us through parts of 23 states over 16 days. We had a tiny blue ugly rental car and a cheap tent. What sticks out the most today, three and a half years later: traveling along the old Route 66, the stunning natural beauty of the Southwest, giving the finger to the Texas state flag, having trouble understanding Southern accents, the Oklahoma City Memorial, drinking beer on the streets of New Orleans, Gettysburg National Cemetery, hearing the some mind-numbing pop songs over and over again, and really getting to know my sister after nine years of being away from home.

Here I am being goofy during the trip, trying on a hat in a shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico:

2) I used to play the piano pretty well. And when my grandmother remarried some 19 1/2 years ago, I was the kid on the keyboard. Unfortunately, because we didn’t have any sort of amplifier, not many in attendance were able to hear my brilliance in action.

3) I lived in Spain for six months as part of two separate stays in 1996 and 1997. I spent four months as a study abroad student in Madrid in early 1996, living with a Spanish family and picking up a good Castillian accent. I then returned to country a little more than a year later to a) teach English to young children at a music school in Mallorca and then b) work as a nanny for a few weeks in the ridiculously rich Southern Spanish village of Sotogrande.

4) For about a six-month stretch in 1999/2000, I went line dancing every Wednesday night.

5) A note on my resume that has generated a couple of interesting interview discussions: I have conversational skills in the Tetum language, which is the national tongue of the tiny Asian country of East Timor. I visited East Timor as a web-development project with a group of Australians during my postgraduate days Down Under, and we arrived less than two months after the nation’s independence from the UN (and Indonesia before that, and Portugual before that). Quick Tetum language lesson:

Diak ka lae? How are you?
Diak. I am fine.
Hau hanoin hau-nia kolega timor-oan. I miss my Timorese friends.
Hau ba uma oras-ne. I’m going home now.

This post in Dili, East Timor translates as “From culture we learn our identity.”

Here’s who I’m tagging: Reid Givens, MaryHelen Votral, Christopher S. Penn, Michael Bailey, Robert French. You’re “it,” guys.

Technorati Tags: five things meme, Reid Givens, MaryHelen Votral, Christopher Penn, Michael Bailey, Robert French, East Timor

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