Only Slightly Behind The Times

It's hard to keep up with all of these quizzes and everything. I'm doing my best!

100 Mostly-Chronologically Honest Things About ME

1. My birthday is November 18, 1977. I share a birthday with Mickey Mouse and Kevin Nealon.
2. I was born with a full head of hair.
3. I had my first haircut at 8 weeks old. I still have the lock of hair from my first haircut in a photo album.
4. I have a birth defect. It's called Poland's Syndrome. I was born without a left pectoral muscle, I'm missing a chunk from my left bicep, and I have a midget left index finger.
5. I didn't realize that Poland's Syndrome had a name until I was 25 years old. No doctor could ever tell me what was wrong with me and none of my family doctors had ever heard of Poland's Syndrome. PS only occurs in 1 in 30,000 births, and only 1 in 10 of those get it on the left side. Essentially that means that only 10,000 people in the U.S. have PS, and only 1,000 of us have it on the left side.
6. I am SUPREMELY self-conscious about my missing boob. So much so that I can remember being 4 years old and walking around with my arms crossed over my chest or never taking my shirt off in the summertime so that no one would be able to see.
7. When I was 6 weeks old, I was rushed to the hospital because I had a lump in my chest. Doctors thought it could have been cancer. My mother smoked while she was pregnant with me. Before they had a chance to do a biopsy, the lump disappeared literally overnight. No one knows how or why or what it actually was.
8. That was the last time I spent the night in a hospital, which is amazing considering all the other accidents and injuries I've had.
9. I got chicken pox when I was 6 months old because my sister and brothers were 10, 10, and 7, and they got it from kids at school. I'm told that I was lucky to have survived it.
10. I only have two visible scars on my face from the chicken pox.
11. I didn't have a first word.
12. I had a first question. I was 8 months old when the first intelligible non-babyspeak thing out of my mouth was the entire question "What did you do?" It was the first thing my father would ask my brothers and sister every day when they got home from school.
13. My parents say that I was 18 months old when I read my first word. They say I was sitting in my car seat in the back of the car, pointed out the window at the sign on the store we were passing and I shouted, "Levitz!"
14. I started reading books when I was 2.
15. My earliest memory is from when I was 2 1/2. I remember sitting on the floor on the orange shag carpet in the living room, a diaper squishing underneath me, my mother (with her Florence-Henderson-business-in-the-front-party-in-the-back-Brady-Bunch-mullet) laying on the couch behind me listening to me as I was reading a Dr. Seuss book.
16. I started taking piano lessons when I was 3, and have always had some innate natural musical ability.
17. I had the first of my five nose-breaks when I was 3 and I fell down the basement stairs.
18. I am naturally platinum blond. Yes, I dye my hair (when it's not shaved). Yes, I dye my eyebrows, too.
19. The carpet does not match the drapes.
20. Most of the time it's hardwood flooring, or at most an area rug. Yes, Will&Grace stole that joke from ME, and I'm bitter about it.
21. I am the only person in my entire family to ever have purely green eyes.
22. I learned how to ice skate when I was 3 on quadruple-blade, strap-on, metal ice shoes.
23. I graduated to double-blade skates when I was 4 and started playing hockey.
24. In true gay fashion, I switched to figure skating when I was 5.
25. I started kindergarten when I was 4.
26. 3 times I was supposed to skip a grade in school, but every time it was shot down because they said I was already too young, and would be bad for me developmentally.
27. I was upset about that when I was kid, but now I agree with the decision, and in fact I wish I had waited to go to college because entering college as a sophomore when I was 17 was absolutely NOT fun, as if I wasn't enough of an outcast already.
28. I started bowling and playing baseball when I was 6.
29. When I was 8 I came in second place in a statewide youth bowling tournament, and was the only person under 13 to be a finalist in the top 10.
30. I learned that I needed glasses at the age of 8 when I could not see the numbers inside the lights at the end of the lanes in the bowling alley.
31. I quit playing the piano when I was 8 and switched to the alto saxophone.
32. I got my first pair of contact lenses when I was 10, because I AM that vain and I probably think this song is about me.
33. I've been wearing contact lenses for 17 years.
34. I was diagnosed as legally blind at the age of 12. My vision has been getting gradually better since I was 20, due to contact lenses reshaping my eyes.
35. I got a job as a paperboy when I was 10. I have always either been a student or steadily employed ever since.
36. I started playing football when I was 10.
37. I was the biggest kid in the school. By a LOT!
38. Some kids thought of me as the class bully until about 7th or 8th grade when everyone else hit their growth spurts and grew past me.
39. My parents made me play every masculine sport known to man and they weren't supportive of the only two sports that I was ever truly interested in, figure skating and gymnastics.
40. When I was a child, in the summer I spent more hours in the water swimming than I spent on dry land.
41. I was a junior lifeguard.
42. I refused to become a senior lifeguard when I was old enough because I didn't want random strangers to see me without a shirt on.
43. I started running track when I was 12.
44. I bought myself a soprano saxophone when I was 11 with paper route money.
45. I played baritone saxophone in my high school jazz band.
46. At the end of my freshman year, I started playing the tuba because the only tuba player in the school was a senior, so they needed a tuba player for the next year. After one lesson with the director, I taught myself how to play, then 7 months later I auditioned and was accepted into the All-New England Music Festival.
47. The tuba was my principal instrument in college.
48. I was a social outcast in high school.
49. I developed anorexia nervosa and bulimia at the ripe old age of 15.
50. I hid it very well from people until I was 20, where at 6'2" I only weighed 135 pounds and had a 27" waist.
51. At the time, I was working at Disney, and the company with the world's largest wardrobe department didn't have any pants that fit me, so they had to make me a pair of 27x36 pants.
52. Thanks to figure skating and Hayes family genes, I've always had a giant ass, even when I was grotesquely skinny.
53. I like my giant ass. It's hard as a rock.
54. I'm the only person I know who has recovered enough from anorexia that I'm actually fat again. (Please refrain from any comments about my current porkiness, I'm still a bit sensitive on the whole topic, maybe I'm not as recovered as I thought.)
55. I love theater.
56. In high school I only did 3 plays and a couple of one-acts because I was too involved in instrumental music and my high school didn't do musicals.
57. I was in a hilariously horrible student-produced teenage soap opera that ran on public access cable called Turning Points.
58. Musically, I have considered myself primarily as a singer for years.
59. Singing was therapy for me in high school. I would never have sung for anyone else because I felt like my voice was the only private thing that I had to myself. I didn't get over that until I was in my 20s, and I'm still very self-conscious about singing in front of people, especially if it's someone that I know well.
60. I became a vegetarian at the age of 16.
61. I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian. (It means I eat dairy and eggs. I don't eat anything that ever had a face or a mother. Please don't get into semantics with me.)
62. I got braces when I was 13. They were clear, because again, I AM that vain. I also convinced the orthodontist to take them off earlier than he was supposed to because I couldn't bear to have them on anymore.
63. I never had to have my wisdom teeth pulled. All 4 grew in mostly straight. I just have a tiny bit of crowding on my bottom teeth.
64. I bought my own first car when I was 16, again with saved up paper route money.
65. I didn't get a license until I was 17, exactly 3 weeks before I graduated from high school, and exactly one year to the day after I bought my car.
66. I was a straight-A student, and would get punished if I brought home anything less on a report card. None of my siblings were held to the same expectations.
67. I went to Florida State University for 3 years. I didn't graduate.
68. I was a double major in music and meteorology with minors in Spanish, math, and physics.
69. I played 4 different instruments in 6 different bands in college.
70. I was in the Flying High Circus for 3 seasons.
71. The 2 acts I did in the circus were Rollerskating and Bicycle Built for 5.
72. I dated my best friend, Melinda, for almost 4 years.
73. I came out to Melinda 7 months before we broke up.
74. I credit some old friends that I don't have much contact with anymore for saving my life. Through a little intervention, these people made me realize what I was doing to myself by not eating, throwing up, etc. and they helped me turn it all around.
75. I was a social outcast in college.
76. I went to the #1 party school in the country, and I don't drink, nor have I ever participated in any sort of herbal or chemical refreshments.
77. I don't believe in altering my state of mind through drugs, whether they're legal or illegal.
78. I moved 26 times in 8 years.
79. The longest I've ever lived in one place since I left home is here with David. At the time of this posting, it stands at 1 year and 8 1/2 months.
80. The second longest was 1 year 3 months when I lived in the worst ghetto of Tallahassee. It was so scary that we wouldn't go outside at night if we could avoid it.
81. I was so poor in my college years that I got a job at a convenience store just so I could eat food while I was at work. I would cut open food when I stocked it, write it off, and eat it.
82. I was so poor that I had to sell my plasma to afford the basics, like groceries and gas for my car.
83. I can't eat spicy food.
84. It may be a psychosomatic response to the fact that when I was about 5 or 6 years old my brother was babysitting me and he thought it would be funny to ask me if I wanted a Pepsi and then get me to drink what was really a bunch of tabasco sauce in a glass of Pepsi. He then proceeded to lock me out of the house so I couldn't call my mother.
85. He feels bad about that to this day, so I hold it over his head whenever I get the chance.
86. I'm getting tired of doing this.
87. I function under the theory that my bones are unbreakable.
88. When I was 18, I was working in the cash office of the Christmas Tree Shops on my summer break. I shut my left middle finger in the door to the safe. The door weighed 800 pounds. I needed 3 stitches and couldn't bend my finger for 2 months, but the bones didn't break. The ER nurse said my finger should have been cleanly cut off.
89. On 12.MAR.1999 I was in a serious car accident. A Ford Ranger blew through a red light at close to 60 mph and T-boned me on the driver's side door of my Hyundai Accent. The firemen at the scene told me I should have been killed based on the location and extent of the damage to my car, but I walked away from the scene. I tore every muscle in my neck and back, and my spine had been compressed so hard that I am approximately 1/2 inch shorter now than I was then, but none of my bones broke. I went through the window of my car, and hit the truck with my head. I have permanent scars on my scalp, but no broken bones.
90. In February of 2002, I was being all Olympical and junk, and while showing off for friends by doing a single axle/double toe loop combination in my living room, I misjudged my spatial obstacle separation on my landing, hit the coffee table on my kick-out and folded over my big toe and stepped on it on my landing foot. I couldn't bend my toe for 2 months, but I didn't break it.
91. In July of 2002, I was at the beach on a layover in San Francisco. I climbed the mountain on the edge of the shore, and while I was walking on the trail on top, I slipped in some gravel. I slid 80 feet down the mountain, then fell off a 30 foot cliff. I severely sprained my shoulder and was in a sling for 3 weeks, but I didn't break my bones.
92. My "achilles heel" is my nose. As I mentioned earlier, it has been broken 5 times.
93. My sense of smell is virtually non-existent.
94. I can never breathe out of my right nostril.
95. I can't chew gum. I have serious TMJ, and gum will lock up my jaw. It's been 10 years since I could chew gum.
96. I used to chew gum compulsively.
97. Steven is my 3rd unofficial husband, and I'm only 27. Aside from my parents, my brother Tim is the only other non-divorcee in my immediate family.
98. I'm the youngest of 4 kids.
99. I became an uncle at the age of 8.
100. I have 6 nephews and nieces currently aged 19, 17, 8, 5, 5, and 3.

This is a ridiculous amount of information. Now you all know more than anyone could possibly care to know about me. I hope you all feel informed. Good night.