weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, & weird

A frequent reader/commenter, 2AMSomewhere, has tagged the Drunken Housewife with a blogger "meme": "THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.” The Drunken Housewife has hated chain letters ever since, as a small child, she joined in a send-a-postcard chain and was bitterly disappointed to get nothing out of it. Hence, she refuses to formally tag anyone. However, it is an occasional feature of this blog that the drunken author writes a post on the topic of a reader's choice, and so she will honor this request and treat this as Number Three in an Occasional Series: Reader's Requests. All readers of the blog are invited to add, in a comment, six weird things about themselves, and the writer of the best comment will receive, as a prize, a post written about the topic of their choice (no holds barred).

So, here we go:

WEIRD #1: My father is a self-proclaimed faith healer, and growing up, our family always had to do these painfully awkward laying-on-of-hands praying rituals. None of those ever achieved anything so far as I know.

WEIRD #2: I suffered from a rare syndrome in which I had multiple episodes of aseptic meningitis, resulting in numerous hospitalizations. A neurologist who saw me for this told me he was writing an article on me because mine was the worst case of this syndrome he'd ever heard of. Thankfully he was correct in telling me that I would eventually stop getting meningitis, as (knock on wood) my last episode was in 1996.

WEIRD #3: I was for a brief time engaged to two different men at the same time.

WEIRD #4: In my intensely Christian phase as a virtuous teenager, I used to fast every year from Good Friday until Easter morning, so I would be conscious of the suffering of Christ. (I was also borderline anorexic, so this served the ulterior motive of allowing me to be freakish about food without getting my parents mad at me).

WEIRD #5: My first fiance was a former SEAL who habitually slept with an authentic samurai sword which was declared a national treasure of Japan and had been smuggled out. When he went out of town, he requested that I sleep with the sword for self-protection. (I was completely untrained in swordplay and probably would have stabbed myself if there had been an intruder).

WEIRD # 6: I once whipped a masochistic man so hard one New Year's Eve that I sprained both my wrists.

And there you have it. Six unusual facts about one Drunken Housewife. Share your own in the comments.

Addendum: Regular reader and commentator Hughman says, with an audible sniff, that these facts were just not weird. Interesting, maybe, but not weird. I think that I don't have a good enough grip on "weird" these days. What is weird? What is normal? Someone once told a friend of mine, "Carole and Anton are the weirdest people I've ever met." My friend refused, irritatingly enough, to tell me who had said that. My response: "If I'm the weirdest person someone has ever met, they need to get out of the house more."

Anyway, here are a couple of bonus, possibly-weird-but-what-then-what-is-weird-in-this-day-and-age facts:

- Once I had sex in the bathroom at our preschool during a mandatory parents' meeting;

and

- I once breastfed a fussy baby while getting a full Brazilian wax. I felt that I should have gotten a gold medal for an Outstanding Feat of Insane Power Mothering for that.