December 30, 2005 [LINK]

Obsessive habits: game of "tag"

Phil Faranda got "tagged" in a cybernetic diversion that has a disturbing resemblance to a "chain letter," but I was intrigued and decided to follow suit anyway. The rules:

The first player of this game starts with the topic "five weird habits of yourself," and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don't forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says "You are tagged" (assuming they take comments*) and tell them to read yours.

* For non-commented blogs like this one, e-mail will have to suffice. With so many neurotic habits to choose from, the hard part for me was choosing the top ones. Here goes:

  1. I am obsessed with precision in the stadium diagrams (and maps) that I draw, often spending several consecutive hours hunched over my iMac getting them just right. As if you didn't know!
  2. Like Phil, I can stare at maps for hours on end, imagining what those other cities, states, and countries must be like. Sometimes I actually go to those places!
  3. I amass stacks of newspaper clippings, fearing that I might forget something important otherwise, and spend a lot of time keeping them organized. It sometimes takes a great deal of willpower for me to toss old news articles away.
  4. I am obsessed with making the classes I teach as informative and enjoyable as humanly possible, going overboard with PowerPoint, Web pages, and multimedia "eye candy," to the exclusion of all other activities (including this blog) when I am so employed.
  5. I have a deeply ingrained "allergy" to free offers of any kind, which means I am immune to most contemporary advertising. I so deeply loathe being enticed into something "with no obligation" (ha!) that I go out of my way to pay for things that most people get for free.

So now, I'm going to "tag" Miguel Centellas, David Pinto, Rudi Riet, Chris Green, and Steve Kijak. You guys are "it"!

[UPDATE: Link(s) in italics denote response to the challenge.]