Ten Revelations About John Wiswell

Laura Eno of http://lauraeno.blogspot.com/ recently granted me the “Sugar Doll” award. I am not one for chain letters and awards posts most of the time, but the condition of this award is to reveal ten things about yourself. To tell a little story in ten revelations was something I kept coming back to in the bathroom.

-In 4th grade, after looking up "wolverine," "gambit," and "nightcrawler" in the dictionary, I was disappointed to find there was no definition for "silver surfer." This began a little streak in my life.

-I fervently avoided looking up "arbitrary" from when I first heard it in middle school (on an episode of Seinfeld). I went ten years before having to learn what it meant because it kept losing me arguments in Philosophy class.

-I first thought "metaphysics" had to do with cubes and three-dimensional shapes. That mistake went uncorrected for about five years.

-I began to ignore Scientology in the middle of the first sentence I heard someone mention it in. I left thinking they worshipped microscopes and genes. That mistake went uncorrected for about seven years.

-From Middle School until I came to my college dining hall, I thought "vegans" were something my brother made up.

-I managed to go the entire Religion unit of a college History & Politics course without learning what "secular" and "non-secular" meant, despite using them frequently and to the apparent nodding approval of my professor and peers.

-I didn't read all of Hamlet until after I graduated from college, despite having a concentration in Literature and a faculty that mandated reading Shakespeare.

-I still don't know what "Hari Krishna" means. Sometimes at meals I'll wet my fingers, make the sign of the cross and say it. I've managed to go twenty years without learning its actual meaning and find more direct pleasure in my ignorance about it than in almost any single piece of knowledge I have.

-I still hear the lyric, “Beelzebub has the devil put aside for” in Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as "Beelzebub has the devil for a cyborg."

-I believe everyone has things like the above nine items. Some people recognize them, others try not to, and still more others deny. I have an immediate distrust for anyone who appears like they would hide such quirks.