Lovely, is it? Why, thank you! 😉

So, Scott, over at Mechanical Anime Reviews, gave me this One Love Blog Award nomination a few weeks ago (aka, last year, LOL), but life is busy, so I am only now getting to it. Thank you, Scott, and apologies for the wait! 🙂

One Lovely Blog Award Rules:
1) Thank the person who nominated you and link their blog
2) Add the One Lovely Blog Award to your post
3) Share 7 things about yourself
4) Pass this on to as many people as you like (max 15)
5) Include this set of rules
6) Inform your nominees

7 things about myself eh? Well, pulling things out of thin air…

1) I’m good with animals, especially dogs.

Maybe it’s the autism, or maybe it’s just my nature, but I get along well with animals. I take to them, and they take to me, more often than not. Often, they make more sense to me than people. 😉

I am the guy who holds the new mama rabbit and keeps her calm while my friends handle the kits and make things a bit more safe and comfortable for them.

I am the guy who looks after the ducks and chickens in the back yard as part of paying my rent to the landlord, and gains a thousand funny stories to share in the experience.

I am the guy who this old, one-woman dog, unsettled for a moment, leans against like he leans against only one other person, his owner.

I am the guy that the dog or the cat takes to pretty quickly, and we become best buds. 🙂

2) I remember movie quotes for years, but what was that this person said yesterday?

There’s a reason I have an entire section of my blog devoted to quotes. 😉

I can recite a great number of movie scenes from memory, and some movies (especially The Princess Bride) I could probably quote from beginning to end. 🙂

Outside the realm of fiction, however, my memory of past conversations is notoriously terrible. Whether it be a college professor or my best friend, somehow I just don’t retain it.

3) I am trying to be a storyteller, but I’ve always been good with writing words.

To hear my mother tell it, I was apparently pretty slow at learning how to read and write, but once I got the hang of it, off I went! Zipping through books, writing stories when I was in the first grade, and all throughout school, when other students were groaning about how long the papers we wrote had to be, I was giddy about how long they could be.

4) I have been complimented on my organization of dirty dishes.

I only realized this recently, but apparently, yes, I can organize things, and fairly well.

I could not begin to count the number of times my mother would urge me to “clean” my room. Actually, my room was quite clean, by my standards. She, however, wanted things “neat” and “organized.” But they were organized! I had a place for everything, and it just happened that they were all visible to the naked eye, so I never lost anything unless my mother went crazy and made things “neat,” thus utterly ruining my system and making me lose things! 😉

In the years since, I’ve had to keep track of more things, often with a purpose in mind. Food, for instance. Having incredibly limited space (and funds) I learned to organize what I bought for increased efficiency. Heck, even just in putting them in the cart or on the belt, things have been faster and easier for everyone with a little organization involved. My stories and now my blog, also, have required me to organize my thoughts and ideas, and I’m always looking to make it easier for you, my wonderful audience, to navigate around my archives. 😉

Lately, I’ve also had opportunity to organize physical things, like when I was working in a warehouse and going through the inventory, or when my job involved collecting dirty dishes to take back to the cafeteria in on a cart. The people who wash the dishes appreciated having a little more order to work with instead of chaos, and the people who pass by while I’m working notice the order as well. So, I have been complimented on my effective organization of dirty dishes! 🙂

5) Born and raised in Alaska. Thank goodness!

I am much more at home in a cold winter night than a scorching summer’s day. Maybe that’s because I got very used to it as a child, or maybe it has something to do with my autism, or something else entirely, but either way, I feel the heat pretty keenly. So, I am very grateful to have been born and raised in Alaska. Whatever possessed my parents to move there shortly before my birth, I certainly benefited from it! 🙂

6) I was always thinking about what the characters should do instead.

You may have noticed in my weekly commentaries that I sometimes mention what these characters ought to do, or ought to have done instead of what they did. Apparently, I’ve been doing that since childhood.

As my mother tells it, I would be watching something, like a movie or a cartoon, and suddenly start talking about what they were doing wrong, and what they should do instead. Heh, nice to know I always had a head on my shoulders, though it would have been nice if I could have figured out what to do in real life as well. 😉

7) I! Am! Me! And proud of it!

Growing up, I didn’t know a thing about autism, or what it meant to be a geek. All I knew was that I was the weird one. Eventually, I embraced my uniqueness as a source of power. I had the ultimate defense against peer pressure, not that I felt it particularly much anyway: I did not care if “everyone” did something, I was not them, I was me. I was weird, so to heck with what the crowd of “normal” people did.

I have since learned that there are people in the world who are similar to me. I am not completely unique. I am not “alone,” as it were. But I have also learned that even people who are very similar to each other have their own perspectives. We are all ourselves, each of us bringing something unique to the table. You can put two people, virtually identical, into the same situation, and they will respond differently. You can try to explain it, but I think the ultimate reason for why I do or don’t do something is because, “I am me.” I have my unique mind, will, circumstances, experience, all of which shape how I make my choices.

So, why do I do what I do? Simply because I am me, and I am not ashamed.

Nomination:

Hmmm, I think I’ll only nominate one person this time around.

Moya, from the Moyatorium! A new online friend of mine, who nominated me for another award I intend to respond to next week. I look forward to learning a bit more about you, too! 🙂