My Five

David Sasaki just tapped me to play this meme game, which has apparently been circling around the Global Voices family for quite some time.  Ethan, Rebecca, Neha and Ndesanjo have all played. 

Many GVers, I found, have presidential ambitions.  Ethan ran for president in 1988 and Ndesanjo still hopes to become the first dreadlocked president (you mean there hasn't been one yet?). Rebecca almost became a violinist, Neha will, if you slap her three times, slap you six, and David is Arachibutyrophobic.

And me?

1. I am 12.5% Chinese. I am also English, Irish (via Argentina), Haitian and Egyptian in similarly small amounts, plus another 25% that is completely unknown.  As far as I can tell, for the last 4 generations of my family (me being fourth generation), each family member ultimately married, made their lives, and died in a different country (and in most cases, continent) than the one in which they were born.  So far, I've been to 14 countries on four continents.  Is there a gene for this?

2. While in Sierra Leone, I once posed as the daughter of the British High Commissioner in order to attend a council meeting of the local Temne headman (i.e., chief).  I felt incredibly guilty about the whole thing, but an elder put me up to it.

3. When I was 14, I wore a dress to homecoming made from nothing but thousands of soda can tabs and craft wire.  It took me weeks to make, and I was wiring tabs together just hours before heading off for the dance.  The pressure was on since I had enlisted the entire school to help me collect these tabs, even placing collection jars in the classrooms of teachers sympathetic to my antics.  Don't worry.  I was wearing something else underneath.  (Edit: I was actually 12 and it was the 8th grade dance).

4. In my brief life, I have been a Baptist, a Roman Catholic, a Scientologist and almost a Jew, a Mormon, and a Seventh Day Adventist.  I missed the Buddhist/Hindu phase (that was in the seventies).  I think I might have been Pentecostal in utero...

5. I love Star Trek.  I have seen 80-90% of TOS episodes, and every single espisode of TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT. If I've already lost you in this sea of acronyms, you are clearly not a Trekkie.  TNG is by far the best series, and Patrick Stewart is my idol.  I met him in 1993 outside the Old Vic in London where he had just performed a one man show of A Christmas Carol.  I waited outside the stage door with my Mom in the bitter cold for almost an hour, and when he came out he almost walked past (wanting to avoid the various reporters), but the woman he was with said, "Oh look, a child."  He smiled at me, signed my program and every word of the nice-sounding speech I had rehearsed in my head vanished.  He looked like Patrick Picard as Dixon Hill on the holodeck - very dapper.  I didn't say anything.  I could only grin like a complete idiot.  Since then, I have always entertained a small hope of one day becoming famous enough to meet him again, if only to be able to say, "You rock." 

In subsequent years, I met Leonard Nimoy, Gates McFadden, Robert Beltran, and Garrett Wang.

I attended Vulcon in Altamonte Springs, FL for 3 (maybe 4) years in a row in the 1990s until meeting a couple who were living in a trailer, traveling around the country chasing Star Trek conferences  (2-3 a month, on average).  I then thought it was perhaps time to take a break... I made a brief comeback in 2002 to attend a conference in Philadelphia with a classmate and fellow Sinophile who will remain nameless (Trekkies don't out other Trekkies).  He was hit on by Deanna Troi and Uhura lookalike drag queens.

I own the Star Trek encyclopedia, a TNG uniform in blue (not because I was a medical officer, but because I thought the color suited me best), and a Bajoran nose and earring.

But the really interesting things are the five things you don't know about me and I may never tell...

I'd love to tag Amira, but as she doesn't have a blog...
Alice, Jeremy, Jose, John and Jacky, you're it! 

If anyone GV plays this game, please send a trackback to this post.  I'd love to read your "five things"

Comments

[neha]

What we really want Jen - is to see you in that strapping blue uniform. Won't you please wear it and have yourself photographed.

We wait - Breathlessly.

[Jennifer Brea]

Come, come, Neha. Don't you have any guilty pleasures?

I actually do have a photograph of me at age 11 or 12, dressed with the blue uniform and a Bajoran earring being harassed or possibly taken prisoner by a rather tall Klingon...unfortunately the photo is somewhere at my mother's house. I should go dig it up the next time I'm there. I'm sure everyone would just love to see that :-)

[Jacky]

I've been waiting for the photo for quite some days, when will you publish it? :-)

Seems the trackback does not work on typepad. Here is my five,

http://www.jackypeng.com/blog/2007/03/03/kenna-arrow/

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