For Lance's Morning Cup of Joe

Lance asked an interesting question when he wanted to know what makes us different from anyone else. I'm not sure there is such a thing. I mean, no matter how unique or strange a person is, there is always someone in the great wide world who has the same trait.

I'm strange, nerdy and very eccentric. All those things I mostly hid when I was younger but at this point I don't care because as an adult, there are 2 things that i've learned about people. Number 1, EVERYONE is a nerd and Number 2, no one really knows what the hell is going on anyway.

I've always been a tomboy. When I was a kid I had Star Wars action figures, I rode skateboards, was a soccer forward and absolutely HAD to be the shot up soldier who dies a heroic and dramatically long death while playing army with the other kids on the block.

I had a weird thing about being in high places. Trees, rocks, ditches, the roof, even mac trucks if available, all had to be climbed. My step father once walked into a hallway past the closet nook only to look up and find me stuck to the ceiling, feet planted against one wall and hands against the other. Henceforth I was nicknamed 'lizard'. I think he called me that until I was 17 or so.

I would only wear boy-ish clothes. Jeans or shorts and t-shirts. And after 3rd grade, always always a pair of vans. That's a weirdness I still haven't grown out of. If i'm girly in anything it's that I love shoes, but they're almost all sneakers and 16 pairs of them are VANS.

When I insisted to my mother that I wanted to ride in BMX she drew the line and desperately tried to 'girl me up' by bringing me to the hairdresser and sticking me in pastels. All that accomplished was the worst perm of my life and a lot of stained pink shirts. Lucky for me she eventually gave up and I was allowed to race and jump my non motorized boys bike, but only in an empty track.

I was oddly entrepeneurial for my age. In 5th grade I figured out how much money I could make if I bought a bag of the ever popular Jolly Ranchers for 1.50 and sold them for .25 cents a peice. I made a killing. If there was a way I thought I could make money i'd try it. By the time I was 10 I already had a bank account with 1024$ in it. I spent it on a horse.

Due to being an only child and mostly alone I suppose, I read books like mad and still do. Like every little kid I loved learning about dinosaurs. But unlike other kids I took it much farther. Paleontology was a jumping off point, I learned the names of each Dino on sight, time periods, approximate sizes and weights and even contemplated the theories that caused their global demise. By the time I was 11 I had graduated from extinct animal to ancient civilization, had a rudimentary understanding of cryptography and could decipher some basic egyptian glyphs.

The truly eccentric part is the morbid fascination with mummification or rather just finding the dead who's dried up forms had somehow survived thousands of years to be studied. I was the only 10 year old I know that, after having buried a found dead bird would go back a month later to dig it up just to see what happened to it. Not only would I look at the remains but color changes to the soil, texture etc. All of that eventually resulted in my going to college to major in general anthropology with a focus on paleoanthro.

Alright that's epic enough for now. Hope you ate your cheerios Lance.