this post is the Word Nerd's fault

Recently, the Word Nerd, who--among other things--describes herself as "bookishly dorkalicious," stopped by my blog on the pretext of reading an announcement about a book give-away challenge for my contemporary fantasy movel Sarabande. But she had hidden motives.

"Meanwhile," she wrote coyly, "I've awarded you for your utter awesomeness" a TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF AWARD. Well, it's not the Pulitzer or the Pushcart, and its "goodies" force the recipient to reveal seven things about himself or herself and then stick 15 other bloggers with the award.

While Word Nerd confessed that she was "nerdariffic" in high school, she knows me well enough to understand that the odds of my revealing anything so personal about myself are slim and/or will be a pack of lies anyway. Yet, in the spirit of the award, here are the magnificent seven.

A girl I had a crush on in high school told me 20 years later she also had a crush on me in high school but was afraid I might think she was too popular for a guy like me from the other side of the tracks to risk asking out on a date, but that if I did ask her out, we'd have to date in another town where nobody knew us well enough to tattle, much think we were going steady.The large angel fish in the aquarium next to my bed used to stare at me when I was trying to sleep.My favorite movie is "The Apartment."I was sent to the principal's office in grade school for saying "yes" rather than "yes ma'am" to my teacher. (Since I wasn't born in the South, and had no idea I was supposed to say "ma'am" and "sir" to my elders.) When I refused to apologize, my parents were called and they told my teacher to stuff it.My first car was a 1954 Chevrolet that had a driver's side window that wouldn't close and that burned oil faster than gasoline.My favorite car was a 1970 Jeep CJ5 that saw IL, GA, KY, MN, SD, MT, TN and a few other states before the repair bills became too much for a starving college teacher.Yes, I really was a college teacher, but I got in trouble because I refused to say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir" to the deans, full professors and other tenured academics.I'm not going to tell you whether (or if) I "bestow" this award on any other bloggers because some of them might work for the mob or the Feds or other groups that really don't want people to know who they are or what they're doing.

--Malcolm