Six Little-Known Facts About Caroline

A dear friend tagged me in her blog yesterday with the challenge to post some little known facts about myself. I do love these lists--partly because they give me such interesting things to read about other people (who would have thought that sweet Heidi once kicked over a trash can? and does anyone have that moment captured on videotape?) and partly because there are certain things that I always wanted to say and never quite found an opportunity because they are so random that they don't fit anywhere in the usual blog scheme of things.

So here we go.

Little known facts about Caroline:

(1) I think Korean rice is one of greatest comforts in life, and I am ever grateful to the Asian market for carrying it. And anyone who thinks that pathetic atrophied excuse for rice in the American grocery stores is an acceptable substitute .... phooey, I say, phooey. You can't smell American rice and have all those memories about freezing snowy mornings riding the train to school in Uijongbu, warming your hands on a little packet of rice and taking little nibbles of it as the train pulled out of the Soyosan station ... okay, maybe that's just me.

(2) When I was a teenager in Korea (attending a school for American children), I once won $1000 for an essay in which I declared ignorance and apathy highly destructive to the American government process. The essay won locally and then regionally, and went national, where it ranked in 4th place, slightly out of prize contention for a college scholarship or something (I don't really remember anymore). Ironically, as an adult, I have never voted, mostly because I grew up in Korea and in a very secluded environment, and so I am extremely ignorant about American politics. I realized early in life that any vote that I cast would be selected by the fun but ill-informed process of Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Moe, and that didn't seem particularly helpful to the American government process, whatever it is.

The truth is that writing for the contest was a required assignment in my high school English class--a fact that I remembered on my way to school that fateful morning as I nibbled my tin-foil wrapped packet of Korean rice. And so, I pulled out a pen and a sheet of notebook paper and, in the final ten minutes of the ride, reached the pinnacle of my writing career. It has been downhill ever since.

(3) I can recite numerous chapters of the Bible from memory, but I am so bad at references that I am sometimes not sure which book they are in. Um ... Chronicles? Corinthians? Colossians? I'm pretty sure it starts with a 'C' ... I can also recite most of the Westminster Larger Catechism, but can't ever remember the number of the questions. Uh ... it could be 19 ... or 91 ... or possibly 119 ... or 191 ... If I ever do study up on politics and go to vote, I'm sure that, when faced with a ballot, I shall remember all the speeches and debates in great detail, but none of the candidates' names.

(4) I have a tattoo on my upper back that reads in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs: "I live in truth. Let not my heart be taken from me."

Upon reflection, I'm not sure that I can categorize this as a 'little known fact' because a few weeks ago, my shirt slipped down slightly at church, revealing this tattoo for the great amusement of all the people sitting behind me. It turns out that Egyptian hieroglyph tattoos are not very common in Reformed churches. (Perhaps they are not common anywhere at all--I didn't really take a poll about it.) I have ever since been pondering whether it was the tattoo in general or whether it was the hieroglyphs ...

(5) Speaking of church ... I'm the world's worst book borrower. Probably at least half the theological books on my shelf are marked 'From the Library of Rev. Tom Trouwborst', which only has the effect of making me say to myself, 'I really should return this at some point', as I flip through it for the hundredth time. And I fully intend to return it, of course, but not quite yet, not while I'm still reading it... I suspect that poor Pastor Tom is reaching the point of hesitating to let me see anything that he is reading. When it comes to theology books, I'm like the annoying little sister lurking vulture-like over her brother's ice cream cone and saying, "So are you gonna finish that or what?"

(6) I love to hear my husband play the guitar, even though I don't tell him that enough. He plays brilliantly. When we were first dating, he wrote a couple of love songs for me. Nowadays, of course, we are an old married couple and we don't often indulge in such romantic nonsense as poems and love songs. But every once in a while, he pulls out the guitar and strums a few chords ... and it brings back memories of being young.

I think the best things in life are always the those that connect us somehow to memories of good friends and fun. Things that are sweet even in their own way are sweetened so much more when we can say, "Oh, don't you remember ..."

Well, I don't know whether I have bored everyone to tears, but Heidi, here are my six little-known facts. I have to think now about who I can tag. Hmmmm ...

Phebe? Tag. You're it.