The irony is that just two hours before I saw Andres’ post, I had written an email to the Global Voices Author mailing list encouraging everyone to take part in this five things meme that’s been circling the internets:

Lastly, I have another favor to ask, but this one is for my personal blog. I think that Ethan Zuckerman made a good point about those “5 Things” memes when he observed that we often know very little about the people we spend so much time interacting with online and that “perhaps it’s a good thing that there are some structured ways to let each other know the details we’d either accumulate from years of sharing the same space and time.” So on my personal blog I’d like to put together a collection of the “5 things” memes (such as this one by Ndesanjo) written by GV authors and editors. If you’ve participated, please send me the link to your post and if it is written in a language other than English or Spanish, please translate it to English for me. And if you haven’t participated yet, what are you waiting for? There’s no need to be tagged (no one tagged me and I’m going to put one up). And it will be a great way for us to learn more about each other.

And then what do you know, I find out that Andres (who I first met during his hilarious Monty Python-themed presentation at iSummit in Rio) used to be a professional DJ in Belfast and that he’s working on a novel titled “El Ataque de las Chicas Kamikaze”. And, bless his heart, I finally found out the origin of the entire meme – from the poetically titled blog, “Dipping Into the Water Butt,” which, you must admit, is slightly better than dipping into the butt water.

And so, my five things:

1.) I played college basketball. [OK, this is a stretch ... in the spring of 1999 - while still waiting on my application to study abroad in Kathmandu - I made the Mira Costa College Spartans basketball team. I was the worst guard on the team. We practiced every day, lifted weights every day. And yet, undoubtedly, I would have never played a single game. In the summer I found out I was accepted to the study abroad in Nepal and I quit the team. It's funny, now looking at the site, I see that Patrick Conahan is head coach - we used to guard each other nearly every single afternoon at Glen Park in Cardiff for at least two or three years.

2.) I am Arachibutyrophobic.

3.) I used to shave my legs. True story. Maybe I'll leave this one without explanation.

4.) I've cuddled with a Nepalese Sherpa. [This was does deserve explanation, but we're actually foolish enough to go to Ikea on Sunday, so it'll have to wait.]

5.) I’ve sung “You’ve lost that loving feeling” to an auditorium of hundreds of high school students. [In high school I was in this thing called CASC. It’s hard for me to believe it’s still around. Mostly it was about leadership training. And, like everything else in high school, it was a bit of a popularity contest. At some point we had a week long leadership conference at Stanford University with hundreds of high school student council kids from all over California. So my buddy Jim Orlando (who later went on to become king of Road Rules) and I decided we’d find the prettiest girl and act out the famous Top Gun scene. It seemed to go pretty well for such cheesiness – we got the entire auditorium to sing along with us – until the girl started crying and ran away. Turns out she was insanely shy and couldn’t deal with attention. It wasn’t the ending we were looking for.

I tag: Rezwan, Sameer, Jen, Kamla, and Nicholas.