my very first meme tag

i've been tagged for the very first time in my life, and i am loving it. really, i'm seriously excited. this one comes from my new internet friend, anitra. she is a new yorker married to a kiwi, living in kentucky. i've been enjoying some of her observations of the south, amongst other commentaries. check her out at i love a kiwi.

so here are seven random and/or weird facts about myself. sorry in advance about the inevitable ME ME ME nature of this post.

1. when i first moved to croatia by myself, i was nineteen years old. i lived alone in a cottage underneath a walnut tree, and i was waiting for university to start to make friends. i read a book a day, and sometimes i'd stay up all night reading. i read william makepeace thakeray's "Vanity Fair" and oscar wilde's "A Picture of Dorian Gray" in this manner, finishing them well after sunrise.

2. my first name is arabic, my last name is jewish, my theoretical middle name is male, but i am none of these things---to my knowledge.

3. my first conversation with the shaun who is now my husband was entirely about an outrageous lie of his fabrication. when i referenced the subject matter at a lunch with friends weeks later, he had completely forgotten the lie, and i was the guillible laughing stock of the group. (you maybe had to be there to see how endearing this was.)

4. the first time i saw a panther, it was for sale.

5. my mother made my father and i wholewheat peanut-butter and tomato sandwiches for lunch at work and primary school, respectively. when he got home from work, he commiserated with his nine-year-old daughter about discovering the unusual combination, and we talked about how we hid them from our colleagues/classmates, who of course were eating something pedestrian---but enviable---like ham-and-lettuce on white bread.

6. i was once mistaken by a girl i was living with at the time for a homeless person.

7. three weeks after i moved to israel, someone i had met there told me the following story:

walking home late at night, he and a friend saw someone they knew climbing the road behind them. thinking quickly, they decided to hide in some nearby bushes, and surprise her as she passed.

as she approached, he and the friend started making extremely strange robot noises, like an electronic alien, still hiding in the darkened bushes.

she paused, looked over the vegetation, and at 11:30 p.m. on this otherwise deserted israeli street (and remember, about two weeks after meeting me) she called out, "Leila? Leila G?"

this was constructed in the middle of a family gathering, involving four generations of women in shaun's family. we've spent the whole afternoon hanging out, picnicking at the dining table, canoodling with the baby, laughing at each other, and playing on computers.

since i may not ever be tagged with a meme again in my life, i might come back to this theme and enliven my housewifery with remembering bygone days of wild, reckless, weirdness. and then i will post it on the internet and my family will be scandalized.

now i tag people! she's only happy in the sun; the behst; poste-haste; everything, nothing, and i'm a middle child; ishikawa blog; montague; and child of africa.

i just needed to stick up a picture today. too. much. text.