Formosa Neijia

I’ve been tagged in a type of meme where you’re supposed to reveal 7 interesting or weird things about yourself and then pass the meme on to other bloggers. It sounds a bit like spam, but I had some fun writing these, so I’ll participate.

So here are my seven:

1. I was a magician in first grade, my first time in front of a large group. It was a school circus, and I played a card trick on the 3rd grader that teased me a lot. That started a life-long love of magic.

2. In the army, out of the 400+ people in Bravo company that went through medic training, I was one of four that passed the Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) test. And I didn’t study a bit. Not one of the top people in the course got it.

3. But I’m color-blind, so I can’t be an EMT, or a cop, or a firefighter, or anything else I wanted to be while growing up. My “good luck” tends to run like this.

4. While in Japan, I got to meet Brian Victoria — the brilliant author of Zen at War. I spent two hours with him hearing about all the terrible things done in the name of Buddhism. It never ceases to amaze me how naive people are when they think that some religions have never been used for war purposes.

5. Speaking of religion, I spent a semester in seminary, thinking I was going to be a man of the cloth. I learned three things: a) Hebrew is hard beyond belief, b) Koine Greek is fun except for the verbs, c) I didn’t belong there.

6. One of my wife’s friends knows the beautiful and talented Ms. Sarah Carter. <Sigh>

7. Something martial arts related: as a 5′7″ 130 lbs. green belt in karate, I once knocked out a 6′2″ 250 lbs. 3rd degree black belt. It was fear mostly, with some lucky timing. We sparred full-contact in my karate club and this guy scared the crap out of me. He came at me full-force and I got so scared that my favorite technique at the time — spinning backfist — just jumped out of me and landed square on his temple. He dropped to the deck, and so did everyone’s mouths — including mine.

To bloggers, this is a way to let your readers get to know you a bit better. And it can be fun, too.

Here are the blogs I’m sending the meme on to:

Renli

Tim Fong

Jianghu

Embodied Motion

Another Neijia Blog

Tabby Cat Gamespace