It’s interesting what a vanity search on Google will do to a person.  In my case, I ended up stumbling across Steve and his chain-letter-like 7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me blog entry. Two caveats before you begin reading…
1. My entire blog is about my personal life / perceptions on things I see in life - I don’t write about work, I don’t really write about other specific people - so I’m not sure how much more interesting this entry would be.
2. I really, really, REALLY loath chain-letters and their rules, so being a total “my-pace” (Japanese colloquialism for the personality type that is a non-conformist who does things on their own schedule and in their own way to achieve their own goals) type of person, I’m going to break the rules I don’t feel like obeying.

So, without further ado…
1. Half my personality is that of a hoarder. The other half is that of a “tosser.” I tend to collect things - books, CDs, papers from grade school, them sparklies (e.g., jewelry, loose gemstones), fuurin (wind chimes), stickers, anime, manga, Japanese drama - you name it (if it’s something that I’m interested in), I collect it. I’ll spend an inordinate amount of time organizing (The Container Store has some great drawers that keep the dust off the collections), cataloging (.xls spreadsheets, dude!), and working on filling in any gaps in my collections. Then comes the fateful day when I run out of room in my room and the ax falls. It’s time to whittle down my collections. I go on this culling rampage while my inner hoarder screams in pain. Talk about conflicted.
2. I drink a lot of water. So much that my brother calls me a camel. But there is a reason… I’m prone to nosebleeds. So, if I let myself get dehydrated, the capillaries in my nose decide to punish me by splitting apart and making a mess.
3. If #2 above was too gross, I can be grosser. I tend to have a practical outlook on bodily functions and am not terribly shy about talking about them. Blame it on the “you’re going to be a doctor when you grow up” brainwashing I had since I was… umm… four? Five? Truly believing it, I did a lot of things to prepare myself for the profession. One was to be utterly pragmatic about bodily functions - especially those that little boys relish giggling about (e.g.,bloody noses and GI track functions) - and stamp out any squeamishness I might have had. I have no problem watching open heart surgeries on TV while eating dinner.
4. I can sleep anywhere. Actually, it’s more like, I can fall asleep anywhere, but I also wake up very easily. You know how I “trained” myself as a kid to deal with the personal functional aspects of being a doctor? Another one was to learn to fall asleep easily anywhere, to wake up quickly, and to function on little sleep. This was to “prepare” for the years I would spend as a sleep-deprived resident. College and E&M cured me of my pre-med plans, but my sleeping abilities stay with me to this day.
5. I don’t deal with alcohol very well. I refuse to drink liquors after my cousin’s Mai Tai made me giggly like an insipid little girl after two sips. I’m convinced that he put 98% rum and 2% juice in my cup and 2% rum and 98% juice in my mother’s cup. She drank her Mai Tai just fine. I used to be able to handle a glass of wine. But after the trip to Hawaii a couple weeks ago when I ordered a glass of wine, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t drink more than 75% of a glass of wine before I get dizzy. To add a little more color to what I have to do in order to drink 75% of a glass of wine and not go past the dizzy stage… I also had bread, a few pieces of sashimi from the appetizer, a plate of salad, part of the entree, and about four glasses of water to accompany the sips of wine. I finished the entree and the dessert with another two glasses of water. Then, the wine I had last Friday night totaled about five or six sips before I had to stop. Dude, talk about a waste of good wine.
6. I am a control freak but I’m also really laid-back. When it comes to me and my performance and my environment that I create for myself, I’m totally a Type-A, anal retentive, annoying brat. I hate losing control over my actions - so I’ve never gotten drunk to the point that I can’t tell myself to stop drinking, I will schedule my personal To-Do list and stick to it until the rotten thing is done, all my collections are organized and cataloged. However, when it comes to my perspective on what other people do, it pretty much boils down to “it’s their life, I don’t care what they do, unless they do something that impacts me.”
7. I call myself an incredibly lazy person. Though I suppose other people who see me working would call it hard-working. I hate untangling messes if I could have not created the mess in the first place with a bit of due diligence. I call it my “work down payment” theory. If one can afford a larger down payment in terms of work effort at the beginning of the project and if that increase in the down payment will result in a lower marginal cost of work in terms of maintenance and upgrades, then invest the time up front to save time later. For example, I am an incredibly stupid person who can’t remember what was said two minutes ago if it isn’t written down. So how can anyone expect me to remember the specifications of a product that was designed a year ago. However, to cope, I write everything down and organize all the relevant information so that if I have to recreate or edit something in the future, I know exactly how to do it. It saves me the time I would have had to spend trying to remember the specifications. The additional benefits being that if a new person needs to learn about the product, there now exists a step-by-step guide for the product, which saves me the time of trying to explain how to do things. They only need to use the guide and walk through the process. Also, if there are multiple people who have to learn the product, there is now a single source of information - a control document - that will cut down on misinformation. Untangling misinformed people because they heard it from someone who heard it from someone is really painful. I’m too lazy to deal with that. So, if I have the time, I’d rather input the work upfront to avoid future problems… see? Lazy.

And there you have it, seven things you may or may not have known about me. At this point, I’m supposed to list the rules:

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I’ve obeyed the first two rules, but I refuse to do the next two, sorry. The people I know fall into four camps: 1. The Already Did This Meme group; 2. The I Barely Know How to Turn On a Computer group; 3. The Attorney group; 4. The Co-Worker group.

For obvious reasons, it doesn’t make sense to tag those in group 1. For my own sanity, I refuse to tag (assuming that they’re tag-able) those in group 2. I’m not convinced my attorney friends have blogs so that kills those in group 3. And, I’m not feeling brave enough to face possible strangulation by my co-workers for passing this along (again, assuming that they have blogs).