Richard has a whole meme of songs as chartage, mostly from his LiveJournal community.

Not wanting to to pass a good meme when I see one, I humbly submit my own chart to the project:

Note that Ludacris does, indeed, have very little hos in the Manitoba area.

You might be wondering why I’m doing this, or why I haven’t done it sooner: a long time ago, I had thoughts of compiling all this madness and somehow using it for financial gain. There’s no shame in admitting that, I think: old school bloggers have their Adsense or their book deals. I’ve also learned that doing something like a book deal takes effort, and that my time is better spent, well, living my current life rather than spending energy trying to capitalize on my past. Not to say I wouldn’t mind some kickback, and maybe I’ll still spend a chunk of time trying to edit down three megabytes of written text into something feasible, but until then, have at it. (Hell, maybe one day I’ll make the whole thing available on a Creative Commons license and someone can write the damn book for me, but I think that will be for another time.)

Going through some old posts and coming back now, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• My really funny posts – the reason, I’m assuming, why most people came to my blog – happened between three to five years ago, right before I got in my relationship and roommates with my friend Paris, who is a thoroughly hilarious person. Then I entered a relationship, where I cocooned for two and a half years, went through a break-up and watched my parents separate. I mentally fell apart and now that alls been sorted out, I’m less manic and not trying so hard to be “funny ha ha,” as my friend Anil puts it. I’m like a fucked up Frasier-like funny, in that Frasier really isn’t a funny show at all.
• Like all bloggers that started in the early 2000’s, content centered around link commentary, rather than having your blog be a personal soapbox. I had a mini-blog a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun, although integrating it with this blog didn’t seem to work so well. I miss that, so for that very reason I’ve set up a tumblr blog – a place to quickly blog about videos I like or links or thoroughly hilarious yet trashy Instant Messenger conversations. As my friend Jason says, it’s 1999 all over again, in the form of gradients and rounded corners. And it really is.
• After reading some old posts, I don’t think I could ever make myself so vulnerable to such a large audience again. But it’s a reflection of a life previous, and the more I realize I’ve changed since those days, the more okay I am with having this stuff available on the Interwebs.

Writing this list was surprisingly difficult – there’s been a lot of trivial stuff about my life I’ve already blogged about over the past five years but have since gone off-line. And while 90% of my life is an open book, what is there left to share to all of the Internet, knowing that friends, co-workers and family members will be reading this as well? Needless to say, here we go:

1. I come from a military family. To anyone who’s ever met me or seen a photograph of me in person, this seems like the most ridiculous concept ever, but it’s true. My paternal grandfather fought under Chiang Kai-Shek, fought the Communists but lost, retreating to Taiwan. My father served in the ROC navy before our family immigrated to the United States some time during the early 70’s.
2. I wanted to be an actor in high school. I was really into it Freshman year; I was in the high school improvisation troupe, my first (and last) play was as De Pinna in our high school version of You Can’t Take It With You. Shortly after that play, my father decided I needed to take more computer courses, pulled me out of all my extra-curricular classes related to performing and made me take a junior college course in Pascal, not that I’m bitter or anything. (Some trivia: also in that play was a senior named Adam Sessler. Thirteen years later, he’s now the host of a little TV show called X-Play. And me? I’m writing this blog entry. Such is my life.)
3. If you already knew this fact, consider yourself an old-school LYD reader: Blogs got big around the same time as Survivor, so I used to do blog versions of popular reality game shows, where the winners would win real money. SurvivorBlog was the first game I did, and I also did a version of The Mole called PuppetMaster, which got profiled in Entertainment Weekly. (More trivia: SixApart’s Mena Trott had applied as a contestant for PuppetMaster, but didn’t make the cut. I’m still kicking myself in the ass over that one.) I would LOVE to do another blog game some day, but knowing how blog-savvy people are nowadays this would be a logistical nightmare.
4. Most American universities seem to have an abundance of a cappella groups. UC Davis didn’t have such a group. Me and three other guys DID, however, create a horrible R&B group called Unrealized Potential, where I would play the piano and harmonize. Think “Boyz II Men,” except really, really not good – I think we spent more time making sure our matching vests matched, rather than making sure we could actually hit the notes. We ended up singing “On Bended Knee” and Jodeci’s “Lately” at a dorm talent show, where we were promptly laughed off the stage. I think we did, anyway. I have a tendency to block things out from memory.
5. Now that I think about it, I guess most people don’t know I used to play the piano. Like all Asian kids, piano lessons were forced upon me when I was four years old; I took classical piano lessons until Junior High school, and then “rebelled” in my piano playing by playing jazz piano and accompanying a church choir in high school. A part of me wishes I still kept up with the piano – I haven’t sat down at a piano bench in years – but I can still read sheet music, albeit awkwardly.

I’ll update this blog post soon as to who I’ll tag. God, I’m so late on this. Hopefully they get the memo.

1. Joe.My.God.
2. Ariel Meadow Stallings
3. Glenda Bautista

Yes, the meme says to tag five people. I’m a rebel.