1. I hate mushrooms. They are a fungus. Don’t you realize you are eating fungus people?!?
2. When I sleep alone, I sleep with a night light on. My house burned down when I was 16 so I have an intense fear of waking up in the middle of the night to that burning smell and not being able to see anything. I’m extremely clumsy and it is multiplied ten fold in the dark.
3. My favorite author when I was a little girl was Mary Higgins Clark but I would read whatever my father put in front of me. This included an array of literature spanning from Reader’s Digest to The Stephen King Dark Tower series. I think this has contributed to my fantastic imagination and belief that everything is a mystery. Give me a book and it will be consumed in two days flat.
4. I have been 25 for three days and it totally weirds me out. But I don’t really know why?
5. I took the Myers Briggs test last week and just finished with my consultation. I am an ENFP which means my “preferences” are extroversion, intuition, feeling and perceiving. My life goal is discovering my identity.
6. I am one of those freaky people that LOVE LOVE LOVE and adore their jobs.
7. My little sister and my mother are my best friends in the entire universe. MommyMac is an audiologist for a non-profit and AliMac is in vet school. They are some of the most brilliant and funny women I know. I thank God daily that they are in my life. Especially when Ali leaves me 45 minute voicemails in an entirely British accent or when my Mom emails me her daily “You are loved” forwards. You know the ones. They feature a slide show of puppies or babies with a Celine Dion song for background music.
8. I had to add some random cheese because I HATE odd numbers. Do you know if you turn the volume in your car up to an odd number you are at risk of getting into a fiery crash? True story. Even if David doesn’t believe me.

Yes. I totally cheated. I changed the name to the Meme and added a extra “weird” fact. So for the Eight people I tag, just know you only have to come up with seven wacky little known facts about yourself and you only have to tag seven people.

I am passing the Weird and Wacky torch to:

1. David Stagg, because he rides with the top down.*
2. Monica Danna, because she is interesting as hell.
3. Gwen Bell, because she is amazing.
4. Katie Laird, because she is happy.
5. Fayza Elmostehi, because she is a monkey.
6. Kathleen Forbes, because she is inspirational.
7. Jenni Rebecca Stephenson, because she is an artist with words.
8. Princess Mia, because she is cuddly.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it?

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• 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 by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

*Hm. David is the only dude I tagged and the least likely to do the meme. Coincidence?

Many of you know I secretly LOVE Perez Hilton.  I think his blog is great.  And amazing.  And fantastic.  I consider it a great source for news I need to know.

Lately I have had to defend this love quite a bit so I decided to compile a top 20 list of why I love Perez Hilton.

Why Perez rawks:

1. Perezzers is always in the know
2. He announced that the new Macbook was being released on October 15 before anyone else
3. and he always has his finger on the pulse of the next big thing in music
4. In fact, Perez got to world premiere the first Leona Lewis song (not MTV!!)
5. He really cares about the Dalai Lama
6. and world peace (and you should too)
7. You can count on him to monitor the stock market for you
8. Or for up to the minute daily updates on that state of our economy
9. He really cares about your oral hygiene
10. and totally thinks you should NOT smoke
11. Perez is a huge proponent of voting
12. and is just as obsessed with Sarah Palin as Fayza and I
13. He even reminds our Canadian neighbors to vote!
14. I actually have a lot in common with Perez…
15. Perez and I both think Andy Roddick is sexy
16. hmmm… come to think of it, we have the same taste as in most men
17. and he loves dogs
18. Despite popular belief, Perez does a lot of good
19. He blogs about a non-profit once a day and encourages donating
20. Our own Houston Food Bank was actually featured post-Ike

The moral of this post? Don’t knock the Pretzel till you try him.

All I ever heard about was what Republicans believe.  I never had anyone to tell me the other side of the story.

Well let me tell you, last week watching the Democratic National Convention I was moved on SO MANY different levels.  I followed twitter religiously and even went upstairs alone at a friends house during a football game (this is a big deal-I’m from Texas remember?) to watch Barack Obama’s acceptance speech.

So I dug down and started doing my research.  I promised myself I wouldn’t make a snap political decision again and I would learn as much as I could before November.  I found as much information on Obama AND his party as I could find.  Along the way I also researched the Republican party more extensively than I ever had before and began to see that I was at a crossroads.  I do truly believe in a lot of what John McCain and his party have to say… But I also believe a lot in what the Democratic Party stands for too

Let me tell you the issue that stands in my way now.  Twitter.

Last week everyone I follow was GLOWING and so happy with what was going on.  Well every since Sarah Palin was named VP, I realized whose voice I was missing.  The Republicans.  I did not hear much from them during the Democratic National Convention.  And since then I have honestly been shocked.  Last time I checked, the point of Social Media and Twitter is to spread awareness and knowledge… not call 17 year old Bristol Palin a whore and point out everything her Mother has done wrong with her family.  I mean… wasn’t Obama’s mother single?  Wasn’t he born when she was 18?  Didn’t Obama specifically say that “people’s families are off limits” during elections???

And I’m not going to even get started on the military thing.  Every day I wonder if this will be the day I am going to be deployed but I still could not find myself saying some of the things that I have heard said about McCain in the last 5 days.

I am not saying McCain is right or Palin is a Saint or that Obama can’t change the world; what I am saying is that I wish we could stick to the facts and leave those kinds of catty comments to Perez Hilton.  I think his blog is best suited for that type of commentary.

I miss the the candid and witty comments on everyday life, the funny OHs, the knowledge sharing and the juicy links to awesome stories…  I miss all that made twitter so charming!

So I’m turning Twitter off during the Republican National Convention tonight.  I want my opinion to be based solely on the facts and not a bunch of angry opinions.  I am all for healthy fact based debate, but since Friday I have felt like I am in high school again.  Except this time the only voices I am hearing are those of the mean.

(Thank you woodleywonderworks for the amazing flickr photo!!)

Two facebook related events have fueled my fire this week.

First.  I bought a book called Facebook: The Missing Manual on Amazon a while back and it finally came in the mail a couple of days ago.  I spent $19.99 on a truly awesome book with lots of cool tips and tricks and knowledge that I wanted to pass on to our clients.  The book is now totally defunct because of the new facebook layout.  A layout that had already been redone once, and pretty recently too.

I think I’m most bitter about this incident because when I excitedly waved the book around in the air like a crazy person, my boss is the one who pointed out that it would probably be worthless.

Second.  I installed the twitter application on my old facebook.  On the new facebook layout, you see NOTHING but my tweets… my wall is totally comprised of my random shout outs to the interwebs.  I could not figure out how to turn off the automattic pull of my tweets from twitter into facebook.  I enlisted a coworker.  We ended up having to uninstall the whole app.  Annoying.

In all, I think I spent about a half hour trying to figure out this new application weirdness.  If I, a facebook vet and complete addict, cannot figure simple things out, what are people who are new to facebook to do?

My point to this rant?  Thank you facebook for making it that much harder to convert people who are nervous around computers to social media superstars.  I imagine a good many people who just started figuring things out on the old facebook are more lost than me.

Also.  WHAT IS UP WITH ALL THE TABS????  You are not a web browser dear facebook.  No one is going to tab over to people’s “info” or “boxes,” it’s too much work and people are lazy when it comes to looking for info on the interwebs.

I miss you already old facebook!

<end vent>

So here I go. Cutting through the cheese of social media.

You may have found me or my blog through one of those “social media applications”–or as people in the “industry” like to shorten to “apps”– that likes to end in “r” minus the vowel. Flickr, Tumblr, Dopplr, Twitter, oh wait, that last one remembered the “e”. Does that make it unhip? Is twitter already unhip? And what’s up with Plurk?

I digress.

So, why am i cutting the social media cheese? Because, frankly, this is all fairly new to me. And I tend to approach it with an outsiders’ innocent and naivety. Sometimes perceived as “socially media retarded”, but mostly just honest, with a touch of sarcasm. Did i say touch? More like a smack.

So if you are just as confused as I am by all this social media hoopla and what it means, or you aren’t and you just enjoy making fun of me, join me in my journey for the search for those missing vowels. Or is that vowls?