Danny Chai10 Random Things About Me
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10. This is well known, but in 7th and 8th grade I was in a junior high school jazz band that won the national jazz festival both years. I played piano. I have not played jazz piano since, so don’t ask me to play jazz. I honestly can’t.
9. I have dated 4 girls in my life. 2 in junior high, 2 in college. Anyone who knows what I looked like in junior high and in college finds this absolutely unbelievable. Quite frankly, I don’t blame them. I’m 100% serious, many of my close friends and my family are relieved that I got married at all, much less married to someone of Jieun’s caliber. Anyway, the ethnicities of my girlfriends were, in order, Filipino, Caucasian, Chinese, and Korean. I’m all about equal opportunity.
8. My Korean is horrible. That’s neither surprising nor random. The weird thing is, up until the age of about 3 or 4, I only spoke Korean, despite being born in the U.S. Apparently when my parents put me in preschool, I didn’t talk to any of the other kids, didn’t interact with any of them, even during group time (I’d sit by myself in the corner) because I didn’t understand them. This was part of the reason my parents decided to speak to us in English. According to my mom, my first English words were, with the teacher while waiting for my mom to pick me up, “I’m hungry”.
7. I take a dump on average 3 times a day. These aren’t express dumps either, but nice leisurely ones, mostly because I like to read on the toilet. It just feels… safe. In the morning the sports section, afternoon Newsweek (at work), in the evening miscellaneous.
6. As Vanderpool might say, I’m a cheapa**. My love for McDonald’s $1 menu is well documented. I clip newspaper coupons every week. But it’s getting a little out of control. I started saving empty plastic bottles instead of putting them in our apartment recycling bins so I can redeem them and get cash at recycling centers myself. But I’m finding the effort/reward ratio of that is way out of whack so no more of that.
5. I pick at my fingernails. I don’t bite at them, but pick at them, so they’re in awful shape and really short. This has had 2 dire ramifications. One, the wedding pics that have closeups of our hands are an unmitigated disaster. Jieun will rue those pictures until the day she dies. Two, my nails are so short that I can’t do big bends on electric guitar. You know what a bend is. When you bend the string so it slides up a note. Think the very first note on the intro to Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton. I can’t do that because my nails are too dang small. I dunno how to explain this but yeah, it sucks.
4. My closest friends in elementary school were an Indian Hindu and a Japanese Buddhist. We called ourselves the 3 Burritos. I was in Cub Scouts but the Den Mother moved away and the replacement was terrible so my Indian friend and I ended up joining the Japanese friend’s troop which met at the Buddhist temple in downtown San Jose. So for a couple years I was in a Buddhist Boy Scout troop. Very interesting experience.
3. At one point in my childhood I used to think that Japanese girls were the most attractive ethnicity. I think in retrospect I was heavily influenced by Tamlyn Tomita in The Karate Kid, Part II. And for that I am not ashamed.
2. I developed lactose intolerance when I was around 15 or so. All of a sudden, I started getting diarrhea and severe intestinal gas every single freaking painful day. This is not right, I thought. Egad. Went to the doctor, suggested I might be intolerant, since it develops later for some, and my dad is intolerant. So I stopped drinking milk. Daily diarrhea disappeared. I was glad. As were the people around me.
1. I have a subscription to Men’s Fitness, but I hide it from guests because it’s embarrassing having magazines with buff topless men and headlines screaming “Awesome Abs in 30 Days” on the cover sitting around. What happened was, I tried to subscribe to Entertainment Weekly through Best Deal Magazines but EW pulled out of the promotion, so they offered me a refund plus a subscription to one of a small list of magazines. Of that list, Men’s Fitness was the best choice. But yeah, kinda embarrassing.