I've been tagged!

Sarah tagged me to carry on a new meme going around by writing six random things about myself.

The rules:

a. Link to the person who tagged you.
b. Post the rules on your blog.
c. Write six random things about yourself.
d. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
e. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment at their blog.
f. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Six random things about me:

1.) Whenever someone shakes hands with me, I wait for the inevitable question that follows. "Your hands are cold." My hands are always cold, and they turn freezing cold when I write, for some reason. Apparently my body boxes up any bit of coolness it has and sends it to my hands (I just realized that the wording of that statement could take on another meaning, lol.)

2.) I know Persian well enough to instant message and write long letters in it in both the Latin and Arabic alphabets and I understand 9/10's of what Iranian or Afghani native speakers say online. But I freak out when I get opportunities to actually speak it, probably a consequence of having learned it online (my pronunciation is good, so I've been told, but I don't have the confidence yet.)

3.) People find my accent hard to pin. Usually they ask if I'm British, but sometimes their curiosity turns into a wild guessing game skipping all over Europe--Russia, France, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Few people actually guess that it's a mix of Californian and Australian, picked up from my mother. She grew up with Australians and we children took on her accent, while she dropped it completely.

4.) When I edit my writing I can see whether I have the right balance of dialogue, description, and action in a scene by checking how it "looks," without actually reading it. If the balance doesn't look right, I mark it with "@@" and go back and fix it when I hit a block somewhere else.

5.) I'm an immigrant rights activist. I live in a racist neighborhood in a very divided rural town, so when I do flyering for protests or other events, the mostly Mexican immigrants here are surprised that a white person would get involved in their cause.

6.) I can be a terrible procrastinator sometimes. But once I get going, I'll stick to the task obsessively until it's done, usually blocking out everything else. I get things done twice as fast with a deadline as without.

And now I randomly tag:

Susan
Jenny Meyer
Amy
Marisa
Helene
Jenna