Kana's Chronicles

I recently took the FaceBook quiz, “What kind of underwear are you?”  Please don’t ask me why I would do such a thing.  (Ironically, I hit cancel rather than let the results post to my FB page—because I didn’t want people to know I was so silly.  But here we are…)

I’m sure you can all live without a description of my actual underwear, but suffice it to say it’s not the kind we used to refer to as Granny Panties—you know, the cover-all cotton kind.  I think my underwear may be responsible for the fact that our teenage son refuses to get his clothes out of the dryer.  (Or maybe that’s just because he’s a teenage boy.) Although as I think about it… Since I’m Granny to three marvelous Little People, I suppose my drawers are all, by definition, “Granny Panties” now.  Along those lines, our kids tease my husband (who’s a generation older than I am) by asking “why’d you have to talk about your underwear?” whenever he answers a question with the word “Depends.”

And I’m suddenly remembering (because who doesn’t have an underwear story or two?) the trip to WalMart a few years back, when my daughter got to collect her potty-training reward of choosing her own Big Girl Panties.  She was entirely obsessed with the movie “Cars” that year, so of course she needed Cars panties.  And of course they don’t actually make Cars panties, so she needed to have the boys’ briefs.  And of course her favorite character (the tow-truck Mater) was on the butt of the briefs, so she needed to wear them backward so she could bend over and say “hi” to Mater at will.  She came home from preschool one day to report that the girls had informed her she was wearing underwear that was not for girls.  “But it’s MY underwear, and I’M a girl—so yes it is,” she concluded triumphantly.  I don’t think we’ll have peer-pressure problems with this one.

Perhaps that’s a fitting story to go with my underwear-quiz result, because (for reasons unfathomable to me) FaceBook has declared that I am… a Pair of Boxers.  Perhaps some of you can enlighten me as to why “Boxers” might be a good descriptor for me.

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On to more serious coverage of the blogging world…  (No, really.  I can do serious.)

I got a lovely little gift in my inbox the other day, in the form of a Versatile Blogger award from one of my blogging-friends.  Every nominee is meant to select the next round of awardees and pass the blog-love along… so while I was busy with the process of meaning-to-get-to-that, another Versatile Blogger nomination joined the first in my inbox, and then a third.  Such synchronicity!  Lacking a Versatile Blogger handbook which might refer me to the proper protocol for a triple-play, I’m going to put my Versatile-Person-skills to work and just forge ahead.

Without further ado: my humble THANKS to the three lovely ladies who so synchronously sent their blog-hugs (Blugs?) my way:  Cerridwen’s Cauldron, Running Naked With Scissors, and Mature Student Hanging In There.

The award comes with responsibility, of course. (No, really.  I can do responsibility.)  I am directed to: (1) link to the nominator(s), (2) nominate fifteen new awardees (with links to their blogs), and (3) share seven random things about myself.

So here we have it, fifteen Versatile Bloggers whose writing I really enjoy (and you might too–hence the links):

• Becoming Cliche
• Word Salad
• Sturm und Mom
• Childhood Relived
• Words from the Woods
• Abrasive Enough
• Miss Demure Restraint
• Worrywart’s Guide to Weight, Sex, and Marriage
• Susan Writes Precise
• Spoiled Fruits of Empire
• I’ve Survived! And I’m Ready to Fly!
• The Musings of a Lesbian Writer
• The Prodigal Scribe
• Random Ruminations of a Mad World
• Antigone’s Clamor

And to finish the job, seven random things about myself (as if my underwear-tales weren’t enough)…

1. Although a lot of girls go for Marine Biology because “dolphins are cute,” I specialized in the funky and fantastic realm of invertebrate physiology.  Marine Invertebrates are living proof that God has a sense of humor.  I also used to carry my dissection-labs over to the dinner table, which habit was not appreciated by my mother.  She really didn’t want to have her oysters’ gonads pointed out to her in the middle of dinner.
2. I did put a girly twist on one research project, as I think about it.  I was tracking the movement patterns of a species of intertidal snail, marking my subjects with red nail polish.  (Though I was un-girly enough to have to borrow said nail polish from a roommate.)
3. The sides of my hands have the tattooed words: “Keoni ku’u pilikua,” which means “Keoni my beloved husband.”  There was some debate, though, about whether the word should be pilikua or pilikia–the latter option meaning “trouble”….
4. My favorite line in the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” is the opening of the 9th-Step Promises: “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through.”  The engraving inside our wedding rings? “We will be amazed.”
5. My husband likes to introduce himself to people as Mister Kana Tyler.
6. I have an obsessive-compulsive aversion to pencil erasers.  Can.Not.Stand.Them.  My insistence on doing the NYTimes crossword in pen has nothing to do with hubris, and everything to do with my utter inability to use an eraser.
7. Maybe the underwear quiz was right–I have been known to borrow our son’s boxers (to wear as shorts).    He doesn’t usually read the Wicked Stepma’s blog, so I think it’s a safe admission.  Very versatile item of clothing, boxers…