tag, we're it!

I was tagged earlier this week with a meme that's been making circles through the SF food blog community. The game? List five sordid facts about yourself, then tag five others. My tagger thought this would be a perfect project for a writer-cook, and that fact threw me into a tizzy. I had to cough up something good. And there are a few sordid stories I'd really rather keep to myself. The pressure was on to come up with five details and then sell them on their grisly details.

I'll just share two of my "five sordid facts" here, but you can find the rest right here. I was hoping we could use this as a celebration of the more literary moments of blogging as well as an adventure. I challenge the subsequent posters to share (at least) one sordid fact with the Fringe community. Hell, you can even make it all up! We'll never know...right?

So, from my list:
1. the "who am I really?": For a long time when you googled me (which is to say when I googled myself) the first thing you saw was this: Toby Reid is a faggot Jew. It was the first sentence of a story I wrote and had published. It's actually a really good piece and I still love it, but I always wondered if people randomly coming across it would think I was a bigot. Also, in grad school I wrote a story on terrorism that involved me googling things like "how to make bombs" and "how to get away with arson" so the government probably thinks I'm nuts. And now you all can as well.

5. the "violence against literature": Recently I took The Last Course out of the library (back in Boston, because SF just has no love for Claudia Fleming) out of the library and photocopied the whole thing because I can't afford to buy a marked-up ebay copy and it's out of print. So I have the most ghetto version of that cookbook, but it's okay, I still love it. Also, years ago when I worked at a bookstore I was so fed up with things in my life that I would rip pages in the back of the travel guides. Customers would be able to bring them back for a new copy...plus people would just take them and read them on the floor so lots were pretty banged up anyway.

And now, I'm looking forward to yours...