Mike Scalise

Person I Know Ryan Call has implicated this blog in a round-about Internet thing called “Seven Things About Me” which requires me to reveal seven things about myself then, similar to the recent Page 56 meme, implicate seven other blog people to do the same thing. Confession isn’t really what this blog is about, but I love memes. So here goes.

1. I grew up in the borough of White Oak, which is in the city of McKeesport, which is 14.4 miles outside of Pittsburgh. Which means I went to McKeesport Area High School, where I was voted “Most Artistic” of my graduating class.
2. This was likely a fixed election, due to the fact that two friends on the Yearbook Committee later confessed their plan to have me win “Most Artistic” simply so that they could strategically misspell the award to read, below my photo, “Most Autistic.”
3. Tonight I went to see The Wrestler in Georgetown, and The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan sat directly in front of me, waiting eagerly for a second party, who arrived a few minutes after the film began.
4. For the first twenty-three years of my life I was a very tan human being, so much so that many  said I looked like I was “off the boat.” However, after I was diagnosed with a very strange hormone disfluency at twenty-four–for reasons that make sense to no one, not even my doctors–I have been completely incapable of tanning, regardless of how hard I try. This leads many to say to me, when they see my muted paleness: “you really need to get some sun,” and the nature of the comment is so benign and small-talky that I avoid bringing the conversation down with my unproven theory as to why I don’t.
5. My wife is extremely attractive. I know everyone says that about their wives, but for me its less of a brag, and more of a thirteen-year bout of bewilderment and disbelief at her own inability to see just how far below her good looks I am in proportion. Seriously.
6. I have a tattoo of Spider-Man on my right shoulder. I got it in 1998–before those movies came out–at a tattoo parlor in Oakland, PA, not far from the Campus at the University of Pittsburgh, where I eventually graduated college. I can’t find an exact pic online, but it looks like this, except only the head.
7. Right now I’m flipping between 7 books: The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (re-read, for this thing I’m working on), The Wettest County In the World by Person I’ve Met On a Number of Occasions Matt Bondurant, Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon, Getting Personal: Selected Readings by Philip Lopate, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (re-read, also for this thing I’m working on), The Unbinding by Walter Kirn, and The Death Issue from Conjunctions. I just have them all on my shelf and I read each one until they make me want to close the book and get to work myself.

So there you go. Hope I didn’t insult anyone. Here’s who I’m implicating to follow up, and I apologize in advance for the implication: Scott Weaver, Patricia Chui, Lillian Bertram, Nat Foster, Rebecca Schuman, Moriah Purdy, Jennine Crucet.