After many requests, and many hot potatoes thrown my way, I surrender! As usual, I felt that 7 things was a lot, but in the end, I had a hard time narrowing things down, so...here I go.
1) I love Diet Coke! Ok, I don't smoke, I hardly drink at all (except for a good bottle of wine). No coffee either. I had to do at least one stupid thing every day, so, I chose Diet Coke. Everyone tells me over and over again that it's crap..., nice and cold please, with lots of ice and no lemon, it's the best!
2) I don't like to sleep! I don't have anything against sleeping in, but I need to exert a whole lot of energy the day before to be able to get in more than 5 hours. So, seeing that I like math (see number 3), I feel better about it when I think that sleeping 3 hours less a day gives you 1100 hours of "other things to do" a year. That way, I can still devote some time to my family and to water skiing (see number 7)!
3) I like mental arithmetic. As soon as I hear numbers on the radio, I start dividing or multiplying to try to understand what they mean. The last time I did this kind of math in my head, I heard that we spent 27 billion Euros to reduce unemployment by 500,000 people. It's great that unemployment is down by 500,000, but when it costs 54,000 Euros a person (3 times the yearly income of an average Frenchman), there's a (big) glitch somewhere and it's not coming from the unemployed (who are certainly not earning that kind of money)!
4) I tend to over simplify things. In a previous company, my nickname was "It's Easy". Since then, I've tried, with difficulty, to make some progress by paying much closer attention to the complexity of what I ask others to do.
5) I love to cook. I hate eating "garbage". So, when I'm lucky enough to be at home, I cook. Given my Sicilian roots, I've been known to make a mean risotto or pasta dish, but I can easily branch out to French food.
6) I like theoretical physics. I would have loved to have lived between 1900 and 1920 when relativity, quantum physics, causality, and tons of other fascinating concepts were born. I would have liked to have been there to see Niels Bohr argue with Albert Einstein about the reality of quantum physics. Einstein, infuriated, hurled "God does not play dice!" at Niels Bohr, who replied "Who are you to tell God what to do!" Incredible!
I still read lots of books and journals in this domain. Pretty often, I have a hard time understanding certain concepts, and an even harder time explaining them to others. When I do understand, I settle for sharing my state of euphoria with myself :-).
7) I have an unhealthily addiction to water skiing. It's a drug. As soon as I see a large body of water, I start to ask myself how I can cross it at high speed! Where can I find a boat? Where can I find a driver? Is a bloody barge going to pass through and ruin my run? When I'm lucky enough to have the body of water, the boat, and the driver, I'll make all kinds of excuses to spend the day doing nothing but skiing.
Why do I like it so much? I could post a whole note explaining why, but, if I had to choose just one thing? Because, to be a good skier, some people say that you can only have one active neuron: the ski neuron. And, like happiness, when only one neuron is in complete concentration mode (in my case, ski mode), you forget all of life's troubles and you live 100% in the moment. So, I often find myself thinking that it's sad a run only lasts 16.25 seconds :-)...
Have a good one :-)
Marc