Five more things

This is shameless theft from cereta and minim_calibre, and I'm sure I won't be able to do this justice one-tenth as well as they have, but I find this meme irresistible. It's the thinking up process, I suppose -- I was always a bit baffled by those "Five things someone didn't do" stories because I didn't quite get the point, but this makes it make a little more sense to me.

You post a topic, list, category, whatever, in my comments section. (examples: "Five Phrases Batman Will Never Say", or "Five Jobs House Wishes He Had" or "Five Things Dean Will Never, Ever Tell Sam"). Then, in a separate post, I'll post the answers to your Top 5 ideas, according to me. Serious or fun!

Stuff I could potentially do fairly well: the Jossverse, Numb3rs, Magnificent 7 (TV series), The Fast and the Furious, The X-Files, Miami Vice, The Professionals, Band of Brothers (Winters and Nixon, at least), La Femme Nikita, Keen Eddie, Miracles, Wonderfalls, Battlestar Galactica, Due South (not so much with the Ray K, I'm afraid, as I don't know him well at all), Life on Mars, Second Sight, Deadwood, Witchblade, major characters on Veronica Mars, and... well, a lot of movies. Also Steve and Kayla on Days of Our Lives. Can't forget my ur-couple.

Five places

For cereta, five places you will never see Dominic Toretto.

1. Salsa dancing lessons. It isn't that he thinks dancing is for faggots, but you really have to wonder about this one -- all that booty-shaking and the frilly clothes, and you can't just sorta halfway get down with someone when you're trying to remember all those damn steps.

2. A Princess cruise ship. Maybe you could eat your way through a nice trip down to Mexico or whatever and just crash on the sun deck all day, but fuck if he'd ever set foot on the Love Boat. And if he can't drive there, he doesn't wanna go.

3. Ordering a triple lo-fat extra whip raspberry capumochachino ANYthing from a Starbucks or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. And no way is he going to go into one of those places to order an "Americano" and pay 2 bucks extra for the privilege. It's a fucking cup of coffee.

4. A gay bar. Brian asked him why they couldn't just go somewhere they didn't have to be afraid of getting drunk and gropey with each other, at least once, just try it out. But Dom killed that idea, fast. He wasn't interested in other guys, or being around guys who were interested in other guys. It was just Brian, straight down the line, and if they wanted to grope, they sure as shit weren't doing it in public.

5. Second place at the finish line. Because he is Dominic fucking Toretto.

5 things Paul won't eat

For maygra, 5 things Paul Callan won't eat in a restaurant (from Miracles).

(There's no way I can do these in order, so please bear with me as inspiration strikes.)

1. Black pudding. There's a great little Irish bar down the street from the diocese, a real one run by a real expat Irish family, not one of the fake ones that people buy a license to own. They serve breakfast every day except Sunday. He didn't know what black pudding was the first time he ordered the full Irish breakfast, but he learned real fast to stay away from it. Why would anyone want to eat sausage made from blood? Just thinking about it makes him shudder with far too many bad memories. Blood shouldn't be a food except for vampires, and they don't really exist. At least, he hasn't found a real one so far.

2. Anything with the word "mom's" on it. It's not something he'd share with anyone except Poppi, and even then, he has never mentioned it. Or maybe the subject just hasn't come up. But there's something sharp and a little painful when you see that on a restaurant menu, a tiny pricking reminder that you never really had a mom to compare the cooking to. What would his mom's recipe for apple pie have been like? Or how would she have made a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup incomparable? Whoever's recipe for "Mom's apple pie" it is, he only knows it wasn't his own mother's.

3. Anything with apricots: jam, tart, pastry, you name it. Peaches, too. Smell of preservative in the grave, smell of arsenic in the breath. They say it's peach pits, that smell, but both apricot and peach pits smell the same to him -- heavy, too sweet, musky, and rotten to the core.

4. He never really understood what the fuss was about chocolate. It doesn't really taste that special to him, so he's never ordered a chocolate shake at the diner, or the chocolate cream pie Evvie likes so much. Alva thinks he has some kind of serotonin deficiency, that his levels aren't lifted by chocolate the way others' are, but he just doesn't really like the taste. Paul would choose caramel any day.

5. Guacamole. It's a texture thing, he tried to explain to Alva and Evvie the time she brought back a giant pile of nachos from the diner. She just raised a Spock-like eyebrow at him, and Alva almost chuckled. "You keep unfolding mysteries like a flower," was all he'd said.

Don the liar

For barkley, 5 times Don lied to his family (Numb3rs).

1. The window was never proven, and his parents wouldn't even have known about it if Charlie hadn't run into the house flapping his mouth, shouting that "Don broke the window" and waiting like a happy executioner for Dad to lower the boom on Don. He denied all responsibility (every kid in the neighborhood had been playing ball that day), and took it out on Charlie later when their parents went out to dinner.

2. He always told them that it was an injury. It was easier to say that than to make a confession about how he knew he would never make it to the show, that the best he could hope for was a farm team and while that might have been satisfactory to some, it wasn't to him. Not with the genius kid brother. If he told them that he knew he would never get where he wanted to go playing ball, where he was driven to go, they would try to shore up his confidence. That was the last thing he needed -- well-meaning pity.

3. Everyone still thinks it was an amicable breakup between him and Kim. Charlie has his suspicions now that he's met her, but he knows better than to ask Don.

4. Once, his dad asked Don where he disappears to on such long weekends, and how come he never seems to get time off from the job except on those long weekends he takes occasionally? Don said he doesn't go much of anywhere, just turns off all the phones, watches TV, forgets about the ugly world he lives in. But if they ever tried to get into his apartment, they'd find out he was gone. Wherever Billy Cooper is holed up, whether in some rickety motel chasing a fugitive or the barren apartment he calls home in Arizona now, that's where Don goes. It's worth the subterfuge.

5. He told his mom that everything would be okay. That the doctors knew what they were doing, that treatment was advancing every day. He told his dad that he hadn't minded coming home to help care for her. They both knew he was lying, but they wanted to hear it, anyway, and if he said it enough, Don might believe it, too.

Eddie gets homesick, so does Sam

Min, you are so totally right -- these are like little crack Pringles. I can't stop! (though both crack AND Pringles would probably be very bad for my poor innards right now)

( 5 things Eddie misses from the States (Keen Eddie) )

( 5 times Sam Tyler really really wished he had his cameraphone with him (Life on Mars) )