I haven’t kept any of these things particularly secret, but my guess is that most blog readers don’t know them:

(1) I have a moderate hearing impairment due to a very serious ear infection about twelve years ago. Most of the time it isn’t a problem, but I often have trouble understanding people speaking under less-than-ideal conditions — background noise, foreign accent, on the phone instead of in person, etc.

(2) I have two university degrees in Islamic civilization (needless to say, the Sept. 11 attack did not come as much of a surprise to me).

(3) When I was much younger, I had a five-year relationship with a married woman twelve years older than myself.

(4) The “753″ in my internet name is a reference to 753 BC, the traditional (though probably apocryphal) date of the founding of Rome. I believe that the true roots of our modern Western civilization lie mostly in the Roman Empire.

(5) I was a Satanist for a fifteen-year period of my life (entirely during adulthood). I was never a priest or licensed to marry people, though, so you’re ahead of me there.

JD has posted the first, the second of his revelations and the the third The first was pretty amusing and the second demonstrates exactly why JD is the blogger’s blogger—because he hangs it all out there sometimes and piss on the consequences. Personally, JD—I hope you give your son a call sometime and I hope he’s receptive.

There is a great line in the Zach Braff movie “The Last Kiss” where he cheats on his pregnant girlfriend and her father confronts him in the aftermath. The dad, a psychologist, says, “What you feel only means something to you. It’s what you do to the people you love that matters in life.”

But it’s always a two-way streets and sometimes family members are just pains in the ass.