#other things i can be tempted me with include keychains and peppermints

[songforaname]

not so much a secret, more just something i've been wondering and never got the opportunity to ask:

what's your connection with lizards?

i've remarked that it's something we have in common and in my case it's having one as a pet, but i've just never brought it up out of, idk, fear that since he's of a species often just grabbed from the wild (which he wasn't, he's one of the first of his kind to be born in captivity in the nordics) that you'd think less of me?

Short answer:

Longer answer:

i've never put too much thought into it, but the earliest i can trace anything back to is reading a children's science book about lizards whenever i went to visit my great-grandma over in canada as a kid.

i specifically remember about it having separate sections for lizards and salamders and how to care for them a return them to the wild after you've caught one.

naturally, living in a place which would be covered in snow for like a third of the year meant i'd never have the chance to do that, and a house full of cats and the occasional dog meant there wasn't any place for a lizard to be put in a tank either. (the fish i had would occasionally disappear from the tank they were in too. except for the goldfish i won at a carnival game, which is a whole different story)

but then at some point after my sister was born, my mom ended up getting us into making crafts out of beads and string. One of the projects in the book we had was a lizard. Guess what i made a lot?

then in like fourth or fifth grade, at the little christmas gift market my school would throw every year so kids could buy presents and get them wrapped, i had bought presents for almost everyone i knew except for my sister and by pure chance the doll bed i had bought for my sister also came with an Iggy the Iguana beanie baby for like $5 extra instead of the other tables there selling the beanie babies for like $15-$20 on their own.

That exact beanie baby has been in my posession since then and is the one i take pictures of whenever i go places and i've taken him cross-country several times. if we assume i got him the same year as his listed birthday is - August 12, 1997 - that would make him 26, and almost a year older than my brother.

At some point, other people in my family would grab me stuffed lizards for christmas or birthday presents because the Iggy pictures on facebook were the main way they would know what i was up to.

however, while typing this out, i remembered that as a really young kid, i had a Barney the Dinosaur doll i would have by my side at all times for years, even forcing my mom to end up getting more eyedrops than necessary when i needed them because i wouldn't take them unless barney had to take them too. And she couldn't fake it because i would watch her put them in. i don't know whatever happened to him.

i also was obsessed with the american godzilla movie at one point, and all kinds of dinosaurs as a kid, but none of those lasted as long or as fiercely as Barney or Iggy. so as far as i can tell, you can tempt me into anything with a brightly colored, fuzzy reptile of some sort.

or, for a probably more accurate answer, plucked from a tumblr post:

(i also don't actually know much about lizards.)