100 Things
Dec. 19th, 2002 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantOne hundred things about me.
1. On the roof of my mouth, just at the back end of that ridge that divides the mouth in two, I can feel a small shape sort of debossed in my flesh. It feels like a copyright symbol.
2. My earliest memory is of plunging both hands into a bucket of birdseed at the hardware store. I remember the feel and smell of the birdseed very vividly.
3. I have three different kinds of religious refugees in my family tree. (Scots Jacobins, French Huguenots, and Austrian Jews.)
4. I have a reasonably good singing voice, but I can't sing vibrato. I don't know how people do it.
5. I also can't whistle.
6. I didn't reliably know left from right until I was ten. That's when I had to get stitches in my right hand, so that if I didn't know which way was right, I could feel for the scar.
7. I've never met any famous people. I have met Alex the African grey parrot, though. (If you do a web search on parrots, you'll find a lot of references to Alex, because he's a popular subject of research projects.) He has a marked Chicago accent, especially on the short 'a' -- "I waaaaant paaaaaastaaaaa."
8. I like to know the words to songs. I know the words to songs in several languages that I don't speak.
9. My right pinky is crooked. My mother says I wasn't born that way; aside from that, she has no answers.
10. With my conscious mind, I don't believe in ghosts. But once upon a time my cat chased a half-deflated Mylar balloon into my bedroom at 2 a.m., so that I was awakened from a sound sleep to see a faintly luminescent object about the size, shape, and location of a human head -- and I discovered that I actually did believe in ghosts.
11. I was not quite two when my brother was born, and while my mother was in the hospital, I was sent to spend a couple of days with an aunt and uncle. I swear to God I remember sleeping in a hammock while I was there, but everybody in the family agrees: There was no hammock.
12. My mother-in-law appears to be unaware that clothes can be bought in any size bigger than Large. I was very happy when she stopped buying me sweaters for Christmas.
13. I wrote my first poem when I was six years old. I was daydreaming in class and composed it in my head. It had a little tune, too. When I look at it now, I think it's pretty good -- it scans perfectly.
14. Occasionally someone asks me why I became a writer. But I don't really feel that I became a writer. It's like asking me why I became female.
15. When I was about seven, my aunt offered me $5 per finger if I could stop biting my cuticles long enough to let them heal, but I couldn't manage it. They're in pretty good shape now, though, since I've discovered that they make less tempting targets if I trim off all the ragged parts with nail clippers.
16. I had to do a cartwheel in order to graduate from high school. My friend Becky and I were literally threatened with failing gym and being unable to graduate if we couldn't do it. As a result, I've done precisely one cartwheel in my life.
17. In college I could lie down on my little futon on the floor and sleep through anything. One morning my roommate said to me, "I'm sorry about last night, with the bicycle and all." I had no idea what she was talking about.
18. I neglect my teeth shamefully, but my dentist still praises me every time I get them cleaned. Heredity and fluoride.
19. I know someone who went to jail for 42 counts of child molesting, and also someone whose brother killed someone.
20. It's only quite recently that I've begun to really believe that if you practice something you'll get better at it. Before this, instead of saying, "I practiced and got better," I would have said, "I tried for a while and I finally figured out how to do it."
21. I know how to fix a window that has a broken sash rope, replace the socket in a lamp, and jump-start a car
22. I've written a triolet and a villanelle and several sonnets. None of them sucked too horribly. However, I've never written a haiku that didn't suck.
23. My friend Ashby and I were an unbeatable Pictionary team. We once pulled the word "motorcade" (me drawing, her guessing) and got it in about seven seconds.
24. The bra I'm wearing right now is light blue with white snowflakes on it.
25. I have a song stuck in my head pretty much 24 hours a day. (Not exaggerating. If I wake up in the night, the song will be right there.) For this reason, I hate bad music more than most people do. Unfortunately I'm saddled with a husband who likes to hum things like "Why Can't We Be Friends."
26. My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven. To this day my mother isn't aware that she's a little nuts when it comes to food and body image. At 60 she came down with a terrible virus that lasted for months, and when I talked to her at the end of it, she said triumphantly, "You should see me now! I'm so thin!"
27. I have a knack for memorizing music and poetry. When I need to calm my mind, I mentally recite the ballad of Tam Lin.
28. I talked to Mike Royko on the phone once. He had a high, squeaky voice.
29. Something I really, really like is to be the passenger in a car driving in the country, and to pass a field that has rows perpendicular to the road, and to be able to look down the rows as we pass. I don't know why I get such a visceral pleasure from this.
30. I cry when I'm angry.
31. I also cry when I give blood, which Red Cross volunteers find quite disconcerting.
32. I can't sleep unless the nape of my neck is covered up.
33. I hate to feel someone breathing on my arms when I'm in bed. I even hate to feel my own breath on my arms.
34. I made myself very sick on peppermint ice cream when I was a kid, and to this day I don't like mint. I don't mind it in toothpaste, but it doesn't taste like food to me.
35. I dislike coconut for much the same reason, though oddly I can eat hunks of fresh coconut meat, just not the packaged flaked stuff.
36. I like most of the men I know, but I'm quite suspicious of men as a group. Most of my female friends seem to share this outlook. On the other hand, most of my male friends are just the opposite -- they're very enthusiastic about women as a group, but not too crazy about most of the individual women they know.
37. Little by little I am becoming allergic to bee stings.
38. I talk to myself. A lot.
39. For my thirtieth birthday, I gave up dieting and birth control pills. There's never a month that passes that I'm not grateful for both of those resolutions.
40. I have a long mental list of names for cats. I have many more names than I will probably ever have cats.
41. In college once I tried to dress up as a guy. (This is tricky because I'm quite busty.) Once I'd thinned my lips out and put imitation stubble on my face, I looked a lot like Roger Ebert.
42. I've never left the United States. I was going to go to Canada once with the Tech Goddess, but when the time came, I was in the morning-sickness phase of pregnancy and couldn't travel.
43. I hate in-between stages. My husband will linger around for hours in his pajamas, but if I'm up, I want to be dressed.
44. When I lived in the mountains, I sang in a community-choir performance of the Messiah. I don't remember much about the performance itself, but I remember the rehearsals very vividly. The conductor sang along as he conducted "For unto us a child is born," breaking into a great grin on the word "Wonderful!" The toughest choral piece in the Messiah is "His yoke is easy and his burthen is light," and when you're struggling for precision on a damned dotted sixteenth note, it just adds insult to injury if the word you're singing is "easy."
45. My kid has pointed eyebrows, and when they raise them and smile, they look very wicked. Once when they were about three months old and I was still quite sleep-deprived, I was nursing in the night, and I sat them up in my lap to switch breasts, and they gave me that wicked grin -- and for a moment I had the conviction that they were about to go for my throat.
46. My own eyebrows are straight, with no curve to them. I've never gotten them plucked because I'm afraid that would make my face look like someone else's face.
47. The first two penises I ever saw belonged to flashers. (The first when I was seven, the second when I was sixteen.)
48. I have duck feet: wide toes, narrow heels. As a result, my shoe wardrobe is a bit juvenile: All my dress shoes are either Mary Janes or T-straps, because if I wear pumps, my feet and the shoes tend to part company at inconvenient times.
49. In high school I worked in a blue-jeans store, and over a period of about six months I stole all the single earrings in a rack (the ones where one earring out of the pair had been lost). To my knowledge this is the only thing I've ever stolen. I later failed a lie detector test because of this, and left in disgrace. (Well, I left for college, but had I been planning to stay, I would have been fired, because no one believed I would have failed the test over some unsaleable earrings, and because one of the questions I "failed" on was "Have you taken folding money from the cash drawer?")
50. The only book that's ever given me nightmares was The Handmaid's Tale. The only movie that's ever given me nightmares was "Last Night," but that might be because I watched it two weeks before the September 11 attacks.
51. I discovered harmony at the age of seven, when my cousin and I would bore the pants off family members by singing "Country Road" and "Top of the World" over and over. My first experience of real, written harmony was in a Christmas choir when I was twelve. We sang "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming" at a Christmas eve service. (Only the Episcopal Church was using a different translation in those days, so what we actually sang was "I know a rose-tree springing/Forth from an ancient root.")
52. I certainly pray for people, but I don't seem to be able to bring myself to say or write, "I'm praying for you." Not even in a condolence card. It seems that the word "pray" is owned by people whose religion I don't want to be associated with.
53. I took CPR to impress a girl. She wasn't impressed. I was quite relieved to let my certification lapse, because (1) I'm a coward who would hate to have someone's life depend on me and (2) the card in my wallet always reminded me of her.
54. I was a high school groupie of a band called Slow Children. I got a fake ID, even though I didn't drink, for the express purpose of seeing Slow Children shows. There's a bootleg tape of Slow Children going around, and on it you can hear my dorky then-boyfriend, Sgt. Pepper, shouting "Pow!" in a Southern accent so thick that the word has two syllables: "PAY-ow! PAY-ow!"
55. I'm 5'6". I was 5'6" when I was thirteen. My mother (who's nearly six feet and always wanted to be dainty) used to stand over my bed as I slept and whisper, "Stop now! Stop now!"
56. I went to high school with the governor's daughter. We weren't friends, but we were in some clubs together. All her phone calls were screened; when I called her house, they'd ask for my name and then there'd be a long pause. After Sgt. Pepper broke up with me because I wanted to sleep with him, he went out with her. Later we compared notes and discovered he gave us the exact same birthday present (a string of fairly good fake pearls).
57. My mother was raised on a farm. When I was in second grade, she taught my entire class how to make butter out of cream. She says that she wouldn't do it again for fear she'd give everyone salmonella and get sued.
58. When Add-a-Bead necklaces were fashionable, I had a string of tiny ones smaller than grains of rice. The joke used to be that you had one bead for every lover, so one wag in my senior class called mine "quickie-beads."
59. During my brother's drug period, he stole my Dan Fogelberg albums and sold them at the used record store.
60. I snore. I was tested for sleep apnea and turned up borderline/normal. The doctor recommended surgery, but I didn't do it because one of the side effects was "permanent change in voice," and I'm sufficiently vain of my voice that I wasn't willing to risk that.
61. I got pregnant my freshman year of college, and had an abortion at 18. The main thing I remember about the experience is that when they brought around cookies and juice afterwards, I wouldn't eat the cookies because I was on a diet.
62. I'm attracted to baffled, bookish men and bossy, authoritative women.
63. Also, while the men I've been attracted to have been all over the map in terms of looks, the women have all looked like me: brown hair, fair skin, dark eyes. If you put them all in a room together, it would look like a family reunion. (And there would probably be bloodshed while they tried to establish who was the alpha female of the bunch.)
64. I have a very good instinct for spelling, but I have a lot of difficulty with double letters.
65. Once I rode with Santa Claus in the Christmas parade. (I was a small-town newspaper reporter, and it was the third Christmas parade I'd covered in two weeks, and I was desperately looking for a new way to write about it.) It would have been fun if Santa hadn't smoked so much.
66. I went to first grade at a "white" school. My hometown didn't integrate schools until the following year.
67. I no longer collect butterfly-themed items, but I can't seem to convince my family of this fact.
68. My brother used to hit me a lot. My parents never punished him because "you hurt him with words, he hurts you with hitting." I thought maybe when I was a parent myself that would make sense to me, but no; it's still bullshit.
69. I used to be able to read palms. I don't know if I could still do it; I'm terribly out of practice.
70. I can read tarot cards, though I do have to consult a book sometimes. I have the Robin Wood deck, and I have a bit of a crush on the Magician.
71. When I take any of those "What tarot card are you?" quizzes, I always get the Lovers. If I identify my Soul Card and my Life Card according to numerology -- again, the Lovers.
72. I've only been a bridesmaid once. And I loved the dress.
73. I'm an optimist. In Rob Brezsny's words, I have pronoia: the conviction that the universe is conspiring to make me happy.
74. From high school to the present day, my closest friends have tended to be radically fatherless. Not just "my parents are divorced" or "my father wasn't much of a presence in my family life" -- those are pretty much normal for people my age. I'm talking about "my father died when I was a toddler" or "throughout my childhood my father was suffering from an untreated mental illness." I once asked my college roommate, "Why do you suppose I'm choosing these fatherless people as friends?" and she said, "Maybe we're choosing you."
75. My husband and I are two of the only people I know with parents who are still married to each other.
76. I've never tried any illegal drug except marijuana. And marijuana made me feel exactly the same way I felt when I forgot to take my allergy medicine, so I kind of said, "Why bother?" and never tried it again.
77. I've also never been drunk. I tend to fall asleep before I have a chance to drink that much. If alcohol lowers inhibitions, then what my inhibitions are preventing me from doing is falling asleep in public.
78. I love to sleep. I love to dream. When I have nightmares, they usually turn into adventure dreams, where I'm leaping into the speeding truck with a knife clenched between my teeth and it's more exhilarating than scary. Or as I'm running away from the bad guy I discover that I can fly.
79. But once I dreamed I had died, and when I was dead I could see the future, and I saw that a huge right-wing religious revolution called the Reclamation was coming. So I came back as a ghost and told my husband (who somehow had two little kids instead of just one), "Take the kids and get out of the country," and he said, "Canada?" and I said, "Too close. Go to Australia or England. Because there are books on the shelves that could get you hanged."
80. The first year after I got married, my husband and I both had 90-minute commutes, in opposite directions, and we also worked opposite shifts three days a week. If we wanted to have a fight, one of us had to wake the other one up. When I tell people about this, most of them wince, but one ex-co-worker said, "Oh, I did something like that once! It was great! After that, nothing else is ever worse!"
81. Of all the things I learned in journalism school, the one that impresses people the most is that I can take notes without looking at my hands.
82. The three things about me that people are most likely to compliment are my speaking voice, my handwriting, and my eyes.
83. I used to have terrible handwriting. Then in ninth grade someone gave me a calligraphy set, and I decided to stop doing capital letters the way they'd taught me in third grade and do them calligraphy-style instead. I've actually had a professional type designer tell me I had beautiful handwriting.
84. I read science fiction for the first time when I was eight. It was a short-story collection aimed at kids, and it had an Anne McCaffrey Pern story in it. After that I went through the sci-fi shelf in my school library in alphabetical order -- Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke. (This was in 1973, and the pickings were considerably slimmer than they are today.)
85. In my fantasy of Christmas, every gift I get is consumable -- coffee, candy, bath gel, stationery, massage gift certificates, etc. -- and by spring all of it is gone and I don't have to dust any of it.
86. I do extremely well on standardized tests. My husband says I ought to find a job where they'd pay me just to take standardized tests.
87. My first fictional crush was the second-oldest kid on "The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan" cartoon. I've also had crushes on Jackie from "H.R. Pufnstuf," Spider-Man, the dark-haired guy on "Emergency," Cyrano de Bergerac, Ursula LeGuin's Sparrowhawk, Han Solo, Data from "Next Generation," Charles DeLint's Coyote, Tick-Tick from the "Borderlands" books, and the pouka from Emma Bull's War for the Oaks.
88. I can't quite equal![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tradescant; I was only a National Merit Semi-Finalist.
89. I never get menstrual cramps. My cycle used to be a nice, reliable 35 days, but then I went on birth control pills, and even after I stopped taking them, I still kept the shortened cycle.
90. A couple of poems that I wrote in high school still get published in Scholastic magazine every now and then. I stopped writing poetry in 1985, though, except for one poem I wrote a couple of years ago about giving birth to my kidlet.
91. If I had kissed a girl before I ever kissed a boy, I'd probably identify as lesbian -- it was that different. But by the time I kissed a girl, I was already in love with the guy I eventually married.
92. I once pulled a car door shut with my left hand, which was wrapped around the outside edge of the door at the time. And I had locked it first, so I couldn't free my left hand from the door until I unlocked it. Amazingly enough, it didn't hurt that much -- there was a lot of rubber weatherstripping between metal and metal -- but it dug my wedding ring into my hand rather painfully. Mostly I was just pained by my own stupidity.
93. I've lived in the Midwest for 20 years, and my Southern accent is mostly gone, but I still can't pronounce my own last name in a way that Northerners can understand. It has an "oo" in it (like "moon"), and I pronounce it with sort of a higher arch than Northerners do. I can hear the difference, but I can't make the sound that they make.
94. The worst pain I've ever experienced was gallstones. It's worse than giving birth (which was never as intensely painful as I'd been led to expect) -- a hideous, dirty, unnatural, panic-inducing pain. I began having gallstone attacks when I was seven months pregnant, and they couldn't operate until I had the baby, and that's the only time in my life I've ever contemplated suicide.
95. I'm Episcopalian, but the local diocese is so conservative that it still won't ordain women. (What century are we in again?) I attend a Presbyterian church, but I consider myself to be "the Episcopal church in exile" here.
96. The first time I saw a dolphin was in a tank at Disney World when I was in my late twenties. I immediately started crying, because even though I had known with my conscious mind that dolphins were real, on some unconscious level I had been believing that they were mythical, like unicorns. Seeing a real one was overwhelming.
97. I tell people I don't want contacts because I'm too squeamish, which is partly true, but really, I just like the way glasses look on my face.
98. I used to consider myself an anarchist. Then I took a job close to a four-way-stop sign. Going through a four-way stop twice a day destroyed my confidence in people's ability to make and follow rules by consensus.
99. I have no spatial skills. Really, I think it's a learning disability. This has more repercussions than you might expect. Naturally I have no sense of direction, but I also have trouble with things like "If you were born in April of 1982, how old are you today?" and "If my checkbook balance is $20 more than the balance on my statement, should I be looking for a withdrawal that wasn't recorded, or one that was recorded twice?" If someone says, "Turn the air conditioner up," I say, "Do you mean make it warmer or make it colder?"
100. I just threw my Halloween pumpkins away this week. I'm a terrible procrastinator.
edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns
1. On the roof of my mouth, just at the back end of that ridge that divides the mouth in two, I can feel a small shape sort of debossed in my flesh. It feels like a copyright symbol.
2. My earliest memory is of plunging both hands into a bucket of birdseed at the hardware store. I remember the feel and smell of the birdseed very vividly.
3. I have three different kinds of religious refugees in my family tree. (Scots Jacobins, French Huguenots, and Austrian Jews.)
4. I have a reasonably good singing voice, but I can't sing vibrato. I don't know how people do it.
5. I also can't whistle.
6. I didn't reliably know left from right until I was ten. That's when I had to get stitches in my right hand, so that if I didn't know which way was right, I could feel for the scar.
7. I've never met any famous people. I have met Alex the African grey parrot, though. (If you do a web search on parrots, you'll find a lot of references to Alex, because he's a popular subject of research projects.) He has a marked Chicago accent, especially on the short 'a' -- "I waaaaant paaaaaastaaaaa."
8. I like to know the words to songs. I know the words to songs in several languages that I don't speak.
9. My right pinky is crooked. My mother says I wasn't born that way; aside from that, she has no answers.
10. With my conscious mind, I don't believe in ghosts. But once upon a time my cat chased a half-deflated Mylar balloon into my bedroom at 2 a.m., so that I was awakened from a sound sleep to see a faintly luminescent object about the size, shape, and location of a human head -- and I discovered that I actually did believe in ghosts.
11. I was not quite two when my brother was born, and while my mother was in the hospital, I was sent to spend a couple of days with an aunt and uncle. I swear to God I remember sleeping in a hammock while I was there, but everybody in the family agrees: There was no hammock.
12. My mother-in-law appears to be unaware that clothes can be bought in any size bigger than Large. I was very happy when she stopped buying me sweaters for Christmas.
13. I wrote my first poem when I was six years old. I was daydreaming in class and composed it in my head. It had a little tune, too. When I look at it now, I think it's pretty good -- it scans perfectly.
14. Occasionally someone asks me why I became a writer. But I don't really feel that I became a writer. It's like asking me why I became female.
15. When I was about seven, my aunt offered me $5 per finger if I could stop biting my cuticles long enough to let them heal, but I couldn't manage it. They're in pretty good shape now, though, since I've discovered that they make less tempting targets if I trim off all the ragged parts with nail clippers.
16. I had to do a cartwheel in order to graduate from high school. My friend Becky and I were literally threatened with failing gym and being unable to graduate if we couldn't do it. As a result, I've done precisely one cartwheel in my life.
17. In college I could lie down on my little futon on the floor and sleep through anything. One morning my roommate said to me, "I'm sorry about last night, with the bicycle and all." I had no idea what she was talking about.
18. I neglect my teeth shamefully, but my dentist still praises me every time I get them cleaned. Heredity and fluoride.
19. I know someone who went to jail for 42 counts of child molesting, and also someone whose brother killed someone.
20. It's only quite recently that I've begun to really believe that if you practice something you'll get better at it. Before this, instead of saying, "I practiced and got better," I would have said, "I tried for a while and I finally figured out how to do it."
21. I know how to fix a window that has a broken sash rope, replace the socket in a lamp, and jump-start a car
22. I've written a triolet and a villanelle and several sonnets. None of them sucked too horribly. However, I've never written a haiku that didn't suck.
23. My friend Ashby and I were an unbeatable Pictionary team. We once pulled the word "motorcade" (me drawing, her guessing) and got it in about seven seconds.
24. The bra I'm wearing right now is light blue with white snowflakes on it.
25. I have a song stuck in my head pretty much 24 hours a day. (Not exaggerating. If I wake up in the night, the song will be right there.) For this reason, I hate bad music more than most people do. Unfortunately I'm saddled with a husband who likes to hum things like "Why Can't We Be Friends."
26. My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven. To this day my mother isn't aware that she's a little nuts when it comes to food and body image. At 60 she came down with a terrible virus that lasted for months, and when I talked to her at the end of it, she said triumphantly, "You should see me now! I'm so thin!"
27. I have a knack for memorizing music and poetry. When I need to calm my mind, I mentally recite the ballad of Tam Lin.
28. I talked to Mike Royko on the phone once. He had a high, squeaky voice.
29. Something I really, really like is to be the passenger in a car driving in the country, and to pass a field that has rows perpendicular to the road, and to be able to look down the rows as we pass. I don't know why I get such a visceral pleasure from this.
30. I cry when I'm angry.
31. I also cry when I give blood, which Red Cross volunteers find quite disconcerting.
32. I can't sleep unless the nape of my neck is covered up.
33. I hate to feel someone breathing on my arms when I'm in bed. I even hate to feel my own breath on my arms.
34. I made myself very sick on peppermint ice cream when I was a kid, and to this day I don't like mint. I don't mind it in toothpaste, but it doesn't taste like food to me.
35. I dislike coconut for much the same reason, though oddly I can eat hunks of fresh coconut meat, just not the packaged flaked stuff.
36. I like most of the men I know, but I'm quite suspicious of men as a group. Most of my female friends seem to share this outlook. On the other hand, most of my male friends are just the opposite -- they're very enthusiastic about women as a group, but not too crazy about most of the individual women they know.
37. Little by little I am becoming allergic to bee stings.
38. I talk to myself. A lot.
39. For my thirtieth birthday, I gave up dieting and birth control pills. There's never a month that passes that I'm not grateful for both of those resolutions.
40. I have a long mental list of names for cats. I have many more names than I will probably ever have cats.
41. In college once I tried to dress up as a guy. (This is tricky because I'm quite busty.) Once I'd thinned my lips out and put imitation stubble on my face, I looked a lot like Roger Ebert.
42. I've never left the United States. I was going to go to Canada once with the Tech Goddess, but when the time came, I was in the morning-sickness phase of pregnancy and couldn't travel.
43. I hate in-between stages. My husband will linger around for hours in his pajamas, but if I'm up, I want to be dressed.
44. When I lived in the mountains, I sang in a community-choir performance of the Messiah. I don't remember much about the performance itself, but I remember the rehearsals very vividly. The conductor sang along as he conducted "For unto us a child is born," breaking into a great grin on the word "Wonderful!" The toughest choral piece in the Messiah is "His yoke is easy and his burthen is light," and when you're struggling for precision on a damned dotted sixteenth note, it just adds insult to injury if the word you're singing is "easy."
45. My kid has pointed eyebrows, and when they raise them and smile, they look very wicked. Once when they were about three months old and I was still quite sleep-deprived, I was nursing in the night, and I sat them up in my lap to switch breasts, and they gave me that wicked grin -- and for a moment I had the conviction that they were about to go for my throat.
46. My own eyebrows are straight, with no curve to them. I've never gotten them plucked because I'm afraid that would make my face look like someone else's face.
47. The first two penises I ever saw belonged to flashers. (The first when I was seven, the second when I was sixteen.)
48. I have duck feet: wide toes, narrow heels. As a result, my shoe wardrobe is a bit juvenile: All my dress shoes are either Mary Janes or T-straps, because if I wear pumps, my feet and the shoes tend to part company at inconvenient times.
49. In high school I worked in a blue-jeans store, and over a period of about six months I stole all the single earrings in a rack (the ones where one earring out of the pair had been lost). To my knowledge this is the only thing I've ever stolen. I later failed a lie detector test because of this, and left in disgrace. (Well, I left for college, but had I been planning to stay, I would have been fired, because no one believed I would have failed the test over some unsaleable earrings, and because one of the questions I "failed" on was "Have you taken folding money from the cash drawer?")
50. The only book that's ever given me nightmares was The Handmaid's Tale. The only movie that's ever given me nightmares was "Last Night," but that might be because I watched it two weeks before the September 11 attacks.
51. I discovered harmony at the age of seven, when my cousin and I would bore the pants off family members by singing "Country Road" and "Top of the World" over and over. My first experience of real, written harmony was in a Christmas choir when I was twelve. We sang "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming" at a Christmas eve service. (Only the Episcopal Church was using a different translation in those days, so what we actually sang was "I know a rose-tree springing/Forth from an ancient root.")
52. I certainly pray for people, but I don't seem to be able to bring myself to say or write, "I'm praying for you." Not even in a condolence card. It seems that the word "pray" is owned by people whose religion I don't want to be associated with.
53. I took CPR to impress a girl. She wasn't impressed. I was quite relieved to let my certification lapse, because (1) I'm a coward who would hate to have someone's life depend on me and (2) the card in my wallet always reminded me of her.
54. I was a high school groupie of a band called Slow Children. I got a fake ID, even though I didn't drink, for the express purpose of seeing Slow Children shows. There's a bootleg tape of Slow Children going around, and on it you can hear my dorky then-boyfriend, Sgt. Pepper, shouting "Pow!" in a Southern accent so thick that the word has two syllables: "PAY-ow! PAY-ow!"
55. I'm 5'6". I was 5'6" when I was thirteen. My mother (who's nearly six feet and always wanted to be dainty) used to stand over my bed as I slept and whisper, "Stop now! Stop now!"
56. I went to high school with the governor's daughter. We weren't friends, but we were in some clubs together. All her phone calls were screened; when I called her house, they'd ask for my name and then there'd be a long pause. After Sgt. Pepper broke up with me because I wanted to sleep with him, he went out with her. Later we compared notes and discovered he gave us the exact same birthday present (a string of fairly good fake pearls).
57. My mother was raised on a farm. When I was in second grade, she taught my entire class how to make butter out of cream. She says that she wouldn't do it again for fear she'd give everyone salmonella and get sued.
58. When Add-a-Bead necklaces were fashionable, I had a string of tiny ones smaller than grains of rice. The joke used to be that you had one bead for every lover, so one wag in my senior class called mine "quickie-beads."
59. During my brother's drug period, he stole my Dan Fogelberg albums and sold them at the used record store.
60. I snore. I was tested for sleep apnea and turned up borderline/normal. The doctor recommended surgery, but I didn't do it because one of the side effects was "permanent change in voice," and I'm sufficiently vain of my voice that I wasn't willing to risk that.
61. I got pregnant my freshman year of college, and had an abortion at 18. The main thing I remember about the experience is that when they brought around cookies and juice afterwards, I wouldn't eat the cookies because I was on a diet.
62. I'm attracted to baffled, bookish men and bossy, authoritative women.
63. Also, while the men I've been attracted to have been all over the map in terms of looks, the women have all looked like me: brown hair, fair skin, dark eyes. If you put them all in a room together, it would look like a family reunion. (And there would probably be bloodshed while they tried to establish who was the alpha female of the bunch.)
64. I have a very good instinct for spelling, but I have a lot of difficulty with double letters.
65. Once I rode with Santa Claus in the Christmas parade. (I was a small-town newspaper reporter, and it was the third Christmas parade I'd covered in two weeks, and I was desperately looking for a new way to write about it.) It would have been fun if Santa hadn't smoked so much.
66. I went to first grade at a "white" school. My hometown didn't integrate schools until the following year.
67. I no longer collect butterfly-themed items, but I can't seem to convince my family of this fact.
68. My brother used to hit me a lot. My parents never punished him because "you hurt him with words, he hurts you with hitting." I thought maybe when I was a parent myself that would make sense to me, but no; it's still bullshit.
69. I used to be able to read palms. I don't know if I could still do it; I'm terribly out of practice.
70. I can read tarot cards, though I do have to consult a book sometimes. I have the Robin Wood deck, and I have a bit of a crush on the Magician.
71. When I take any of those "What tarot card are you?" quizzes, I always get the Lovers. If I identify my Soul Card and my Life Card according to numerology -- again, the Lovers.
72. I've only been a bridesmaid once. And I loved the dress.
73. I'm an optimist. In Rob Brezsny's words, I have pronoia: the conviction that the universe is conspiring to make me happy.
74. From high school to the present day, my closest friends have tended to be radically fatherless. Not just "my parents are divorced" or "my father wasn't much of a presence in my family life" -- those are pretty much normal for people my age. I'm talking about "my father died when I was a toddler" or "throughout my childhood my father was suffering from an untreated mental illness." I once asked my college roommate, "Why do you suppose I'm choosing these fatherless people as friends?" and she said, "Maybe we're choosing you."
75. My husband and I are two of the only people I know with parents who are still married to each other.
76. I've never tried any illegal drug except marijuana. And marijuana made me feel exactly the same way I felt when I forgot to take my allergy medicine, so I kind of said, "Why bother?" and never tried it again.
77. I've also never been drunk. I tend to fall asleep before I have a chance to drink that much. If alcohol lowers inhibitions, then what my inhibitions are preventing me from doing is falling asleep in public.
78. I love to sleep. I love to dream. When I have nightmares, they usually turn into adventure dreams, where I'm leaping into the speeding truck with a knife clenched between my teeth and it's more exhilarating than scary. Or as I'm running away from the bad guy I discover that I can fly.
79. But once I dreamed I had died, and when I was dead I could see the future, and I saw that a huge right-wing religious revolution called the Reclamation was coming. So I came back as a ghost and told my husband (who somehow had two little kids instead of just one), "Take the kids and get out of the country," and he said, "Canada?" and I said, "Too close. Go to Australia or England. Because there are books on the shelves that could get you hanged."
80. The first year after I got married, my husband and I both had 90-minute commutes, in opposite directions, and we also worked opposite shifts three days a week. If we wanted to have a fight, one of us had to wake the other one up. When I tell people about this, most of them wince, but one ex-co-worker said, "Oh, I did something like that once! It was great! After that, nothing else is ever worse!"
81. Of all the things I learned in journalism school, the one that impresses people the most is that I can take notes without looking at my hands.
82. The three things about me that people are most likely to compliment are my speaking voice, my handwriting, and my eyes.
83. I used to have terrible handwriting. Then in ninth grade someone gave me a calligraphy set, and I decided to stop doing capital letters the way they'd taught me in third grade and do them calligraphy-style instead. I've actually had a professional type designer tell me I had beautiful handwriting.
84. I read science fiction for the first time when I was eight. It was a short-story collection aimed at kids, and it had an Anne McCaffrey Pern story in it. After that I went through the sci-fi shelf in my school library in alphabetical order -- Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke. (This was in 1973, and the pickings were considerably slimmer than they are today.)
85. In my fantasy of Christmas, every gift I get is consumable -- coffee, candy, bath gel, stationery, massage gift certificates, etc. -- and by spring all of it is gone and I don't have to dust any of it.
86. I do extremely well on standardized tests. My husband says I ought to find a job where they'd pay me just to take standardized tests.
87. My first fictional crush was the second-oldest kid on "The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan" cartoon. I've also had crushes on Jackie from "H.R. Pufnstuf," Spider-Man, the dark-haired guy on "Emergency," Cyrano de Bergerac, Ursula LeGuin's Sparrowhawk, Han Solo, Data from "Next Generation," Charles DeLint's Coyote, Tick-Tick from the "Borderlands" books, and the pouka from Emma Bull's War for the Oaks.
88. I can't quite equal
tradescant; I was only a National Merit Semi-Finalist.89. I never get menstrual cramps. My cycle used to be a nice, reliable 35 days, but then I went on birth control pills, and even after I stopped taking them, I still kept the shortened cycle.
90. A couple of poems that I wrote in high school still get published in Scholastic magazine every now and then. I stopped writing poetry in 1985, though, except for one poem I wrote a couple of years ago about giving birth to my kidlet.
91. If I had kissed a girl before I ever kissed a boy, I'd probably identify as lesbian -- it was that different. But by the time I kissed a girl, I was already in love with the guy I eventually married.
92. I once pulled a car door shut with my left hand, which was wrapped around the outside edge of the door at the time. And I had locked it first, so I couldn't free my left hand from the door until I unlocked it. Amazingly enough, it didn't hurt that much -- there was a lot of rubber weatherstripping between metal and metal -- but it dug my wedding ring into my hand rather painfully. Mostly I was just pained by my own stupidity.
93. I've lived in the Midwest for 20 years, and my Southern accent is mostly gone, but I still can't pronounce my own last name in a way that Northerners can understand. It has an "oo" in it (like "moon"), and I pronounce it with sort of a higher arch than Northerners do. I can hear the difference, but I can't make the sound that they make.
94. The worst pain I've ever experienced was gallstones. It's worse than giving birth (which was never as intensely painful as I'd been led to expect) -- a hideous, dirty, unnatural, panic-inducing pain. I began having gallstone attacks when I was seven months pregnant, and they couldn't operate until I had the baby, and that's the only time in my life I've ever contemplated suicide.
95. I'm Episcopalian, but the local diocese is so conservative that it still won't ordain women. (What century are we in again?) I attend a Presbyterian church, but I consider myself to be "the Episcopal church in exile" here.
96. The first time I saw a dolphin was in a tank at Disney World when I was in my late twenties. I immediately started crying, because even though I had known with my conscious mind that dolphins were real, on some unconscious level I had been believing that they were mythical, like unicorns. Seeing a real one was overwhelming.
97. I tell people I don't want contacts because I'm too squeamish, which is partly true, but really, I just like the way glasses look on my face.
98. I used to consider myself an anarchist. Then I took a job close to a four-way-stop sign. Going through a four-way stop twice a day destroyed my confidence in people's ability to make and follow rules by consensus.
99. I have no spatial skills. Really, I think it's a learning disability. This has more repercussions than you might expect. Naturally I have no sense of direction, but I also have trouble with things like "If you were born in April of 1982, how old are you today?" and "If my checkbook balance is $20 more than the balance on my statement, should I be looking for a withdrawal that wasn't recorded, or one that was recorded twice?" If someone says, "Turn the air conditioner up," I say, "Do you mean make it warmer or make it colder?"
100. I just threw my Halloween pumpkins away this week. I'm a terrible procrastinator.
edited 2020 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 01:14 pm (UTC)And I, too, will fall asleep from alcohol consumption before I will get drunk. Although I can get *very* tipsy on one drink if I haven't eaten enough food beforehand.
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 06:24 pm (UTC)Did you also have a different "Angels We Have Heard On High"? The one I remember is actually better than the current one.
Shepherds, why this jubilee?
Why these songs of happy cheer?
What great wonder did you see?
What glad tidings did you hear?
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 09:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 01:50 pm (UTC)Yeah, what she said. It's kinda like surviving a disaster with a stranger, though. You've got this connection, and commitment, without necessarily getting along with the person. After four years of marriage, a mutual friend mentioned that she'd never seen us in the same room before.
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:17 pm (UTC)For an introvert, that's a recipe for a long and happy marriage! We still split up the day in such an extreme way that the kidlet becomes quite wild with excitement on the rare occasion that we're both home. "Mommy! And Daddy!"
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 01:52 pm (UTC)Oh cool! I would love to meet him, I'm so excited by that research.
I never get menstrual cramps.
I was set to be madly jealous of you until I got to the gallstone bit -- guess it all evens out.
...even though I had known with my conscious mind that dolphins were real, on some unconscious level I had been believing that they were mythical, like unicorns.
I had much the same experience when I went to England for the first time, and saw that it was a real place that I could actually go to, unlike Pern or Narnia.
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:18 pm (UTC)Wow. I love that.
Similarities
Date: 12/19/02 03:17 pm (UTC)My husband lost a lot of weight during the year he lived in Ghana; he had dysentery, for crying out loud. To this day, my mother (who's 67) insists that the photos of him from that year are "lovely" because "he looked so good!" He looked *emaciated*, Mom, but thanks for the thought.
On a related note, I love the one about your mom standing over your bed willing you to stop getting taller. You could start an essay with that. :-)
I like the way glasses look on my face, too.
And thanks, now you've put "His Yoke Is Easy And His Burthen Is Light" in my head. Are you an alto, too?
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 03:50 pm (UTC)Um. I was a National Merit finalist, but it was so long ago I didn't think it counted any more.
What small newspaper did you work for? I was at the Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal for five years.
Sometime, if you want, if we're in the same place, I'll try to explain how vibrato works. I'm finally figuring it out based on what I'm learning from my voice teacher. (It mostly has to do with getting out of the way of the sound.)
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:23 pm (UTC)[wide-eyed] Wow. I'm impressed.
I love the deck. (Except for the Devil, which is a little too unambiguous for my taste.)
What small newspaper did you work for? I was at the Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal for five years.
The Waynesville (N.C.) Mountaineer. Bet my small newspaper is smaller than your small newspaper!
Sometime, if you want, if we're in the same place, I'll try to explain how vibrato works.
I guess it's not something you can really explain in writing, is it? Sometimes when I'm singing along with a recording, I'll think I'm singing vibrato, but I'm never sure, and I can never replicate the sound.
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 04:34 pm (UTC)Spider-Man: check.
Sparrowhawk: check.
Han Solo: check.
Data: check.
Pouka: check.
I do like your taste in fictional men. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:24 pm (UTC)also crushed on Sparrowhawk
Date: 12/19/02 06:55 pm (UTC)And I still do. Hell, yes.
Freaky Handmaid's Tale nightmare there. My nightmare book is Gerald's Game by Stephen King.
This is one of the most interesting "100 lists" I've seen. :)
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:25 pm (UTC)And thanks. Now that I've done it (and it took me days), I want everyone to do it.
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 08:50 pm (UTC)leave Harry/Draco in the dustbe quite feasible, yes.And, um... (re-reading these books about once a year since I was nine) - oh, Ged/Vetch. Arha/Penthe. Thar/Kossil. Even Ged/Arren, oddly enough.
Don't suppose you like Guy Gavriel Kay as well, do you? Julian May? Susan Howatch?
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 06:29 pm (UTC)I haven't read Susan Howatch -- recs?
I attempted Kay's The Summer Tree and May's The Many-Colored Land and neither of them really captured me enough to make me seek out more by the same author.
(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 07:02 pm (UTC)As for vibrato... oy. No, I'm not even going to try to explain it, as everything I know about singing was learned through the 'oh, yeah, s/he's doing that. I can do that' method of pulling shit out of my ass. *g* I'm a really good mimic.
I love this meme. *g*
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 06:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/23/02 02:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 12/19/02 09:29 pm (UTC)I have a reasonably good singing voice, but I can't sing vibrato. I don't know how people do it.
i think it's one of those things that you either can do or you can't. but i could be wrong -- i don't know enough of the anatomy involved to be sure. i do know i used to try to sing vibrato as a kid and was told to knock it off; i expect it sounded like a machine gun, since i was manufacturing it like chester the cheetah. ugh. i got my actual vibrato when i was about fifteen, but if i concentrate i can still sing without it.
I'm 5'6". I was 5'6" when I was thirteen. My mother (who's nearly six feet and always wanted to be dainty) used to stand over my bed as I slept and whisper, "Stop now! Stop now!"
i'm 5'4", and i was 5'4" when i was eleven. but there are no women above about 5'6" on either side of my family, so there wasn't much chance of my getting any taller. your mother's whispers, however, made me laugh and laugh and laugh, because i keep seeing this card in the bookstore with a quote on it from talmud: "every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, 'grow, grow.'"
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 06:41 pm (UTC)Hooting with laughter.
i've thought of doing it myself, but i had the hardest time coming up with three things (that happened in the same year), much less a hundred
Oh, Fox, it took me forever. Especially since the first one I read was from Pares, (http://kormantic.diaryland.com/100.html) who has a far more interesting life than any one person ought to have.
But the Chester the Cheetah vibrato makes four, right? And the fact that you know how many comparative degrees the Inuit language has ... that makes five ...
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 08:38 am (UTC)On the other hand, my spatial perception is pretty acute. And I want to hire you to fix my sash windows.
(no subject)
Date: 12/20/02 06:43 pm (UTC)Brilliant Little Flower
Date: 1/4/03 01:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/4/03 06:18 pm (UTC)