100 Things
A pleasurable exercise in navel-gazing, inspired by elswhere's 109 things.
1. I’m a bit pigeon-toed, the left side more than the right.
2. I’m made ridiculously uncomfortable by sitcoms and even dramas where characters are lying, acting inappropriately, and embarrassing themselves—sometimes I even have to go in the other room until that part’s over.
3. Since 1993, I don’t eat birds and mammals.
4. But I did when I was pregnant. (Pete and I even went to a steakhouse on our anniversary.)
5. When I was 10 months old, I got a systemic staph infection called Ritter’s Disease, and all my skin peeled off, and they weren’t sure at first that I was going to live.
6. I failed my first driver’s test on my 35th birthday, for going through a red light.
7. I won our town’s spelling bee when I was in 8th grade. My best friend came in second.
8. I was always the slowest typist of my group of friends in college, but when I had to take a typing test recently, to temp, I typed 64 words a minute, and the agency people acted all impressed. Go figure.
9. I used to hate pine nuts, but they’re starting to grow on me.
10. Um. Not literally.
11. When I get extremely angry, I get all quiet, and everything goes white, and my mouth gets dry, and sometimes people can’t even tell that I’m upset at all.
12. I don’t get extremely angry very often. I can think of maybe 5 or 6 times.
13. The traditional academic regalia for graduation at my college included a white rabbit fur collar, and although some people got a more contemporary white velvet substitute, I got the real bunny.
14. I have this weird intolerance for caffeine and can’t have more than one cup of coffee, and even that’s pushing it. Maybe I’m missing an enzyme or something.
15. I taught myself to wiggle my nose in Math 12.
16. I took Math 12 and calculus at the same time, which in retrospect was possibly a mistake.
17. I’m pretty messy, but much more at home than at work.
18. For Christmas one year, my mom gave me this extremely cool 19th-century thingy that has a carved stone seal on the bottom and a compass on the top, and you wear it on a chain or a ribbon. The compass still works, and if I remember to, I wear it when I’m going someplace new.
19. I really, really love goat cheese. Also ceviche. And dark chocolate. And those airport/movie theater nachos with the gloopy orange cheese-food on top and lots of pickled jalapenos.
20. I generally have a very good visual memory, but strangely not for faces.
21. I took 3 years of high school Latin.
22. They tell me I loved to watch football when I was little. There’s a photograph of me in a walker, avidly watching the very first Superbowl on television.
23. My little brother and I used to fight like cats and dogs, and he would dig his fingernails into the backs of my hands until they bled. I secretly encouraged this tactic of his because it actually didn’t hurt that much, and it looked absolutely terrible.
24. I went to an alternative elementary school, where we got to pick a lot of our own classes and called the teachers by their first names. I loved it passionately.
25. My daughter and I have a ritual of spending a couple minutes smelling the scented candles together when we go to the grocery store.
26. I’ve always really hated my belly, which has a very pronounced shape and is where I gain weight. Since having a baby, though, my belly looks way worse than ever, and I miraculously almost don’t care at all any more.
27. I hate telling people what kind of music I like, because it makes me feel like they’re trying to peg me, and I’ve just never really defined myself that way.
28. Okay, okay, Joni Mitchell and the Clash and Luscious Jackson and Aimee Mann and 70s funk and Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and Gang of Four and Rickie Lee Jones. Ooh, and the Au Pairs.
29. My dad taught me to swim, so I have a pretty clean, streamlined crawl stroke.
30. My eyes are blue, with little yellow bits. There is no green.
31. Even though I considered myself too old for Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood at the time, I was actually very relieved when he talked about how you can’t go down the bathtub drain.
32. I had a crush on Neil Armstrong, the astronaut, when I was 3.
33. My family lived in Honduras when I was very little (ages 1 ½ to 4 ½). I remember that we had maids, and iguanas in the back yard, and drank our milk with ice cubes in it. I loved arroz con pollo and desperately wanted long black hair like all the pretty ladies.
34. My first pet was when we lived in Honduras, a yellow dog named Tara (after the name on the milk truck). She started getting out and killing the neighbors' chickens, and they had to take her out and shoot her.
35. I have a streak of something that might be gullibility or might just be literal-mindedness. My first impulse is usually to take what somebody’s saying at face-value even when I know better.
36. My first sexual experience was a torrid 10-month affair with another girl when I was 14 and 15. We had sex in the high school girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, among other places. It was really great. Until she broke my heart in a thousand pieces.
37. My first sexual intercourse with a boy was when I was 17.
38. I’m a “non-taster” of that bitter stuff that genetically you can either taste or you can’t, and so I love broccoli and brussels sprouts.
39. I have freakishly small ears.
40. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually getting a tiny bit tired of Jon Stewart.
41. I have never owned a PDA and maybe never will.
42. I realized only this past week that I like the idea of taking baths more than I actually enjoy taking baths.
43. I secretly want to shuck it all and just go to art school.
44. When I learn foreign languages, my accent gets good prematurely, and so I get into trouble because people naturally assume I understand more than I do.
45. I’ve had one manicure and one pedicure in my life (about 10 years apart).
46. I had a dream last night in which I was yelling at somebody about the lack of statistical soundness of a third party’s study design, and how it would make the research useless.
47. I made way, way too little breastmilk for Cassie—almost none at all—which just crushed me because I had big plans for breastfeeding exclusively.
48. When I was a kid going swimming, I would stay in the water until my fingernails turned purple and even longer if my mom didn’t notice.
49. One summer when I was maybe 6 or 7, I spent a piece of my vacation with my cousins. With them I went to church and participated in “daily devotions” and read bible story books for kids. Under my aunt’s careful tutelage, I “let Jesus into my heart” and then cried myself to sleep for weeks because I was going to miss my Mommy and Daddy when I was in Heaven and they weren’t.
50. Relations are apparently still strained between my dad and his sister.
51. Peonies and gardenias are my favorite flowers.
52. In my 22nd month of trying to get pregnant, one night I had very strong images of white lilies during sex, and the next morning on my way to work I thought, “holy shit, white lilies are an annunciation symbol! maybe I’m pregnant.” And I was.
53. When I was in high school, my friends nicknamed me Smack because I acted so calm all the time it seemed like I was on heroin.
54. My daughter is a Year-of-the-Horse Pisces firstborn girl with A-negative blood. Just like me. Only I was a Wednesday’s child (“full of woe”), and she was “born on the Sabbath day” and therefore “bonnie and bright and good and gay.” (whew.)
55. For my first few years of babysitting, I charged a dollar an hour.
56. My mom pulled a few all-nighters with me when I was in high school (and one in college), typing my papers as I wrote them.
57. When I was working as a clinic nurse and under a tremendous amount of stress, my fingernails grew very fast and strong.
58. My mom was involved in Re-evaluation Counseling (a.k.a. Co-Counseling) for a few years when I was in my teens, and little patches of my worldview remain based on those principles.
59. In biology lab in junior high and high school, I would do the dissections, so my lab partners only had to watch.
60. I went to Spain all by myself for two weeks in 1993 for no really good reason.
61. I was a very serious child; I’ve lightened up as I’ve aged.
62. I was a Brownie, but then only was a Girl Scout for a month or two. I had some kind of camping phobia.
63. I almost always give money to buskers in the subway.
64. Jews for Jesus handing out leaflets, on the other hand, make me disproportionately furious. I’m not entirely sure exactly what that’s about.
65. The first time I went to Prague (with Pete, who had lived there a while during graduate school), it was late December and very dark and continually overcast, and I found it grotesquely ugly and unsettling.
66. Codeine works really, really well for my occasional migraines. It even makes the nausea go away.
67. I once researched and wrote a syllabus chapter on geriatric sexuality because none of the physicians was willing to do it.
68. I have a soft, gentle touch when I draw blood.
69. I’ve struggled on and off with urge urinary incontinence at least since junior high. Since giving birth it’s even worse, and compounded by stress incontinence.
70. Cassie weighed 10 lbs., 4 oz., at birth, and I delivered her vaginally without drugs.
71. My husband often thinks I’m stubborn and pedantic. (He should talk.)
72. I strongly dislike “new car smell.”
73. I find it very pleasant to be around outspoken people with big, huge personalities. Something in me just relaxes.
74. My skin is so pale that when I used to bleach my hair platinum, people sometimes thought it was my natural color.
75. I wanted to adapt Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly” into a two-person play, and I still think it’s a good idea, but I bet I’ll never get around to it.
76. My feet have unusually high arches, and sometimes it’s hard to find shoes or boots that fit over the top.
77. Sometimes I think that only teenagers should have sex.
78. I was married in yellow. A 1914-style dress made for me by a local seamstress/designer for $200 out of a very lightweight pale/soft yellow wool that I picked out at a fabric store, with subtle matching braid trim.
79. For deeply embarrassing reasons of supreme lameness, we never sent out all our wedding thank-you notes. If there’s an after-life, I know I will have to pay.
80. I give very good backrubs.
81. When I read Susan Sontag essays, she just makes me want to yell at her, argue with her, except I know that she’s much smarter than I am and would win even if I were right. (Well, plus she’s dead now.)
82. Because I love lattes, Pete says, “for someone who despises coffee with milk, you’re sure willing to drink milk with coffee.” I think the thing is that American coffee is more water, and so you’re mixing milk and water, which somehow grosses me out. But espresso is more concentrated, and smaller volume, so adds not very much water to the milk.
83. I could spend hours looking through fonts, or paint color sample strips, or stationery choices.
84. I went to the orthodontist for 11 years.
85. My dad taught me to read when I was 3 ½, out of an old copy of Dick and Jane that he and my mom borrowed from a friend of theirs who used to be a school teacher. Dick and Jane seemed like big kids to me, and I identified more with little blonde sister Sally. Sally’s daddy gave Sally a ride on his shoulders, and when he was walking behind a tall hedge, Dick and Jane were very surprised because Sally looked so tall. (This was clearly a narrative that made a big impression on me at the time, since I still remember it.)
86. I’ve worn Dioressence since I was 16.
87. For ten years of my childhood, my parents (and then my mom, after the separation) drove a gold 1970 Buick Grand Sport. It had a raised ridgey stripe down the middle of the backseat, and my brother and I would bug each other by “accidentally” putting some body part over the line.
88. When I was growing up, my grandparents (on my mom’s side) lived on the banks of the Mississippi river, and we could sit out front and watch the barges go by. There were also trains that ran along the river, down a steep embankment that had rattlesnakes. I loved listening to the trains as they went by at night. It was a feeling of utter contentment.
89. I don’t really get schadenfreude. I think maybe I’m too earnest and goody-goody.
90. The last bicycle I owned was sparkly purple, with a flowered banana seat. It was stolen out of our garage.
91. I really hate how in order to choose one thing, you have to un-choose a bunch of other things.
92. I love to go to supermarkets in other countries.
93. Despite some pretty strong competition, seventh grade was hands-down the worst year of my life.
94. I really wish I could go back and take my pathetic, awkward childhood self shopping for clothes.
95. At the beginning of my junior year in France, our group went to visit Chambord, and a few of us managed to sneak into the locked central tower (by trying each of our housekeys in turn until one worked) and climb all the way up.
96. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on, it penetrated my unconscious in a way that no show or book has before or since, and I regularly had Buffy-based dreams.
97. A long time ago, I went swimming in a fjord in Norway. It was a record-breaking warm summer, but the water was still quite brisk.
98. When I look at a digital clock to check the time, and the time is my birthday, that’s good luck.
99. I’d rather be cold than hot.
100. I love to dance so much that I don’t even care that I’m not so good. Except one time in San Francisco, dancing in a lesbian club, a skinny little Black drag queen told me, “Girl! You should be on Soul Train!” Which is my favorite compliment I have received ever.
1. I’m a bit pigeon-toed, the left side more than the right.
2. I’m made ridiculously uncomfortable by sitcoms and even dramas where characters are lying, acting inappropriately, and embarrassing themselves—sometimes I even have to go in the other room until that part’s over.
3. Since 1993, I don’t eat birds and mammals.
4. But I did when I was pregnant. (Pete and I even went to a steakhouse on our anniversary.)
5. When I was 10 months old, I got a systemic staph infection called Ritter’s Disease, and all my skin peeled off, and they weren’t sure at first that I was going to live.
6. I failed my first driver’s test on my 35th birthday, for going through a red light.
7. I won our town’s spelling bee when I was in 8th grade. My best friend came in second.
8. I was always the slowest typist of my group of friends in college, but when I had to take a typing test recently, to temp, I typed 64 words a minute, and the agency people acted all impressed. Go figure.
9. I used to hate pine nuts, but they’re starting to grow on me.
10. Um. Not literally.
11. When I get extremely angry, I get all quiet, and everything goes white, and my mouth gets dry, and sometimes people can’t even tell that I’m upset at all.
12. I don’t get extremely angry very often. I can think of maybe 5 or 6 times.
13. The traditional academic regalia for graduation at my college included a white rabbit fur collar, and although some people got a more contemporary white velvet substitute, I got the real bunny.
14. I have this weird intolerance for caffeine and can’t have more than one cup of coffee, and even that’s pushing it. Maybe I’m missing an enzyme or something.
15. I taught myself to wiggle my nose in Math 12.
16. I took Math 12 and calculus at the same time, which in retrospect was possibly a mistake.
17. I’m pretty messy, but much more at home than at work.
18. For Christmas one year, my mom gave me this extremely cool 19th-century thingy that has a carved stone seal on the bottom and a compass on the top, and you wear it on a chain or a ribbon. The compass still works, and if I remember to, I wear it when I’m going someplace new.
19. I really, really love goat cheese. Also ceviche. And dark chocolate. And those airport/movie theater nachos with the gloopy orange cheese-food on top and lots of pickled jalapenos.
20. I generally have a very good visual memory, but strangely not for faces.
21. I took 3 years of high school Latin.
22. They tell me I loved to watch football when I was little. There’s a photograph of me in a walker, avidly watching the very first Superbowl on television.
23. My little brother and I used to fight like cats and dogs, and he would dig his fingernails into the backs of my hands until they bled. I secretly encouraged this tactic of his because it actually didn’t hurt that much, and it looked absolutely terrible.
24. I went to an alternative elementary school, where we got to pick a lot of our own classes and called the teachers by their first names. I loved it passionately.
25. My daughter and I have a ritual of spending a couple minutes smelling the scented candles together when we go to the grocery store.
26. I’ve always really hated my belly, which has a very pronounced shape and is where I gain weight. Since having a baby, though, my belly looks way worse than ever, and I miraculously almost don’t care at all any more.
27. I hate telling people what kind of music I like, because it makes me feel like they’re trying to peg me, and I’ve just never really defined myself that way.
28. Okay, okay, Joni Mitchell and the Clash and Luscious Jackson and Aimee Mann and 70s funk and Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and Gang of Four and Rickie Lee Jones. Ooh, and the Au Pairs.
29. My dad taught me to swim, so I have a pretty clean, streamlined crawl stroke.
30. My eyes are blue, with little yellow bits. There is no green.
31. Even though I considered myself too old for Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood at the time, I was actually very relieved when he talked about how you can’t go down the bathtub drain.
32. I had a crush on Neil Armstrong, the astronaut, when I was 3.
33. My family lived in Honduras when I was very little (ages 1 ½ to 4 ½). I remember that we had maids, and iguanas in the back yard, and drank our milk with ice cubes in it. I loved arroz con pollo and desperately wanted long black hair like all the pretty ladies.
34. My first pet was when we lived in Honduras, a yellow dog named Tara (after the name on the milk truck). She started getting out and killing the neighbors' chickens, and they had to take her out and shoot her.
35. I have a streak of something that might be gullibility or might just be literal-mindedness. My first impulse is usually to take what somebody’s saying at face-value even when I know better.
36. My first sexual experience was a torrid 10-month affair with another girl when I was 14 and 15. We had sex in the high school girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, among other places. It was really great. Until she broke my heart in a thousand pieces.
37. My first sexual intercourse with a boy was when I was 17.
38. I’m a “non-taster” of that bitter stuff that genetically you can either taste or you can’t, and so I love broccoli and brussels sprouts.
39. I have freakishly small ears.
40. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually getting a tiny bit tired of Jon Stewart.
41. I have never owned a PDA and maybe never will.
42. I realized only this past week that I like the idea of taking baths more than I actually enjoy taking baths.
43. I secretly want to shuck it all and just go to art school.
44. When I learn foreign languages, my accent gets good prematurely, and so I get into trouble because people naturally assume I understand more than I do.
45. I’ve had one manicure and one pedicure in my life (about 10 years apart).
46. I had a dream last night in which I was yelling at somebody about the lack of statistical soundness of a third party’s study design, and how it would make the research useless.
47. I made way, way too little breastmilk for Cassie—almost none at all—which just crushed me because I had big plans for breastfeeding exclusively.
48. When I was a kid going swimming, I would stay in the water until my fingernails turned purple and even longer if my mom didn’t notice.
49. One summer when I was maybe 6 or 7, I spent a piece of my vacation with my cousins. With them I went to church and participated in “daily devotions” and read bible story books for kids. Under my aunt’s careful tutelage, I “let Jesus into my heart” and then cried myself to sleep for weeks because I was going to miss my Mommy and Daddy when I was in Heaven and they weren’t.
50. Relations are apparently still strained between my dad and his sister.
51. Peonies and gardenias are my favorite flowers.
52. In my 22nd month of trying to get pregnant, one night I had very strong images of white lilies during sex, and the next morning on my way to work I thought, “holy shit, white lilies are an annunciation symbol! maybe I’m pregnant.” And I was.
53. When I was in high school, my friends nicknamed me Smack because I acted so calm all the time it seemed like I was on heroin.
54. My daughter is a Year-of-the-Horse Pisces firstborn girl with A-negative blood. Just like me. Only I was a Wednesday’s child (“full of woe”), and she was “born on the Sabbath day” and therefore “bonnie and bright and good and gay.” (whew.)
55. For my first few years of babysitting, I charged a dollar an hour.
56. My mom pulled a few all-nighters with me when I was in high school (and one in college), typing my papers as I wrote them.
57. When I was working as a clinic nurse and under a tremendous amount of stress, my fingernails grew very fast and strong.
58. My mom was involved in Re-evaluation Counseling (a.k.a. Co-Counseling) for a few years when I was in my teens, and little patches of my worldview remain based on those principles.
59. In biology lab in junior high and high school, I would do the dissections, so my lab partners only had to watch.
60. I went to Spain all by myself for two weeks in 1993 for no really good reason.
61. I was a very serious child; I’ve lightened up as I’ve aged.
62. I was a Brownie, but then only was a Girl Scout for a month or two. I had some kind of camping phobia.
63. I almost always give money to buskers in the subway.
64. Jews for Jesus handing out leaflets, on the other hand, make me disproportionately furious. I’m not entirely sure exactly what that’s about.
65. The first time I went to Prague (with Pete, who had lived there a while during graduate school), it was late December and very dark and continually overcast, and I found it grotesquely ugly and unsettling.
66. Codeine works really, really well for my occasional migraines. It even makes the nausea go away.
67. I once researched and wrote a syllabus chapter on geriatric sexuality because none of the physicians was willing to do it.
68. I have a soft, gentle touch when I draw blood.
69. I’ve struggled on and off with urge urinary incontinence at least since junior high. Since giving birth it’s even worse, and compounded by stress incontinence.
70. Cassie weighed 10 lbs., 4 oz., at birth, and I delivered her vaginally without drugs.
71. My husband often thinks I’m stubborn and pedantic. (He should talk.)
72. I strongly dislike “new car smell.”
73. I find it very pleasant to be around outspoken people with big, huge personalities. Something in me just relaxes.
74. My skin is so pale that when I used to bleach my hair platinum, people sometimes thought it was my natural color.
75. I wanted to adapt Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly” into a two-person play, and I still think it’s a good idea, but I bet I’ll never get around to it.
76. My feet have unusually high arches, and sometimes it’s hard to find shoes or boots that fit over the top.
77. Sometimes I think that only teenagers should have sex.
78. I was married in yellow. A 1914-style dress made for me by a local seamstress/designer for $200 out of a very lightweight pale/soft yellow wool that I picked out at a fabric store, with subtle matching braid trim.
79. For deeply embarrassing reasons of supreme lameness, we never sent out all our wedding thank-you notes. If there’s an after-life, I know I will have to pay.
80. I give very good backrubs.
81. When I read Susan Sontag essays, she just makes me want to yell at her, argue with her, except I know that she’s much smarter than I am and would win even if I were right. (Well, plus she’s dead now.)
82. Because I love lattes, Pete says, “for someone who despises coffee with milk, you’re sure willing to drink milk with coffee.” I think the thing is that American coffee is more water, and so you’re mixing milk and water, which somehow grosses me out. But espresso is more concentrated, and smaller volume, so adds not very much water to the milk.
83. I could spend hours looking through fonts, or paint color sample strips, or stationery choices.
84. I went to the orthodontist for 11 years.
85. My dad taught me to read when I was 3 ½, out of an old copy of Dick and Jane that he and my mom borrowed from a friend of theirs who used to be a school teacher. Dick and Jane seemed like big kids to me, and I identified more with little blonde sister Sally. Sally’s daddy gave Sally a ride on his shoulders, and when he was walking behind a tall hedge, Dick and Jane were very surprised because Sally looked so tall. (This was clearly a narrative that made a big impression on me at the time, since I still remember it.)
86. I’ve worn Dioressence since I was 16.
87. For ten years of my childhood, my parents (and then my mom, after the separation) drove a gold 1970 Buick Grand Sport. It had a raised ridgey stripe down the middle of the backseat, and my brother and I would bug each other by “accidentally” putting some body part over the line.
88. When I was growing up, my grandparents (on my mom’s side) lived on the banks of the Mississippi river, and we could sit out front and watch the barges go by. There were also trains that ran along the river, down a steep embankment that had rattlesnakes. I loved listening to the trains as they went by at night. It was a feeling of utter contentment.
89. I don’t really get schadenfreude. I think maybe I’m too earnest and goody-goody.
90. The last bicycle I owned was sparkly purple, with a flowered banana seat. It was stolen out of our garage.
91. I really hate how in order to choose one thing, you have to un-choose a bunch of other things.
92. I love to go to supermarkets in other countries.
93. Despite some pretty strong competition, seventh grade was hands-down the worst year of my life.
94. I really wish I could go back and take my pathetic, awkward childhood self shopping for clothes.
95. At the beginning of my junior year in France, our group went to visit Chambord, and a few of us managed to sneak into the locked central tower (by trying each of our housekeys in turn until one worked) and climb all the way up.
96. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on, it penetrated my unconscious in a way that no show or book has before or since, and I regularly had Buffy-based dreams.
97. A long time ago, I went swimming in a fjord in Norway. It was a record-breaking warm summer, but the water was still quite brisk.
98. When I look at a digital clock to check the time, and the time is my birthday, that’s good luck.
99. I’d rather be cold than hot.
100. I love to dance so much that I don’t even care that I’m not so good. Except one time in San Francisco, dancing in a lesbian club, a skinny little Black drag queen told me, “Girl! You should be on Soul Train!” Which is my favorite compliment I have received ever.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 3:12 PM
3 Comments:
I count 17 things we have in common! Soulmates, indeed. I get that way about sitcoms, too. It's just cringe-making. And about the foreign supermarkets! I just love that! It's like, exotic yet ordinary in a comforting way.
And I learned so much I hadn't known about your torrid past! (I'm referring of course to the football fandom and the Neil Armstrong crush. Also you seem to have had a bit of a thing for wee Sally, no?)
As they say in show biz, "I love your work." No air kisses from me, though.
1. What I hate the MOST about sitcoms is when someone is gambling. I have to turn the tv off. Not only that but I have to vigorously think of something else. It's just excruciating.
2. If they were impressed at 64 words a minute, imagine how they'd feel after reading the rest of this post.
3. Good lord! My 4 month old is only 10 pounds 6 ounces now. I am feeling for you! Ouch.
4. And I too love foreign supermarkets. And department stores. I remember going into dept stores in Romania in 1994 which were totally empty except for, for instance, one lonely display case with motor oil in it.
--Angela
Post a Comment
<< Home