I didn't particularly want to do the "100 Things about Me" meme, but my brain started plotting it out when I wasn't looking. So, read and learn. I can't do cut tags--I apologize.
1. I was 6 weeks premature, delivered by C-section because I was "in distress." The first picture we have of me, I have tubes up my nose.
2. I am four and a half years older than my younger sister. Apparently, there were several lost pregnancies between us.
3. My beloved sister M does not have a formal diagnosis, but my professional opinion is that she fits plenty well under Pervasive Developmental Delay-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). This is still a broad diagnosis under the huge range that is the autism spectrum, but I find that if I classify her as PDD/autistic, she is considerably less likely to drive me nuts.
4. The majority of my sister's obsessive characteristics are mine, magnified.
5. I can remember being breast-fed. For a long time, I attributed my relatively strong immune system to the length of time I received breast milk.
6. One of my favorite books as a young child was our household medical encyclopedia of childhood diseases. I read it compulsively, and still recall much of the information. In second grade, I diagnosed myself--correctly--with a common parasite.
7. Actually, I read a lot of stuff compulsively. I had certain comfort books that I took everywhere with me for weeks at a time, reading and re-reading without boredom. Some of these included Harriet the Spy, A Little Princess, and I think The Secret Garden.
8. I was not a particularly precocious child. I learned to read in kindergarten or first grade, right along with the middle of the bell curve.
9. My second grade teacher thought that a good way to entertain his students was by making up long, rambling stories in which members of our class got turned into vampires. These stories scared the hell out of me, and prompted my present inability to fall asleep without the covers wrapped around my head and neck, mummy style.
10. To protect myself, I also made up a long list of rules governing vampire behavior. These included things like: Dracula can only leave his castle for one second at midnight, and he moves as slow as a turtle, so he can't get to your house.
11. I continued to have a lot of trouble sleeping as a child. Memo to Mr. Russell: you suck.
12. I hit puberty around eight. It wasn't so cool.
13. I took a lot of acne medication around that time, not because I ever had particularly bad acne, but rather because any acne at all is pretty damn striking on a third grader.
14. Third grade was also when I got glasses. I still laugh when I think about the school screening: I'm standing part way up the aisle in the auditorium, ostensibly so I can read the letters off the eye chart. The screener says, "What's the smallest letter you can read?" Me: "Where's the chart?"
15. I'm pretty near-sighted. I know you don't believe me, because every single person who wears corrective lenses claims to be blind as a bat, but without my contacts I have approximately eight inches of clear vision. It's genetic.
16. I have great teeth. I've never needed braces, and I have hardly any fillings.
17. I've got the two top wisdom teeth, but the bottom ones never developed. Evolutionarily speaking, this means I am more highly evolved than those of you with all four wisdom teeth.
18. As a nine or ten-year-old, I was so passionately attached to a couple of kid humor novels that I hid them in the bed with me for months. The books were Sizzle and Splat and Second Fiddle by Ronald Kidd, and I used to find it comforting to wake up and feel the scratchy library binding pressing into my calves.
19. A fair number of my important sexual crushes have been on women. I'm probably bisexual to some degree, but since I'm married and have no practical experience whatsoever with other women, it seems rather presumptuous to claim it.
20. I go with "functionally straight."
21. Like many future fans, I created a great number of Mary Sue-esque characters for my favorite books and series. One of my favorites was the younger sister who accompanied Hal and Roger Hunt (of the Willard Price animal adventure books, which were highly formulaic and had names like Whale Adventure, Safari Adventure, Volcano Adventure, and so on) on their travels. She was 13 to Roger's 14 and Hal's 19, and if I had to guess her name was probably Sara Hunt. I was pretty blatant about my Mary Sue-ing.
22. I made the ship from Whale Adventure out of a Styrofoam egg carton. There were also two tiny little Styrofoam boys with ballpoint ink faces, and I kept them for ages.
23. I grew up in a relatively liberal Catholic university parish, and thus escaped the animosity toward the Catholic Church that so many seem to have. Intellectually, I get the problems, but emotionally I don't, because my experiences with Catholicism have been primarily positive.
24. I still more or less identify as Catholic, although the outlines are blurred.
25. For instance, the other day I bowed to the Buddha in a Chinese restaurant.
26. My confirmation name is Christopher. I chose him because he is the patron saint of travelers, and also because he figures prominently in an L.M. Boston book that I loved when I was little.
27. Of the three sports trophies I've earned, two of them say, "Most Improved Player."
28. As a youth basketball player, I averaged two points a season.
29. I was a terrible softball player. Despite intensive coaching from several people over two seasons, I could not (and cannot) throw the damn ball farther than about thirty feet. To illustrate, that means that as a catcher, I could not return the ball to the pitcher without standing up, flinging my entire weight into the throw, and then watching the pitcher lunge forward off the mound to retrieve the ball.
30. I did have occasional flashes of brilliance, though, such as one spectacular out where I materialized under a ball in right field. I don't remember much about the catch except knocking my cap off and running. Ah, the glory days.
31. My motor planning skills are below average, although they seem to be integrating as I get older. I still can't trust my body to copy any kind of complex movement, though.
32. Not surprisingly, I can't dance worth shit.
33. I desperately wanted a twin brother when I was younger. I had an imaginary one, either Jonah or Jonas, I can't remember which, who stayed with me until I was at least eleven.
34. I'm now married to a twin.
35. I used to narrate my daily adventures in my head, in a semi-conscious fashion. I caught myself one day by following up some comment with, "...said Sara."
36. When I was learning to touch type in high school, I spent a couple of weeks compulsively typing out conversations and lectures on a keyboard in my head. It was quite the cognitive drain, but I couldn't turn it off.
37. I got my period the summer after fourth grade. Elementary schools do not have sanitary napkin disposal bins in the bathroom stalls.
38. I actually met my husband at a mutual acquaintance's birthday party before we started sixth grade. He was fighting with his twin sister and I wanted him to shut up.
39. I met him for real the week before ninth grade band camp started. I liked him that time.
40. I have a certain amount of innate musical talent, but I don't like to practice and I have a tendency to freeze up in performance situations. You can more or less compensate for this on the violin, but on wind instruments such as the French horn where breath support is everything, it's the kiss of death.
41. Although I can technically read music, I have difficulties that I liken to dyslexia when it comes down to it. I am more or less unable to read rhythm unless it's quite simple, and I often found that when confronted with a sheet of music, even familiar music, it was meaningless to me until somebody started playing. I play primarily by ear, so once I had a tune I could follow along, but I couldn't do much decoding on my own. I suspect, though, that if I were to ask around this might be a pretty common problem.
42. I won a lot of academic awards in high school. Two years in a row I got "Best Student in English" out of my fancy-dancy accelerated program, and I got a bunch of prizes for French too.
43. The accelerated program was the International Baccalaureate program, a fairly prestigious deal where you take a lot of internationally standardized exams. When I was there, my high school IB program was one of the top-performing in the world.
44. Although I loved the challenge of the program, I'm not at all happy with the intellectual elitism and sheer snobbery that was bred into us there.
45. Some of my bitterness comes from the fact that the magnet program was two hundred middle-class white kids getting bused to a poor black high school in the South. Gee, do you think racial tensions were kind of high?
46. My public school education, surrounded almost exclusively by other "gifted" kids, meant that it took me a long time to grok the fact that A). most people do not test as high on the Stanford-Binet as I do, and B). I am still way at the bottom of the heap when it comes to practical knowledge.
47. My high school French teacher, who taught in the IB program and had about twenty years of experience, said I was one of the best students she'd ever had.
48. I got an unprecedented high score on my IB French exam (and the AP one, too), but right now I could maybe get myself a hotel room in French if you put a gun to my head. I'd like to think that it's dormant, rather than gone.
49. As part of the foreign language exam, we had to interview with a native French examiner. My senior year, I did an independent study sort of thing since I'd already finished the standard course with the aforementioned high score as a junior. For part of it, I had to pick a topic--either the politics or the environment, both of which made me want to yak--to discuss with the examiner. During the interview, my French teacher, sitting in the waiting room providing moral support while I was in with the examiner, freaked out when she heard raucous laughter coming from the exam room. I'd provoked it with the following exchange: French dude, subtitled: So, the environment, it is an interest of yours? Me: No.
50. Because of my exam scores, I got a year of college credit and a free ride through undergrad.
51. Good thing, because I hated my life when I was in college, and having to have paid for that experience would have really pissed me off.
52. Between high school and college, I spent seven years in marching bands playing mellophone.
53. I cared nothing about football, but I liked playing and I liked getting shipped around the country to support the team.
54. Some of the places I went with various bands included: San Francisco, CA; Tempe, AZ for the National Championship; Baton Rouge and New Orleans, LA; whatever the big football school is in Alabama; some horrible place in Mississippi where I ate at a fried chicken joint and then almost puked on the bus during the video of Braveheart; Atlanta, GA; and Memphis, Tennessee. And lots of places in Florida.
55. My first job was as a dishwasher and mouse care provider in my dad's lab.
56. One of the post-docs there was this guy J, who used to give me long, incomprehensible spiels on financial planning and the stock market, which is not information that should ever be forced on a person trapped behind a three-foot pile of used petri dishes. In spite of this, I enjoyed his company, and consider myself forever in his debt because he made me a tape containing the first X-Files episode I ever watched.
57. That episode was "One Breath." I think much of the reason that XF grabbed, held, and ultimately shattered me was because my first impression of Mulder was that of the broken man, hunched over sobbing in the doorway of his darkened apartment.
58. I have never loved a bad guy the way I loved Alex Krycek. Lex, you're my one and only now, but you live forever in his shadow.
59. I love fruitcake. Apparently this is unusual.
60. I'm double-jointed, and I can also do this thing where I wiggle the tendons in my thumbs that nobody I've met has ever seen before. It really grosses people out.
61. I ran a marathon last February. It took me just over six hours.
62. I am very, very good with shy toddlers. I cannot count the number of times I've heard, "He's talking to you? He never talks to strangers!"
63. I've never broken any bones, although I did once chip a tooth trying to wakeboard.
64. To my great surprise, the first time I soloed in a Sunfish I was told I was a natural sailor. Unfortunately, I've only soloed once more in the year and a half since then.
65. As a child, I hated boats. I didn't get seasick, but I was terrified of the rocking.
66. My dad's side of the family, the one I know most about, is Greek. There is an apocryphal story of a paternal great-grandmother meeting a maternal great-grandmother and accusing her line of being descended from Macedonian hill bandits.
67. The summer of 1999, I drove all over Lewis and Harris, the two largest islands in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, with my best friend HB. Not long after we returned, I learned that some of my mother's cousins had found record of the birth of my great-(possibly great-great-)grandfather, Angus McExtremelyScottishSurname on Barra, a tiny island south of Harris.
68. I spent a night in the Yukon on my honeymoon.
69. For a high school English assignment--something to do with a character study--I wrote the "Femme Fatale," two pages brimming with such loaded erotic imagery that my English teacher refused to finish reading it out loud to the class.
70. That was about the extent of my adolescent rebellion.
71. I know how to catch, dry, and mount butterflies.
72. I used to be able to classify insects by Order, as well as make and maintain a kill jar.
73. I've never for one minute considered not having children. Even when my main goal in life was to live someplace overseas and garden a lot, I always pictured having little boys.
74. I'm considerably more afraid of raising a daughter than I am of raising a son.
75. My mom's history of difficult pregnancies troubles me deeply. I worry that I will either have problems conceiving, thus rendering many years of fussing over birth control pointless, or problems carrying a pregnancy to term.
76. When I was four, we lived in Boston for a year while my dad was on sabbatical. I was obsessed both with sculpting tiny families of birds out of playdoh and with the door frames in our married student housing apartment. For some reason, the hole where the doorknob fixture-thing slotted into wasn't just a notch, but was an empty pit hollowed out in the frame. I lost a great deal of playdoh sending the birds to "roost" in the walls.
77. That was also the year when I taped pieces of thread to the lower backs of everyone in the house to simulate tails.
78. Between four and five I was fixated on a half-hour nature program--it may have been called Wild Kingdom, although I think that was a different show, the one with Marty Stouffer--but the first show I remember being fannish about was GIJoe. I was heavily invested in the Flint/Lady Jay relationship.
79. I have met Red Green, shaken his hand, and entered a duct tape chandelier in a contest held in his honor. This means there are only two degrees of separation between myself and Paul Gross, and three degrees between me and CKR.
80. I've also met and shaken hands with Omar of televisionwithoutpity fame. He was very polite, and I felt like a huge dork.
81. I've had my hair cut in the style of two separate characters on The X-Files: early-series Scully, where she had the shoulder length cut that was longer in back than in front, and Krycek from the "Anasazi/Blessing Way/Paperclip" trilogy.
82. Three different people have told me I write like Ray Bradbury.
83. A guy once told me I was sexually boring when I said I thought mud wrestling was disgusting.
84. I once had to get my cartilage piercing replaced because I got kicked in the head. The girl at the piercing place thought I was really fucking cool until I let it slip that the kicker was a six year old.
85. I paid good American dollars to stand in line for an autograph from Ray Park (Darth Maul and Toad from X-Men). I have a bookmark with gold glitter pen reading "feel the force!" but I had to look up his name just now.
86. Sorry, but I don't get the big deal about vibrators. Yes, I have one. Yes, I know how to turn it on.
87. I have great auditory memory, and terrible loudness perception.
88. My best friend and love interest from ages 3 to 6 or so was a boy named TE, a brilliant child who is now a top-notch kite designer in Australia. I have a dim memory of stooping in the dirt of the crawl space under his house, conducting an "experiment" where we somehow shocked each other using a spoon and a piece of twine. There must have been more to it, because it worked, but that was my comprehension at the time.
89. Sometime mid-graduate school, when the only things that made me happy were Krycek slash and Coke, I gave up collecting. I used to spend a lot of energy hunting down pictures and articles and action figures and random celebrity TV appearances, and then, abruptly, I decided that knowing that I would never find all of them, that I simply couldn't keep up with someone else's whole life, hurt too much. So I quit.
90. The more time I spend around drooling kids, the more tolerant I get of dogs.
91. In high school I used to sew complex, whimsical, stuffed animals--"soft art," I believe they call it--as gifts for friends. I pulled the patterns out of thin air, and the majority of them came out fabulously. However, I have no practical abilities with a sewing machine, and resort to hand-mending or paying for alterations whenever necessary.
92. If I were one of the Seven Deadly Sins, I would be Sloth.
93. I have threatening dreams nearly every night. The most frequently recurring theme is that of blindness--having partial sight, having only peripheral vision, having my eyes covered, losing my contacts or glasses, visual obstructions of all sorts. Being pursued is a close second.
94. I have a tattoo of wings at the base of my skull. It's partially under my hairline, so unless you were looking you probably wouldn't notice it.
95. I am not a stutterer per se--if you met and talked with me you would assume that I was a typically fluent person. However, when tired enough, stressed enough, under enough pressure and cognitive drain, I will produce noticeable sound and word repetitions and blocks. Fluency is a continuum, yo.
96. I vividly remember the first time I was conscious of blocking: standing in one of my undergrad professor's offices, asking her some mostly unnecessary question about grad school. I completely froze up on a laryngeal block, and had a blistering flash of empathy for every person who lives with stuttering on a daily basis.
97. At an outdoor festival, I once had a very persuasive older gentleman sit down next to me and spend the better part of an hour explaining why I should return with him to Mexico to meet his son.
98. For some reason, I have an absolutely terrible time learning how to play games of any type--board games, card games, computer games, anything involving strategy--and consequently dislike and avoid them. When it comes to playing any game more complex than Candyland with my speech kids, I just make up rules wildly in hopes that they won't ask me to read and interpret the instructions.
99. The most backhanded compliment I ever received was from my mother. I overheard her speaking with a friend about me--the friend said something about how I seemed mature and self-possessed for my age, and my mom, in a highly dubious tone of voice, said, "Well...she's certainly never been swayed by peer pressure." I suspect that this, innate independence versus the need to be part of a community, is the crux of many matters for me. How to be a little more interested in others, how to be a little less of my own person and a little more of a friend, how it's occasionally necessary to go along with my friends because they're my friends, even when I don't give a good goddamn about martinis or painting pottery or Homicide or whatever. Remembering to engage.
100. I like having secrets.
Snow days are the coolest thing ever. I spent yesterday lying around the house in my pajamas, reading, drinking coffee, and occasionally calling in to work just to listen to the sweet, sweet sound of the answering machine: "Our offices are closed today due to icy road conditions." Ha! Aha ha ha! Eeeeeee!
I'm from Florida, remember. This is all new to me! New and wondrous!
Played the violin for about an hour tonight, something I haven't done in roughly ten years. It went fairly well, considering. It was--God, I know I have musical talent, but I'd forgotten how much more intuitive the violin is after so many years with the french horn. I could feel the intervals, I could find notes without thinking, without working so damn hard.
I'd have a lot of bad habits to adjust if I were to get back into it. I bow at an angle, for instance--watching in the mirror it was obvious how much I was sliding around, instead of cutting a clean line across the strings. My bow grip has never been right--something about the amount of tension I use, which I think is probably a function of weak hand and forearm muscles. My left wrist was breaking a little, a beginner's mistake. And I never learned vibrato, which is more or less why I quit in the first place. But I have an ear with the violin, and good strong tone, something I never had with the horn. I haven't missed playing these past ten years, but I might like to try again.
I'd like to comment on "Prodigal," but somewhere between Lex in jeans with a pitchfork and Lex and Lucas fighting dirty in the gym, I swooned and missed the rest of the episode. Fuck, that was hot.
You know those columns in magazines like Woman and Redbook that are always called things like, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?!," where first the woman tells her side of the story, then the man, and then the shrink tells them both to stop acting like morons and maybe get help with the daddy issues? That's my life.
This weekend: Sara attends peaceful, contemplative retreat where she meditates on how to protect her mind, body and the world from toxins. The Hubster stays up all night snarfing Girl Scout cookies and playing a video game based on killing zombies with a board with nails sticking out.
Picture this: it's somewhere between 5 and 6 o'clock in the morning. I'm asleep, in that restless state where any unexpected noise or movement is enough to yank you back to consciousness. In my dream, I'm in possession of the Ring of Power. I'm small, a hobbit or possibly a dwarf. As is typical of most of my dreams, I am pursued. Gollum attacks me and we wrestle for control of the ring, which I have slid onto my index finger ala Elijah Wood. In an attempt to trick me, Gollum tries to pry off my wedding ring instead. Since, to my knowledge, I have never removed my wedding ring since it was put on during the wedding ceremony (this is true), I become unnerved and panic. I escape Gollum and run, suddenly invisible. Gollum and his little helper, a small rubbery creature with fangs, follow. I alternate confusedly between wearing the ring and not, invisible but not see-through, more like a blur in the air or James Bond's invisible car in Die Another Day. We're in a great hall of some kind, decorated for Christmas with pine trees and huge red and green draperies. I climb to the top of a fifteen foot window and stand petrified on the sill, knowing Gollum has seen me block out the background and can place my movements. He and Little Helper begin to climb the stone walls toward the sill, whispering and coughing (gollum) back and forth to each other. They are almost upon me, and it will go badly with their teeth and claws. I time it carefully, and the moment before they close in on me I leap, clearing ten or fifteen feet of stone floor and Christmas parade to grab the draperies and slide down to the floor. I duck under the draperies and run, invisible.
My first amorphous thought upon waking is extreme displeasure at having possession of the One Ring. "Why do I always have to be the Ringbearer?" I snit, lying there with the covers up to my nose and the Hubster snoring away next to me. "Fuckin' elves."
