100 things : about me

1. My parents sometimes claim to have named me after a Simon & Garfunkel song, or a Three Dog Night song. I'm pretty sure they're lying.
2. I have two cats. They're both named for writers (Anna Akmatova and Banana Yoshimoto).
3. I've always been a little put out by my last name. It's rather boring.
4. If I ever had a daughter, I'd want to name her Chloe or Chloris. That would be like naming her after myself, only in Greek instead of Latin/English. I'm that vain.
5. My car has a name, too. He's Oliver. He told me this on the way home from the world's worst party just after I graduated high school (yes, I still have the car from high school).

random physical bits
6. I have allergies and allergic asthma. And sadly, I've also smoked on and off at various times.
7. I'm still entranced by the habit of smoking, the paraphenalia and the grace of that slow movement, brownian motion.
8. I'm fat. I'm fat in this really weird way; I have a distinct waist and look much slimmer from the front or back than from the side. If you look at most fat people, they seem slimmer from the side.
9. My body is almost "perfectly" proportioned according to Neoclassical drawing models. Basically, I'm just the right number of heads tall.
10. I have really tiny feet and hands. I wear a something between a size 5 and 6 shoe.
11. I'm totally fixated on my hair. I'm vain. I can hardly walk past a mirror without checking the hair.
12. I've had both a fingernail and a toenail fall off. I'm still wearing a bandaid on the toe.
13. When faced with the reality of wearing a bandaid for a month or more, I went out and bought three different boxes of interestingly styled bandaids (not one flesh-toned strip among them).

tres sportif
14. One of my favorite physical activities is swimming nude. I wish I had a private pool.
15. I get pedicures. This is a recent development, but I'm already addicted.
16. I've also been known to bite my toenails. I'm flexible like that.
17. I love going to baseball games. I get caught up in the action. But I rarely watch games on television (except, occasionally, the World Series).
18. I enjoy riding a bicycle. I wish I had paved trails and wasn't dating the only boy who ever forgot how to ride a bicycle.
19. I can touch my head to my toes. From either direction.

culture. rowr.
20. I make up songs. All. The. Time. I sing for no reason (and not even well).
21. When acting in a show, I become impossibly sensitive. I've been known to do stupid things like storm out of the room.
22. Actually, in college, I had a group of friends who did that sort of thing all the time. We were very emotional and intense.
23. I started learning to bellydance from a video several months ago. I think I'm pretty good at it now, but I'm still afraid to go take a class.
24. I have a history of bad television viewing habits: leaving it on while I do homework, watching soap operas (in middle school), becoming addicted to embarassing shows like "sex in the city".
25. I love dancing of any sort - in clubs, whatever. I took years and years of ballet and tap classes when I was a tot.

we are family
26. I'm an only child. For a long time, I was convinced that I was meant to be a twin, but devoured my twin as a fetus.
27. There are three sets of twins in my extended family.
28. I've lived with my boyfriend for over five years. We're not getting married (at least not soon), and we don't want kids.
29. I barely speak to any of my blood family besides my parents. I envy people who seem to have big, exciting families.

home girl
30. I was born in southeastern Virginia. And I grew up there.
31. I own two purple sofas (they're both really cheap, and were bought at the IKEA).
32. I bought three sets of curtains for our living room windows. They kept looking wrong when I brought them home.
33. I have framed my own art to put on the walls. I've even made art for the express purpose of filling a wall.
34. I have never been out of North America. I don't even have a passport.
35. But I have been to pretty much every southern and mid-atlantic state.
36. My favorite household chore is spraying the shower with that "fresh shower" stuff. I don't like chores. I have an arrangement with my boyfriend in which he does most of them.

art fag
37. I play the harp. I don't play well, despite having studied for years. I can't be troubled to practice, but I do own a full-sized folk harp (slightly smaller than a full harp and with levers, not pedals).
38. I'm secretly terrified that I'm too fat to be an actor. I've said it now, though, so I guess it's not secret anymore.
39. I am a terrible draftsman. I do, however, enjoy lighting design using an autocad-ish computer program.
40. Purple was my favorite color when I was a kid. It's still my favorite color, partly because it doesn't exist in the light spectrum. Most colors of light are described with color temperatures, but purples are descripted as the inverses of greens.
41. I do not write poetry. I don't even really like poetry, to be quite honest.<[> everyone eats
42. I love hollandaise sauce. I like it best on crabcakes.
43. I sometimes eat ice cream every day. You can do that when you've accepted your fatness.
44. I don't drink coffee or soda. Nothing caffeinated and few things that are carbonated. I also don't really eat eggs. These are all things that make me sick.
45. I love greek and mediterranean food. And japanese food. I like light and fresh food, fish, and trying new things.
46. I hate cake. Hate it. Especially white storebought birthday cake. And plain cheesecake, or cheesecake with fruit on top. Or carrot cake.

narf.
47. Prior to my current relationship, the longest I'd ever "dated" someone was a month. And that's stretching the definition of "dated".
48. My best friend in college was a gay boy, a bi boy and a straight butchish girl. This is remarkable only because they were three people who functioned as one entity to me.
49. One of my favorite memories is of sitting in a car watching one of those people walk away in my brown courdoroy jacket.
50. Almost every pre-1997 Indigo Girls song has some sort of nostalgic meaning as a result of those three people.
51. I still vaguely celebrate anniversaries of some friendships starting.

sing it
52. I'm very fond of many show tunes. I like the usual slightly dark musicals that all young thespians are expected to like: Les Miz, Sondheim, Cabaret, Chess.
53. I don't hate Andrew Lloyd Webber.
54. I know the names and key roles of several Broadway musical stars. I even recall their obscure television shows.
55. I believe in the transformative power of musical theatre.
56. I used to describe my musical taste as "lesbian folk rock". Now I listen to a lot more whiny alt-country singers.
57. When I was in my early teens, I was a huge fan of the Monkees: the show, their music, even their somewhat sad comeback. I'm still fond.
58. Around the same time, I also discovered Crowded House and Split Enz. Two of the best pop groups ever.
59. I also have a deep history with Jethro Tull. And an abiding affection for Yes, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles. This is the musical taste I've inherited from my parents.

things that make me itch
60. Dust. Dustmites (little bugs you can inhale!)
61. Mold. Pollen (except not tree pollen)
62. Animal hair & dander. Especially lanolin.
63. Acrylic and cashmere. Itch. Itch.
64. Incense. Except for the mildly fragranced Japanese variety.
65. Any chemicals you might consider putting on your lawn, carpet or clothing.

nine to five
66. I work for what might be the most annoying credit card marketer in America. Upside: they're still hiring people (not many) at a time when it's nearly impossible to get a job in many cities.
67. The first job I ever had was as a clerk at a Hickory Farms in the mall. It's a seasonal store that sells those goofy sausage and cheese gift packs. Once a guy got shot around the corner from my store. Otherwise, it was an okay job.
68. I once had a job running laser disks for my gay literature class in college. I got paid to play with a high-tech mini movie screen. And laser disks, which were fun to hold.
69. I've also been an artist's model. Someone once built a naked me out of tiny bricks and called me a "brickhouse". I was renowned for my non-cliched positions and my ability to hold them. That was my warmest job (due in part to heat lamps).
70. I recently became an officer in my local chapter of PMI (the Project Management Institute). I'm pretty sure this makes me a nerd.

words
71. Despite the fact that I tout the English language as a gloriously dynamic, fluid thing, I am very picky about grammar.
72. I often switch between the English and American spellings of colour and anything that ends in -ize/-ise. I think it's just that I read a lot of English children's books when I was a tot.
73. I can read but not speak French, Latin, and a little Greek. I still occasionally buy and read books in French.
74. I have studied German and Russian, but can't actually say much more than "Hey, what's that?" in either. That's less than I can say in Spanish (which I've never studied).
75. I think I might have been a Russian club groupie in college. I went to a surprising number of their events with my then-roomate.

geek girl
76. I have been known to play D&D. Though I prefer L5R (that's "Legend of the Five Rings" for you uninitiated types).
77. I can also hold forth on the vastly superior structure of the L5R gaming rules versus those used when the system was smushed into D&D. That conversation might include words like "travesty". I kid you not.
78. I have owned three computers in my life. Two were Macs (the first was a C64).
79. I spent a semester of math class (in high school) programming my TI-81 graphing calculator to display a character named George who did a little dance.
80. I once halfway derived the quadratic formula when I was supposed to be taking an algebra test. I forgot the formula, likely as a result of the limited attention paid to class (due to #79).

book smart
81. My favorite books as a child included the first half of the Anne of Green Gables series, Asimov's Robot series, and nearly anything by Katherine Patterson or Lloyd Alexander.
82. I really hate J R R Tolkien. I love Peter Jackson, though, so I'm still a huge fan of the LOTR movies. And I appreciate the vast amounts of trivia retained by serious LOTR fans.
83. The first adult book I read was "The Christmas Carol".
84. The first thing I remember having read to me was a book of short stories by Steven King ("Night Shift", I believe).
85. I'm still convinced that the best short story ever written is Kit Carlson's "Automatic Tiger". My dad used to read me that, too.
86. The last five pages of "Speaker for the Dead" (Orson Scott Card) hold a nostalgic significance for me.
87. I have read nearly everything available (in English) by Barbara Kingsolver and Banana Yoshimoto.

crafty
88. I make my own jewelry. Necklaces, mostly, as I rarely wear anything else jewelry-wise.
89. One of the few gender-stereotyped things I do in our household is sew. I don't remember how to operate a sewing machine (and don't own one, anyhow), but I'm pretty good at handsewing and mending. I also do beadwork and detailing.
90. I've also produced handmade soap and candles. I obviously have a thing with hot wax.
91. My dad and I once took apart a Buick engine and put it back. It worked much better when we were done.

remembered
92. Being crushed after realizing that all the other teenagers saw themselves in "Atlas Shrugged", too. Obviously, we can't all be that impressively competent, and yet that seems to be what everyone thinks.
93. Swimming in an urban hole and locking a cousin in a closet. The day I realized how satisfying it can be to be mean.
94. Biting the crinkly top skin off my fingers after baths. And chewing on Barbies' hands and feet.
95. Sitting in trees reading and pretending to be Pocahontas and Sacajawea, which mostly involved riding our bicycles so fast.
96. Kissing people at parties and that squirrelly feeling you get when you're with someone you don't want to talk to. A silent girl with a tongue ring.
97. Listening to Jello Biafra do spoken word shows and dyeing an asian girl's hair dark purple (impossible without bleach).

some lists
(also known as the "I thought of so many other things I could say just at the end" category)
98. Things I miss about the dot-conomy: free Fresca, big meetings where you sat on the floor, feeling in charge, knee socks at the office, boys in shiny shirts.
99. Schools I've attended: Norfolk Academy, Granby High & the theatre Governor's school (we used to call it GMSA, but they changed it), William & Mary. So, yeah, if you think you know me from school, now you can check.
100. Why corporate America is okay: endless office supplies and utensils, great variety of hot beverages, the ability to disappear when needed, job security, big meetings at amusement parks.