100 things

[jinian]

They just started popping into my head this morning, so I figured I'd write them down.

• Fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt makes me unreasonably happy.


• I dislike the smell of lilies.


• I'm sort of a low-grade computer geek. I can't code worth a damn, but it usually takes me a minute to figure out that "DOS" is also a word in Spanish.


• It's generally difficult for me to be around people for long periods.


• Tonari no Yamada-kun is the only Studio Ghibli movie that hasn't made me at least come close to crying.


• I also cried over the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, but I was fourteen and had crushes on them.


• When I was in kindergarten, I was allowed to take higher-level books out of the library. Unfortunately, not everyone knew this, and once I was enraged to have been sent home with a book about a cartoon moose.


• When I was five or six, I had a bilateral otoplasty (cosmetic surgery to change outsticking ears to flatter ears). I remember Brian asking his mother, "Is she going to die?", which one might think he would have asked outside the room. My Halloween costume had an extra-big head piece to cover the bandaging.


• When I was in elementary school, I once demanded to see the spider that a boy was chasing a girl with. He didn't have one.


• When I was still in single-digit ages, my parents put in a lot of effort to help me make the herb garden I desperately wanted. Later, and I don't remember how, a red trillium grew there. I found out last year that it was of a species not found north of southern Oregon. (My childhood home was in Poulsbo, WA.)


• When I was in junior high, the kids at the bus stop called me Nature Girl because I didn't wear makeup or mess with my hair.


• When I was sixteen, I took a three-week summer course in World Geopolitics, because the Etymology course was full. I got in trouble for throwing fluorescent paint into the fountain.


• Except for school assignments when I was very young, I've never written a complete work of fiction.


• My highest grade in a class was 122%. It was seventh or eighth grade biology, and drawings meant extra credit.


• Every December when I lived with my parents, my mother and I would sing Christmas carols in the car whenever the two of us drove anywhere. This year, we emailed the lyrics to "Good King Wenceslas" back and forth.


• I don't have any tattoos yet, but both of my parents have gotten them since I moved out.


• I learned to drive stick-shift before automatic.


• About 2/3 of my hair has been permanently dyed light auburn. The reddish has not come out despite dye-overs of ashier colors, and my hair has started growing in cinnamony.


• I don't like nuts, bell peppers, or mangoes. I have been known to appreciate onions, but it is rare.


• My sense of pitch is not very good, but I sing reasonably well if I've practiced a song lots.


• I have vivid recollections of what it feels like to receive cuts, and sometimes I feel injuries that other people tell me about.


• My first love's name was Mary Frances.


• My dad taught me to trap birds for banding and release and to catch snakes without hurting them.


• There is at least one thing that no one knows about me and that I never plan to tell anyone. I don't like reading about things similar to it.


• I have been tempted to have a baby just to get rid of my awful menstrual cramps.


• I'm allergic to cigarette smoke.


• I am still trying to get over being proud of my IQ after testing off the scale at five and much more reasonably (crushed!) in junior high.


• The only bone I've ever broken was a pinkie toe. I'm not sure any more which one it was. I do remember I couldn't ski on it, damn it all.


• Vib-Ribbon is my favorite console game ever. Most of the Final Fantasies are right up there.


• The whole story doesn't belong here, but ask me to tell you how I lost my virginity sometime. It's funny.


• I think abortion should be safe and legal. I don't think I could bring myself to have one, but I don't think I can know what I would do.


• I've had to take the morning-after pill, and I felt really bad about it the second time. Still not sure what to do to prevent future stuff.


• My people do not shout unless they're out of control, so I'm very frightened and likely to shut down if people shout at or near me.


• Despite being very good at spelling, I have never been in a spelling bee. I came close once, but misspoke, and, though the judge was willing to let me try again, I refused to go on.


• I'm getting more afraid of things as I get older. Takeoffs and landings worry me a bit these days, and I've been startled by enough spiders that I don't really like them now.


• Breakfast is basically the same thing every day, but two meals in a row of the same thing will annoy me.


• My handwriting is partly natural and partly made up of features that I've liked in others' writing and practiced deliberately.


• If it's wish-fulfillment for bookish children, I'll read it.


• I've been off my home continent twice, once in each direction.


• I was spanked when I was little (and bad, of course), and I once had the wooden spoon broken over my ass. Didn't hurt a bit. Buns of steel!


• Recently I have started to be able to get rid of bad books rather than reading them all the way through.


• I detest incorrectly spelled, badly punctuated, and ungrammatical signs, and I sometimes proofread books and send the notes to the publisher.


• Public transportation is great and I love it. I am very much in favor of a decent train system for America. It's ridiculous that people in some places truly can't live without multiple cars.


• I was taught how to shoot guns when small and have ambivalent feelings about it now.


• The little gray aliens used to frighten me badly. I'm largely over it, "thanks" to my ex-fiance, who was crazy about them and kept exposing me to media showing them.


• I usually sleep with either my stuffed cat Lockheed or my stuffed clownfish. A live cat or my sweetie can generally usurp this position despite not being quite so good for squishing between my breasts.


• The past few years have shown a trend of reclaiming cuteness. Let us hope that I have reached its apex -- being a big Cardcaptor Sakura fangirl with a Hello Kitty dice-bag, there's not much room to get cuter.


• I still have a stash of old notes written between me and my friends from junior high and high school, including one in which I discussed with someone whether we would have sex after prom and another in which my best friend broke up with me. (My reaction to reading the latter now is "go her!", since I was actually behaving pretty badly.)


• When I was engaged, we planned to take a new name together. I still don't tell anyone what it was, though my ex has since changed names and uses it.


• I somehow slipped under the teasing radar for nearly everything when I was at school. The first person I really dated mentioned that I wasn't stuck-up like those other girls from the accelerated classes, but I still have no idea why he thought that.


• I am against legal marriage in its current state. There are valid reasons for people to do it, and it's up to them, but I think the laws badly need reform. Unfortunately, I have been unable to muster my arguments lately due to weird feelings about my own relationship.


• For me, sugar is both an analgesic and slightly addictive.


• I really don't want to have a day job any more, but I can't figure out how to ditch it without being miserable.


• I can't really describe what's so fulfilling about shoujo manga, except that it is sort of almost the same thing that lives in Emma Bull's books, but more so.


• Artificial sweeteners usually taste bad to me.


• I am still annoyed that I couldn't take any Asian languages in high school.


• I haven't been to the dentist in a very long time. I need to go, but I'm afraid they'll yell at me.


• I go blissed-out over music, scenery, the feeling of the air, touching loved ones, biking, and stretching.


• My cat's breath smells like cat food.


• I feel like a wimp for being so sensitive to shouting when plenty of people were actually abused as children.


• I feel bad for liking the girly things that I do, too.


• I used to self-injure, but, again, I feel like a wimp saying, because I was never in any danger.


• After reading the novelization of the movie Alien, I slept with the covers over my mouth for years. I still do, mostly.


• When I was little, I never thought I'd know real live authors.


• My only cons so far are alt.polycons, but the way Wim keeps going "ooh, Toronto" I think I may end up at a Worldcon.


• I like anime pr0n. The only exceptions are the really crashingly stupid stuff and the ones with realistic rape.


• When my parents had a streetlight put in the cul-de-sac outside my childhood home, I was incredibly annoyed. Years earlier, I sulked for days when the pavers ripped all the bushes out of that area.


• The first dog I remember having was a blind black Lab named Slick. He was very intrepid. We think that someone found him exploring, as he was wont to do, and picked up the poor little blind doggie because he was clearly lost. Bah.


• The first cat I remember having was Homer. He was sweet, and people big enough to do so could hold him in their arms and have long eye contact with him. He died young from leukemia, and my parents didn't tell me where he had gone for a long time.


• I've never dated a girl, but one of the people I did date is a girl now.


• My mother thinks it's really funny to deliberately startle people. I have always disagreed, and once punched her when she did it. (I pulled it, but I was tempted not to; I could have stopped entirely but still did it because I knew I'd get away with it.)


• I'm usually reading more than one book. I don't even know how many I'm partway through right now. Does Goedel, Escher, Bach count?


• I've won Chip's Challenge without skipping levels.


• Once I got in trouble for practicing rock-throwing with a sling in the field at school. It was for a book report.


• I have just learned to knit. I can crochet a straight line, but that's it so far. I've been able to sew and embroider since I was pretty small.


• I eat the raw cookie dough by preference.


• I skipped first grade, but wish I'd done early college entrance instead.


• Sometimes I smack the cats because I've lost my temper. I'm getting better, and I've never injured them, but I feel terrible about it.


• Until I was past 20, none of my mother's self-image trouble had manifested in me. More recently, I've discovered just how much of it has been lying in wait.


• Every now and then, I see the beauty in a city the way I do in a setting with no humans. It doesn't happen often, though.


• My mom pretends that she once came outside and untied me from a tree after the boys I was playing with had tied me up and run off. She says I told her I liked it.


• I don't like to touch most people.


• It's not so much that I want to own a house, though that would be fine; I really want to own a yard.


• I'm extremely pleased to have white hairs in my bangs. They're wavy!


• I have mild SAD. It is muchly helped by a light box, but I still need to sleep lots in winter.


• Most of the times I've been stopped by police while driving, I've been able to get off with a warning. It's only when I'm somewhere that would be inconvenient to go back to for traffic court that I get tickets.


• I haven't driven on a regular basis in almost ten years. I haven't owned a car in two.


• I didn't get stuck in the ditch at the boat ramp while making out. I got stuck in the ditch at the boat ramp while telling my best friend about it several days later.


• Once I spray-painted an M on a sign so that it said "WATCH FOR MICE".


• Green is my favorite color, but these days I even like orange okay.


• Foreshortening is my nemesis.


• I won't usually drink regular American Coke, but Vanilla Coke is yum and Canadian Coke is wonderful.


• Having long hair makes me happy, but I have to dye it interesting colors lest I grow bored.


• The height-estimates done when I was one and two years old claimed that I'd be six feet tall like my mother. I'm 5'8".


• I like books better than I like people, on the whole.


• Wearing bras is more comfortable than not. Wearing panties is less comfortable than not.


• Most of my scars are from things that never bled or bled very little.


• My dad and I agree on politics. This makes him very happy. Also me, since I don't much like arguing.


• I could almost always use a massage, but the list of people who are allowed to give them to me is small.


• I am easily amused.

some of these were inspired by rivka, mactavish, baratron, clairaide, elynne, and kalmn (on her blog)