E-go-a-Go-Go
Jan. 15th, 2003 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tzikehSo, y'all can blame ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eliade for this, to an extent. What the hell.
1) The minute I finished my 100 things, I thought I could do another 100 easily, but then I thought, wouldn't that be egotistical of me, but then I thought, hey, that's the whole point and besides, I'm enjoying reading everyone else's so who cares, and then I thought, well, let's not go crazy. And theneliade did a second set of 100 things, and I felt stupid for not just having gone ahead and done it.
2) One of the few aggravating patterns in my life is that I think of saying or doing something clever or original and then I argue myself out of it for ridiculous reasons and then someone else does it later and then I feel stupid and envious that they get the accolades for coming up with it first when actually I did, dammit.
3) This is possibly the only time I feel envy or jealousy. I'm not really an envious or jealous person as a rule. I don't want more than I have or need to be more than I am.
4) I am hyper-organized and anal - a classic type-A personality. If I don't die in an accident or perpetrated act of violence, I will die of a heart attack. I'd bet money on it.
5) The whole hyper-organized thing means that office supply stores send me into fits of ecstasy. Stuff to put other stuff in! Alphabetized and color-coded! Cue the Hallelujah Chorus!
6) My handwriting sucks. Not just bad, like lefties often can be, but terrible. Illegible. Sometimes I can't even read it.
7) Good thing I love to type.
8) I prefer fall and spring to summer and winter. Fall is the absolute best.
9) I have a very narrow range of temperatures in which I am comfortable. I become too cold or too hot much faster than other people. This plays hell with my roommates on occasion.
10) But if I had to choose an extreme, I'd choose cold over hot. You can put on thermal underwear and a turtleneck and a sweater and leggings and sweatpants. Once you've stripped down to naked and it's still hot, what can you do? Nothing.
11) I can tie cherry stems into knots with my tongue. I was doing this long before it was popularized on Twin Peaks.
12) I've taught ballroom dance on and off for 14 years for fun. I love all the steps, but the tango can give me fits of exasperation.
13) I lead well. So well, and have taught for so long, that it is hard for me to follow anyone who doesn't have a really strong lead. However, it's extremely useful for teaching - if I lead a woman in a dance, she can go back to her partner and explain to him why his lead sucks dead donkey dick through a twisty straw, thus saving me from having to do it.
14) I love being in the ocean - jumping and diving through waves. I love being in a pool and doing handstands or going down a slide. I love being in water. And yet I don't like baths - only showers.
15) Until about six years ago, I didn't like drinking water. I didn't think it tasted very good. I cannot explain this.
16) My vocal impressions include Ethel Merman singing Handel, Carol Channing singing The Stones, and Julie Andrews singing The Doors.
17) No, really, I'm not kidding.
18) For someone who doesn't give a good goddamn what anyone thinks of her most of the time, I have an almost incapacitating need for everyone I know to get along with everyone else I know. I want everyone to be happy all the time, and wow, that's just not going to happen, and that leaves me a little sad and a bit fraught.
19) I am 30 pounds heavier than I was through college and most of my 20s. I'd like to change this. At my heaviest a year ago, I was 60 pounds heavier, so hey, halfway there. I look okay, but I don't like the way I feel. And I can't wear all the cool clothes in my closet. Something Must Be Done.
20) I have no cavities.
21) I have green eyes with freckles in them. Some people say freckles in your eyes is a sign of mental illness. This amuses me, and would amuse me further if it were true.
22) In the basement of my parents' house is a "Nip-It" pinball machine - you know, the one in Al's Diner on Happy Days. Why we bought that pinball machine I do not know. It's broken now, but my brother and I played it a lot when we were kids.
23) Also in the basement is a Yamaha organ. That's probably broken too, but that was another thing I played when I was a kid. I took lessons and everything. I haven't thought about that in ages. My legs were juuuuuust long enough to reach the footpedals with my toe. I have no idea what the hell that was about -- I don't think I asked for organ lessons. Bizarre.
24) I can also play the guitar, for limited definitions of "play". Took it up in summer camp, learned a few chords, continued in college a bit, then took more classes as an adult at the Old Town School of Folk Music here in Chicago, which is one of the great cultural resources in this city and I adore it. I don't go there nearly enough.
25) For about two months in 1993, I played the guitar and sang standard folk songs and some comedy songs on weekends at a coffee shop called Cafe Modo Miko. That was sort of interesting. Then I tried writing my own songs, which very quickly convinced me to give up. The coffee shop is gone now.
26) I've been a huge fan of folk music (read - singer/songwriter) for a long time. I work as a volunteer with a radio show here in Chicago which is the oldest folk-music radio show in the U.S. I get to see a lot of terrific concerts for free, and I get to be on the air a bit.
27) One day, I'd really like to learn to play the violin. What a gorgeous sound. But I think practicing with roommates in the house would drive them to homicide.
28) I love the smell of gasoline. In New Jersey, where I grew up, you are not allowed to pump your own gas (it's a union job). When I was a kid, I'd love it when my mom or dad would stop at the gas station because I could just sit in the car and smell the gasoline for a few minutes.
29) I thought I wanted a career - but what I really wanted was a paycheck. I have too many interests and obsessions to make just one thing the focus of my life. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to do what you are for a living, but there is no one job that would be what I am.
30) I'd have liked to have been a professor, though. I'd make a great teacher. Actually, I do teach, all the time, I just don't usually get paid for it. Of course, I don't have to deal with academic politics or turning in grades, either.
31) I was fired from my last job. I interviewed at my current job as a part-time freelancer the same day.
32) I once stood on a Broadway stage and sang. The house was empty and I had no accompaniment, but it was a great feeling.
33) I also once got chosen out of the audience to take part in a sketch in a Broadway play called Fool Moon. That, interestingly, doesn't resonate with me as much, even though it was a sold-out Broadway house applauding for me at the end. It was enjoyable enough, and I had a good time, but it doesn't measure up to the singing.
34) I find it extremely difficult to keep myself from singing along at movie musicals, and sometimes at the theatre or the opera. I imagine I look rather strange to people around me.
35) I can be brought to tears listening to or even thinking about a certain lyric or a particular musical progression, or by imagining deeply OTT fanfiction in my head. I do not, however, cry at births, weddings, funerals, or any other real-life ceremony of passage.
36) Tangentially, I fundamentally do not understand what the big deal is with a huge portion of societal constructs. The whole "my name dies with me if I don't have a child" thing - so what? People create meaning where there is none and then get emotional all out of proportion about it. Drives me crazy.
37) I am judgemental about the arts, and I'm at peace with that. While allowing for a broad range of taste, I firmly believe that there are bases for qualifying writing, or painting, or music, or any art form, as "good" or "bad" within the strictures of that particular form.
38) I will never understand the inability to separate "I like it" from "it's good" and "I don't like it" from "it's bad". There seems to be a huge problem involved in allowing that one enjoys a qualitatively bad thing. There's nothing wrong with liking something that's not well done, or disliking something that's quite good, but self-worth issues get tangled up in the quality of our chosen entertainment. I think the inability to distinguish between personal taste and application of standards is and ever shall be the downfall of every conversation between Them Over There and Us Over Here.
39) If anyone can explain the appeal of Keanu Reeves to me… no, you know what? Never mind. Because no matter what you say, I'll still think he's a bad actor and an unattractive man, and you won't convince me otherwise.
40) Taste baffles me.
41) In that same vein, I don't comprehend why "I find that disgusting and would never do it" immediately becomes "that should be illegal" for so many people. I fundamentally do not get it.
42) I adore humorous or thoughtful quotations to the point of a collector's obsession. I write down funny things I or my friends say and keep them in books. I am happy to use someone else's words to express something I'm feeling or thinking if they've said it better than I ever could.
43) I seem to be congenitally unable to take a good photograph of anything.
44) I smoked cigarettes for one week during finals my junior year of college. Virginia Slims Ultra-Lights. I liked to watch them burn, and I liked to flick the ashes off the cigarettes. Didn't like to smoke too much.
45) In Girl Scouts, while going for my Roller Skating badge (they'd give badges for anything, wouldn't they?), I skated over Debbie Brown's arm and broke it. I got the badge anyway.
46) No women have hit on me since I was 17. I can't tell if this is because I am simply unattractive to women, or because it's somehow honkingly obvious that I'm not gay. I mean, I'm surrounded by gay and bi women. Is there such a thing as het-dar? Where are my goddamned lesbians?
47) I talk aloud to myself at work and at home. I try not to do it in the supermarket or on the street because I don't want to frighten people. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, though, and I think most people who talk aloud to themselves are perfectly sane.
48) I take inordinate pleasure in engaging salesmen at electronics stores in in-depth conversations. Shaking them out of their misconception (consciously held or un-) that women don't know anything about their toys is almost a hobby of mine.
49) I wish I knew more about pretty much everything.
50) I believe in the death penalty as a concept. I believe that there are some crimes which are so despicable and unforgivable that the perpetrators have forfeited their membership in the human race and should be taken out of it.
51) As far as I can tell, this belief is the only one I hold that is not fully 100% head-on leftist liberal.
52) However? Our Trial and Penalty Phase system sucks, and I mean like a Hoover. Governor Ryan here in Illinois was absolutely right to commute every single sentence of the inmates on Death Row. I don't think that the State can, in good conscience, execute anyone at this point while the justice system is such a disaster area of bias and arbitrariness.
53) I can remember my mother coring out Granny Smith apples, filling the hollows with brown sugar and golden raisins, covering them in foil, and baking them in the oven, and then serving them for dessert. I cannot remember my mother making anything else in the kitchen, even though I know she cooked most of our breakfasts and dinners. Those baked apples were really, really good.
54) My brother and I recently discovered that we are both unnerved by certain sounds. My brother still gets a little anxious when he hears keys in a door, and I have to prep myself, if only for a second, before opening my garage. We realize this is because keys in the door meant dad was home, and the garage door going up meant dad was home. Ah, nostalgia.
55) When I was five I tried to trim my brother's eyelashes with a nail scissor. I thought they were too long. I am still astounded that I didn't blind him.
56) When I was little, we had a dog named Kevin. Kevin was a girl. My childhood was really just fucked up.
57) When I was a child, I was physically violent to my brother. I used to strangle him. It is unbelieveable to me now, but I was a miserable kid who was abused by her father and ignored by her mother and shit flows downhill. As an adult, I abhor phsyical violence. Yes, I can still feel a desire to hit someone, if I'm angry enough, but I never act on it. I generally take myself away from that person, find a way to calm down, and then decide what to do next. Adults who resort to hitting someone else in anger are the worst kind of pathetic.
58) I am terrified of surviving something like a nuclear blast. I'd really rather be dead, thank you.
59) Dead bodies do not freak me out.
60) The concept of death doesn't scare me. I think when you're dead, you're dead. There is no punishment, no praise, no you. I just don't want it to hurt - and I'd rather not spend the last minutes or hours of my life waiting to die and knowing it's coming. Going in your sleep is good, or something instantaneous. Still, I'd love to live forever - not to avoid dying, but just to see how it all turns out.
61) I've only had one experience where I thought I was going to die, and it was this past year. I don't remember much about it, but I do remember that as I collapsed on the floor of my bedroom, my brain was going "Man, so, this is it, huh? Okay, well, fuck."
62) I don't want to fucking die before Return of the King comes out, though, I'll tell you that much.
63) I curse a lot. When I was in the opera company, one of my co-choristers once said to me "for someone with a pretty face, you have an ugly mouth." On opening night she gave me a Bible tract.
64) This did not dissuade me from cursing.
65) I swing wildly back and forth on being able to watch surgery on television. Some days I have no problem at all with looking at someone getting cut open, and find it exceptionally interesting. Some days I have to cover my eyes or change the channel.
66) If there is an emergency that requires immediate action, I'm your gal. I can organize people into productive teams like nobody's business. I know who to contact, where to go, and what to do.
67) If something happens that I cannot do anything about - for example, a friend's illness - I'm a disaster area. I often think of Colonel Brandon's line from the film - "Give me an occupation or I shall run mad." I can't stand having things out of my control.
68) When my mother's father was dying, I got the call to "get on a plane as quickly as you can" because they didn't think he'd last much longer. I went to the airport and got on the plane. For two hours, I sat on the plane and read a book. At 6:03, 25 minutes from landing, I had to call my mom at the hospital - I just knew that I had to call. They wouldn't let me use the phone on the plane, as we were in descent. We landed at 6:28 and my father met me at the gate with "Well, you're too late. He died about half an hour ago." Time of death - 6:03.
69) I do not find that mystical, or proof or even vague evidence of higher powers, psychic powers, or any kind of order to the world. I wonder if thousands of years in the future they won't find some kind of scientific reason for things like this. I imagine we will.
70) When I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., I was standing next to a girl and her boyfriend, both high-school age.. We were watching newsreels of the liberation of one of the camps. The young lady turned to her boyfriend and said, "Wow, it looks just like Schindler's List!" After reining in the urge to beat her to death with a television monitor, I said, "I think you mean Schindler's List looked just like this." She stared at me for a moment, and then said "Oh, yeah!" and nodded. I kept walking.
71) I did not lose any relations in the Holocaust; my entire family was here long before the 1940's. I am not acquainted with anyone who survived the Holocaust. Yet walking through two of the barracks doors from Auschwitz which are in that museum made me so viscerally uncomfortable that I had to leave that installation.
72) My first "boyfriend" was named Harold Colton - he and I played chess together when we were seven. We drifted apart; we needed to see other people, and we were attending different grade schools anyway. He is now a multi-millionaire. I am not wracked with regret.
73) At one point in a three-and-a-half-year, on-again off-again relationship with an alcoholic and drug-addict (but fun! and good-looking!), he said "If things were different, I'd have asked you to marry me already" and I said "If things were different, I'd have said yes." That's the closest I've ever come to being engaged.
74) Holy FUCK am I glad that didn't happen. Though at the time, I'd probably have done it.
75) I have remained in various forms of contact with all of my ex-boyfriends except that one. I email them and occasionally see them when they're in town. He was the biggest relationship, though, and the first person I ever fell in love with for real.
76) I wonder where he is.
77) My college acting teacher and I clicked when we first met and have stayed in touch all this time. We are now dear friends 14 years later. Going from being his student to being his friend and equal has been an astounding journey for me. I can still be surprised by realizing that I'm sitting in a restaurant or in his home and talking to him without a sense of deference. I sometimes wish I were a gay man so that he might fall in love with me.
78) I was wait-listed by Yale, but flat-out rejected by Boston University. Go figure.
79) I didn't really want a pseud. I chose it only recently - not to disguise myself from fans, but to keep my name separate from anything that could link me to pornography. I never used a pseud before to hide myself, but since fandom has grown exponentially since "the old days", I decided it was probably safest. Jobs are scarce and I don't need anything out there that might put me in danger.
80) "tzikeh" is a shortened transliteration of my name in Hebrew.
81) I attended Hebrew school and was bat-mitzvahed. It never once occurred to me that I was supposed to believe anything that was being taught about the Bible or God or any of it.
82) I really enjoyed learning the Hebrew alphabet, though - dots and dashes for vowels, and they go under the consonants, and you read it from right to left! It's like secret code.
83) I often obey social niceties for the sake of my friends' peace of mind and continued ease rather than for my own sake.
84) If left to my own devices, I have absolutely no recognizable sleeping pattern. I will sleep for four hours, wake up and do things for sixteen hours, sleep for two hours, wake up and do things for five hours, sleep for thirteen hours, wake up…
85) I love to go out to coffeehouses or cheap food places by myself with a book or a magazine and just eat and read. Sometimes when I go out to eat with friends I forget that I can use two hands on a sandwich or whatever because I'm not holding a book in one.
86) When I was 23, I was mugged one night coming home from the store around the corner from my apartment (not the one I live in now). I flagged down the next car that came by and made the poor guy drive me to the Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away, where I knew the cop cars were. I can't believe I was so stupid as to get into a stranger's car right after being the victim of a crime, but I was not thinking entirely clearly. Besides, the guy driving looked as freaked out by me as I was feeling. He took me right to the cops. I described the mugger and filled out a complaint. A few days later, they found my purse in a lard-filled dumpster behind a restaurant. Gorgeous leather bag I'd bought in Florence - totally destroyed. But that was nothing compared to the fact that the cops knew who did it, knew where he lived, broke into his apartment to get his coat and hat to bring to me to identify, and then never pursued it. Yay Chicago!
87) Once I got back to my apartment, after my trip to the Dunkin Donuts, my knees gave out. That was the first time that I understood the concept of being so emotionally overwhelmed as to be unable to continue standing. I'd always thought that was sort of a hoary cliché before.
88) The scene on the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer always makes me cry.
89) I am not in touch with a single person I went to high school with. One of my favorite cartoons is an RSVP card for a high school reunion that says "Sorry, I'm going to be busy that weekend getting on with my life."
90) I do not keep a journal or a photo album - but I keep comic strips and political cartoons and articles I've cut out. I can look back over what I thought was funny or perceptive from my early college years up to the present. I no longer get the daily paper, which has slowed the collection down.
91) When I was doing the movie-quote meme, I forgot to use "It's so stimulating, being your hat." Hee. I love that line.
92) I adore birthday cake. An offer of buttercream frosting can get me to do almost anything. I come up with reasons other than birthdays to buy it. Cake!
93) In summer camp, during a rainstorm, I decided I would put on a bathing suit and wash my hair in the rain, because that would be cool. This did not work out so well for me, and I had to make my way to the showers with shampoo in my eyes.
94) I can still listen to Styx without irony.
95) I didn't learn how to swallow pills until I was nearly 30. This made for 30 years of unnecessary pain, disgusting liquid medications, and, when I absolutely had to take pills, gagging, chewing, and awfulness. Orange juice will forever mean "aspirin" to me because it was the only thing that could vaguely disguise the taste of aspirin when I had to chew it.
96) But I liked the flavor of liquid penicillin. You know, the pink stuff? I liked that. Also orange Triaminic. Mmmmm.
97) After my breast reduction, I had to take enormous pills for a length of time to prevent infection. I would sit down at a table with the pill, a paring knife, a meat tenderizing hammer, and a television. Using the paring knife and meat tenderizer as mallet and chisel, I would chop the pill in half, then quarters, then eighths, and so on until it was mere slivers. Then I would take each sliver and put it in a spoonful of applesauce or jam and I'd *still* wind up tasting it. The process took about an hour - hence the television.
98) I still can't swallow pills with water. I have to have food in my mouth so that my body thinks it's just eating something, pop the pill in behind it all, and then swallow.
99) I got allergy shots every week for six years. I don't think they did a damned thing, and I outgrew my allergies by college.
100) Penguins make me smile.
eliade for this, to an extent. 1) The minute I finished my 100 things, I thought I could do another 100 easily, but then I thought, wouldn't that be egotistical of me, but then I thought, hey, that's the whole point and besides, I'm enjoying reading everyone else's so who cares, and then I thought, well, let's not go crazy. And then
eliade did a second set of 100 things, and I felt stupid for not just having gone ahead and done it.2) One of the few aggravating patterns in my life is that I think of saying or doing something clever or original and then I argue myself out of it for ridiculous reasons and then someone else does it later and then I feel stupid and envious that they get the accolades for coming up with it first when actually I did, dammit.
3) This is possibly the only time I feel envy or jealousy. I'm not really an envious or jealous person as a rule. I don't want more than I have or need to be more than I am.
4) I am hyper-organized and anal - a classic type-A personality. If I don't die in an accident or perpetrated act of violence, I will die of a heart attack. I'd bet money on it.
5) The whole hyper-organized thing means that office supply stores send me into fits of ecstasy. Stuff to put other stuff in! Alphabetized and color-coded! Cue the Hallelujah Chorus!
6) My handwriting sucks. Not just bad, like lefties often can be, but terrible. Illegible. Sometimes I can't even read it.
7) Good thing I love to type.
8) I prefer fall and spring to summer and winter. Fall is the absolute best.
9) I have a very narrow range of temperatures in which I am comfortable. I become too cold or too hot much faster than other people. This plays hell with my roommates on occasion.
10) But if I had to choose an extreme, I'd choose cold over hot. You can put on thermal underwear and a turtleneck and a sweater and leggings and sweatpants. Once you've stripped down to naked and it's still hot, what can you do? Nothing.
11) I can tie cherry stems into knots with my tongue. I was doing this long before it was popularized on Twin Peaks.
12) I've taught ballroom dance on and off for 14 years for fun. I love all the steps, but the tango can give me fits of exasperation.
13) I lead well. So well, and have taught for so long, that it is hard for me to follow anyone who doesn't have a really strong lead. However, it's extremely useful for teaching - if I lead a woman in a dance, she can go back to her partner and explain to him why his lead sucks dead donkey dick through a twisty straw, thus saving me from having to do it.
14) I love being in the ocean - jumping and diving through waves. I love being in a pool and doing handstands or going down a slide. I love being in water. And yet I don't like baths - only showers.
15) Until about six years ago, I didn't like drinking water. I didn't think it tasted very good. I cannot explain this.
16) My vocal impressions include Ethel Merman singing Handel, Carol Channing singing The Stones, and Julie Andrews singing The Doors.
17) No, really, I'm not kidding.
18) For someone who doesn't give a good goddamn what anyone thinks of her most of the time, I have an almost incapacitating need for everyone I know to get along with everyone else I know. I want everyone to be happy all the time, and wow, that's just not going to happen, and that leaves me a little sad and a bit fraught.
19) I am 30 pounds heavier than I was through college and most of my 20s. I'd like to change this. At my heaviest a year ago, I was 60 pounds heavier, so hey, halfway there. I look okay, but I don't like the way I feel. And I can't wear all the cool clothes in my closet. Something Must Be Done.
20) I have no cavities.
21) I have green eyes with freckles in them. Some people say freckles in your eyes is a sign of mental illness. This amuses me, and would amuse me further if it were true.
22) In the basement of my parents' house is a "Nip-It" pinball machine - you know, the one in Al's Diner on Happy Days. Why we bought that pinball machine I do not know. It's broken now, but my brother and I played it a lot when we were kids.
23) Also in the basement is a Yamaha organ. That's probably broken too, but that was another thing I played when I was a kid. I took lessons and everything. I haven't thought about that in ages. My legs were juuuuuust long enough to reach the footpedals with my toe. I have no idea what the hell that was about -- I don't think I asked for organ lessons. Bizarre.
24) I can also play the guitar, for limited definitions of "play". Took it up in summer camp, learned a few chords, continued in college a bit, then took more classes as an adult at the Old Town School of Folk Music here in Chicago, which is one of the great cultural resources in this city and I adore it. I don't go there nearly enough.
25) For about two months in 1993, I played the guitar and sang standard folk songs and some comedy songs on weekends at a coffee shop called Cafe Modo Miko. That was sort of interesting. Then I tried writing my own songs, which very quickly convinced me to give up. The coffee shop is gone now.
26) I've been a huge fan of folk music (read - singer/songwriter) for a long time. I work as a volunteer with a radio show here in Chicago which is the oldest folk-music radio show in the U.S. I get to see a lot of terrific concerts for free, and I get to be on the air a bit.
27) One day, I'd really like to learn to play the violin. What a gorgeous sound. But I think practicing with roommates in the house would drive them to homicide.
28) I love the smell of gasoline. In New Jersey, where I grew up, you are not allowed to pump your own gas (it's a union job). When I was a kid, I'd love it when my mom or dad would stop at the gas station because I could just sit in the car and smell the gasoline for a few minutes.
29) I thought I wanted a career - but what I really wanted was a paycheck. I have too many interests and obsessions to make just one thing the focus of my life. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to do what you are for a living, but there is no one job that would be what I am.
30) I'd have liked to have been a professor, though. I'd make a great teacher. Actually, I do teach, all the time, I just don't usually get paid for it. Of course, I don't have to deal with academic politics or turning in grades, either.
31) I was fired from my last job. I interviewed at my current job as a part-time freelancer the same day.
32) I once stood on a Broadway stage and sang. The house was empty and I had no accompaniment, but it was a great feeling.
33) I also once got chosen out of the audience to take part in a sketch in a Broadway play called Fool Moon. That, interestingly, doesn't resonate with me as much, even though it was a sold-out Broadway house applauding for me at the end. It was enjoyable enough, and I had a good time, but it doesn't measure up to the singing.
34) I find it extremely difficult to keep myself from singing along at movie musicals, and sometimes at the theatre or the opera. I imagine I look rather strange to people around me.
35) I can be brought to tears listening to or even thinking about a certain lyric or a particular musical progression, or by imagining deeply OTT fanfiction in my head. I do not, however, cry at births, weddings, funerals, or any other real-life ceremony of passage.
36) Tangentially, I fundamentally do not understand what the big deal is with a huge portion of societal constructs. The whole "my name dies with me if I don't have a child" thing - so what? People create meaning where there is none and then get emotional all out of proportion about it. Drives me crazy.
37) I am judgemental about the arts, and I'm at peace with that. While allowing for a broad range of taste, I firmly believe that there are bases for qualifying writing, or painting, or music, or any art form, as "good" or "bad" within the strictures of that particular form.
38) I will never understand the inability to separate "I like it" from "it's good" and "I don't like it" from "it's bad". There seems to be a huge problem involved in allowing that one enjoys a qualitatively bad thing. There's nothing wrong with liking something that's not well done, or disliking something that's quite good, but self-worth issues get tangled up in the quality of our chosen entertainment. I think the inability to distinguish between personal taste and application of standards is and ever shall be the downfall of every conversation between Them Over There and Us Over Here.
39) If anyone can explain the appeal of Keanu Reeves to me… no, you know what? Never mind. Because no matter what you say, I'll still think he's a bad actor and an unattractive man, and you won't convince me otherwise.
40) Taste baffles me.
41) In that same vein, I don't comprehend why "I find that disgusting and would never do it" immediately becomes "that should be illegal" for so many people. I fundamentally do not get it.
42) I adore humorous or thoughtful quotations to the point of a collector's obsession. I write down funny things I or my friends say and keep them in books. I am happy to use someone else's words to express something I'm feeling or thinking if they've said it better than I ever could.
43) I seem to be congenitally unable to take a good photograph of anything.
44) I smoked cigarettes for one week during finals my junior year of college. Virginia Slims Ultra-Lights. I liked to watch them burn, and I liked to flick the ashes off the cigarettes. Didn't like to smoke too much.
45) In Girl Scouts, while going for my Roller Skating badge (they'd give badges for anything, wouldn't they?), I skated over Debbie Brown's arm and broke it. I got the badge anyway.
46) No women have hit on me since I was 17. I can't tell if this is because I am simply unattractive to women, or because it's somehow honkingly obvious that I'm not gay. I mean, I'm surrounded by gay and bi women. Is there such a thing as het-dar? Where are my goddamned lesbians?
47) I talk aloud to myself at work and at home. I try not to do it in the supermarket or on the street because I don't want to frighten people. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, though, and I think most people who talk aloud to themselves are perfectly sane.
48) I take inordinate pleasure in engaging salesmen at electronics stores in in-depth conversations. Shaking them out of their misconception (consciously held or un-) that women don't know anything about their toys is almost a hobby of mine.
49) I wish I knew more about pretty much everything.
50) I believe in the death penalty as a concept. I believe that there are some crimes which are so despicable and unforgivable that the perpetrators have forfeited their membership in the human race and should be taken out of it.
51) As far as I can tell, this belief is the only one I hold that is not fully 100% head-on leftist liberal.
52) However? Our Trial and Penalty Phase system sucks, and I mean like a Hoover. Governor Ryan here in Illinois was absolutely right to commute every single sentence of the inmates on Death Row. I don't think that the State can, in good conscience, execute anyone at this point while the justice system is such a disaster area of bias and arbitrariness.
53) I can remember my mother coring out Granny Smith apples, filling the hollows with brown sugar and golden raisins, covering them in foil, and baking them in the oven, and then serving them for dessert. I cannot remember my mother making anything else in the kitchen, even though I know she cooked most of our breakfasts and dinners. Those baked apples were really, really good.
54) My brother and I recently discovered that we are both unnerved by certain sounds. My brother still gets a little anxious when he hears keys in a door, and I have to prep myself, if only for a second, before opening my garage. We realize this is because keys in the door meant dad was home, and the garage door going up meant dad was home. Ah, nostalgia.
55) When I was five I tried to trim my brother's eyelashes with a nail scissor. I thought they were too long. I am still astounded that I didn't blind him.
56) When I was little, we had a dog named Kevin. Kevin was a girl. My childhood was really just fucked up.
57) When I was a child, I was physically violent to my brother. I used to strangle him. It is unbelieveable to me now, but I was a miserable kid who was abused by her father and ignored by her mother and shit flows downhill. As an adult, I abhor phsyical violence. Yes, I can still feel a desire to hit someone, if I'm angry enough, but I never act on it. I generally take myself away from that person, find a way to calm down, and then decide what to do next. Adults who resort to hitting someone else in anger are the worst kind of pathetic.
58) I am terrified of surviving something like a nuclear blast. I'd really rather be dead, thank you.
59) Dead bodies do not freak me out.
60) The concept of death doesn't scare me. I think when you're dead, you're dead. There is no punishment, no praise, no you. I just don't want it to hurt - and I'd rather not spend the last minutes or hours of my life waiting to die and knowing it's coming. Going in your sleep is good, or something instantaneous. Still, I'd love to live forever - not to avoid dying, but just to see how it all turns out.
61) I've only had one experience where I thought I was going to die, and it was this past year. I don't remember much about it, but I do remember that as I collapsed on the floor of my bedroom, my brain was going "Man, so, this is it, huh? Okay, well, fuck."
62) I don't want to fucking die before Return of the King comes out, though, I'll tell you that much.
63) I curse a lot. When I was in the opera company, one of my co-choristers once said to me "for someone with a pretty face, you have an ugly mouth." On opening night she gave me a Bible tract.
64) This did not dissuade me from cursing.
65) I swing wildly back and forth on being able to watch surgery on television. Some days I have no problem at all with looking at someone getting cut open, and find it exceptionally interesting. Some days I have to cover my eyes or change the channel.
66) If there is an emergency that requires immediate action, I'm your gal. I can organize people into productive teams like nobody's business. I know who to contact, where to go, and what to do.
67) If something happens that I cannot do anything about - for example, a friend's illness - I'm a disaster area. I often think of Colonel Brandon's line from the film - "Give me an occupation or I shall run mad." I can't stand having things out of my control.
68) When my mother's father was dying, I got the call to "get on a plane as quickly as you can" because they didn't think he'd last much longer. I went to the airport and got on the plane. For two hours, I sat on the plane and read a book. At 6:03, 25 minutes from landing, I had to call my mom at the hospital - I just knew that I had to call. They wouldn't let me use the phone on the plane, as we were in descent. We landed at 6:28 and my father met me at the gate with "Well, you're too late. He died about half an hour ago." Time of death - 6:03.
69) I do not find that mystical, or proof or even vague evidence of higher powers, psychic powers, or any kind of order to the world. I wonder if thousands of years in the future they won't find some kind of scientific reason for things like this. I imagine we will.
70) When I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., I was standing next to a girl and her boyfriend, both high-school age.. We were watching newsreels of the liberation of one of the camps. The young lady turned to her boyfriend and said, "Wow, it looks just like Schindler's List!" After reining in the urge to beat her to death with a television monitor, I said, "I think you mean Schindler's List looked just like this." She stared at me for a moment, and then said "Oh, yeah!" and nodded. I kept walking.
71) I did not lose any relations in the Holocaust; my entire family was here long before the 1940's. I am not acquainted with anyone who survived the Holocaust. Yet walking through two of the barracks doors from Auschwitz which are in that museum made me so viscerally uncomfortable that I had to leave that installation.
72) My first "boyfriend" was named Harold Colton - he and I played chess together when we were seven. We drifted apart; we needed to see other people, and we were attending different grade schools anyway. He is now a multi-millionaire. I am not wracked with regret.
73) At one point in a three-and-a-half-year, on-again off-again relationship with an alcoholic and drug-addict (but fun! and good-looking!), he said "If things were different, I'd have asked you to marry me already" and I said "If things were different, I'd have said yes." That's the closest I've ever come to being engaged.
74) Holy FUCK am I glad that didn't happen. Though at the time, I'd probably have done it.
75) I have remained in various forms of contact with all of my ex-boyfriends except that one. I email them and occasionally see them when they're in town. He was the biggest relationship, though, and the first person I ever fell in love with for real.
76) I wonder where he is.
77) My college acting teacher and I clicked when we first met and have stayed in touch all this time. We are now dear friends 14 years later. Going from being his student to being his friend and equal has been an astounding journey for me. I can still be surprised by realizing that I'm sitting in a restaurant or in his home and talking to him without a sense of deference. I sometimes wish I were a gay man so that he might fall in love with me.
78) I was wait-listed by Yale, but flat-out rejected by Boston University. Go figure.
79) I didn't really want a pseud. I chose it only recently - not to disguise myself from fans, but to keep my name separate from anything that could link me to pornography. I never used a pseud before to hide myself, but since fandom has grown exponentially since "the old days", I decided it was probably safest. Jobs are scarce and I don't need anything out there that might put me in danger.
80) "tzikeh" is a shortened transliteration of my name in Hebrew.
81) I attended Hebrew school and was bat-mitzvahed. It never once occurred to me that I was supposed to believe anything that was being taught about the Bible or God or any of it.
82) I really enjoyed learning the Hebrew alphabet, though - dots and dashes for vowels, and they go under the consonants, and you read it from right to left! It's like secret code.
83) I often obey social niceties for the sake of my friends' peace of mind and continued ease rather than for my own sake.
84) If left to my own devices, I have absolutely no recognizable sleeping pattern. I will sleep for four hours, wake up and do things for sixteen hours, sleep for two hours, wake up and do things for five hours, sleep for thirteen hours, wake up…
85) I love to go out to coffeehouses or cheap food places by myself with a book or a magazine and just eat and read. Sometimes when I go out to eat with friends I forget that I can use two hands on a sandwich or whatever because I'm not holding a book in one.
86) When I was 23, I was mugged one night coming home from the store around the corner from my apartment (not the one I live in now). I flagged down the next car that came by and made the poor guy drive me to the Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away, where I knew the cop cars were. I can't believe I was so stupid as to get into a stranger's car right after being the victim of a crime, but I was not thinking entirely clearly. Besides, the guy driving looked as freaked out by me as I was feeling. He took me right to the cops. I described the mugger and filled out a complaint. A few days later, they found my purse in a lard-filled dumpster behind a restaurant. Gorgeous leather bag I'd bought in Florence - totally destroyed. But that was nothing compared to the fact that the cops knew who did it, knew where he lived, broke into his apartment to get his coat and hat to bring to me to identify, and then never pursued it. Yay Chicago!
87) Once I got back to my apartment, after my trip to the Dunkin Donuts, my knees gave out. That was the first time that I understood the concept of being so emotionally overwhelmed as to be unable to continue standing. I'd always thought that was sort of a hoary cliché before.
88) The scene on the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer always makes me cry.
89) I am not in touch with a single person I went to high school with. One of my favorite cartoons is an RSVP card for a high school reunion that says "Sorry, I'm going to be busy that weekend getting on with my life."
90) I do not keep a journal or a photo album - but I keep comic strips and political cartoons and articles I've cut out. I can look back over what I thought was funny or perceptive from my early college years up to the present. I no longer get the daily paper, which has slowed the collection down.
91) When I was doing the movie-quote meme, I forgot to use "It's so stimulating, being your hat." Hee. I love that line.
92) I adore birthday cake. An offer of buttercream frosting can get me to do almost anything. I come up with reasons other than birthdays to buy it. Cake!
93) In summer camp, during a rainstorm, I decided I would put on a bathing suit and wash my hair in the rain, because that would be cool. This did not work out so well for me, and I had to make my way to the showers with shampoo in my eyes.
94) I can still listen to Styx without irony.
95) I didn't learn how to swallow pills until I was nearly 30. This made for 30 years of unnecessary pain, disgusting liquid medications, and, when I absolutely had to take pills, gagging, chewing, and awfulness. Orange juice will forever mean "aspirin" to me because it was the only thing that could vaguely disguise the taste of aspirin when I had to chew it.
96) But I liked the flavor of liquid penicillin. You know, the pink stuff? I liked that. Also orange Triaminic. Mmmmm.
97) After my breast reduction, I had to take enormous pills for a length of time to prevent infection. I would sit down at a table with the pill, a paring knife, a meat tenderizing hammer, and a television. Using the paring knife and meat tenderizer as mallet and chisel, I would chop the pill in half, then quarters, then eighths, and so on until it was mere slivers. Then I would take each sliver and put it in a spoonful of applesauce or jam and I'd *still* wind up tasting it. The process took about an hour - hence the television.
98) I still can't swallow pills with water. I have to have food in my mouth so that my body thinks it's just eating something, pop the pill in behind it all, and then swallow.
99) I got allergy shots every week for six years. I don't think they did a damned thing, and I outgrew my allergies by college.
100) Penguins make me smile.
