Sunday, November 15, 2009

Here's a Recycled Post

I've been really sick for days, so I'm pretty lethargic and have nothing interesting or exciting to talk about. But my blog is getting stale. So here is a repost, from a note I filled out on Facebook a few months ago.

25 Random things about me

1. It took me 10 years to finish my first 2 years of college and 2 years to finish the last 2.

2. When I was a kid my mom would sometimes pay me 5 cents an hour to stay completely quiet.

3. When I lived in Florida I had a wild lizard that lived in my room. Sometimes he would scamper across my legs when I would lay face down on my bed and totally freak me out. He/she ate any palmetto bugs (giant flying cockroaches) that dared to venture into my room. I found him dead one day while I was cleaning my room, his little claws curled around some empty squares in the latch hook kit I was working on at the time. Apparently he did his job too well. I screamed and screamed, and ran to sob to my mom. After she calmed me down, I asked if I could still have the 5 cents she was paying me to be quiet for that hour. She agreed.

4. When I was 12, my dad agreed to pay me 10 cents for every dandilion weed I pulled out of the yard. The first day, he owed me 60 bucks. By the time I finally got the yard weed free, he had reduced my wages to one cent for every ten weeds pulled, and I had still practically bankrupted him.

5. My hair color has been blonde, brown, black, yellow, green, red, blue, and purple.

6. I pierced my own belly button with a safety pin in 1990, way before piercing was available on every corner. My mom's comment to me was "Where is your brain? Is that in your navel too?"

7. When I was in second grade, I told my mom I wanted a mohawk for Halloween. She didn't know how to do one, so she tried to do it with Vaseline. It took weeks for the greasy stuff to completely wash out of my hair.

8. I'm not sure how old I was when I found out about Chapstick. It's entirely possible that it wasn't until I was an adult. As a kid, my mom sent me to school with a spoonful of Vaseline wrapped in a sandwich baggie. I was so embarrassed that I would hide it in my coat back in the little coat closet cubbie and only sneak back there to dip my finger into my spoon when the pain from my dry, cracked lips became unbearable.

9. My parents used to take long walks around the neighborhood and bring back all sorts of stuff they found. I still have Reeses Peanut Butter Cup t-shirts that they got with all the candy wrappers they found and redeemed. Almost all their spoons are mismatched, because at least once a week they would find an abandoned spoon that they would bring home and add to the silverware mix. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that those spoons were probably discarded drug paraphenelia. I wonder if my parents ever figured that out, or if they thought people were just walking around, eating lots of yogurt or something.

10. Most of my old friends are on Myspace, while my new friends are on Facebook. Some are both places. The ones that are on both I am sure are going to be my friends forever.

11. When I die, I want my last words to be "You girls were the best thing that ever happened to me." Unfortunately, that would kind of imply that my daughters would watch me die, which I don't want them to have to do if they don't want to.

12. I only recently discovered that I like the band Journey, and have always liked them. It really made me reevaluate who I am, as a person.

13. I'm not a bad cook, and if I have a recipe, I'm actually quite good at it. I just hate doing it. Before my kids were born, I had made dinner for my husband less than 10 times...and we had been married more than 9 years. Now I cook all the time. My oldest daughter almost always says "Thank you Mommy making yummy dinner." That totally makes it worthwhile.

14. I'm terrified of bees, but not because I'm afraid of being stung. I have been stung, and it really doesn't hurt that bad. It's because they're so unpredictable. There's just no way to know what a bee is going to do. They can turn on a dime!

15. When I was 9 or so, I became deathly afraid of food, and refused to eat for several months. It got to the point where I became afraid of ingesting anything, including my own saliva, and I would spit constantly.

16. Sometimes I wrack my brain, trying to figure out if I have any other personalities living inside my head, that are doing things that I'm unaware of.

17. I wrote a full length novel when I was 15 but never attempted to get it published.

18. My favorite car I ever had was a 1990 Toyota Celica, but I got rid of it because it reminded me too much of somebody that I missed a lot.

19. I started smoking when I was 17 because my boyfriend at the time was going to break up with me because I was "too good." I didn't really feel like doing drugs, or becoming a big drinker, or stealing stuff, but I didn't want to break up with him, so I figured smoking would sully my image enough. We lasted 2 more months. My relationship with cigarettes lasted 10 years.

20. I violently hate commercials for mouthwash. I don't like people swishing their mouths at me and making googley eyes. Who does that when they're rinsing? Upon seeing a commercial like that, my gut clenches, and my instant reaction is go grip something tightly and rear back as though to throw it at the TV.

21. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from college. When I start my master's degree, I am tempted to intentionally do poorly in at least one early class, so that the pressure to achieve super duper grades is taken off the table right out of the gate. I like the idea, but I don't think I'm the type of person who can actually do that.

22. When I was in junior high, one of my teachers was too lazy to collect papers and grade them, so she had us exchange our papers and she'd call out the answers. We'd score each other's papers, then hand them back to the owner. Then she's call out our names and we'd say what our grade was (A, B, C, D, or F). If you announced you'd gotten an A, you were just *asking* to get beat up after school. I physically couldn't mark a wrong answer though, I just couldn't do it. I would get an A on the test, but when it came time to announce my grade, I would always say "C." My momma didn't raise no dummies.

23. Every activity I involve my daughters in has to pass one test: "Is this something I wish my parents had done for me?" If the answer is yes, I do it. I am 100% CERTAIN that when my daughters are adults, I will find out that there were all sorts of things they wanted to do that they felt deprived of.

24. I wish I had taken an interest in playing music the way my brother did when I was young. We were always entirely different people though (though we loved each other very much and got along great). When he was about 4 and I was 3, my mom asked us when we wanted to be when we grew up. My brother said he wanted to be a draw-er. I said I wanted to be a tracer. I think that says a lot about the people we were, and the people we are today. He's always been more of a creator, while I toe the line.

25. I felt really lucky that I didn't have to give birth the normal way. A lot of women feel that they're not complete without going through the act of childbirth. I think those women are crazy. I felt like I'd hit the jackpot when my babies both turned out to be breech. I had considered just asking my doctor if I could have a c-section with my first baby, but I really don't like requesting medical procedures. Turns out I didn't have to. I do wish we had known earlier about M though. I hate to think of her suffering in there.

4 comments:

  1. Interesting. Hope you feel better soon. If it's the same flu I had, you'll still be coughing weeks from now. (Sorry -- honesty -- tough love, you know.)

    I videotaped a "You're the best thing that ever happened to me" for my kids to watch after I die. I wanted to do it before I got so old they wouldn't have any memories of what I looked like prior to being ancient (assuming I live awhile longer).

    Get well!

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  2. Penny!
    I love this post. Get better. Muah!

    How come we aren't friends on facebook?

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  3. I'm so glad you feel better! Now if I could get all of my kids well, too.

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  4. Oh, BTW. If you had posted #2 and #3 at my blog today, you would have won. Hands down.

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