100 Things About Me
Random Physical Stuff.
1. I look exactly like my mother, who looks exactly like her mother, who looks …….. You get the idea. I have a picture of my great great grandmother and it looks like me in costume. We call it the Amazonian uber-gene. Doesn’t matter what father’s genetic material dilutes it, it comes out.
2. I have a great scar on my lower back. Whenever people ask about it, I make up a story like I was attacked by a shark, or that I hit a tree skydiving. The truth is horribly prosaic – when I was three years old I tripped off a curb and fell on the hot jagged muffler pipe of an old car, leaving behind a combo cut/burn. That was the same year I fell out of a wagon and broke my collarbone.
3. I have small hands.
4. I’m 5’3 in thick soled shoes. The shortest person in a short family. I can sit cross-legged in a coach airline seat.
5. I’ve had every hair length from an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut (at least that’s what I asked for, people said my hair looked cute, but no one said I looked like Audrey) to down past my butt.
6. When I take the Jr. Highers that I work with out on an excursion, people think I’m one of them. At Magic Mountain, a guy came up and asked if we should be running around without an adult. What’s really weird is that when I was in Jr. High, everyone thought I was an adult. Weird. I’m regressing.
7. After getting a really, really bad sunburn on my legs once, there are spots I still don’t have to wax because the hair follicles are dead.
8. I like to take pictures of my feet.
9. I used to be a dancer (ballet mostly) until I completely blew out my knees. I miss dancing so much, sometimes I have a dream that I’m dancing the way I used to be able to, and I wake up and cry.
10. I once dislocated a toe in the middle of a show, and finished the show. I’m tough like that.
Random Background Stuff
11. I was a huge baby, 10lbs, 12oz. I blew up my mother’s ovary when she was 41/2 months pregnant with me. We both survived (contrary to the odds the doctors gave). The shirt I came home from the hospital in, ‘Another El Cajon Valley Hospital Special Delivery’ was designed for a six month old. Since my birthday is Dec. 23rd, they sent me home in a red velvet stocking, but I barely fit. After I was born my mother had her tubes tied and the hospital was torn down. Someone was determined to close that portal, I guess.
12. Growing up, my parents gave me a horse, tennis lessons, ballet, private school, and the ultimate lego collection. But they never bothered to learn anything about what sort of person I was.
13. Whenever the circus came to town, my mother was vaguely uneasy because I wanted to run away and join. I wanted to be the ballerina on the back of the horse. She was right to be worried; I was qualified for the job and resourceful enough to pull it off.
14. But when asked what I wanted to be, I said I wanted to be a pirate. Sailing, your own island, cool pets, it sounded good to me. That, or a tour guide at the zoo.
15. My brother and I got along great. He’s been my best friend from the day I was born. He would always find a way to drag me along anywhere he went. He rigged my little wagon so that he could pull it behind his tricycle. We absolutely insisted on sharing a room until puberty hit. We would lie in our bunk beds and make shadow puppets on the wall. Eventually, once we got old enough to realize that that was weird, we took over a wing of the house so we wouldn’t be too far from each other.
16. I just realized that I’ve made my relationship to my brother sound kinda creepy.
17. I thought Mr. Rogers was God. Really.
18. I had horrible insomnia as a kid. I think that was one reason I didn’t want to be alone.
19. I was an avid reader. I read everything I could get my hands on. My babysitters loved me because I was the easiest kid to watch. I think the book that really defined my childhood was “The Caboose Who Got Loose” by Bill Pete.
20. I was molested and raped as a very young kid by a family friend. I think of myself as a ‘recovered victim’ because I’ve really dealt with it. I’ve seen it for what it was and the effect it had on my life, and moved past it. The only part I still struggle with is anger at my father for doing nothing when he found out. But I’m working on that. I refuse to let it eat away at my life.
21. I did really well in school. I taught myself algebra in the fourth grade because I was bored with the coursework I was given. I would have been valedictorian of my high school, but I graduated a year and a half early.
22. When I graduated, my father offered to pay for my tuition, an apartment, car, everything, if I would major in law, medicine or architecture. I declined. (Contrary to popular belief, I did not decline to piss him off. I simply had no inclination to major in any of those three things.) He was shocked, flabbergasted, taken aback (and in a furious rage). He’d never encountered anyone he couldn’t buy before. He informed the financial aid office that I was his dependant (not true) ruining any chance I had for financial aid. It’s been a struggle, but I’ve never once regretted it.
23. My two best friends in high school, Roger and Liz, died within a year and a half of each other. Both in car accidents. Two months after Liz died, my father told me to stop moping, that it was ruining the atmosphere at home. I moved out that night. I don’t think he noticed for a few days. I’ve never once regretted it. I was seventeen.
24. My father still thinks he was ‘father of the year’ for 23 years running.
25. My mother is on freakishly large amounts of mood stabilizers. Horses are tranquilized on less then she takes in the morning. Her list of phobias is longer than my arm. Lately, since my father filed for divorce, she’s been actually doing a bit better.
26. I’ve given myself a deadline to be completely over all the crap I was dealt as a kid. The person I was at like 18, I think is partly their fault. But the person I will be at 25, that’s going to be what God and I have made of me. I’m not going to carry their junk around forever.
27. I had a great cat as a kid. Her name was Callie and she was this absolute bitch to anyone but me. She would let me cry into her fur. I also had a duck named Priscilla. We had two horses, Snicker and Lucy. We let them roam most of the property, but Snicker would get lonely and come up to the house and look in the windows.
28. I rode Snicker through the house once. Don’t tell my mother.
29. I once lit my hair on fire, just to see what would happen. It didn’t occur to me that I could get hurt. I didn’t.
30. My favorite childhood memory was spending nights in a tent or one of the tree forts Jesse and I built in the backyard with an alarm set for the middle of the night to see a lunar eclipse or a meteor shower.
Random Stuff
31. I’m allergic to broccoli.
32. I would rather go blind than deaf.
33. I have a title. I am the Dude of the Hurricane Halls. See, my father’s parents are both from a small town in southern Utah, Hurricane. I’m related to a third of the town, mostly through my father’s mother’s family, the Hall family. It’s hard to explain the relationship of the Hall family to the town of Hurricane unless you are from a small town. The Hall family is a good 30% of the town, and the defiantly the richest and most influential family. It’s weird to go there for a visit. The guy in the coffee shop or gas station knows you don’t live there, so they drop subtle questions, “Passing through, miss?” If I say I’m a visiting relatives, the Hall family, it’s like suddenly I’m a returned princess. “Beverly’s granddaughter? Here’s your coffee, ma’am, you make sure you tell your great-uncle Roland that I, [insert name here] down here said hello”. I practically get bowed to. It really weirds me out. You drive an hour in any direction and no one gives a crap about the Hall name, but by golly, in that town, I am SOMEBODY. But about the title. My great, great….. I don’t know exactly how many greats, grandmother was named Julia. When she was a toddler, she couldn’t say Julia, so she referred to herself as ‘dude’ which the rest of the family picked up and she was called that affectionately by the family for the rest of her life. She was referred to unaffectionately by several names by a few others, because she was known as quite the little spitfire. The nickname ‘dude’ was eventually passed down generation to generation to whichever girl they felt most reminded them of Julia. My grandmother, the current reigning ‘Dude’ has recently named me as successor to the title. And the family takes this whole thing rather seriously; everyone in the family calls her ‘Dude’, including her husband and children.
34. I’m terrified of being a snob. That’s why I only visit Hurricane every couple of years. It’s like junk food, its fun every once in a while, but too much is bad for you.
35. I love climbing trees. The real selling point on the house I live in now wasn’t the roommates (although they’re fab); it was the huge, multi-level, brilliantly painted tree house.
36. I don’t really like chocolate. But if someone gave me a box of sun-ripened cherry tomatoes, they would have my heart until the day I die.
37. Secretly, every Christmas, I want power tools.
38. I still have in my possession, every stuffed animal that was ever given to me. I can’t get rid of them. My imagination is too strong for my own good; I look at their beady little eyes and hear their little voices, “But Sarah, I’m your little buddy. We played shipwrecked and house together, but now you are soooooo old, you never play with us anymore……..” The fact that I know I’m being neurotic doesn’t help at all. I’ll probably be buried with them.
39. I actually have a To Do list of things to do before I die.
40. I can’t wait to be old. I’m going to wear bright aqua and purple caftans and dye my white hair orange. I’m going to wear too many bracelets so that they ‘click, click’ when I walk and you can hear me coming before you see me. I’m going to get a big white RV with pink flamingos painted on the side.
41. When my pet hermit crab Jack died, and I was so devastated because I was convinced I’d done something wrong, JR told me that he must have been old when I bought him and that all I had done was give him a nice retirement. He pointed to my big tank (which I put a lot of work into) and said, “See, you gave him Florida.” I think it was that moment that I realized that JR was The One.
42. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up with a weird mix of holidays. My favorite is Passover, but Christmas holds a special place. When the tree lots open, I’m first in line.
43. The carol “Silent Night” makes me cry (in a good way). I always dreamed of a Christmas with no drunk relatives fighting, no spending the day with relatives that I never saw at any other time and trying to pretend I wouldn’t rather be someplace else with people I actually cared about and that cared about me. Once, when I had just moved to New Mexico, I decided not to travel anywhere to see family, no matter what guilt trips were laid on me. I went to midnight mass (I’m not catholic, but what the heck, they still let you in) at a very old adobe mission on Christmas Eve. The next day I opened a few presents that had been mailed, and then (despite the weather predictions) it began to snow. I filled an ice chest with the snow and set a couple of beers to chill in it. Then I sat and watched the snow and sipped beer and all was calm and all was bright. That experience taught me to inject a little more sanity into my holidays. I finally had the guts to stop going to my grandfather’s house on Christmas (although his groping my ass was also a factor) and told all my relatives to make a donation to charity instead of giving me a gift. I make it a point to schedule time to observe the Navajo winter tradition, ‘the time of being still’ and also to use the now freed up time to go to a nursing home or homeless shelter. Then I sleep in heavenly peace.
44. Despite the way it sounds, do have a few relatives that I dearly love. My paternal grandfather (whom my father despises because he’s too generous to ever get rich), Dude (she lives with such passion and joy), my mother’s mother, (aka ‘what I will look like when I’m old) and cousins Caleb and Jordan. And of course my brother.
45. I can eat an entire box of popsicles in one sitting.
46. I can recite the whole script of ‘The Princess Bride’ in one sitting. No prompts, no movie playing in the background, I know the whole thing, start to finish.
47. I name everything. Seriously, everything. My cell phone (Chloe), my computer printer (Boris), my fur wrap (Ginger).
48. I never give my real name at Starbucks or when making dinner reservations. This can lead to interesting complications, however. Of course there is the obvious chance you will forget what name you gave, but worse, one time I was getting a table for lunch and gave my name as Lorelei. She asked me how to spell it and I had no idea. I said ‘pardon?’ to buy time, and then said, ‘it’s just like it sounds’. She rattled something off questioningly, and I said ‘exactly’.
49. When I was a kid I thought the big handicapped access stall in the bathroom was for VIPs like movie stars and queens. I used to slip in and use it whenever it was empty, just to feel special.
50. Whenever I go on road trips I always stop at little diners. For some reason I always order chicken strips. I’m not sure why.
51. I would love to be a vegetarian, but I know I would last like two days and then you’d find me with a carne asada burrito in one hand and a fish stick in the other.
52. I’m kosher. Not for religious reasons, but because it’s a healthy way to live. I must confess, occasionally I cheat and have a sausage.
53. I love the smell of old books.
54. A mug of tea and a good book, that’s rich to me.
55. My favorite time of day is that hour after the sun sets and it’s still kind of half-lit but there are a few stars out and the breeze blows the scent of the night-blooming flowers.
56. I love to go swimming in the ocean at night when there is a full moon. Words cannot describe.
57. Whenever I’m down, I go to Ciao Bella italian restaurant and the owner yells, “Bella! (kiss, kiss) You came back again! I get you a gooooooood table, you sit here, Francesca made your ravioli, I bring you wine! (kiss, kiss, slight grope)” How could anyone not feel better after that?
58. I snort a little sometimes when I laugh.
59. My brother and I have the exact same laugh. It doesn’t sound like anyone in our family.
60. I’m really handy to have around in emergencies. I’m totally calm and collected until it’s all over, then I panic. Like the time a car drove into the house, right into my roommate’s room (luckily she was gone), I went out, helped the driver and passenger from the vehicle (they were mostly unhurt, just drunk), called 911, offered them a cool glass of water. Then about an hour later, once the police when helping the tow truck driver pull the car out of the house, my knees suddenly buckled and I almost puked on a nice policeman. I was like, “Ohmygosh, a car drove into our house.” Another time I was almost trampled by a spooked horse. I’m lying on the ground, dodging hooves that could bash my skull in, and I’m calm and once I roll out from under the horse, I get up, walk over to a tree, and pass out. It’s a really helpful delayed reaction.
61. I think if I ever won the lottery, I’d take two or three years to travel the world with just a backpack, JR and a camera, then come back to San Diego, buy a decent house, get a job (or raise my kids) and live pretty much like I do now, just with better stories to tell, and a better financial cushion to fall back on if I lost my job.
62. I swore I wouldn’t get married before I’m twenty five. Even though it’s almost a given that I will marry JR (there is nothing official, he hasn’t asked and I haven’t responded, we both just kinda know that this is it), I’m sticking to that.
63. I’m a Messianic Jew, which is more or less a Protestant Jew. I go to an unaffiliated Christian church. It’s one of the few unhypocitical churches I found. I work with the Jr High group there. I absolutely love it.
64. I believe that there are no rules in life, only consequences. (It’s sort of a mix between a bible verse ‘all things are lawful, not all things are beneficial’ and a Buddhist teaching) You can hit your friend, but he will probably hit you back, or at least hate you for it.
65. I believe that people make rules to avoid making decisions.
66. I believe that people are designed to respond to love and kindness.
67. I believe that you should never give someone your opinion unless they ask for it. And sometimes not even then.
68. I’ve learned that number 67 is a lot easier if you give up your so called ‘right to have an opinion’.
69. I always give money to street performers.
70. I secretly want to be a street performer. A cello player or a latin ballroom dancer. Or someone who makes balloon animals.
71. I’ve worked as an intern in a state assemblyman’s office, an order taker at Pizza Hut, a busgirl, a cashier at a gift and engraving store, a cashier at an art store, a telemarketer for ‘adult videos’ and diet pills, a phone research interviewer, a tour guide/bearmaker at a teddybear factory, an assistant manager at a dollar store, an assistant manger at a candy store, an office assistant at a church office, an office assistant at refrigeration company, and now, this gig as the receptionist for company that manufactures high density computer servers.
72. I can’t sleep if I’m cold. I bought a heating pad for nights when I’m menstrual, but I love it so much it just stays in my bed. I’ve named him Leon, and he’s so cozy on chilly evenings.
73. I’ve never met a baby I couldn’t make smile.
74. I wish I had curly hair.
75. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is my favorite movie. You know how sometimes you hear or read something and you think, “I could have written that. Those are my words”. I feel that way about the ‘mean reds’ part and the ‘people do belong to people’ speech.
76. My favorite book is The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery. It’s about a woman in a small town in turn of the century Canada. She’s poor, ugly, has no friends, unmarried, shy, and completely dominated by an unkind family. She finds out she has a year to live, but tells no one. She’s still poor and ugly and shy, but she completely turns her life into something worth living, just by the choices she finally has the courage to make. It’s an amazing story about not sitting back and whining about what you don’t have, but carving out a niche for yourself.
77. I think you can never own too many picture frames.
78. As you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of wall space left.
79. I bought William Hung’s album. I will buy his Christmas album.
80. I think my car is too boring. I think I will give my Jr. Highers some paint and tell them to have fun.
81. I think if I actually do number 80, my boyfriend will have a heart attack.
82. I adore used book stores. For one thing, I read so fast that books cost me a fortune. But with a used book, you might get lucky and find where someone else underlined or made notes in the margin. When I find that, I feel like I’ve found King Tut’s Tomb.
83. Once I found a phone number written on a page of a library book. I called the number and got voicemail. I left them a message telling them that their phone number was written in a book in the library. In hindsight, my reaching out to my fellow man probably just creeped them out.
84. I figure a wrong number is just a chance to make a new friend.
85. Sometimes I write my phone number places to see if anyone ever calls. No one ever has.
86. Sometimes I write my mother’s number on walls with “for a good time, call………” I figure its revenge for her telling me as a kid that we should never hit a bag on the road because it was probably full of puppies. I still swerve to avoid bags to this day.
87. Yo estudio el espanol in mi escuela por tres anos.
88. Despite that, when I travel in Mexico, the natives insist on practicing they’re English on me. So I end up standing there speaking Spanish to them, while they speak English to me, until I give up and just speak English. That seems to make them happy.
89. The only person I get to speak Spanish to is the cleaning lady her at my work. And no matter whether I speak in English or Spanish to her I always get the same response. “Yes…………..yes”. Maybe my Spanish is as incomprehensible to her as my English is.
90. Sometimes I buy the cleaning lady a coke. I found out from the maintenance guy that they make less then I do, and I think that’s just not right. I don’t know if she likes the cokes, she smiles and takes them, but I’ve never seen her drink them.
91. My phone here at work is about two feet long, and has about 130 extensions. Not only do I have them all memorized, but most of the people’s cell numbers too.
92. I have too much time on my hands.
93. I like that.
94. But it’s dangerous.
95. My best friend, Bunny, is 20 years older than me.
96. I think she should have been my mother.
97. My other best friend, is the man I love. (Hi JR)
98. I’m thinking of turning my cubicle into a ball pit, like at McDonalds.
99. My boss would never notice.
100. Re-reading this, I’ve realized that I would like me if I met me.
Random Physical Stuff.
1. I look exactly like my mother, who looks exactly like her mother, who looks …….. You get the idea. I have a picture of my great great grandmother and it looks like me in costume. We call it the Amazonian uber-gene. Doesn’t matter what father’s genetic material dilutes it, it comes out.
2. I have a great scar on my lower back. Whenever people ask about it, I make up a story like I was attacked by a shark, or that I hit a tree skydiving. The truth is horribly prosaic – when I was three years old I tripped off a curb and fell on the hot jagged muffler pipe of an old car, leaving behind a combo cut/burn. That was the same year I fell out of a wagon and broke my collarbone.
3. I have small hands.
4. I’m 5’3 in thick soled shoes. The shortest person in a short family. I can sit cross-legged in a coach airline seat.
5. I’ve had every hair length from an Audrey Hepburn pixie cut (at least that’s what I asked for, people said my hair looked cute, but no one said I looked like Audrey) to down past my butt.
6. When I take the Jr. Highers that I work with out on an excursion, people think I’m one of them. At Magic Mountain, a guy came up and asked if we should be running around without an adult. What’s really weird is that when I was in Jr. High, everyone thought I was an adult. Weird. I’m regressing.
7. After getting a really, really bad sunburn on my legs once, there are spots I still don’t have to wax because the hair follicles are dead.
8. I like to take pictures of my feet.
9. I used to be a dancer (ballet mostly) until I completely blew out my knees. I miss dancing so much, sometimes I have a dream that I’m dancing the way I used to be able to, and I wake up and cry.
10. I once dislocated a toe in the middle of a show, and finished the show. I’m tough like that.
Random Background Stuff
11. I was a huge baby, 10lbs, 12oz. I blew up my mother’s ovary when she was 41/2 months pregnant with me. We both survived (contrary to the odds the doctors gave). The shirt I came home from the hospital in, ‘Another El Cajon Valley Hospital Special Delivery’ was designed for a six month old. Since my birthday is Dec. 23rd, they sent me home in a red velvet stocking, but I barely fit. After I was born my mother had her tubes tied and the hospital was torn down. Someone was determined to close that portal, I guess.
12. Growing up, my parents gave me a horse, tennis lessons, ballet, private school, and the ultimate lego collection. But they never bothered to learn anything about what sort of person I was.
13. Whenever the circus came to town, my mother was vaguely uneasy because I wanted to run away and join. I wanted to be the ballerina on the back of the horse. She was right to be worried; I was qualified for the job and resourceful enough to pull it off.
14. But when asked what I wanted to be, I said I wanted to be a pirate. Sailing, your own island, cool pets, it sounded good to me. That, or a tour guide at the zoo.
15. My brother and I got along great. He’s been my best friend from the day I was born. He would always find a way to drag me along anywhere he went. He rigged my little wagon so that he could pull it behind his tricycle. We absolutely insisted on sharing a room until puberty hit. We would lie in our bunk beds and make shadow puppets on the wall. Eventually, once we got old enough to realize that that was weird, we took over a wing of the house so we wouldn’t be too far from each other.
16. I just realized that I’ve made my relationship to my brother sound kinda creepy.
17. I thought Mr. Rogers was God. Really.
18. I had horrible insomnia as a kid. I think that was one reason I didn’t want to be alone.
19. I was an avid reader. I read everything I could get my hands on. My babysitters loved me because I was the easiest kid to watch. I think the book that really defined my childhood was “The Caboose Who Got Loose” by Bill Pete.
20. I was molested and raped as a very young kid by a family friend. I think of myself as a ‘recovered victim’ because I’ve really dealt with it. I’ve seen it for what it was and the effect it had on my life, and moved past it. The only part I still struggle with is anger at my father for doing nothing when he found out. But I’m working on that. I refuse to let it eat away at my life.
21. I did really well in school. I taught myself algebra in the fourth grade because I was bored with the coursework I was given. I would have been valedictorian of my high school, but I graduated a year and a half early.
22. When I graduated, my father offered to pay for my tuition, an apartment, car, everything, if I would major in law, medicine or architecture. I declined. (Contrary to popular belief, I did not decline to piss him off. I simply had no inclination to major in any of those three things.) He was shocked, flabbergasted, taken aback (and in a furious rage). He’d never encountered anyone he couldn’t buy before. He informed the financial aid office that I was his dependant (not true) ruining any chance I had for financial aid. It’s been a struggle, but I’ve never once regretted it.
23. My two best friends in high school, Roger and Liz, died within a year and a half of each other. Both in car accidents. Two months after Liz died, my father told me to stop moping, that it was ruining the atmosphere at home. I moved out that night. I don’t think he noticed for a few days. I’ve never once regretted it. I was seventeen.
24. My father still thinks he was ‘father of the year’ for 23 years running.
25. My mother is on freakishly large amounts of mood stabilizers. Horses are tranquilized on less then she takes in the morning. Her list of phobias is longer than my arm. Lately, since my father filed for divorce, she’s been actually doing a bit better.
26. I’ve given myself a deadline to be completely over all the crap I was dealt as a kid. The person I was at like 18, I think is partly their fault. But the person I will be at 25, that’s going to be what God and I have made of me. I’m not going to carry their junk around forever.
27. I had a great cat as a kid. Her name was Callie and she was this absolute bitch to anyone but me. She would let me cry into her fur. I also had a duck named Priscilla. We had two horses, Snicker and Lucy. We let them roam most of the property, but Snicker would get lonely and come up to the house and look in the windows.
28. I rode Snicker through the house once. Don’t tell my mother.
29. I once lit my hair on fire, just to see what would happen. It didn’t occur to me that I could get hurt. I didn’t.
30. My favorite childhood memory was spending nights in a tent or one of the tree forts Jesse and I built in the backyard with an alarm set for the middle of the night to see a lunar eclipse or a meteor shower.
Random Stuff
31. I’m allergic to broccoli.
32. I would rather go blind than deaf.
33. I have a title. I am the Dude of the Hurricane Halls. See, my father’s parents are both from a small town in southern Utah, Hurricane. I’m related to a third of the town, mostly through my father’s mother’s family, the Hall family. It’s hard to explain the relationship of the Hall family to the town of Hurricane unless you are from a small town. The Hall family is a good 30% of the town, and the defiantly the richest and most influential family. It’s weird to go there for a visit. The guy in the coffee shop or gas station knows you don’t live there, so they drop subtle questions, “Passing through, miss?” If I say I’m a visiting relatives, the Hall family, it’s like suddenly I’m a returned princess. “Beverly’s granddaughter? Here’s your coffee, ma’am, you make sure you tell your great-uncle Roland that I, [insert name here] down here said hello”. I practically get bowed to. It really weirds me out. You drive an hour in any direction and no one gives a crap about the Hall name, but by golly, in that town, I am SOMEBODY. But about the title. My great, great….. I don’t know exactly how many greats, grandmother was named Julia. When she was a toddler, she couldn’t say Julia, so she referred to herself as ‘dude’ which the rest of the family picked up and she was called that affectionately by the family for the rest of her life. She was referred to unaffectionately by several names by a few others, because she was known as quite the little spitfire. The nickname ‘dude’ was eventually passed down generation to generation to whichever girl they felt most reminded them of Julia. My grandmother, the current reigning ‘Dude’ has recently named me as successor to the title. And the family takes this whole thing rather seriously; everyone in the family calls her ‘Dude’, including her husband and children.
34. I’m terrified of being a snob. That’s why I only visit Hurricane every couple of years. It’s like junk food, its fun every once in a while, but too much is bad for you.
35. I love climbing trees. The real selling point on the house I live in now wasn’t the roommates (although they’re fab); it was the huge, multi-level, brilliantly painted tree house.
36. I don’t really like chocolate. But if someone gave me a box of sun-ripened cherry tomatoes, they would have my heart until the day I die.
37. Secretly, every Christmas, I want power tools.
38. I still have in my possession, every stuffed animal that was ever given to me. I can’t get rid of them. My imagination is too strong for my own good; I look at their beady little eyes and hear their little voices, “But Sarah, I’m your little buddy. We played shipwrecked and house together, but now you are soooooo old, you never play with us anymore……..” The fact that I know I’m being neurotic doesn’t help at all. I’ll probably be buried with them.
39. I actually have a To Do list of things to do before I die.
40. I can’t wait to be old. I’m going to wear bright aqua and purple caftans and dye my white hair orange. I’m going to wear too many bracelets so that they ‘click, click’ when I walk and you can hear me coming before you see me. I’m going to get a big white RV with pink flamingos painted on the side.
41. When my pet hermit crab Jack died, and I was so devastated because I was convinced I’d done something wrong, JR told me that he must have been old when I bought him and that all I had done was give him a nice retirement. He pointed to my big tank (which I put a lot of work into) and said, “See, you gave him Florida.” I think it was that moment that I realized that JR was The One.
42. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up with a weird mix of holidays. My favorite is Passover, but Christmas holds a special place. When the tree lots open, I’m first in line.
43. The carol “Silent Night” makes me cry (in a good way). I always dreamed of a Christmas with no drunk relatives fighting, no spending the day with relatives that I never saw at any other time and trying to pretend I wouldn’t rather be someplace else with people I actually cared about and that cared about me. Once, when I had just moved to New Mexico, I decided not to travel anywhere to see family, no matter what guilt trips were laid on me. I went to midnight mass (I’m not catholic, but what the heck, they still let you in) at a very old adobe mission on Christmas Eve. The next day I opened a few presents that had been mailed, and then (despite the weather predictions) it began to snow. I filled an ice chest with the snow and set a couple of beers to chill in it. Then I sat and watched the snow and sipped beer and all was calm and all was bright. That experience taught me to inject a little more sanity into my holidays. I finally had the guts to stop going to my grandfather’s house on Christmas (although his groping my ass was also a factor) and told all my relatives to make a donation to charity instead of giving me a gift. I make it a point to schedule time to observe the Navajo winter tradition, ‘the time of being still’ and also to use the now freed up time to go to a nursing home or homeless shelter. Then I sleep in heavenly peace.
44. Despite the way it sounds, do have a few relatives that I dearly love. My paternal grandfather (whom my father despises because he’s too generous to ever get rich), Dude (she lives with such passion and joy), my mother’s mother, (aka ‘what I will look like when I’m old) and cousins Caleb and Jordan. And of course my brother.
45. I can eat an entire box of popsicles in one sitting.
46. I can recite the whole script of ‘The Princess Bride’ in one sitting. No prompts, no movie playing in the background, I know the whole thing, start to finish.
47. I name everything. Seriously, everything. My cell phone (Chloe), my computer printer (Boris), my fur wrap (Ginger).
48. I never give my real name at Starbucks or when making dinner reservations. This can lead to interesting complications, however. Of course there is the obvious chance you will forget what name you gave, but worse, one time I was getting a table for lunch and gave my name as Lorelei. She asked me how to spell it and I had no idea. I said ‘pardon?’ to buy time, and then said, ‘it’s just like it sounds’. She rattled something off questioningly, and I said ‘exactly’.
49. When I was a kid I thought the big handicapped access stall in the bathroom was for VIPs like movie stars and queens. I used to slip in and use it whenever it was empty, just to feel special.
50. Whenever I go on road trips I always stop at little diners. For some reason I always order chicken strips. I’m not sure why.
51. I would love to be a vegetarian, but I know I would last like two days and then you’d find me with a carne asada burrito in one hand and a fish stick in the other.
52. I’m kosher. Not for religious reasons, but because it’s a healthy way to live. I must confess, occasionally I cheat and have a sausage.
53. I love the smell of old books.
54. A mug of tea and a good book, that’s rich to me.
55. My favorite time of day is that hour after the sun sets and it’s still kind of half-lit but there are a few stars out and the breeze blows the scent of the night-blooming flowers.
56. I love to go swimming in the ocean at night when there is a full moon. Words cannot describe.
57. Whenever I’m down, I go to Ciao Bella italian restaurant and the owner yells, “Bella! (kiss, kiss) You came back again! I get you a gooooooood table, you sit here, Francesca made your ravioli, I bring you wine! (kiss, kiss, slight grope)” How could anyone not feel better after that?
58. I snort a little sometimes when I laugh.
59. My brother and I have the exact same laugh. It doesn’t sound like anyone in our family.
60. I’m really handy to have around in emergencies. I’m totally calm and collected until it’s all over, then I panic. Like the time a car drove into the house, right into my roommate’s room (luckily she was gone), I went out, helped the driver and passenger from the vehicle (they were mostly unhurt, just drunk), called 911, offered them a cool glass of water. Then about an hour later, once the police when helping the tow truck driver pull the car out of the house, my knees suddenly buckled and I almost puked on a nice policeman. I was like, “Ohmygosh, a car drove into our house.” Another time I was almost trampled by a spooked horse. I’m lying on the ground, dodging hooves that could bash my skull in, and I’m calm and once I roll out from under the horse, I get up, walk over to a tree, and pass out. It’s a really helpful delayed reaction.
61. I think if I ever won the lottery, I’d take two or three years to travel the world with just a backpack, JR and a camera, then come back to San Diego, buy a decent house, get a job (or raise my kids) and live pretty much like I do now, just with better stories to tell, and a better financial cushion to fall back on if I lost my job.
62. I swore I wouldn’t get married before I’m twenty five. Even though it’s almost a given that I will marry JR (there is nothing official, he hasn’t asked and I haven’t responded, we both just kinda know that this is it), I’m sticking to that.
63. I’m a Messianic Jew, which is more or less a Protestant Jew. I go to an unaffiliated Christian church. It’s one of the few unhypocitical churches I found. I work with the Jr High group there. I absolutely love it.
64. I believe that there are no rules in life, only consequences. (It’s sort of a mix between a bible verse ‘all things are lawful, not all things are beneficial’ and a Buddhist teaching) You can hit your friend, but he will probably hit you back, or at least hate you for it.
65. I believe that people make rules to avoid making decisions.
66. I believe that people are designed to respond to love and kindness.
67. I believe that you should never give someone your opinion unless they ask for it. And sometimes not even then.
68. I’ve learned that number 67 is a lot easier if you give up your so called ‘right to have an opinion’.
69. I always give money to street performers.
70. I secretly want to be a street performer. A cello player or a latin ballroom dancer. Or someone who makes balloon animals.
71. I’ve worked as an intern in a state assemblyman’s office, an order taker at Pizza Hut, a busgirl, a cashier at a gift and engraving store, a cashier at an art store, a telemarketer for ‘adult videos’ and diet pills, a phone research interviewer, a tour guide/bearmaker at a teddybear factory, an assistant manager at a dollar store, an assistant manger at a candy store, an office assistant at a church office, an office assistant at refrigeration company, and now, this gig as the receptionist for company that manufactures high density computer servers.
72. I can’t sleep if I’m cold. I bought a heating pad for nights when I’m menstrual, but I love it so much it just stays in my bed. I’ve named him Leon, and he’s so cozy on chilly evenings.
73. I’ve never met a baby I couldn’t make smile.
74. I wish I had curly hair.
75. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is my favorite movie. You know how sometimes you hear or read something and you think, “I could have written that. Those are my words”. I feel that way about the ‘mean reds’ part and the ‘people do belong to people’ speech.
76. My favorite book is The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery. It’s about a woman in a small town in turn of the century Canada. She’s poor, ugly, has no friends, unmarried, shy, and completely dominated by an unkind family. She finds out she has a year to live, but tells no one. She’s still poor and ugly and shy, but she completely turns her life into something worth living, just by the choices she finally has the courage to make. It’s an amazing story about not sitting back and whining about what you don’t have, but carving out a niche for yourself.
77. I think you can never own too many picture frames.
78. As you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of wall space left.
79. I bought William Hung’s album. I will buy his Christmas album.
80. I think my car is too boring. I think I will give my Jr. Highers some paint and tell them to have fun.
81. I think if I actually do number 80, my boyfriend will have a heart attack.
82. I adore used book stores. For one thing, I read so fast that books cost me a fortune. But with a used book, you might get lucky and find where someone else underlined or made notes in the margin. When I find that, I feel like I’ve found King Tut’s Tomb.
83. Once I found a phone number written on a page of a library book. I called the number and got voicemail. I left them a message telling them that their phone number was written in a book in the library. In hindsight, my reaching out to my fellow man probably just creeped them out.
84. I figure a wrong number is just a chance to make a new friend.
85. Sometimes I write my phone number places to see if anyone ever calls. No one ever has.
86. Sometimes I write my mother’s number on walls with “for a good time, call………” I figure its revenge for her telling me as a kid that we should never hit a bag on the road because it was probably full of puppies. I still swerve to avoid bags to this day.
87. Yo estudio el espanol in mi escuela por tres anos.
88. Despite that, when I travel in Mexico, the natives insist on practicing they’re English on me. So I end up standing there speaking Spanish to them, while they speak English to me, until I give up and just speak English. That seems to make them happy.
89. The only person I get to speak Spanish to is the cleaning lady her at my work. And no matter whether I speak in English or Spanish to her I always get the same response. “Yes…………..yes”. Maybe my Spanish is as incomprehensible to her as my English is.
90. Sometimes I buy the cleaning lady a coke. I found out from the maintenance guy that they make less then I do, and I think that’s just not right. I don’t know if she likes the cokes, she smiles and takes them, but I’ve never seen her drink them.
91. My phone here at work is about two feet long, and has about 130 extensions. Not only do I have them all memorized, but most of the people’s cell numbers too.
92. I have too much time on my hands.
93. I like that.
94. But it’s dangerous.
95. My best friend, Bunny, is 20 years older than me.
96. I think she should have been my mother.
97. My other best friend, is the man I love. (Hi JR)
98. I’m thinking of turning my cubicle into a ball pit, like at McDonalds.
99. My boss would never notice.
100. Re-reading this, I’ve realized that I would like me if I met me.
4 Comments:
Wow!!
You have a great imagination & a wonderful personality. I find your outlook on life refreshing & have been trying to adopt the same outlook myself. When I look back I my life, I feel like I focused too much on the negative. I look forward to hearing about the remodeling of your cubicle. I've been debating a Hawaiian theme for mine.
That's a really great list. I see we share the same favorite movie.
Wow. I think that's one of the longest and most interesting blog entries I've ever read. Truly fascinating.
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