About Me

100 (and a few more) Things About Me

1. I'm a radical feminst.
2. I'm also a hardcore liberal.
3. I love the footprint that I leave on cement when my foot is wet.
4. I'm a coffee snob.
5. I take my tea English- lots of milk and sugar.
6. I definitely go through food obsessions- I have to have a certain thing over and over and over and...well, you get it.
7. Which led my husband to buy me 30 pounds of Hot Tamales for Valentines Day last year.
8. There's still 20 pounds left, 8 months later.
9. I dream of one day owning my own business, preferably a book/coffee shop, like on the first Ellen show.
10. I have a lot of pet peeves, most of which are things that annoy me, but have no effect on me whatsoever.
11. Like people who drink hot coffee through a straw. Or people who say 'the' in front of something where there is no 'the'. Like The Washington D.C.
12. And people who mow their lawn, but don't edge it. Or people who don't shovel their sidewalk or driveway. Or my neighbors that don't wave back when they drive by.
13. I would be a terrible comedienne, because I always laugh at my own jokes.
14. A lot of people tell me I look like Alyson Hannigan, of American Pie and Buffy fame.
15. I can see their point, but I don't think the resemblance is as startling as some have led me to believe.
16. I am the worst procrastinator.
17. Plus, I have little to no self-control.
18. I think blue cheese burgers are some of the most perfect food- not only for taste, but because I can scare away annoying men with my breath after I've eaten one.
19. If I don't have enough money to travel around the world when I'm older, I want to buy a Winnebago and travel around the US, with one of the US maps that you color in after you've visited each state.
20. She would be called Winnie, of course.
21. I never thought that I would become a mother. It still astounds me that I am someone's mom, even though there are days when I forget what my actual, given name is.
22. I was researching the options I had to make biological motherhood an impossibility for me when I found out I was pregnant with my first child.
23. Motherhood is harder in ways that I never could have fathomed, and in ways that I struggle to give voice to, despite reading almost every book I could get my hands on prior to giving birth.
24. The two most empowering experiences of my life (thus far) have been giving birth to my children without pain medication.
25. I even got to help deliver my daughter, and saw the whole thing with a mirror. It was beautiful.
26. Having done this, I am a bit of a freak when it comes to talking about childbirth and advocating doing it on your own (meaning without drugs, not in a cornfield).
27. But life is all about choices, and I would never want anyone to do anything that they didn't feel 100% behind, especially when it comes to squeezing human life out of your coochie.
28. I love to peel my bread- take the crust off first, eat that, and then eat the heart. I used to do this with bagels, too, but it gets rather time consuming.
29. I love the way taco meat smells when it's cooking.
30. I love pretty much any Mexican food, and could eat it every day.
31. I love to read, but don't consider it a hobby.
32. How could something that you do everyday be considered a hobby? Is breathing a hobby? Taking a crap? Reading is vital to my existence, and not just in the reading the instructions on household cleaners kind of way.
33. My favorite book of all time is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
34. That or The Christmas Cookie Sprinkle Snitcher by Robert Kraus.
35. I adore movies- a lot of that is going to the actual theater, sitting in the dark, having a snack with a bunch of other people you'll never see again.
36. My favorite movie is probably Fight Club. I saw it 7 times in the theater.
37. There are many other movies that I love, though too- The English Patient, The Usual Suspects....of course my mind is blanking a bit now.
38. I was married in Las Vegas, on purpose (meaning it was planned ahead of time), at Paris.
39. It was a shotgun wedding (I was 3ish months pregnant), but I think I would have planned to get married there even if I wasn't. And what better way to have great boobs in your wedding dress?
40. I met my husband at work. I thought he was scary. He thought I looked like a sexy librarian. How can I argue with that?
41. He's the last kind of guy that I thought I would marry, but he has everything that I never thought I wanted, but am so grateful for.
42. And he's an amazing dad.
43. I learned to knit in late 1996 from my best friend Julie.
44. My ability does certainly not reflect the amount of time that I've known how to knit.
45. I took a long knitting sabbatical- at least three years- where I didn't pick up the needles, go to yarn stores, nothing.
46. My longest UFO is the first project I started- a lacy, aran-y sweater that I would never ever wear. It needs to be ripped, big time. I think that is what I will break my ball winder in with, whenver I get one.
47. I get lots of crafty ideas, some of which can't be executed because they are physically impossible, and most of which I don't do because I get distracted by something else in the meantime.
48. I can sort-of crochet- I taught myself through a book- but I'm not very good. I hope to change that.
49. I also know how to cross-stitch, but don't do it often for lack of patterns that I like.
50. I'd try pretty much any craft, because I love making things, although I definitely have some sort of finisher's remorse, because I get a little sad when a project is complete.
51. I am a celebrity gossip hound, which sometimes gets in the way of number 35.
52. And just like I said with number 17, I can't help but read ahead on things that I love, finding out what's happening next on my favorite shows.
53. I love to travel.
54. I've only been out of the continental US twice, both times to London.
55. I dream of going to Paris, and hope to go for my 30th birthday.
56. Although I love traveling by plane, I also really love train travel and road trips.
57. My favorite trip so far was the road trip I took up the California coast with my friend Julie.
58. My ideal place to live would be an apartment in downtown Chicago. Or any of the suburbs that I could easily get into town from on the El. Chicago is the perfect big US city.
59. I was born right outside of Chicago, and my dad continued to live there after my parents divorced.
60. Yes, I'm a Cubs fan, of course.
61. And my favorite number, 8, is partially that because of the Cubs history that is tied up in that number (first night game 8/8/88, last time they won the World Series 1908, fave Cubs player of all time, Andre Dawson, #8).
62. I'm a Sagittarius, and think I fit the description pretty well. Although I'm not a slave to my horoscope, I believe in it more than I probably let on.
63. I'm a romantic at heart.
64. I definitely prefer to be the one in control in relationships, even thought I don't think you'd meet anyone who would say that I'm controlling.
65. I'm a huge primper, although I've had to let that go a bit since becoming a mom. Not much feels better to me than having a cute outfit on and a face full of MAC makeup.
66. I graduated from beauty school, after dropping out of one of the top 20 liberal arts colleges in the nation.
67. I do fantasize about being a professional hairdresser, but not enough to go back and get the schooling required to practice in this state and hone my skills again.
68. After I had graduated from beauty school, I moved back to Colorado, which, while not a choice I was excited about at the time, it was one of the best things I ever did.
69. My stepfather died 3 months after I moved back, and I am so glad I had that extra time with him, and that I was able to be here with my mom.
70. My mom has experienced some of the most amazing things, and I am so lucky to be close to her, and have her be so close to my kids.
71. My father died when I was 16, of lung cancer. It taught me a lot of lessons, the most important being to tell people how you feel, all the time, as often as possible.
72. It taught me who my real friends were, too, a lesson that didn't really sink in until a couple years later.
73. Enough seriousness- Banana Republic clothes make me all lusty and gushy.
74. I'm a complete clotheshorse- even though we have a sizable walk-in closet, my half is stuffed to the gills. And my dresser is exploding.
75. I wonder what we (I mean we as a society) are going to leave our children- what memories, what sentiments, what home.
76. I wonder if everyone sees things the same- when I see pink, do you see the same color, or does what you see as pink is the color that I think of as brown?
77. I get pissy when I see something at a store that I could make selling for an outrageous amount.
78. Even though I usually don't make those things.
79. I love it when celebrities sing, mostly standards though (Kevin Spacey on the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil sndtrck, Matt Damon on The Talented Mr. Ripley sndtrck).
80. Not typically a fan of when musicians act, though.
81. I think Robbie Williams is close to the perfect specimen of man- British accent, brown hair, v.v. sexy body, tattoos, a Ducati, bad boy image and a beautiful singing voice. I don't care if people say he is gay- lalalalala I'm not listening.
82. I've seen Ani Difranco live 6 times.
83. I've seen Tori Amos live 4 times. I miss going to her old shows, with just her and the piano, harpsichord and an audience of a thousand or so.
84. I'm an impulse shopper, big time.
85. Getting a good deal and bargain shopping is virtually a sport to me.
86. But I would never be caught dead with anything emblazoned, 'I love to shop!' or it's more annoying companion, 'I [heart] to shop!'.
87. I was a vegetarian for three years, and a vegan for one.
88. Because I'm not the most creative cook, I had to stop my vegan diet, because I was constantly dizzy from lack of protein. It was either that, or my cheeselust was rewiring my brain.
89. Weak excuse, I know. See number 17 again.
90. I'm definitely an indoorsy type of gal. Outside is nice, but there aren't any coffeemakers out there.
91. I feel like I teeter on the fine line of wanting my children to love the things I love and wanting them to develop completely on their own, finding their own passions.
92. I have a serious magazine problem.
93. Seriously. I subscribe to 11 magazines. My mom passes on three that she subs to. And I still buy more at the store some months. But if I had to choose just one, it would be Entertainment Weekly. I live for my EW every week.
94. I think the margarita is probably the best alcoholic drink ever. On the rocks, with salt.
95. I like to think that I'm not a competitive person, but I kind of am.
96. I'm a complete trivia nerd. I would love to be on a game show. I tried out to be on The Weakest Link, and made it to a small group of finalists, but the show was cancelled shortly thereafter.
97. I went to nerd camp when I was younger, for 8 years, two weeks every summer. It changed my life. It saved my life.
98. I often think about winning the lottery, and what I would buy with the money. I think my husband and I have probably already spent most of whatever we most likely will never win.
99. My favorite color is periwinkle. But I do adore pink, having come into my super-girly groove about 7 years ago.
100. Even though I love the internet, and I'm exposed to so much that I wouldn't normally be, it makes me really sad how there's a real dearth of personal snail mail because of it. There's not much better than getting a personal letter in the mail.
101. It astounds me that my married name, which is a mere five letters long, and has the correct proportion of vowels and consonants to be easily recognized by anyone, is mispronounced as often as my maiden name, which was a 10 letter long Italian Job.