me at age 3 workin' hard for the money2. I played the French Horn from the 6th to the 12th grade. I was first chair of my section every year from the 8th grade on. I still remember all the fingerings and would like to play it again.
3. I had the dorkiest letter jacket in high school EVER. Seriously. I had letters for marching band, the literary criticism team, National Honor Society, creative math and science team, academic decathalon, and my nickname was Clogar (which is, of course, a math term).
4. I have admitted that I am painfully addicted to reality TV. What you do not know is that I relapsed. I watched reality TV avidly in high school, but stopped during college, and promptly got addicted again once I moved to Ann Arbor and got cable. I can still name almost all of the contestants from the first season of Survivor.
5. I am a terrible cook. Strangely, I am really good at spicing food.
6. I am absolutely fearless when it comes to strange foods, but I have weird issues with drinking milk and eating eggs. It grosses me out, even though it didn’t when I was a kid.
7. I weigh my two cats almost everyday by picking them up, weighing myself, dropping them, weighing myself again and subtracting the two. I find it endlessly amusing.
8. I have horrendous sinus issues. My nose is constantly stuffy and for the last five years, I have tended to pop Benedryl like candy. This makes me virtually immune to its sedative side effects.
9. I can comfortably give a piggy back ride to Jon, who weighs roughly 90 pounds more than me. You have to see it to believe it.
11. I love my hands and feet. They are long and thin and graceful, like my father’s.
12. My sister and I have very similar voices, and people sometimes have problems telling us apart on the phone. The trick is to remember that she curses more.
13. I can’t lose my Texas accent. It’s especially evident with the words hill, fire, and oil. I thought the ‘h’ in words like human or Houston was silent until I went to college.
14. I do almost all of my work on the coffee table sitting on the floor. I stack my papers underneath the coffee table and I’ve spread a sleeping bag out in the space between the coffee table and the couch. Jon and I call this “The Nest.”
15. I am not that attached to my books, but I am attached to my DVDs. I hoard them, protect them, and I’m very picky about the cases, whereas I tend to haphazardly break the spines of books and give them away for no reason.
16. I hate backpacks and purses and carry only messenger type bags.
17. I hated wearing socks until I started knitting them.
18. During college, I gained about 25 pounds, but I didn’t change clothing sizes. My friends speculate that I must have swallowed a piece of dark matter at some point.
19. I have my nose pierced but not my ears.
20. I have dyed my hair pink, red, purple, blue, and green.
21. I am an amateur haircuttress, and I seem to have a weird knack for it. I have a regular clientèle of five people now.
22. I once ate an entire lemon tart (that served 4 people) by myself and gave myself a blinding sugar migraine.
23. People think Dani and I are sisters when we’re together. When we were housemates in Oberlin, people thought we were the same person because we shared clothes.
24. When something wakes me up in the middle of the night, my immediate response is to punch Jon until he wakes up and deals with the problem. Then I steal the covers and go back to sleep.
25. My mother taught me to leave a bit of food on my plate at meals for the “Manners Fairy” when I was growing up. Jon is from the clean plate club and finds this odd, but now depends on me having leftovers so he can finish my food for me. It’s symbiotic.
26. I am, like, the Typhoid Mary of socialism. At one point, everyone I’d lived with for the last two years was affiliated with a socialist organization.
27. I am tied with my aunt for the shortest person in my family. We clock in at about 5 feet and ½ inch.
28. I have blood-injury-injection phobia, which means I pass out at the sight of blood. My grandpa does too.
29. I am woefully unobservant of my surroundings. It often takes me a couple of days to realize furniture has been moved or that Jon’s cleaned the apartment.
30. I once dropped the pair of eyeglasses I’m currently wearing off the top of the golden angel statue in Berlin. They landed safely and were turned into the gift shop without incident.
It's a very tall statue.32. I am very fond, though, of seeing terrible horror movies in theaters. I saw House of Wax, The Fog, and Stay Alive in theaters.
33. I have a bizarrely deep and unemotive singing voice.
34. I only started wearing a bra regularly when I became a grad student. Once people started referring to me as Ms. Sanders, I felt like it was time to wear proper foundation garments.
35. I am terribly addicted to caffeine and consume around 250mg a day, but I can’t stand coffee. I do love coffee ice cream though.
look at all the empty cans behind me!37. I also can’t tell my right from my left.
38. I do a mean impersonation of George Michael’s dance moves in the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” video.
39. I studied abroad in Estonia and Morocco. I learned a lot of Estonian and Arabic words for food and that’s about it.
40. Goldfish crackers are a major staple of my diet
41. My father worked at a living history ranch for a few years and I learned how to make bullets, weave saddle blankets, and make lye by hanging out there. Jon jokes that I’ll be ready for the apocalypse.
42. When I get bored, I take photos of myself making funny faces and post them on MyHeritage to see what celebrities will come up. It's really addictive.
| http://www.myheritage.com |
43. I have a scary good memory. Sometimes I worry that I’ll come across as a stalker if I let on that I remember random facts about people, so I tend to feign ignorance about small things.
44. I really like subways. Quality public transportation will always be a novelty for me.
45. I kind of want a pet octopus. I’d name him Botkins and give him a rubber ball to play with.
46. Despite the fact that I’m a huge film buff and have been referred to on occasion as a “walking IMDB,” I haven’t seen such cultural touchstones as American Pie and Never Been Kissed.
47. My first word was cheese. No kidding.
48. I am a compulsive list-maker. I’m the kind of person who writes things down in my planner that I was expecting I had to do in order to strike them out.
49. I can sing the entire soundtrack to the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar.
50. My handwriting is peculiar. It’s small and I write in straight lines ad looks neat from far away, but is totally illegible close up.
51. I am very attached to my pillow. I carry it everywhere and find it hard to sleep on other pillows. I even took it with me when I studied abroad.
52. I find it endlessly amusing that people either think my sister and I look totally different (we have very different skin tones and coloration) and not related or virtually identical (but our bone structure is pretty similar). It’s quite polarizing.
What do you think?
53. My favorite movie of all time is Wages of Fear. It’s fantastic, with an ending that was once described by a Ed Chigliak on Northern Exposure as the definition of closure.
54. My friends and I sometimes play the if-you-were-a-fictional-character-who-would-you-be game. Jon is clearly the Dude from The Big Lebowski, and general consensus is that I am either Lily Tomlin’s character, Vivian, from I Heart Huckabees or Frylock from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Which is totally awesome.
55. I talk during movies. At the theater, at home, it doesn’t matter.
56. I am the biggest car singer ever. I belt and do those stupid I’m-sitting-but-I’m-actually-dancing movements that make you look like a total spaz.
57. If I had a spare couple hundred dollars, I would totally by myself SPSS, my preferred statistical analysis package, in order to do data analysis from home. ‘Cause there’s nothing better than running MANOVAs in your pj’s.
58. I had the following phrase engraved on the back of my iPod nano: “And tschuss balls to you, sir.”
59. I almost never wear jewelry or make-up.
60. I look way younger than I actually am. I regularly get carded going to R-rated movies, and I get stopped when I’m walking to my office once or twice a week by someone asking if I’m lost and looking for one of the intro psych experiments.
61. Sometimes when I’m bored or stressed out, I chase my cats around the apartment. I find their looks of annoyance endlessly uplifting for some reason.
62. Despite my klutziness, I’m really good at yoga poses that involve standing on one leg. I am terrible at downward-facing dog, though.
63. During high school, I drove a silver Chrysler Lebaron convertible with a broken speedometer that overheated so often that I kept a gallon of water in the trunk at all times.
64. Quite appropriately, I drove this car to go see Cake in concert.
65. My second major in college was Law and Society, but I never considered going into law.
66. I spent a summer couch-hopping in Boston. The only job I managed to get was a shelf-straightening position in the Harvard library system. I literally spent eight hours a day pulling books forward and then pushing them back so that they were all flush against the edge of the shelf. I didn’t even have to check see if they were in order.
67. I was obsessed with dinosaurs when I was little. I had a set of blow-up dinosaurs that I loved and I apparently spent the better part of a year refusing to change out a dress that had pterodactyls printed on it.
68. I spent a large part of my childhood watching Labyrinth and tend to quote sections of it at random.
69. I have phone issues. I’m not shy, but for some reason I can’t really bring myself to call people. I’m afraid that said phone call would be terribly obtrusive and awkward as a result.
70. I really love things like subatomic particles and dark matter. I’ve never taken physics, so I don’t really understand any of it, but I’m still captivated by quarks and charms and the like.
71. My father was a staunch atheist that refused to lie to his children about Santa Claus. So, I was that kid in kindergarten who spilled the beans about his nonexistence.
72. I have played Myst and all of its sequels twice through. I stayed on campus one spring break and my roommates came back to find our quad covered in scraps of paper with badly drawn maps and symbols on them.
73. Because I grew up in Texas, I will never get used to real seasons. When the temperature drops, my first reaction is that it’s just a fluke, and I tend to get confused about it still being cold three months later. By the time spring rolls around, I feel betrayed by the weather and I don’t trust that the warmth will hold until about July.
Damn you, Jack Frost!74. I hate tying shoelaces. It’s too fussy an inefficient, and besides, Velcro has made laces obsolete.
75. My father worked for our local newspaper when I was a kid. Once, he took me with him when he was writing a story about a local sighting of the Virgin Mary’s face on the side of an old refrigerator.
76. I used to be a morning person…but that has dramatically changed since high school.
77. I kept pet rats when I was younger. I still think they make great pets.
78. I score surprisingly not-great on standardized tests. It’s not like I bomb them, but I scored about 100-200 points lower on the SATs and GREs than people guess my scores would be. I did rock the psych subject GRE, though.
79. Despite my revolutionary leanings, I was a member of Business Professionals of America in high school (one of my teachers signed me up) and went to state competitions for international business 3 years in a row. I also aced the Economics AP test. Weird, huh?
80. I have very strong hands, and give really good back massages. I do not like receiving massages myself, though, as I have a very low pain threshold.
81. Strong hands also means that I have a really firm handshake. This once got me turned down for a job as a waitress at a pizza place. The manager later told a friend of mine that I”d scare the customers because I was so manly, and that he could maybe find me a job stacking boxes in the back room.
82. I have never broken a bone, had a serious medical emergency or gotten significant dental work done. I have had several concussions, though.
83. I was born skinny and with a ton of hair. I have a weird Mohawk in most of my baby pictures. My sister, on the other hand, was the prototypical fat, pink, bald Gerber baby.
84. My pet peeve is when people are really indecisive, but still super-picky. Like when everyone’s sitting around and somebody decides we should do something. So, you start suggesting things, and they’re like, “no, no.” And you eventually just ask them what they want to do and they’re like ,”you know, whatever….” Drives me nuts.
85. My other pet peeve are those people that are completely unable to just chill. Like, I have a friend who thinks that we have to do something fun in order to hang out. I’m all for going out and having good times, but that’s too much pressure! Can’t we just plop down on the couch every now and then and watch a DVD?!
86. Guys with really long, thick eyelashes get me every time.
87. I have always wanted to ride in a submarine.
88. I flirt like a boy in the 4th grade. Seriously, my method involves showing the guy how smart I am and then punching him in the arm. I’m, like, the least smooth person ever.
89. I get totally weirded out when I see my professors around town. There’s one in my department that lives near me and rides the same bus to campus as me, and I find it very jarring to see him just sitting there minding his own business, listening to his iPod like everybody else.
90. I find weddings kind of annoying. I always feel like they’re way longer than they need to be. I really don't have a romantic bone in my body.
91. I am a very fast but utterly terrible typist. I never learned the proper technique and can’t touch-type to save my life.
92. I once saw a production of Madame Butterfly in Estonia, with a Russian singer playing a Japanese woman. It was totally surreal.
93. If I have kids, I’d really like to name them crazy things like Balthazar or Phlox. I’m not sure if this impulse is a love of quirkiness or a latent sadistic streak.
94. Peculiar things bother me in film and TV. Like, why was Hermione’s dress the wrong color at the ball in the fourth movie? And why do all the women on Lost wear their hair down? It’s a tropical island for chrissakes! My neck gets too hot, and I live in the Midwest!
95. My favorite word is nexus. It sounds cool, and is the kind of cool word you can use in everyday conversation.
96. Sometimes I pretend I speak German. The most I can say is ‘du hast ein fleishe-tascha’ which I’m told roughly translates to “you have a flesh sack.”
97. I have an irrational hatred of William Shatner.
98. As I mentioned before, I’m a fiend for coca-cola. But I am sure that it tastes a bajillion times better out of the can than a 2-liter bottle. I have very defined opinions on this.
99. One time, Jon, Dani and I were driving from Ohio to Texas and I kinda….lost it after my driving shift. I was driving in the wee hours of the morning and right about dawn and Bjork came on. Somehow the combination of these things made me all loopy and we pulled over to switch drivers. At this point, I jumped out of the car and rolled down the grassy hill at the rest stop, much to the chagrin of my roadtrip-mates.
100. I’m the most annoying sick person ever. And poor Jon has to deal with my urgent, and sometimes conflicting demands. One time, I whined for him to get me some water, and then change the channel…WAIT! THE WATER’S OT COLD ENOUGH!! Where are you GOING? I HATE this show……etc. (Note: I have made efforts to be better this time around, but I've failed. In the last 48 hours, I've made Jon order me a milkshake, a burger, and go out for muffins...twice.)
