Snippets About Moi

I got this very cool idea from another blog. So, here goes — my list of too much information about me (I ran out of steam before I got to her ambitious “100 things”).

1. I’m *passionately* in favor of the separation of church and state. So many problems are caused when we muddy the waters between personal faith and public institutions. On this topic, I really like this bumper sticker, too.

1. I think gay marriages should be legal. Never made sense to me how one couple’s marriage could somehow “threaten” another. Marriage is a sacrament, according to your religion; it is a civil right, according to your citizenship in a forward-thinking country.

1. I test squarely as Libertarian on the online quiz, “The World’s Smallest Political Quiz” but have voted for candidates from other political parties too. I despair of our country ever breaking out of a two-party system, though, particularly when the mainstream media won’t even give equal time to ALL parties’ candidates.

1. Perhaps I should mention that I’m socially VERY liberal, but fiscally and politically pretty conservative.

1. One of my all-time favorite things to do in this world is to attend a performance by, watch a TV show about, or listen to a webcast or podcast of professional comedians. From the profane to the profound, they are fabulous to me.

1. I’ve been married three times. Third time’s the charm — since 1994 and going strong.

1. I met my third husband and the love of my life when we were both in college and he was living down the dormitory hallway from my boyfriend (who later became my first husband). Fourteen years later, Mr. Destiny was looking at the Tupelo, Miss., newspaper while he contemplated moving there for a new job when he spotted my name and photo beside my regular newspaper column (which only appeared once a month, so imagine the luck). He wrote to me, I found him a place in my apartment complex, and the rest was history. (Marriage hint for anyone who cares to obtain said hint: Hitch up with someone who knows how to love unselfishly. Feel cherished. It’s a priceless gift.)

1. Nicknames and inside jokes about names/personalities are fairly common in my family and in the one I married into (Chic, Caity-Cakes, Gin, Toogie, Egg, Princess, Thumb, Sausage), but I don’t have one. (No, I’m not sniffling, really … I like being “Carolyn.”)

1. I have two children, born in 1990 (second marriage) and 1997 (this marriage).

1. Child No. 2 was my miracle baby — I had toxemia and she was born 7 weeks prematurely and weighing in just an ounce shy of three pounds. Her head was as small and fuzzy as a peach, and her back was as small and firm as the palm of my hand. Her fingernails were specks the size of pepper flakes, and it took her whole hand to wrap around the tip of my thumb. But she was tough and strong from the start. She still has the same tilted almond aspect to her eyes that made me think of a fairy the first time I held her.

1. Child No. 1 has also held my heart since I first laid eyes on her. I remember when she too was the size of a rump roast and am still astonished at this suddenly curvy and self-assured young woman who is almost grown up.

1. We’ve talked about Theoretical Kiddo No. 3, but at my age, I’m uncertain how much maternal abuse my middle-aged body will take gracefully. In fact, I’m pretty damned sure. But wistful.

1. My husband’s legal first name is Harry. Middle name is Dewitt. I call him Dee, the nickname I knew him by when we were in college together. Everyone except family and really long-time friends calls him Harry. I still stutter to get his name “right” when I call his office. I suspect his co-workers are unsure whether I’m bright enough to know my hubby’s name.

1. I’m intimidatingly outspoken in areas of my life where I feel either (1) competent and confident, (2) terribly wronged and angry, or (3) compelled to speak out for an underdog. But at heart I’m a squashy marshmallow. Sort of a “closet” shy person, if that makes any sense. When I mention my shyness, people invariably say, “YOU?”

1. I’m double-jointed. Learned this in the third grade when a classmate got a repelled look on her face when she looked at my index finger when I was pointing; it was (and still is, like my other fingers) as curved as a swaybacked rope bridge when I “straighten” it out.

1. My little fingers are noticeably crooked at the tips. I read online somewhere this is a sign of having Indian blood somewhere back in the gene pool. Only effect in my daily life: My little fingers pop a lot when I’m doing lots of typing.

1. I also read online somewhere that a LOT of people in the South (1) have some percentage of Indian heritage and (2) like to point this out.

1. I’ve been going online obsessively since around 1990, when I got my first Mac (the one with the 9-inch screen).

1. My first computer was a Tandy that booted up with a tape drive (a real cassette tape) and had a grand total of 16K memory, back around 1984. My second was an office hand-me-down from my then-father-in-law, and the unit was one of those bulky industrial-size giant desktop units that used the pie-plate sized floppy disks. My, haven’t we come a long way.

1. I worry that no one will read any of my blogs, and then I have to laugh at the vanity of it all — putting my nattering online for anyone to view. You’ll read it or you won’t — somehow I’ll survive. But I guess that high-school-era fear of rejection still lives, at least just a little bit, deep in the heart of all of us, doesn’t it.

1. In my attic is a box or two of spiral notebooks that date back to my elementary years, filled with my scrawlings about boyfriends, growing-up pangs, and the usual angst. I stopped keeping diaries regularly sometime after my first marriage, but in my second I began writing in a shared journal known as an Amateur Publishing Association, or “APA” (pronounced AP-uh). Actually, I wrote in several of these monthly things, and they were a lifesaver for my sanity at the time. (Explanation for anyone who doesn’t know: Before online groups were so common, people would write about their personal lives and their interests/hobbies, make multiple copies, and send the info to one central person in the group; this person would collate everyone’s materials, slap on a cover, staple them together, and mail out that month’s contribs to all the members. Think of it as a compilation of each member’s blogs, just in print.)

1. My ears are double pierced. A bold thing at the time (when I was 13, back in 1974, and done without my mom’s permission) but hardly astounding in today’s Era of Ornate Body Piercing and Outrageous Body Mods.

1. My first car was a Vega — used. It doesn’t get any more pitiful than that. I actually melted the aluminum engine block because our shadetree mechanic assured me that “that there little ol’ ‘check engine’ light don’t mean a thing, honey.”

1. I’m one of those people who, when they have minor health concerns, will Google the topic until I read enough dire possibilities to scare myself. (My lupus fears turned into your basic adult acne, easily subdued with some meds. Gallbladder failure turned into simply wearing old jeans that were too tight for my fat self; an admission that I now wear Size Mumble-Mumble cured that. Glaucoma — well, that turned into simply the need to get *grimace* trifocals and better lighting.)

1. My vision is markedly different in each eye; I’ve always known that. But in recent years I found out from my eye doctor’s careful testing that I rely on my left eye for up-close reading and my right eye for looking long distances. Guess I’m playing to my natural strengths.

1. What is it about wading through your 40s that makes you so suddenly aware of the body’s gradual surrender? I got one really, really bad ear infection, and it messed up something in my inner ear; now I’ve got a permanent case of mild “positional vertigo.” Nothing life threatening. Just means that if I suddenly change my position (roll over abruptly in bed, lean my head back steeply to kiss my kid standing behind me while I’m sitting on the sofa, etc.), the room spins drunkenly. Medicine can help, but it’s not crippling; my brain compensates most of the time, my audiologist told me.

1. Celebrities, singers, politicians, noted businessmen, and famous writers/editors I’ve met: Art Linkletter, Lee Greenwood, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, George Foreman, Pat Conroy, Alan Dean Foster, Andre Norton, several “Miss Mississippi’s” (my years as a reporter), Trent Lott, former Miss. Gov. Kirk Fordice, John Grisham, Doug Marlette, and FedEx CEO Frederick Smith.

1. Favorite foods: Spicy sushi with lots of ginger, squid salad, broiled salmon, hummus, tabouleh, semi-sweet dark chocolate, turnip greens with pepper sauce (served with hot buttered cornbread — and we’re talking cornBREAD, not cornCAKE — none of that sweet stuff), and my Aunt Doris’s squash casserole.

1. I can touch the tip of my nose with my tongue (just barely). Also, I can curl it enough to lap water like a doggy (not that I DO that). And curl it tightly enough to drink through it like a short straw. And twist it like a washing machine agitator. And flap the sides of it like a manta ray skimming through the water (really). And undulate it from front to back or from back to front. And do the old bar trick of tying a knot in a maraschino cherry stem without touching it with my hands (although, to be honest, that also involves the use of teeth).

1. My hobbies: Knitting, blogging, reading, writing.

1. My daddy was one of four brothers and a sister. My mom was one of four sisters and a brother. Don’t you love that mirror symmetry?

1. As a toddler, I once drank some mildly toxic hairstyling goo of my mother’s when I found the bottle under the sink. I turned blue, and Mom and her maid kept handing me back and forth while they tried to figure out what to do. By the time the doc arrived (this was the era of house calls), my dad had angrily thrown the bottle into the field behind our house, and he had to trudge out to find it for the doctor.

1. I’m an only child.

1. I took piano lessons for nine years as a kid and still regret selling my beloved old piano to pay off debts, shortly before I gave up the financial fight and declared bankruptcy a few months after my second divorce.

1. I have a little blue-gray dot on the top of my right knee from a third-grade injury where Alison Graham jammed the tip of her pencil into the skin. I feel certain I must have pissed her off to get knee stabbed but don’t remember the reason. Just the little blue dot — an accidental tattoo to remind me of an old playmate.

1. I’ve got a meandering series of five pairs of freckles that skip along the top of my right arm, just as if I had been stitched up there in a previous life. (Some pretty bad stitching — one of the pairs of freckles is seriously out of line.) Not that I believe in previous lives, but still. It’s kind of cool.

1. If I had to pick the most common way I’ve been accident-prone, I would say, “Burns. Definitely.” I have burned the tender underside of one forearm (Inattentive Ironing Episode #1), my abdomen (Inattentive Ironing Episode #2, due to standing too close to the ironing board while wearing nothing but panties, bra, and an open housecoat), the bottom of one foot (a travel iron left plugged in and on its side on a towel on a hotel room floor — the Inattentive Walking Around episode), a small spot on my cleavage (sunburn, but a very bad one, on a narrow strip of tender white skin exposed by a newer, smaller bathing suit), a perfectly circular spot on my right wrist (an oil splash from frying chicken, once again Inattentively Working with a Heat Source, during a college job at a curb market), and some second- and third-degree burns on the arches of my feet and on the tops, bottoms, and sides of various toes (stepped in some combusting chemicals when taking photos at a fire across the street from the newspaper where I worked). But really — I don’t LOOK all scarred up — there’s at least one benefit from being too lazy to get a tan anymore — really pale skin doesn’t show my old, faded scars much at all.

1. I may still be remembered for dropping my camera on the front street of Waynesboro, Mississippi, in 1987 and whipping off my hot pink high heels and then my pantyhose right there on Main Street in front of the mayor, the firemen, and most of the business owners and customers on the block. I wasn’t being an exhibitionist — my feet were quite literally on fire from the chemicals I had stepped into. My unembarrassed quick thinking was inspired by remembering a news story of a woman who had recently been badly burned squirting lighter fluid onto a lit barbecue grill; when the flame zipped up the arc of liquid onto her, the synthetic fabric she was wearing melted onto — and then into — her skin. I whipped those nylons off in record time. The mayor and firemen had a few grinning comments to make when I saw them next. I discovered that the mayor — who I once called “Peachcakes” after he called me “Hon” one time too many when I was interviewing him for our newspaper — actually had a pretty good sense of humor.

1. That mayor was also the one who laughed until I thought he would choke when he saw me try to pick up the quarter glued to the sidewalk in front of city hall.

1. I know firsthand that burned feet, when properly bandaged, look quite comical. Much like Minnie Mouse’s shoes, only in white gauze. I mean, the padding is immense.

1. My hair length has ranged from less than an inch from the scalp (due to a wide variance in my definition of “pixie” versus my hairdresser’s definition) to nearly-waist-length (just wanted to see how long it would get). I like it best just barely above shoulder-length. It’s fine and a bit thin and has just enough curl in it to be ornery but not to look *deliberately* curly.

1. My older daughter — whose ponytail is almost as thick as my wrist and who clearly inherited her “hair” genes from her daddy — truly thinks she’s complimenting me when she sighs heavily and says, “I just WISH my hair was as thin and straight as yours.” (Uh, gee … thanks?)

1. My children both have strong cowlicks somewhere in their hairlines, as I do.

1. I’ve got deep brown eyes and (probably because of my nearsightedness) virtually always have really tiny, constricted pupils. I’m guessing that if a cop ever pulled me over and trained his flashlight on my face, he’d spot my pinprick pupils and wonder just what illegal stuff I’ve been ingesting recently.

1. The answer would be “nothing since the mid-1980s, and not much before then, since the few times I smoked pot it really didn’t have a lot of effect on me, except for making me dizzy.”

1. The reason for “nothing since the mid-1980s” would be best explained as “because of the time when it *did* have a strong effect on me.” Here’s the embarrassing detailed explanation: I still remember when a friend’s husband bought some weed that clearly had been ‘enhanced’ without my knowledge, and after one shared joint I became convinced that a little man on a white pogo stick was slowly hopping up and down on my spine. I also had spaghetti sauce under my skin, and you could move it around like squeezing toothpaste from a tube. I saw musical notes in the air, watched people in framed pictures wink at me, and felt as if I were falling backwards in slow motion even though I was sitting still. And I thought I was falling backward through open space toward a red window frame that was hanging inexplicably in thin air, like a bad Salvador Dali-wannabe painting. Worst of all, I couldn’t feel the air coming into my lungs and I thought I wasn’t getting enough air, so I started hyperventilating, to the amusement and then alarm of my friends. I would go on to tell you how I shrieked on the way home and almost made husband #1 stain his drawers because I was blabbing about how he had just driven through an apparition of brown-robed Death standing in the highway and motioning for us to stop, but I think you get the point. Stone-cold stoned. Nevah again …

1. Kind of makes you wonder about what skeletons are in the closet of all those *other* 40-something PTA moms out there, doesn’t it?

1. I’m an amateur techie in love with learning software’s ins and outs, coveting fancy new cell phones, blog tweaking, GPS units, laptops, etc. I’m the kind of gal who really likes bling-bling but who LOVES shopping at computer stores. Almost as much as I love shopping at bookstores.

1. I read science fiction, fantasy, romances, serious literary and Southern fiction, mysteries, thrillers, horror, young adult, books full of my favorite comic strips, how-to books about virtually anything crafty or scientific or quirky, trivia books, and … well, there’s not much I *don’t* like to read.

1. I can still recite the Greek alphabet from the one year I spent in the Greek system as an AOII in college, but I cannot for the life of me remember the names of some very nice colleagues who work on the same floor of my building and who I should know by now. My capricious memory exasperates me. Thank God for nametags.

1. My work history ranges from door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman (two weeks, right out of college) to 13 years as a newspaper reporter/editor, as well as various stints writing/editing for trade magazines, trade books, a university PR department, a university publications department, and a transportation company (*cough-cough* FedEx *cough-cough*).

1. I love dreadful puns. No, really. There ARE people like me. One of my favorite groaners ends up with the punchline: “He was arrested for transporting gulls across staid lions for immortal porpoises.”

1. I’m, frankly, kind of hard to categorize. Girly enough to knit and like high heels but brainy enough to be entranced by a TV show about math and a book on quantum physics theories. I kinda like that about myself.

1. Many moons ago, I made a 31 on my ACT, graduated as salutatorian of my high school class, and successfully passed a MENSA quiz. I still like to do crossword puzzles and Mensa quizzes.

1. I’m a Brownie troop leader and a soccer mom.

1. I enjoy science fiction/fantasy conventions (”cons”) when I can go to them. However, I only rarely have the opportunity, the inclination to squander my precious spare time, and the money to do so in style all aligned properly. But I do so VERY much enjoy being around bright, quirky, literate, broad-minded, and fun individuals. That’s the heart of a con — the very cool folks who attend. Books and speakers are just great side benefits. Side note: Here’s a list of lots of cons. Side Note #1: When I do go to cons, my husband calls it “entering the Dork Forest of Nerdvana.” Side Note #2: He’s also the one who coined the phrase “geek strap” for the USB flash drive I used to wear at the office on a lanyard with my work ID.

1. I love going to museums, learning trivia, and finding out how things work.

1. I participated in 2003’s Nanowrimo — National Novel Writing Month — and plan to do so again someday. It is too much fun for my inner geek. I only made it to 25,000 words or so instead of the goal of 50,000 words, but it was more than I had before I started.

1. I’m a night owl. If I go to bed before midnight, I’m sick or succumbing to sleep deprivation. It’s not that I don’t like to sleep — I love to wallow in bed as much as the next working woman — but I love my alone time with the computer, my knitting, the TV, and my books after everyone else in the house beds down for the evening.

1. My mom lives with my family and has needed that family support since two months after my husband and I married in 1994. If I were to describe how she and I get along, I would say it’s historically akin to a plugged-in toaster being dropped into a bathtub. Nowadays, it’s just the occasional hiss or spark. My husband’s natural good humor is the grace that lets Mom and me just nudge each other occasionally rather than grind each other to dust.

1. Re my husband: Yes, he is a saint in many ways.

1. I’m often stricken with the common affliction of having a song “stuck” in my head — it will whisper and roar and march and tiptoe through my head until I think I will go insane. I’ve read that this means I may have slightly neurotic tendencies although I’ve also heard of “cognitive itch” and studies on how the auditory cortex works. I once spent a week trying to get “the Name Game” out of my head. (”Shirley! Shirley, Shirley bo Birley Bonana fanna fo Firley, Fee fy mo Mirley, Shirley!” Try that with every word that goes through your head for a few days. Soon, you’ll find yourself swearing under your breath, “Shit! Shit, shit, bo bit, bonana fanna fo fit …” and then the men in the little white coats will come and take you away. “Crazy! Crazy, crazy, bo-bazy …”

1. I used to love listening to Dr. Demento. Still would if I could find it on the radio.

1. I simply cannot listen to music or talk radio while I write. My brain locks up like a 286 computer trying to download a DVD movie on a 56K connection.

1. I can, however, work in a REALLY noisy work environment*, thanks to my years in journalism. Worst-case scenario in my working history: Working in one room with all the other reporters jammed together at a few tables with our computers and phones for a few weeks (months?) while the building was being remodeled, section by section. And concrete was being jack-hammered in the next room. Fun environment for phone interviews. (*One caveat: The noise doesn’t bother me if it’s omnipresent. If it’s intermittent — quiet some days but clattery the next, I go as nuts as the next person.)

1. My current office is as silent as a strictly managed library, which was pretty unnerving to me at first.

1. Unfortunately, I have a voice that “carries.”

1. When we retire (someday), my husband and I have talked about getting a kit and building a plane over the period of a few years (he’s a private pilot) and fly around to places that interest us and to family members and friends who we miss. I’d also like to own a really small community newspaper I could run as I see fit — with everything from rah-rah community articles to fire-and-brimstone editorials and hard news reporting. Maybe someday. Alternative: Write for such a paper as a freelancer and work in a knit shop or book store or both. Such fun things to contemplate!

1. I learned very quickly that having children is an humbling, life-enriching, and mind-expanding experience. And I’m a better person for the patience they have taught me and how my children have helped me break my I’m-an-only-child “the world revolves around me” selfishness. (It’s not completely gone, unfortunately, but definitely broken.) You have to really love the little critters even when they hurl into the pocket of your shirt (while you’re wearing it), accidentally cut holes in the arms of your like-new sofa while making you a pretty picture, or sing “It’s a Grand Old Flag” so many times, with such enthusiasm, over so many months, that you could cheerfully choke the school administrators who play it over the intercom daily. (This is my life.) My theory is that kids are so darned cute and endearing as a form of self-preservation.

1. Hmm, what else? … I’m a really sloppy housekeeper for both my house and my car. They both deserve better. I’m still not sure, though, whether this trait means I have my priorities straight or totally screwed up.