Meming with SCB

My computer is still in the hospital, recovering from its transplant operation.  So I am in the library again.  I'm seated between an Eminem clone browsing a dating site, and an old man who keeps muttering curses against Warren Buffett.  Just outside the lab is a teenaged couple on a small sofa, cuddling and closely inspecting what look to be about 20 sets of dental x-rays.

I want my computer back.

In the meantime, SCB tagged me in a Q&A.  So here's some stuff about me that she wants to know:

1.     Which of your ancestors would you most like to meet?

Probably my maternal grandmother's parents or grandparents.  My grandmother talks about her grandmother telling stories about hiding the silver under the house when the Yankee soldiers blew through town, and so forth.  And my great grandfather used to go to the local black holy-roller church (I was raised Pentecostal, so I'm allowed to say that) on Sunday nights, which was kind of an odd thing to do in North Carolina during the Depression.  And there have been a lot of extremely intelligent and artistic and interesting people on that side of the family from my grandmother's generation on, so I'd like to see what things looked like a few steps farther back.

My ancestors on my dad's side were the scary kind of Appalachians, so...

2.     If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?

Hm. North side of Chicago (or Oak Park), southern Vermont, or a Scandinavian city.

3.     If you could have dinner with three contemporary celebrities, who would you choose?

I always need to place boundaries on these questions to be able to answer them to my satisfaction, and celebrity is a confusing concept these days, so I'm going with living entertainers.  The people I'd like to meet are ones who, when I read, watch, or hear interviews with them, make me think some variant on, "Wow, that's fascinating."  This can mean, "What a fascinating story," or, "what a fascinating perspective," or, "what a fascinating self-concept for a person of his experience."

So, offhand, the people who stand out in my memory would be: Ringo Starr, Brian May, and (in case nobody else wanted to talk to me) Jim Parsons.

Wildcard, believe it or not, would be Queen Latifah.  As an entertainer I feel neither here nor there about her, but she also spoke at the conference I mentioned over at Christine's that featured Christiane Amanpour and Jehan Sadat.  I'm not a celebrity hound and didn't care much beforehand, but she was far more impressive than I ever would have expected, and had the most interesting and articulate perspective on self and fame.  Anyone who can pleasantly surprise me that much deserves more time.

4.     What is your favorite piece of music?

The overture to Bernstein's Candide. Or Hey Jude.  Or the Gloria that my church uses during Lent and Easter.

What was your favorite toy when you were a child?

My little bear, Clarence.  My mom's brother got married when I was about 2 and the only grandchild yet, and his bride-to-be (Claire) gave me a teddy bear that had been given to her by some earlier boyfriend.  I still have him.  He is lovely.

6.     What is the last movie you saw (either in the theater or at home)? Would you see it again?

Monsoon Wedding.  Love it, seen it many times, make everyone else watch it, will see it again.

7.     If you could hire someone regularly to do one chore around your house, what would it be?

Putting things away.  Dishes, laundry, groceries, Christmas decorations, pretty much anything I ever take out in order to use.  This has always been my weakness.

8.     When you think of your favorite holiday or celebration, what sound(s) come to mind?

Karen Carpenter singing Ave Maria.

9.     Which is your favorite season, and why?

Fall.  I like feeling the coolness, the reprieve from summer, the sense of slowing down into the stillness and introspection of winter.  Also the colors look good on me.

10.  Which book do you wish YOU had written?

Eek.  Um, maybe the Thursday Next books?  There's just something about his brand of genius.

11.  Tidy desk or messy one?
 
Prefer a tidy one, but generally have a messy one.  Or, well, an in-between one.

sNOw

It's just started snowing those giant, floppy flakes that in a few weeks will evolve into those giant balls of sludge hurtling from the sky that characterize springtime snow.  I honestly don't mind winter, but this part is inconvenient.

So, via Wende, a list of things that someone thinks I might have done by this point in my life.

1. Started your own blog (um...yeah)
2. Slept under the stars (I've never slept over the stars...)
3. Played in a band (does marching band count?)
4. Visited Hawaii (only for a few hours in the middle of the night)
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain (I guess, sort of, part of one...)
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped (I have no desire whatsoever to do this)
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a thunder and lightning storm (at every opportunity)
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch (what's an art?  I taught myself to crochet, and to snake a drain...)
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning (surprising, but not that I remember)
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France (um, as opposed to the Mona Lisa in Zimbabwe?)
20. Slept on an overnight train (Rome to Paris...I think I was 13?)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill (this really depends on how you define ill.  My conscience is clear.)
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb (Only part of one.  I got it at Safeway.)
26. Gone skinny dipping (yuck.  Just saying.)
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice (no, but ridden every other form of Venetian transport)
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person (Once in winter.  There was a lot of ice.)
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors (You mean Kentucky?  Well, I've been to Scotland, too.)
35. Seen an Amish community (there are several near my parents'.)
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied (I'm not sure what that means.)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke (I've never seen the appeal of being in a place where people are doing this.)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant (Not on purpose.  I was given the wrong bill.)
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris 
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling (I did spend part of my childhood in Guam...)
52. Kissed in the rain  
53. Played in the mud (I hate dirt.  I've always hated dirt.  Even as a child.)
54. Gone to a drive-in theater (my parents thought it would be a novel experience.  Then they couldn't get the audio to work.)
55. Been in a movie (I hope not.)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (never a Girl Scout.  But I ate some today.)
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason (as long as "because I want them" doesn't count as a reason)
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma (ineligible, due to both medical issues and having lived in Europe during a mad cow disease scare.)
65. Gone sky diving (see bungee jumping)
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp (I can do this when I visit the birthplace of the rest of my ancestors...)
67. Bounced a check (For someone who's good at math, I can sometimes be very bad at math.)
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job (assuming "fired" doesn't included layoffs)
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been a passenger on a motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Kissed a stranger at midnight on New Year’s Eve
86. Visited the White House (only outside)
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (I'm sure the animal is never "prepared"...)
88. Had chickenpox (Never!  Even though my younger sister did when she was 3 and I was 6 or 7.  The vaccine came out around when I started college, and I got it then.)
89. Saved someone’s life (see #64)
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous (does the Pope count?)
92. Joined a book club
93. Got a tattoo
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit (define "involved"...)
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee (I sat on the corpse of a wasp-like thing once.  I suppose it stung, but not by the creature's volition.)

Locale Meme

At Wende's request:  

 

10 Things I Like About Where I Live

1. Short commute. Like, 3 miles, most of it through a county forest preserve.  My last 3.5 years in Massachusetts, I drove a minimum of 40 minutes each way (and there were evil school buses that had to stop at the end of every. single. driveway. because the New English can't be bothered to build sidewalks, because building a sidewalk where there previously was none would be changing something, and changing stuff is BAD.  Though you'd think than in a region where almost every home's yard features sizable bedrock outcroppings, they'd be looking for something to do with all their sand and gravel.)  Anyhow, I realize 40-60 minutes isn't all that bad compared to what some people do every day, but I find the quality of life effects enormous.
   
   
2. Looking at the City. Chicago is unspeakably gorgeous. Particularly the parts that Mayor Daley isn't trying to pretend don't exist, but even the slums are vaguely pretty in their own way. 
   
   
3. Pleasantness. Living here as someone who's fundamentally northeastern, I can't help but reflect on the climatic differences.  Cultural shorthand has it that people in the northeast are mean, and people in the midwest are nice. It's an observation more accurate than its simplicity suggests, though the wording is off.  The best descriptor I've found for folk around here is "pleasant" - it's all about behaving oneself in such a way that meaningless, everyday interactions aren't made unecessarily combative.  Frankly, I really wouldn't like Minnesota nice or Southern friendly, but Chicagoland pleasant is just right.
   
   An aside: It's so cute the way local transplants from Iowa and Minnesota seriously think Chicagoans are the big, gruff, mean city folk.
    
4. Public Libraries.  By and large, they're quite good.  Illinois is known for allegedly funding them well. 
   
   
5. Snow removal.  It's not that they do it particularly well, it's just that Massachusetts does it incredibly badly, and I really do feel a lot safer now in that respect. 
   
   
6. Public Radio pledge drives.  They have attitude.
    
   
7. Friends.  This has been an issue for me in the past.  But here there are people I like who like me and who actually have room for new friends, and it's a really good thing.
   
   
8. Mass Transit.  Ok, this is a mixed bag.  The locals think the CTA is hell itself, but they don't know what they're talking about.  It's like hearing the British complain about their national rail - ok, so, no, it's not West Germany, but has anybody heard of Amtrak?  I have a standing disagreement with a friend who grew up here and went to school in Boston and who insists that the T is divine and the El is gross.  I don't know how a right thinking person with a full set of faculties could arrive at this judgment, but if there's one thing anybody should retain from an elite eastern education, it's an understanding of the futility of arguing with an MIT grad. 
   
   While the Boston T does have the advantage of serving what's really quite a small city, the four lines are basically incompatible and were only connected as a distant afterthought, and the trains make this horrible noise that always leaves you thinking they're going to explode in the station and kill everyone.  El trains rumble pleasantly the way trains should, and the stations are named in a manner that hints at their location - calling the stop on Washington Street, "Washington Street" is an innovation that would never occur to Bostonians. There's occasional transparency in T-stop nomenclature - having a station named "Airport" is handy when you're trying to get out of town - but it takes extensive insider knowledge to figure out why there's a subway stop called "Wonderland."
   
   
9. Orthogonality. Yes, this is another Boston-backlash issue.  It's not that I think roads should be perpendicular on some abstract moral grounds, but I've really gotten hooked on this whole knowing-how-to-get-places thing.  Did I mention we have street signs here, too?  It's like Shangri-La, but with potholes.
   
   
10. Spectator politics.  If I were inclined to, or even capable of, feeling attached to or invested in my community, it would be depressing.  But I've long since accepted that I wasn't socialized for that, so it's fun to watch.  Yes, there's ex-gov Blago - anybody can refer to an elected official as a narcissistic sociopath, but how often do you get to be clinically accurate while doing it? - but my soft spot is for our County President, who in a meeting last month reportedly dissolved into tears while begging the board not to rescind last year's sales tax increase.  He lost the battle, by the way, so our local combined sales tax was reduced back to "only" 10.75%. 

Oh, I had homework, didn't I?

I'm finally feeling better and spent the evening decorating for Christmas!  Everything but the tree.

Five more questions:

from Anne in Reno
What do you do to keep from being depressed at the state of the world (as you see it) and the way things are going around you? How do you take control of your environment in a positive manner? 

There is nothing new under the sun.

and

Let us cultivate our garden.

with an occasional dose of

What does it matter?  We're all going to die eventually anyway.

(Which I don't expect anyone else to find as comforting as I do.  Let's agree to chalk it up to, "people are different.")

I take control by shutting out the noise.  I don't always do a particularly good job of it, but I'm learning.

SCB

My question is a three-parter. A) If you could live anywhere at all, where would you live? B) in what style would you live (I don't mean MCM or traditional, I mean opulence or simple or whatever...) C) Why?

A) Either in a decent bungalow apartment in one of the northwest neighborhoods in Chicago, or back in the Fingerlakes, on a hill.  Third choice would be Vermont, but I know I wouldn't like the social scene.

B) General (but not extreme) simplicity - the straightforward, no-nonsense kind, not the back-to-the-earth kind.  Lots of quiet and privacy (what the city would lack in these respects it would make up for in public transit and ready access to ethnic food). Small house in which everything works properly with only things I like inside it.

C) Chicago is the only large city I know where I would actively wish to live; likewise, the physical setting of central NY carries a lot of the right emotional connotations for me, plus the location is convenient.  Pleasant and easy are good.  My lifestyle fantasy is apparently to be like one of those Victorian poetesses who "lived very quietly" with a rich interior life.

Lorijo
Do you really care what kind of car you drive?

Not exactly.  As with many other things in my life, my affections lie with whatever requires a minimum of attention.  Oddly enough, my 9-year old American car with over 150k still more or less fits that bill.  I fancy a hybrid, once they've been around long enough for someone to do a lifecycle analysis that means something.

If we were to go on looks alone, a Mercedes or a Volkswagen (yes, that does sound weird).

Interpreting the question another way...I was given a PT Cruiser as a rental car on a business trip over the summer, and that felt a bit embarrassing.

Christine in DC

"If you were given $250,000 that you had to spend (i.e. no savings, like that old Richard Pryor movie...), how would you spend it?" Let's assume that's after taxes.

Either:

A.  Giving and some very good travel would account for about 50,000.  The other 200,000 would go to purchase of a residence, if the math made sense.  Then the other things I'd like to do would be taken care of by the change in cash flow resulting from having most of my housing expenses suddenly eliminated. 

Or:

B.I'd take off three years completely to study and travel.

Cookbook

What would you be doing with your life right now if you were free of all present constraints (family, money, geography, time, health, etc.)?

I'd be living somewhere in a pleasant little house in near-complete isolation with my cat and books doing the autodidact thing.  I'd venture into the nearby town once a week to replenish supplies and call my mother.


That's not to say I'd want to stay indefinitely, but it's absolutely what I'd be doing right now.  I have hermit fantasies.

20 Questions - 2

Bit of an update, perhaps?  All is well here.   Highlights:

• I saw a rather...ambitious stage adaptation of Frankenstein in the smallest theater I've ever seen, in the company of two MIT alumni.  Resurrecting the dead is exactly the sort of thing MIT types would try to do for fun, if it weren't already a cliche.  Strange evening.  Probably would have been a better production if the best actor hadn't been cast as the monster, and therefore had no lines.  Also, if the doctor could have remembered any of his lines, that maybe would have been good, too.
  
  
•  This weekend was warmer here than it was on my birthday.  In August.
  
  
• I accidentally finished my Christmas shopping last month. 
  
  
• Somehow, I'm hosting Thanksgiving.  More on that later, believe me.
  
  
• We went to the vet yesterday.  We were severely displeased about this.  Also, we have gingivitis.  To be fair, she redeemed herself in one respect - we were listening to the Beatles in the car on the way there and back, and she most definitely prefers Paul to John.  I don't know if we could continue to live together if that had gone the other way.  (No joke: When The Battle Ballad of John and Yoko came on, she started to make this atrocious noise that...well, to be blunt, sounded rather like Yoko.  I'm so proud.)
  

Ok, on to the inquisition.

AC

Q: What's the first movie you remember seeing in a theater? Or what movie reminds you of your childhood?


Ooh.  That's tough.  I don't have a particular first cinema memory, though I'm told I was taken to The Empire Strikes Back as an infant.  And when we lived in SoCal (I was 5-ish) I remember going to see what must have been The Search for Spock at a drive-in.  What made it memorable was that my parents couldn't get the sound to work, so the only enjoyable parts were the Klingon scenes, which were subtitled. 

The movie that most literally "reminds me" of childhood is Mary Poppins.  Specifically, it reminds me of the year my sister was three and she had to watch it Every. Single. Day.

SharonM

Q. Which book has had the biggest impact on you?

Books are one of those areas where a single superlative is difficult to identify.  Long-time readers may correctly suspect that I'm trying hard not to answer Animal Farm, and that's because:

a) That's what I always say, regardless of whether it's accurate;
b) I don't mean it in the way any thoughtful person would assume; and
c) It's a rather freakish answer, particularly without significant elaboration upon (b).

Really, my best answer is that there's a small number of books that leave me with what I can only describe as the profound feeling that it's ok to be me. (That's not to say that I persistently suffer from the impression that it isn't.)  Some of these are a bit obvious (Surprised by Joy, Girl Meets God); others I can't even begin to understand myself, and may even be a bit disturbing in this context. (Brideshead Revisited?  Candide? 1984?)

Brian Sibley

If you could take a real life holiday to a totally fictional location, where would you go and what would you bring back with you as a souvenir of your visit?

The Well of Lost Plots; a Mrs. Danvers clone.


Kerry

Is there a particular place Here that makes you happy?

I love being anywhere along the source branch of the Chicago River, north of the Loop.  This is a gorgeous town.

Hammie

What is your drag song? 

Which meaning of "drag" are we going with, here?

Let's go with the theme of the day and say anything early Beatles.  I think that's safe.

20 Questions - 1

Hi, I'm back-ish.  Everything's fine - I've been occupied with a little bit of work, a little bit of personal, a little bit of miscellaneous, but nothing crisis-like or even particularly unpleasant.  (Alana: Thanks for the greetings and concern!)

Anyhow, Wende's request for 20 Questions has been fulfilled, and we're answering in sets of five.  For simplicity, I've chosen to write my answers before reading the ones already posted by others.

Lauralynne
Would you rather eat Reese's Cups or Peppermint Patties?
Peppermint Patties.  I'm rather picky about what can adulterate my chocolate, and coffee and mint are the only flavors that get full permissions.  Reese's Cups are fine, but they're pretty much the only concession I'll make to peanut butter.

Would you rather never listen to music again or lose your TV?
Lose the TV.  I do watch it but it wouldn't be a very significant loss.

If you could visit any one time period in history, when would it be?
I really don't know.  Most periods in history suffer from the absence of indoor plumbing (and attendant advances in basic sanitation).  And, as hard as it is to spend time somewhere without indoor plumbing, imagine how much worse it would be if nobody else in the world had even heard of such a thing.  If there's one thing that we inhabitants of the modern west are accustomed to, it's not being able to smell each other.

Also, it's hard to make that sort of judgment on the basis of distilled history.  No matter how many exciting things happened during a given stretch of time, you have to remember that pretty much every day for pretty much every person was pretty mundane.

Plus, I've always thought that answers to this question tend to betray an idealized conception of the period under discussion.  And it would be totally humiliating to discover you'd gone all the way back in time in search of a fantasy.

If I try very hard to ignore all of that and pretend I have an ounce of romanticism in my being, I guess I'd go for the U.S. in the postwar period, because I'd really like to see whether or not everyone was really as earnest as we portray them.

Would you rather die peacefully, but unexpectedly in your sleep at age 60 or die at 90 after suffering for years from disease?
I know this will sound grim to people, but let's say 60.  Suffering is unpleasant, and, after allowing for all the necessary theological issues, it doesn't seem to me as though a person could really mind having died once it's happened.

Not that I'd like it if my parents felt that way.


Lynn
Do you think that questions such as "what's your favourite colour/ice cream/album of all time" help you get to know another person?

By themselves, no, of course not.  In fact, they're completely useless things to know about someone about whom you know nothing else.  But they can be both pleasant and useful things to know about anyone with whom you have an actual relationship at any level.  And perhaps the actual conversation and interactions that result in gaining the trivial knowledge have some relational purpose beyond conveying unimportant information.

More Childhood

The kid meme breeds.

What childhood habit or passion now seems most absurd?
The most problematic preoccupation was certainly the paranoia about childhood itself.

Related was my near-obsession with enhancing the stupidity of my peers. I wasn't (and still am not) particularly competitive, in the way of having rivalries with the other kids who were up at the top of the heap with me, but I delighted in making the chasm between us and the proletariat as wide as possible. This culminated with a brief period in high school during which I was letting people cheat off me and intentionally feeding them the wrong answers. (Speaking of dumb, they kept coming back. Sadly, my education featured little in the way of academic tracking, which was why I had classes with these people.) This is the sort of thing I should be ashamed of...

What was the first thing you wanted to do when you grew up? Did you do this thing?
I don't recall having a very specific desire one way or the other until high school, when one's thoughts on the topic are expected to become serious, and when I started thinking in the math and science direction in more than a vague sort of way. When I was asked about it as a younger child (Because children always are asked - why is that? Most kids are only aware of maybe a half-dozen professions.) I think I must have claimed "teacher," for lack of a better notion. I do remember people independently suggesting that path, and some of that may have been recognition of native talent that I do know exists and which I exercise in church and volunteer activities. But schoolteacher would probably be the worst possible job for me, as people under 18 still give me hives.

What did you most value doing with your opposite-sex parent? How did this influence you?
Walking and talking. I've always been close to my dad, and of my parents he's the one to value ideation and introspection, so I think I've always made more sense to him. Not that there's anything wrong with my relationship with my mother, but it's significant to their respective characters that his profession (pastor) involves dealing with ideas and life, while hers (librarian) prioritizes categorizing them, wrapping them in plastic, and putting them on shelves.

What's the remark you most resent having had made to you?
Nothing I recall with particularly enduring effects. During childhood, of course, the worst was anything that aimed to pin me with standard expectations for children, as discussed below.

Also in childhood, I was pretty easily crushed by any sort of criticism - I put an awful lot of stake in impression management - and the worst was being criticized for not taking criticism well, which actually happened rather often. This is something else that I more or less just outgrew on a reasonable schedule.

Trend in child-rearing today that annoys you?
This is the kind of question I think is pretty treacherous for childless people to answer - one can't help but have opinions, but chances are high that many of them will be naive. That said, the hyperindulgent helicoptering is troubling...though I would still stand by the truth of this assessment.

Childhood

Wende's community-generated Kidness Meme.

What were you afraid of as a child?

Frogs. They still repulse me.

I also have an irrational terror of being in the same room as someone who's using a knife (like for cooking). Actually, that may not have developed until adolescence (though I don't know why), and I can control it enough to seem normal.

Other than that, I don't remember being afraid of much specifically, in terms of things like the dark or monsters under the bed. I have a dim memory of being afraid of the neighbors' dogs when we lived in South Carolina, but I think my parents might have engineered that, the dogs actually having been dangerous.

A few years later, I recall being slightly afraid of the Soviet Union, of all things, because it seemed mysterious. (The Cold War was pretty icy by the time I was old enough to have global awareness.) And though it was never a fear exactly, I did have the occasional thought along the lines of "I wonder if China's going to carpet bomb us with nukes tomorrow." Or Iranian paratroopers going to infiltrate the Capitol, or whatever. I realize that sounds completely psychotic. But it did puzzle me, after 9/11/01, to hear adults say things like, "I never dreamed this could happen here," when it had seemed to me a perfectly reasonable topic for speculation when I was 8 years old.

Ok, we should move on right now to something that makes me sound less than completely insane...

What were your favorite books as a child? Do you ever reread any of them? If so, how do they hold up? Were there ever any that gave you nightmares, but you had to finish them anyway?

Circa age 3, the being-read-to-from-the-same-picture-books-repeatedly stage, my favorites were:

• Richard Scarry's Picture Dictionary. I was so insistent about this one that it became my parents' go-to baby gift for new parents that they didn't like.
• The Sweet Pickles Books. This was a series available by mail order in the late 70s and early 80s, and featured anthropomorphic animals, most of whom suffered from some sort of pathological compulsion: Very Worried Walrus, Me Too Iguana, Goof-off Goose, Fix-it Camel. These were the ones I recited from memory in the bathtub.

There were also golden books and Dr. Seuss and so forth. Always lots of books.

At the chapter book age there were also always lots of books, but from the early days I especially remember Pooh and Paddington, and The Wind in the Willows, which I call my first favorite book. Mom bought a set of Laura Ingalls Wilder around 2nd grade, which I found to be torture and abandoned after the first two or three - I'm going to blame inborn temperament, because simple-folk and country-folk stories have never managed to gain appeal for me.

I also had a soft spot for how-to books in the elementary years, and for the sort of books that were put out by organizations like National Geographic and were basically the equivalent of a science museum between hardcovers.

As a child, how did you feel about other children? Were your friends mostly your age, mostly older, or mostly non-existent?

Well. As a child I was moderately, though not debilitatingly, shy, something I outgrew in a more or less linear manner over time. I do recall being chastised (or that's how I took it at the time) for hanging out by myself instead of playing more with other kids during recess - that was 1st grade. I also recall that most of my series of "best" friends - in series mostly because of all the moves - were about a year older than me and/or a year ahead in school. I preferred the company of adults in a lot of cases, particularly when in groups of people I didn't know. "There will be kids your age there!" was never the reassurance it was meant to be. And I always wanted to be an only child - it just seemed like it would be so much more convenient. (It's a testimony to the quality of our adult relationship that My Sister The Blond Artist understands me well enough that she gets why I felt this way without being tempted to take it personally.)

I never liked the amount of noise and activity that other children generated, nor the general child-ness. Generally speaking, I hated childhood. Not my childhood, which was basically perfect and completely trauma-free. But childhood in general, and as a concept. It seemed obvious to me from a very early age that being a child was simply inferior to being an adult, and I deeply resented that spending 15-or-so years as (what I perceived to be) a second-class citizen was completely outside my control. So I lived through my entire childhood in a state of low-grade panic about being perceived as a child or being caught engaging in childlike behavior. At the same time, I realized that since I was a child, it was perfectly reasonable for adults to notice the fact, but that didn't make it any more palatable.

I hated asking for things, out of a fear (so maybe this part belongs under question 1) of the answer being no; what could be more childish than not knowing better than to ask for something that your parents wouldn't choose to give you/let you do? (Speaking of parents, this quirk drove mine crazy, and it wasn't until I was much, much older that they found out why I never asked for anything.) I was frequently incensed at being offered something because "all the kids love these." My grandmother was bad about this - I knew she was trying to make my day with something special, but I couldn't help but still be insulted that she would lump me with, and push me to be like, the group of people that I explicitly regarded as the scum of the earth - i.e., those my own age.

And being one of the smart ones, I also knew I had to keep the precociousness under control - certainly precocious wasn't exactly the same as childish, but in my childhood accounting method, they were just two parallel paths to getting oneself laughed at by adults, a.k.a. Real People. So the goal was to be mature and brilliant, so as to minimize the general child-ness of my persona, but not too mature and brilliant, so as to be cute. If I could have come out the other end and landed on actual savant, that would have been ideal, but I knew I wasn't that good, and hated it.

Ok, so much for that whole not-making-Mella-look-crazy thing. For the record, no, I don't know why I didn't turn out to be any more neurotic than I currently am.

What was your favorite toy? Do you wish that you still had it? Do you still have it or have you bought another off eBay?

Toys...I'm sure I had favorites in various seasons, but none stands out to me. I still have my teddy bear, Clarence.

Maybe the next meme should be "What were you like as a teenager?" - that could be scary.

Wende is Meming the Workout

Source.

If forced into motion, what's your first preference?
Walking. I would prefer to walk much, much more than suburban realities accommodate, though my present locale is an improvement over Massachusetts in that, here, most urban and suburban neighborhoods can be counted on to have sidewalks. My habit of living in places that do winter-with-a-capital-W doesn't really help, either.

In the realm of the less-than-routine, I'm also fond of dancing and ice skating. The former I don't do much, largely for lack of initiative in figuring out how/where to do it; the latter has actually proven rather difficult to find venues and opportunities more convenient than, say, "2:00-2:45 every other Tuesday afternoon in an obscure rec center four towns away."

When you have a gym membership, do you use it?
This is an unknown, primarily because I doubt it sufficiently that I've never invested in trying to find out. Part of it is temperament - the one thing I want even more than to be alone is to be left alone, so doing something that unpleasant in public is only going to make it worse. The other part is that I'm not naturally competitive, with others or myself, not in that way, so progress in the physical realm isn't the motivator it seems to be for some people.

If you could change your body type, would you?
No. All other things being equal, there are non-idealities that I might choose to tweak, but I'm happy with the basic plan. I've never been jealous of the waif look, despite the fact that the I-hate-my-body-and-shop-way-too-much-but-I'm-fabulous-anyway-and-so-are-you-so-let's-celebrate-our-bravado-together-and-pretend-it's-real-confidence blogs (and associated culture) tell me that really, I am, and just don't know it. I've always very much liked having an actual shape.

If you wouldn't change your body type, why are you working out? (Or if you would, why aren't you?)
I was never under the impression that exercise (you don't want to know how long it just took me to spell that correctly) could change one's body type, but alright.

1) I haven't been naturally skinny since the age of 7, so yes, keeping a general handle on things requires some sort of effort.
2) Dealing with (admittedly mild) chronic illness starting at age 25 has a way of making even the most cerebral of us acknowledge that she has a body (and only one, at that).
3) My family medical history is rife with bogeymen.

Mandatory high school P/E -- discuss.
I did 9th grade in the Department of Defense-Europe system, which at the time required only one year of P.E. - and it wasn't a completely terrible experience. But then we moved to California, where, at the time, the public schools required three years of P.E. I did find it offensive that they would require more P.E. than math (or science, or foreign language, or social science, or fine arts, or anything else besides English) to graduate from high school, but then again, California had the 50th best educational system in the U.S. at that point (it may be still; I honestly don't know). Somehow or other, I managed to exempt myself from the third year's requirement by way of marching band.

This is where I usually tell the story about how, in the spring of my sophomore year, it rained every day for three months, and the concurrently scheduled P.E. classes were all confined to the gymnasium. On the days when we weren't running laps around the basketball court (bad enough even when there aren't 100 other adolescents in there with you), they set up three volleyball nets lengthwise down the court and made us play tournaments in six teams of 25 players each. That was a completely terrible experience.

Worst feature?
Off-limits question, though there is (mildly) an answer. I don't hate my body, and that's good enough for me.

Best feature?
Gotta be the hair. It's abundant enough and appropriately textured that, even on its worst days, it looks at lest decent with basically no effort on my part. It's also a color that is apparently widely desirable and basically impossible to reproduce (you see the failed attempts all the time, and yes, I'm smug about it). The problem is that I'm certainly excessively vain about it. That statement would sound incongruous to many, given that I don't curl, straighten, de-frizz, blow dry, color or style - I don't think I even own any hair spray at the moment - but trust me, it's possible.

Guilty

In retribution for comparing her to John McCain, Anne has tagged me to report on my guilty pleasures. Oddly, I found this kind of difficult. So if my guilty pleasures don't sound guilty enough, please put it down to poor memory.

Music: I don't think I have a deep passion for anything especially humiliating, but I have a higher tolerance for stuff like ABBA, The Carpenters, Barbra Streisand and Air Supply than it's generally thought advisable to admit. My real guilty pleasure is a tendency to listen to the same song as many as 100 times in a row when it strikes my fancy. I love living alone.

Food: My guilty pleasure is "easy." And chocolate chip cookies. Also, I'll occasionally develop obsessive cravings that last for days. It could be for hot chocolate or macaroni and cheese, but it could just as easily be for hummus or creamed spinach. But it's probably not good to just eat spinach for days on end.

Movies: Honestly, I've got nothing. I can't watch action movies because all the noise and motion annoys me. As best I can tell, I don't like bad movies. I'm probably forgetting something.

Books: This will sound obnoxious, but if I feel guilty, it's for reading literary criticism rather than actual literature. I don't do much in the way of genre fiction these days. I used to read The Cat Who mysteries, because the early ones were reasonably good, even with a few truly bizarre plot twists. But they turned awful a good long time ago and are certainly ghost written now. What I read now for unadulterated fun is Alexander McCall Smith and Wodehouse. Not Tolstoy, but not especially embarrassing either.

TV: Ooh. Um. I watched the second half of American Idol this year. I only have basic cable at home (and only that because I'm right under an O'Hare flight path, and would only get reception every other minute with an antenna) so my options aren't that interesting. But when I'm staying at a hotel or my parents' house, I tend to gorge on HGTV. I don't know what that tendency would look like if I had regular access to that programming, because it all starts to look the same really quickly.

Meme Day - Part 2

My initial reaction to Wende's Fashion Rag meme was, "Hm, if anybody actually has anything to say about this, I'll be very interested to hear the answers, but I bet nobody does." I'm not sure my answers are interesting, but here they are.

1. What's your favorite magazine on "women's" issues, e.g., fashion, beauty, relationships?
None. I've never read any regularly, or even often enough to be able to tell the difference between them. At the salon, etc., I'll sooner look for something more shelter-oriented, even if it's Better Homes & Gardens. Whenever I've ingested the fashion, etc., material, it's most often been from the internet. The rise of the populist web coincided with late high school for me, so perhaps if I were a bit older I would have read more magazines.

2. If you do read 'em, what gives your favorite its status? If you don't, why not?
Why not: the way-over-the-top sexuality they all feature so prominently. Aside from the "I don't need that garbage" factor, it indicates a foundational worldview quite different from my own, so how useful would any of the advice actually be for me anyway?

3. What's the best piece of advice you ever got from a fashion magazine?
Everything I know about makeup I probably learned from magazines (and the occasional library book, and the web), because nobody ever taught me. Considering how few of them I've ever read, I suppose I'm fortunate to know anything at all.

4. What's the first fashion magazine you can remember reading?
Honestly no idea. Sometime in my late teens they stopped feeling so much like declasse contraband, and I decided I didn't need to feel guilty if there was no Readers' Digest available in the dentist's waiting room.

5. What's your most memorable experience with a fashion mag?
1. Hanging out with a high school friend who was obsessed by magazine quizzes and had accumulated enough of them to keep us occupied all night after a school dance.
2. During college - one very memorable instant messenger conversation with dearest G (my guy friend) when he discovered that Cosmo had gotten something right about the male mind. As I recall, the article asked something like, "What physical trait in women do guys find most important/attractive? Hair, legs, earlobes, or what?" Cosmo came to the brilliant conclusion that Different Guys Like Different Things. This was a breakthrough.

6. What fashion mag have you read regularly for the longest stretch (at any point in your life)?
NA, unless you count the few months I used a gym with a subscription to Lucky, which contains nothing but pictures of pretty things to buy. I don't remember exactly when that was, but I recall lots of photos of candy-colored leather.

7. What beauty moves cause you, in retrospect, to laugh nervously and change the subject?
I've probably worn too much makeup on a few occasions...and not enough on others...but honestly, I've never habitually done anything distinctive enough to be embarrassing. As a child and adolescent, I was convinced that being outlandish, or even style-conscious generally, was juvenile and pathetic. As a result, until I was old enough to buy my own clothes, I wore a lot of things that I utterly hated, because telling my mother that yellow corduroy was really not the done thing in the third grade would have undermined my self-imposed concepts of respectability, and I decided it was better to suffer through it and wait it out, since even then I knew I would eventually become a Real Person (i.e., an adult) and allowed to dress myself without risk of being found precocious. On the upside, I never had feathered hair or body glitter, and only wore blue nail polish to pep rallies.

8. Would you change your image if you were a different size?
Unlikely. Individual garments might change, but the basic concept would hold.

9. Are you ever going to post a picture of yourself?
Not more than I have already, unless I come up with an extraordinarily good reason.