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Jan. 11th, 2003 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonI started this a while back, and set it aside, feeling like it was just too egomaniacal for words. But ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eliade lured me into finishing and posting, drat her. So, ho for the
1. Back when I thought I wanted to be an architect, I took and passed a semester of calculus, with no more math preparation than 10th grade algebra.
2. I tend to believe I can do anything as long as I have adequate instructions.
3. When I was an infant, the pediatrician predicted (based on some kind of extrapolative formula) that I would be six feet tall as an adult. I have always been deeply disappointed that that did not, in fact, come to pass.
4. I have some issues with body image, and have felt fat my entire life, including when I weighed 125 pounds (at 5'7").
5. On the other hand, I have always been extremely fond of the way my feet look; I think I have fuckin' *gorgeous* feet, despite the fact that they are size 9s.
6. I have not appeared in public wearing shorts or a swimsuit since I was perhaps 13.
7. I have not worn high heels since February of 1979, when I went out on a day of job-hunting in San Francisco in a pair of borrowed pumps, and crawled back so crippled with pain that I had to spend the next two days in bed.
8. About three times a year I'll put on a necklace. Other than that, I never wear jewelry. I used to have pierced ears, but they closed up long ago.
9. I hate tight clothes and refuse to wear them. Brightly-colored clothing makes me feel hot and uncomfortable.
10. When I was a teenager, I had hair down to my waist. Ten years later, I had a crewcut. Of the two, I vastly prefer the latter.
11. My favorite color is grey. About three-fourths of my wardrobe is grey or black.
12. Wherever I've lived, I have never painted my walls anything but white.
13. I really, seriously dislike being on boats, partly due to seasickness (I have been known to get seasick while on a boat tied up at dock), and partly due to claustrophobia (the not-being-able-to-get-off thing).
14. Mountains also make me claustrophobic, as well as tapping into my fear of heights.
15. However, I love prairies.
16. One midsummer evening twenty years ago I was camped outside of Kadoka, South Dakota, and sat up for hours breathing in the wind that had travelled across hundreds of miles of fresh open grasslands. That is the best smell I can ever remember smelling in my entire life.
17. I am very much a Scullyist with regard to weird phenomena; I really like finding empirical scientific explanations for things, and am a non-believer in ghosts, precognition, astrology, etc.
18. I have never had anything remotely resembling a supernatural experience. Any time I get a premonition of disaster, I can safely assume that everything is going to be fine.
19. None of this has kept me, my whole life long, from being deeply fearful of ghosts, the dark, mysterious basements, the space under beds, etc. I tend to be nervous about moving for fear I'll someday end up in a house that actually *is* haunted.
20. I am especially frightened of being alone in the woods at night. There's a reason I've never seen The Blair Witch Project.
21. If a doctor said me that I could never have chocolate again the rest of my life, I'd shrug and think "Bummer. Eh. OK." If I was told I could never have bread, cheese, garlic or alcohol, I'd be despondent.
22. I rather actively dislike donuts and most varieties of pastry.
23. There is no kind of alcohol I dislike except for certain extra-sweet liqueurs, but a really big robust red wine can make me moan with pleasure.
24. When I was 13 I developed an ulcer, and had to go into the nurse's office at school every day and take Gelusil. The memory still makes me gag.
25. I was an excellent oboeist in high school, and my orchestra teacher tried to talk me into going into a music conservatory.
26. I am very good at losing people from my life. Apart from my family and my ex-partner S., there's no one I knew before I was 35 that I'm still in touch with, and only two others from before I was 40.
27. Parking makes me anxious. I can easily talk myself out of going out for social or recreational purposes by stressing about whether I'll be able to find a parking place.
28. I did not own a car until I was 35.
29. Though cars as such don't interest me, I love driving, especially solo, especially long trips across country.
30. I have an excellent sense of spatial relations and volumes, and can go to the co-op, fill a paper bag with rice or flour, bring it home, dump it into the bin, and find I have exactly enough to fill the bin to within a half-inch of the top. I also excel at packing boxes or trucks.
31. I have an abysmal sense of direction, however, and can get lost almost immediately in a strange city.
32. On the other hand, I firmly believe I can navigate anywhere as long as I have a good map.
33. I love giving people directions, and am very good at it. But I hate asking for directions.
34. When I was seven, my best friend Peggy and I wrote and staged a one-act play titled "The Vampire." The plot consisted of a sequence of hapless people (played by Peggy) coming to the vampire's house, ringing the doorbell, and getting messily chomped to death. I got to play the vampire, which is surprising since Peggy was usually the dominant one in our friendship.
35. Despite that, I tend to find the whole vampire thing very boring, which is one reason it took me so long to get into Buffy.
36. When we were only slighly older, Peggy and I used to play what we called "naked games" in an old refrigerator carton in her parents' garage. Boys were not invited to participate.
37. When I was perhaps eleven, my brother's friend J., the neighborhood miscreant, pulled me down behind a hedge and fondled my perfectly-flat chest while muttering in my ear. I had no idea what he was on about, and thought this was just another variant of the rough games of tag and wrestling all us neighborhood kids used to play together.
38. Apart from that, I have never been sexually assaulted, coerced, or threatened. I do not get catcalled or approached on the street, nor has anyone ever tried to pick me up in a bar. I tend to attribute this to my knack for being unobtrusive, and projecting a neutral asexual aura. It also could be because I don't get out much.
39. Leaving aside a few one-night chemical-fueled flings with friends (the kind where you try to pretend the next day that none of this ever happened), I have had five sexual partners in my life. I've been monogamous with P. for ten years now.
40. Despite this, I have no problem with courteously-conducted open relationships, and would be fine if P. wanted to sleep with other people. Monogamy just makes my own life simpler.
41. As a child, I went through a brief intense phase of wanting to be a nun. This had nothing to do with religious belief; I was drawn to the austerity and simplicity of the life. There seemed to be a great many things nuns didn't have to worry about.
42. Small children make me nervous; I really don't know how to talk to them, and usually end up addressing them in the same way I would an adult who didn't have a solid grasp of English.
43. I really like giving speeches and presentations to groups, and am good at it.
44. On the other hand, parties make me wretched, and I often end up in the bathroom, sobbing about my social inadequacy.
45. When I was young, I very much wanted to be an actress. I would go to the library and check out recordings of Royal Shakespeare Company productions, and imitate the various performers. I used to be able to do a *killer* Dame Edith Evans impression.
46. I believe this affected my speech patterns; until I was well into my thirties, people would often ask me if I was English.
47. I have not been to a big rock concert since 1973, when I saw the Rolling Stones at the Met Sports Center and almost got crushed by the crowd in front of the stage.
48. I did, however, once see the New York Dolls perform live in the Youth Pavilion at the Minnesota State Fair. Afterwards, I hung around the exit and watched them take off for the midway, too shy to approach them or ask for autographs.
49. I have never, in fact, asked anyone for an autograph; I don't really get the point of autographs, except as a pretext for having some kind of direct communication with someone one admires.
50. In 1975, I spent a day hiking through the Middlesex countryside and talking about Coleridge and Wordsworth with Roger Ebert, who was staying at the same hotel as I in London. He took me out to dinner that night in Soho, and then to his room for drinks, where I got rather tipsy and told him I thought I was a lesbian, which seemed to quash any further plans he might have had for the evening. This is as close as I've ever come to sleeping with someone famous, and it wasn't very close, nor was he famous at the time, of course. I remember him as being a very nice guy, though.
51. I tend to think of myself as non-competitive, but anyone who's played Trivial Pursuit with me would not agree with this assessment.
52. Likeresonant8, I do extremely well on standardized tests. I've taken the GRE twice, and got 800 on the verbal both times. I am very cynical about the validity of such tests in predicting much of anything besides the ability to answer multiple-choice questions. Unfortunately, there are few careers where that skill is particularly useful.
53. I am very much a morning person. My natural wake/sleep cycle seems to run around 5 a.m./9 p.m.
54. I have never hit or been hit by anyone. Despite this, I firmly believe that I would be capable of killing someone, if necessary, to protect myself or others.
55. I used to be able to type 115 words per minute, back when I made my living by typing.
56. When I was 16, I had two bottles of Seconal in my desk drawer; I used to take them out, pour the pills into my hands, roll them around, and stage elaborate suicide rituals in my mind. I don't know what ever happened to those pills; I never actually took any of them.
57. I firmly believe that my life would be entirely different if SSRIs had been around thirty years ago.
58. I've had more therapists than I can now clearly remember, stretching back over the past thirty years.
59. I've had *way* more jobs than I can clearly remember. I tried making a list once, about ten years ago, and finally had to give up.
60. I do know that since 1970 I've worked for 24 different departments or units at the university where I'm currently employed. This often leads to odd conversations when I encounter someone on campus who clearly expects that I remember him or her, and where we know each other from.
61. I have never had a clear sense of my sexual identity, and have at various times defined myself as lesbian, bisexual, reluctantly straight, and queer. I like sex with men, but am drawn to nonsexual physical contact (touching, stroking) with women. Especially shoulders and the backs of necks. I tend to have mad crushes on women, but fall in love with men. In my sexual fantasies, I am male as often as female. I have no idea what all this means, if anything.
62. My mad crushes hew very closely to a specific type: women who are extremely smart, verbal, focused, quick, sharp-edged. These women always make me feel lumbering and thickwitted in comparison, and I gaze upon them, timidly, with fearful stupid adoration.
63. My first mad crush was on a girl named Debbie, when I was fifteen. She was tall, lovely, exuberant, and flirtatious. Her father was in town on a one-year contract, and when she moved back to California, I gave her, as a token of love, a beautiful deep-blue velvet evening frock that my grandmother had bequeathed me. She looked stunning in it. My mother was *furious* when she found out.
64. It was at Debbie's house that I picked up and read James Baldwin's Another Country, which was my first revelation of the fact that sometimes men have sex with other men. It left me in equal parts shocked and aroused.
65. I was, in general, slow in picking up on the concept of sex. I remember in 11th grade reading the scene in Rabbit, Run where the protagonist is getting a blowjob from a hooker, and being completely befuddled as to what that woman was *doing.*
66. I have never believed in God. The entire concept has never made a lick of sense to me.
67. Until I was in my mid-teens, my mother forced me to go to the local Episcopal church, every Sunday. At first it was because she thought I needed to at least be exposed to religion; later, it was because the choir (which she helped run) was very thinly populated, and I could (at that time) sight-read choral music with ease and sing any part from tenor to soprano.
68. I was once, in the middle of choir practice, overcome with a sudden sense of cosmic love and bliss, and right in the midst of rehearsing some hymn, spontaneously leaned over and kissed my mother on the cheek. I was perhaps thirteen at the time, and for years afterwards was mortally embarrassed at the memory. Now it rather pleases me.
69. Many years later, I was being walked home on a summer evening by some friends who (rightly) assessed I was too drunk to get home safely on my own. A block from my house, I staggered over and wrapped my arms around a neighbor's arborvitae tree, which seemed to me in that moment transcendently lovely and loveable.
70. I am definitely an affectionate and cheerful drunk. Marijuana, on the other hand, tends to make me self-conscious and apprehensive; I feel that I am making a fool of myself, and go all rigid with the effort to maintain control.
71. When I was twelve, my mother, sensing my deficiencies in conventional femininity, signed me up for a Junior Fashion, Grooming and Deportment class at a downtown modeling school. I never attended a single session, but instead spent the time each week riding up and down in the elevator in the building that housed the school.
72. Some years earlier, my mother had signed me up for children's art lessons at the Art Institute, and I never attended a single session of these either, because I couldn't find the right room and was too fearful to ask anyone where it was. So each week I spent the time sitting in the lobby, waiting for my mother to come pick me up again.
73. When I was about 13, my mother essentially gave up trying to make a normal girl of me, and we became much better friends after that.
74. It is difficult to overstate the extent of my social phobia as a child and teenager. Simple errands that required talking to strangers, like going into the post office to buy stamps, would leave me shaking and sobbing.
75. I am a very facile, glib and easy liar. I usually have a good sense of what people want to hear, and will often tell them that rather than the truth. I feel less guilt about this than I probably should.
76. (However, nothing in this list is untrue, at least as far as my perceptions and memory serve.)
77. Open anger frightens me a great deal, and always has. Arguments, bickering, or even heated debate make me queasy.
78. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of riding in a car with my father, on a bleak Sunday afternoon in November, through a run-down industrial district of warehouses and factories and second-hand stores and bars. I remember thinking that this was what adult life was like, this grey gritty squalor, and having no idea how grown-ups managed to endure it.
79. I have never once, for even a moment, regretted not having had children.
80. Both my parents were only children, and neither of my brothers have had or will have children either. When we die, the family line dies too. This does not bother me even slightly.
81. I almost never listen to music these days. I sometimes get the urge, but then I can seldom decide what exactly I want to put on, and eventually I do nothing.
82. I can be driven to frothing frenzy by the sound of spillover music from neighbors, even if it's music I rather like. This is another reason I seldom play music myself--I don't want to inflict it on those around me.
83. I am entirely incapable of writing while any kind of music is playing, or in fact with any kind of background noise.
84. I almost never buy books, but for most of my adult life I've had at least six books out of the library at any given time.
85. I hate shopping in general, and find it unpleasant to spend more than half an hour in any kind of store.
86. I go to see movies in theatres maybe once or twice a year, at most, and even then usually have to be talked into doing so by somebody else.
87. Few things make me happier than being in an austere, simple, spare interior that is entirely devoid of clutter. Despite this, my living space is chronically bestrewn with clutter. I'm very bad at putting things away.
88. I have never collected anything. I don't understand the collector drive.
89. I truly, seriously loathe second-hand stores, garage sales, yard sales. Looking at the miscellaneous cast-offs of other people's lives makes me unbearably morose and sentimental.
90. I love bland starchy food. Plain bread, plain pasta, mashed potatoes, oyster crackers, rice pudding. I am very fond of raw pie dough, rolled thin and dusted with flour.
91. If I could have any super-power, I would choose invisibility. All my life I have fantasized about being invisible, being able to watch and listen to people without them knowing I was there.
92. When frightened, upset, or seriously overstressed by too many choices, I sometimes disappear into myself, and become completely mute, nonresponsive, rigid, unseeing and unhearing. This state tends to alarm others, so I try not to do it these days, though it was a fairly frequent recourse in my childhood.
93. I earnestly believe that no matter what horrors old age may hold, they can't possibly be as bad as grade school, junior high, and high school. The kind of festering rage and inability to forgive that some people hold toward their parents, I hold toward the schools of my youth.
94. When I was in tenth grade, my algebra teacher asked me one day, out of the blue, if I was bored. (I may have been visibly drowsing.) When I said yes, he told me to leave his class. I went to my locker, put into it everything that belonged to the school, took out of it everything that belonged to me, phoned my mother, and told her to come get me, that I was leaving school and not coming back. In retrospect, I wish I had stuck to that resolve.
95. (That algebra teacher, by the way, was a dead ringer for Jim Ellison, which I think explains my total inability to get interested in Sentinel fandom.)
96. I am always, perpetually, afraid of being found out. There have been very few times in my life when I didn't feel at least somewhat fraudulent.
97. My deepest fear in life is of being permanently shackled into a commitment to another person, being responsible for somebody else.
98. I wonder at times what my life would be like right now had I not stumbled into on-line fandom. I do know for sure that I would never have written anything.
99. Finding on-line fandom has given me the one thing I truly wanted in life: acknowledgement that I am capable of writing well, from people whose judgment I respect. As maudlin and silly as it sounds to say it, I can now really die happy.
100. Since I was quite young, a great deal of my inner life has been preoccupied with the creation and elaboration of a complex fantasy world which no one reading this has ever known or will ever know anything about--my ultimate private retreat, which feeds my writing but really has nothing to do with it.
eliade lured me into finishing and posting, drat her. So, ho for the 1. Back when I thought I wanted to be an architect, I took and passed a semester of calculus, with no more math preparation than 10th grade algebra.
2. I tend to believe I can do anything as long as I have adequate instructions.
3. When I was an infant, the pediatrician predicted (based on some kind of extrapolative formula) that I would be six feet tall as an adult. I have always been deeply disappointed that that did not, in fact, come to pass.
4. I have some issues with body image, and have felt fat my entire life, including when I weighed 125 pounds (at 5'7").
5. On the other hand, I have always been extremely fond of the way my feet look; I think I have fuckin' *gorgeous* feet, despite the fact that they are size 9s.
6. I have not appeared in public wearing shorts or a swimsuit since I was perhaps 13.
7. I have not worn high heels since February of 1979, when I went out on a day of job-hunting in San Francisco in a pair of borrowed pumps, and crawled back so crippled with pain that I had to spend the next two days in bed.
8. About three times a year I'll put on a necklace. Other than that, I never wear jewelry. I used to have pierced ears, but they closed up long ago.
9. I hate tight clothes and refuse to wear them. Brightly-colored clothing makes me feel hot and uncomfortable.
10. When I was a teenager, I had hair down to my waist. Ten years later, I had a crewcut. Of the two, I vastly prefer the latter.
11. My favorite color is grey. About three-fourths of my wardrobe is grey or black.
12. Wherever I've lived, I have never painted my walls anything but white.
13. I really, seriously dislike being on boats, partly due to seasickness (I have been known to get seasick while on a boat tied up at dock), and partly due to claustrophobia (the not-being-able-to-get-off thing).
14. Mountains also make me claustrophobic, as well as tapping into my fear of heights.
15. However, I love prairies.
16. One midsummer evening twenty years ago I was camped outside of Kadoka, South Dakota, and sat up for hours breathing in the wind that had travelled across hundreds of miles of fresh open grasslands. That is the best smell I can ever remember smelling in my entire life.
17. I am very much a Scullyist with regard to weird phenomena; I really like finding empirical scientific explanations for things, and am a non-believer in ghosts, precognition, astrology, etc.
18. I have never had anything remotely resembling a supernatural experience. Any time I get a premonition of disaster, I can safely assume that everything is going to be fine.
19. None of this has kept me, my whole life long, from being deeply fearful of ghosts, the dark, mysterious basements, the space under beds, etc. I tend to be nervous about moving for fear I'll someday end up in a house that actually *is* haunted.
20. I am especially frightened of being alone in the woods at night. There's a reason I've never seen The Blair Witch Project.
21. If a doctor said me that I could never have chocolate again the rest of my life, I'd shrug and think "Bummer. Eh. OK." If I was told I could never have bread, cheese, garlic or alcohol, I'd be despondent.
22. I rather actively dislike donuts and most varieties of pastry.
23. There is no kind of alcohol I dislike except for certain extra-sweet liqueurs, but a really big robust red wine can make me moan with pleasure.
24. When I was 13 I developed an ulcer, and had to go into the nurse's office at school every day and take Gelusil. The memory still makes me gag.
25. I was an excellent oboeist in high school, and my orchestra teacher tried to talk me into going into a music conservatory.
26. I am very good at losing people from my life. Apart from my family and my ex-partner S., there's no one I knew before I was 35 that I'm still in touch with, and only two others from before I was 40.
27. Parking makes me anxious. I can easily talk myself out of going out for social or recreational purposes by stressing about whether I'll be able to find a parking place.
28. I did not own a car until I was 35.
29. Though cars as such don't interest me, I love driving, especially solo, especially long trips across country.
30. I have an excellent sense of spatial relations and volumes, and can go to the co-op, fill a paper bag with rice or flour, bring it home, dump it into the bin, and find I have exactly enough to fill the bin to within a half-inch of the top. I also excel at packing boxes or trucks.
31. I have an abysmal sense of direction, however, and can get lost almost immediately in a strange city.
32. On the other hand, I firmly believe I can navigate anywhere as long as I have a good map.
33. I love giving people directions, and am very good at it. But I hate asking for directions.
34. When I was seven, my best friend Peggy and I wrote and staged a one-act play titled "The Vampire." The plot consisted of a sequence of hapless people (played by Peggy) coming to the vampire's house, ringing the doorbell, and getting messily chomped to death. I got to play the vampire, which is surprising since Peggy was usually the dominant one in our friendship.
35. Despite that, I tend to find the whole vampire thing very boring, which is one reason it took me so long to get into Buffy.
36. When we were only slighly older, Peggy and I used to play what we called "naked games" in an old refrigerator carton in her parents' garage. Boys were not invited to participate.
37. When I was perhaps eleven, my brother's friend J., the neighborhood miscreant, pulled me down behind a hedge and fondled my perfectly-flat chest while muttering in my ear. I had no idea what he was on about, and thought this was just another variant of the rough games of tag and wrestling all us neighborhood kids used to play together.
38. Apart from that, I have never been sexually assaulted, coerced, or threatened. I do not get catcalled or approached on the street, nor has anyone ever tried to pick me up in a bar. I tend to attribute this to my knack for being unobtrusive, and projecting a neutral asexual aura. It also could be because I don't get out much.
39. Leaving aside a few one-night chemical-fueled flings with friends (the kind where you try to pretend the next day that none of this ever happened), I have had five sexual partners in my life. I've been monogamous with P. for ten years now.
40. Despite this, I have no problem with courteously-conducted open relationships, and would be fine if P. wanted to sleep with other people. Monogamy just makes my own life simpler.
41. As a child, I went through a brief intense phase of wanting to be a nun. This had nothing to do with religious belief; I was drawn to the austerity and simplicity of the life. There seemed to be a great many things nuns didn't have to worry about.
42. Small children make me nervous; I really don't know how to talk to them, and usually end up addressing them in the same way I would an adult who didn't have a solid grasp of English.
43. I really like giving speeches and presentations to groups, and am good at it.
44. On the other hand, parties make me wretched, and I often end up in the bathroom, sobbing about my social inadequacy.
45. When I was young, I very much wanted to be an actress. I would go to the library and check out recordings of Royal Shakespeare Company productions, and imitate the various performers. I used to be able to do a *killer* Dame Edith Evans impression.
46. I believe this affected my speech patterns; until I was well into my thirties, people would often ask me if I was English.
47. I have not been to a big rock concert since 1973, when I saw the Rolling Stones at the Met Sports Center and almost got crushed by the crowd in front of the stage.
48. I did, however, once see the New York Dolls perform live in the Youth Pavilion at the Minnesota State Fair. Afterwards, I hung around the exit and watched them take off for the midway, too shy to approach them or ask for autographs.
49. I have never, in fact, asked anyone for an autograph; I don't really get the point of autographs, except as a pretext for having some kind of direct communication with someone one admires.
50. In 1975, I spent a day hiking through the Middlesex countryside and talking about Coleridge and Wordsworth with Roger Ebert, who was staying at the same hotel as I in London. He took me out to dinner that night in Soho, and then to his room for drinks, where I got rather tipsy and told him I thought I was a lesbian, which seemed to quash any further plans he might have had for the evening. This is as close as I've ever come to sleeping with someone famous, and it wasn't very close, nor was he famous at the time, of course. I remember him as being a very nice guy, though.
51. I tend to think of myself as non-competitive, but anyone who's played Trivial Pursuit with me would not agree with this assessment.
52. Like
resonant8, I do extremely well on standardized tests. I've taken the GRE twice, and got 800 on the verbal both times. I am very cynical about the validity of such tests in predicting much of anything besides the ability to answer multiple-choice questions. Unfortunately, there are few careers where that skill is particularly useful.53. I am very much a morning person. My natural wake/sleep cycle seems to run around 5 a.m./9 p.m.
54. I have never hit or been hit by anyone. Despite this, I firmly believe that I would be capable of killing someone, if necessary, to protect myself or others.
55. I used to be able to type 115 words per minute, back when I made my living by typing.
56. When I was 16, I had two bottles of Seconal in my desk drawer; I used to take them out, pour the pills into my hands, roll them around, and stage elaborate suicide rituals in my mind. I don't know what ever happened to those pills; I never actually took any of them.
57. I firmly believe that my life would be entirely different if SSRIs had been around thirty years ago.
58. I've had more therapists than I can now clearly remember, stretching back over the past thirty years.
59. I've had *way* more jobs than I can clearly remember. I tried making a list once, about ten years ago, and finally had to give up.
60. I do know that since 1970 I've worked for 24 different departments or units at the university where I'm currently employed. This often leads to odd conversations when I encounter someone on campus who clearly expects that I remember him or her, and where we know each other from.
61. I have never had a clear sense of my sexual identity, and have at various times defined myself as lesbian, bisexual, reluctantly straight, and queer. I like sex with men, but am drawn to nonsexual physical contact (touching, stroking) with women. Especially shoulders and the backs of necks. I tend to have mad crushes on women, but fall in love with men. In my sexual fantasies, I am male as often as female. I have no idea what all this means, if anything.
62. My mad crushes hew very closely to a specific type: women who are extremely smart, verbal, focused, quick, sharp-edged. These women always make me feel lumbering and thickwitted in comparison, and I gaze upon them, timidly, with fearful stupid adoration.
63. My first mad crush was on a girl named Debbie, when I was fifteen. She was tall, lovely, exuberant, and flirtatious. Her father was in town on a one-year contract, and when she moved back to California, I gave her, as a token of love, a beautiful deep-blue velvet evening frock that my grandmother had bequeathed me. She looked stunning in it. My mother was *furious* when she found out.
64. It was at Debbie's house that I picked up and read James Baldwin's Another Country, which was my first revelation of the fact that sometimes men have sex with other men. It left me in equal parts shocked and aroused.
65. I was, in general, slow in picking up on the concept of sex. I remember in 11th grade reading the scene in Rabbit, Run where the protagonist is getting a blowjob from a hooker, and being completely befuddled as to what that woman was *doing.*
66. I have never believed in God. The entire concept has never made a lick of sense to me.
67. Until I was in my mid-teens, my mother forced me to go to the local Episcopal church, every Sunday. At first it was because she thought I needed to at least be exposed to religion; later, it was because the choir (which she helped run) was very thinly populated, and I could (at that time) sight-read choral music with ease and sing any part from tenor to soprano.
68. I was once, in the middle of choir practice, overcome with a sudden sense of cosmic love and bliss, and right in the midst of rehearsing some hymn, spontaneously leaned over and kissed my mother on the cheek. I was perhaps thirteen at the time, and for years afterwards was mortally embarrassed at the memory. Now it rather pleases me.
69. Many years later, I was being walked home on a summer evening by some friends who (rightly) assessed I was too drunk to get home safely on my own. A block from my house, I staggered over and wrapped my arms around a neighbor's arborvitae tree, which seemed to me in that moment transcendently lovely and loveable.
70. I am definitely an affectionate and cheerful drunk. Marijuana, on the other hand, tends to make me self-conscious and apprehensive; I feel that I am making a fool of myself, and go all rigid with the effort to maintain control.
71. When I was twelve, my mother, sensing my deficiencies in conventional femininity, signed me up for a Junior Fashion, Grooming and Deportment class at a downtown modeling school. I never attended a single session, but instead spent the time each week riding up and down in the elevator in the building that housed the school.
72. Some years earlier, my mother had signed me up for children's art lessons at the Art Institute, and I never attended a single session of these either, because I couldn't find the right room and was too fearful to ask anyone where it was. So each week I spent the time sitting in the lobby, waiting for my mother to come pick me up again.
73. When I was about 13, my mother essentially gave up trying to make a normal girl of me, and we became much better friends after that.
74. It is difficult to overstate the extent of my social phobia as a child and teenager. Simple errands that required talking to strangers, like going into the post office to buy stamps, would leave me shaking and sobbing.
75. I am a very facile, glib and easy liar. I usually have a good sense of what people want to hear, and will often tell them that rather than the truth. I feel less guilt about this than I probably should.
76. (However, nothing in this list is untrue, at least as far as my perceptions and memory serve.)
77. Open anger frightens me a great deal, and always has. Arguments, bickering, or even heated debate make me queasy.
78. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of riding in a car with my father, on a bleak Sunday afternoon in November, through a run-down industrial district of warehouses and factories and second-hand stores and bars. I remember thinking that this was what adult life was like, this grey gritty squalor, and having no idea how grown-ups managed to endure it.
79. I have never once, for even a moment, regretted not having had children.
80. Both my parents were only children, and neither of my brothers have had or will have children either. When we die, the family line dies too. This does not bother me even slightly.
81. I almost never listen to music these days. I sometimes get the urge, but then I can seldom decide what exactly I want to put on, and eventually I do nothing.
82. I can be driven to frothing frenzy by the sound of spillover music from neighbors, even if it's music I rather like. This is another reason I seldom play music myself--I don't want to inflict it on those around me.
83. I am entirely incapable of writing while any kind of music is playing, or in fact with any kind of background noise.
84. I almost never buy books, but for most of my adult life I've had at least six books out of the library at any given time.
85. I hate shopping in general, and find it unpleasant to spend more than half an hour in any kind of store.
86. I go to see movies in theatres maybe once or twice a year, at most, and even then usually have to be talked into doing so by somebody else.
87. Few things make me happier than being in an austere, simple, spare interior that is entirely devoid of clutter. Despite this, my living space is chronically bestrewn with clutter. I'm very bad at putting things away.
88. I have never collected anything. I don't understand the collector drive.
89. I truly, seriously loathe second-hand stores, garage sales, yard sales. Looking at the miscellaneous cast-offs of other people's lives makes me unbearably morose and sentimental.
90. I love bland starchy food. Plain bread, plain pasta, mashed potatoes, oyster crackers, rice pudding. I am very fond of raw pie dough, rolled thin and dusted with flour.
91. If I could have any super-power, I would choose invisibility. All my life I have fantasized about being invisible, being able to watch and listen to people without them knowing I was there.
92. When frightened, upset, or seriously overstressed by too many choices, I sometimes disappear into myself, and become completely mute, nonresponsive, rigid, unseeing and unhearing. This state tends to alarm others, so I try not to do it these days, though it was a fairly frequent recourse in my childhood.
93. I earnestly believe that no matter what horrors old age may hold, they can't possibly be as bad as grade school, junior high, and high school. The kind of festering rage and inability to forgive that some people hold toward their parents, I hold toward the schools of my youth.
94. When I was in tenth grade, my algebra teacher asked me one day, out of the blue, if I was bored. (I may have been visibly drowsing.) When I said yes, he told me to leave his class. I went to my locker, put into it everything that belonged to the school, took out of it everything that belonged to me, phoned my mother, and told her to come get me, that I was leaving school and not coming back. In retrospect, I wish I had stuck to that resolve.
95. (That algebra teacher, by the way, was a dead ringer for Jim Ellison, which I think explains my total inability to get interested in Sentinel fandom.)
96. I am always, perpetually, afraid of being found out. There have been very few times in my life when I didn't feel at least somewhat fraudulent.
97. My deepest fear in life is of being permanently shackled into a commitment to another person, being responsible for somebody else.
98. I wonder at times what my life would be like right now had I not stumbled into on-line fandom. I do know for sure that I would never have written anything.
99. Finding on-line fandom has given me the one thing I truly wanted in life: acknowledgement that I am capable of writing well, from people whose judgment I respect. As maudlin and silly as it sounds to say it, I can now really die happy.
100. Since I was quite young, a great deal of my inner life has been preoccupied with the creation and elaboration of a complex fantasy world which no one reading this has ever known or will ever know anything about--my ultimate private retreat, which feeds my writing but really has nothing to do with it.
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Date: 2003-01-12 10:30 am (UTC)17, 18 and 19 you've hit right on for me.
This was all so very interesting.