My 100 Things

1. Whenever I use the bathroom in the basement, I lift the seat to check for spiders.

2. I can still feel embarrassed about dumb things I did as a child.

3. I worry about gigantic hypotheticals.

4. For example, I don’t want to make any permanent birth control decisions until after a flu pandemic, so that if only one of us survives, s/he won’t have to be childless.

5. The husband says my eyes change color when I cry.

6. When I was a child, my two best friends had the same middle name I do.

7. I wear my grandfather’s wedding band on my index finger.

8. I love the cracking sound of biting into a juicy apple. The sound is almost as good as the taste.

9. I did not get my driver’s license till I was 19 because I was afraid if I drove I would kill someone.

10. I still blame the tabloids for Diana’s death.

11. I have an embarrassing history of inappropriate crushes on father figures.

12. I have overactive tonsils. It’s really gross. You don’t want to know.

13. I love old radio dramatic series. The more pompous and self-important, the better.

14. My favorites are Bold Venture and I Was a Communist for the FBI.

15. I have four movie star crushes:

16. James Stewart

17. Tommy Lee Jones

18. Jason Statham

19. Hector Elizondo. You heard me. I can’t explain it. The husband, completely unthreatened, refers to him as “your sexy little man.”

20. I have never pretended to be stupid to attract a man. I know that shouldn’t need to be said, but apparently it makes me unusual.

21. I didn’t drink alcohol (because it tasted gross) until a friend gave me a margarita when I was 23.

22. Now I even like scotch.

23. When I am pregnant, I eat Paul Newman’s salsa straight out of the jar with a spoon.

24. If I were a plant, I’d be a Catalpa tree.

25. I have two pet cockatiels. They stopped getting attention as soon as the kids were born, poor things.

26. I have terrible allergies to tree pollen.

27. The white ash tree is my mortal enemy.

28. I plant trees anyway. I can take a pill.

29. I have never told anyone who I voted for in the last presidential election. Actually, I admitted it once to my father, but he didn’t hear me, and I will never repeat it.

30. Because given the candidates, whichever one I voted for, I knew I would feel dirty. I did.

31. In the 2000 election, I voted for Nader, even though I knew he would lose.

32. I used to keep selections from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in my back pocket to read on my breaks when I did blue collar temp work.

33. I never finished memorizing “Lancelot and Elaine.” Some day I will.

34. I always mean to bring reusable bags to the grocery store, but usually forget.

35. I dress my daughters in matching clothes as often as possible. Because it’s adorable, that’s why.

36. On any given day, I am about two weeks away from having an actual, visible goatee. My friends do not believe this. It is true.

37. I have only had a manicure once in my life. I did not enjoy it. I thought it was a nuisance.

38. I had my first grey hair when I was 16.

39. The first time I saw the husband’s blue eyes, my heart literally skipped a beat.

40. He refuses to believe this. We still argue about it.

41. I hate the Three Stooges.

42. I love Chris Farley movies, but I keep it to myself. Oops.

43. If I could look like anyone, I would stay like me. Because it’s home.

44. If I had to choose to look like someone else, I would pick Greer Garson at about age 30.

45. I love roses, but only when someone else plants them and cares for them.

46. The spring that the husband and I became engaged, it seemed like every garden in town was covered in stinky oak mulch.

47. So now to me “stinky oak mulch” is the scent of falling in love.

48. I only had one serious boyfriend before I married the husband.

49. I only eat the yellow sugar wafers.

50. I have never seen the Pacific ocean.

51. I want to go to Mongolia someday.

52. I hope the Mongolian winter doesn’t kill me. Because it really could.

53. I got two Cs in college.

54. One was for gym.

55. The other was in the class of a teacher I had no respect for.

56. I have a special affection for crotchety old curmudgeons. They are fun to charm.

57. As I get older, they find me less charming, and more threatening.

58. Colin Farrell creeps me out.

59. I hated the Hitchiker’s Guide movie.

60. I can read ten languages (most of them dead ones).

61. But I only speak English.

62. My first childhood memory is getting stuck in a toilet when I was three.

63. My first car was an old Crown Victoria named Bessie.

64. I own one Yanni CD. I am so sorry.

65. I find Mel Gibson’s comb-over personally embarrassing. I don’t know where to look.

66. I stayed up all night reading a book for the first time in fifth grade. I wanted to finish reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Ring of Endless Light.

67. When Sweetpea was in the womb, I always called her Lily. I planned to give her a real name based on what she looked like.

68. I brought a list of thirty possible names to the delivery room. The name she looked most like was not on the list.

69. I stuck to the list. We named her after her great-great-grandfather. It is a lovely name.

70. Before I had kids, I would do a ten-mile walk at least once a week in the warm months.

71. Now I’m lucky if I can get a three-mile walk twice a month.

72. I still eat raw cookie dough sometimes. Ooh, now I want some.

73. I make a great lamb stew.

74. Purple is my favorite color. Except in prose.

75. I think hard-boiled eggs are the grossest food on the planet.

76. I even hate custard because it reminds me of hard-boiled eggs. That includes creme brulee and flan.

77. When people call meat “flesh,” I’m okay with it. Animal flesh is tasty.

78. My first crush was on Shaun Cassidy.

79. My favorite flower is the ordinary wood violet.

80. I am really good at scrabble. But not as good as the psycho tournament players. Those people don’t have lives.

81. When I was a child, I came in second at our local spelling bee. I misspelled “gooey.’

82. The next year I misspelled “apothecary.”

83. Today I had to look up the spelling of “misspell.”

84. If I had been a boy, my parents were going to name me Jonathan Edwards.

85. My favorite living author is Robin McKinley. But I’ve never been able to read her first book. I see the bungled archaic English and I cringe.

86. When I was twenty I realized I liked Aslan better than Jesus. I’m over it now.

87. I can only swim the backstroke.

88. I think Jungle Book was Disney’s best animated movie.

89. I love to watch good actors act badly in bad movies. Especially if the husband watches with me. Battlefield Earth, baby.

90. I always sleep on two pillows.

91. Sudafed makes me paranoid.

92. I got my worst sunburn ever at Lake Tenkiller. Soooo painful.

93. For our sixth anniversary, we spent the weekend with my sister and brother-in-law at Natural Bridge State Park in Kentucky. It was a beautiful place, definitely worth the visit, but we refer to that weekend as “The Anniversary Death March.” Never hike with my sister. Never.

94. I went to Russia in college. We studied Russian for a month. The only thing I remember how to say is “I am a spy and I work for the CIA.”

95. I am afraid of heights.

96. I have a romantic longing for the Great Plains. Just sky, dirt and grass. It’s elemental.

97. I can recite “Jabberwocky” and do.

98. Whenever I need to get angry, I just think of all the mechanics who have treated me like a dumb woman.

99. I love good pie. And restaurants don’t make it anymore. I mourn this frequently.

100. I used to write 15 letters per week. Handwritten on creamy stationery. Now I blog. Someday I will go back to letters.