Looking Back, Looking Forward
A while ago, I began looking through my boxes of keepsakes that have been tucked away in my parents basement. I came across my first ever blog entry. It actually predates Savoring.
Posted June 5, 2001, a Tuesday. . .
In the beginning. . .
there was fire. It brought people together to share the stories of where they'd been and what they'd come to know. Today, the Web extends that circle to the world, connecting our paths, allowing us to share our stories. I invite you to share in my fire - savoring the journey that is life.
100 Other Things
It struck me while recently re-reading the post “100 Things About Me” that many of them are no longer true, or at least in need of serious updating. So, from October 2002 to August 2005, here are...
100 Completely & Utterly Random Things About Me:
1. I lived in Manhattan for 3 years.
2. My birthday is April 20. Unfortunately, so was Adolf Hitler’s (1889). On the upside, Lionel Hampton (1908) was also born on that day, and he rocked. And, to round it all off, Carmen Electra (1972) shares the birthday too.
3. I'm probably the only person that actually enjoys those survey emails friends send you. (i.e. Coke or Pepsi, last movie you saw, favorite brand of toothpaste, etc.)
4. As a teenager, I was banned from using the family lawnmower after a freak incident involving a pine tree, a horseshoe stake, and several hundred dollars of twisted metal lawnmower parts.
5. I LOVE to travel. So far, I’ve only been to three continents and eight countries.
6. I now have an assload of student loans, and it’s freaking me out.
7. I think the Simpsons and Eminem provide two really insightful commentaries on contemporary society.
8. I wish I could speak lots of foreign languages.
9. No pets. Don’t have any. Don’t want any. (Unless I live in the country, then a dog might be good.)
10. I don't like Charmin toilet paper.
11. Someday I’ll hire someone to assemble scrapbooks from all the miscellaneous stuff I’ve been accumulating.
12. I love snail mail.
13. My extended family is enormous, but I like it that way.
14. I love stationery and the accoutrements that go with it. I also love the word accoutrements.
15. I need a man who hates Old Spice and Axe Body Spray as much as I do.
16. I love Impressionist painters, R&B and quiet cafes.
17. I was painfully shy as a child - I wouldn't even go into the grocery store to buy a newspaper.
18. I grew up in a town where cows outnumbered people 4 to 1, and there was (and still is) only one stoplight.
19. I love watching sports, especially in person.
20. I wish for grace.
21. I love botanical gardens.
22. I’m not religious. (But will probably be struck by lightning because I constantly use words like “pray” and “God” without actually meaning any connection to religion.)
23. I really want to publish a book someday.
24. I’m tired of living in a city.
25. I have a fear of deep water. I swim fine with my head above water, but not at all underwater.
26. In the ninth grade, I was in a play. Important realization: I can't act.
27. I wonder what other people would write if they had to write 100 things about me.
28. I wish the whole world would recycle. There's no good reason not to.
29. I’d like to roadtrip leisurely across the country.
30. My dream of the perfect engagement proposal would be in the Tuscan countryside of Italy.
31. I procrastinate. Too much.
32. I’d love to take dance lessons some day - ballroom and salsa - but I'm extremely uncoordinated.
33. I love words. They can be subtle or bold.
34. I’d like to learn how to play the piano, the cello and the acoustic guitar.
35. One of my top goals in life is to own clotheslines.
36. My middle name is Jay.
37. My roommate and I had a discussion about women’s names and their impact on whether you reach the boardroom. That may sound stupid, but . . . For instance, do you think that a “Holly” could be the CEO of a petroleum company? I doubt it. For that reason, I’ve been wondering if I should take to using A.J. instead of Amanda.
38. My favorite treats are Kinder Bueno bars. It’s really hard to find them here in the States.
39. I like to know the basic storyline of musicals and operas before I see them. Just three or four sentences – otherwise I get confused and don’t enjoy them as much.
40. I require more sleep than normal human beings, preferrably nine hours a night.
41. I think pigeons are the carp of the bird world.
42. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It's a time to be grateful for what you have, spend time with family, eat good food, watch football. . .and you don't have to buy any gifts! It doesn't get any better than that.
43. I’m 28 and have never seen The Nutcracker, The Godfather, or Scarface. I’m so pop culture illiterate.
44. When I moved out of my NYC apartment, I sold or gave away everything I owned except my laptop and my books. Everything else had to go. (Clean ending for that chapter and a fresh start for a new one.)
45. I love collecting quotes and quips from things I happen to hear or see. I keep them in a red can I bought off a Christmas clearance rack ages ago.
46. I own shelves and shelves of books. Not that I've read them all, or even half, but I love being able to just go to the shelf and learn something new. Big fan of garage sales and used book stores. I always get a kick out of being able to buy Toni Morrison for the same 25 cents as Danielle Steele.
47. I love to cook, especially when it's for other people. I often wonder why it is a woman's duty to do basic daily cooking, but the top chefs of the world are all men. Why can guys make money doing what women do thanklessly every day? For men it is a profession, for women it's a chore or hobby.
48. I love warm fluffy towels straight out of the dryer (especially in the winter).
49. I've been in love with the same person since the sixth grade.
50. At one point in March, I was in the middle of reading three books and had to laugh because they couldn’t have been be more opposite: Still Life with Woodpecker, Tipping Point and Managing with Power. The last one was for a class, but I actually liked it.
51. I like seafood a lot. All types of it.
52. I own an iPod, but am still confused on how to operate it right.
53. I want to own a thousand acre ranch in the mountains of Colorado, Montana or Wyoming. I want to live right in the middle of it without another person for miles. Just me, my husband, 2-3 big dogs, a pair of Belgian draft horses, some quarterhorses, some beef cattle or bison and a stable hand.
54. I value honesty, integrity, trust, family, commitment, progress, optimism, innovation, strength, love, determination, vision, passion, hope, patience, creativity, peace, resilience...
55. I wish I knew how to sew and crochet. Someday I will. Side thought: What’s the difference between knitting and crocheting with the exception of the material you use?
56. I hate sleeping with socks on.
57. My only known allergy is cats.
58. My cd collection is diverse. Bread, Chopin, Miles Davis, Rage Against the Machine, Stones, etc. I love music.
59. My latest nickname is “Peyton”. My mom and my sister said I’m a nerdy oldest child overachiever just like Peyton Manning. So, I’ve started calling them Archie and Eli (i.e. the Manning father and little brother). It works out perfectly. (Plus I like the name Peyton. It’s better than Geoffrey, which is my main nickname right now. It’s after Geoffrey the Giraffe, the mascot for Toys R Us. We both have a long neck and silly eyelashes.)
60. I love photography. Someday I'll take a class and actually learn what I'm doing.
61. My tiny little digital camera is the best gift I’ve ever given myself.
62. I watch soap operas. (Especially now that there’s SoapNet. Make fun all you want.)
63. I wish I read more. There is so much I want to learn, but I read incredibly slow.
64. I love thunder.
65. Champion Reverse Weave sweatshirts are one of the greatest things ever created. They're right up there with post-its.
66. It’s a little Martha Stewart-ish, but I think ice cubes made of Kool Aid are totally cool.
67. I love movies. Long movies, short movies, independent films, main stream films, animated flicks, film noir, old stuff, classics, new stuff. All of them.
68. I’ve been searching for the perfect chocolate or caramel-colored suede jacket.
69. I love Dictionary.com.
70. I love crossword puzzles. (But only the easy to medium ones, none of the NY Times Friday type ones.)
71. A lot of times I do a crossword puzzle to get to sleep. Some people read, but my mind is always bouncing around to too many things to concentrate on a book. Somehow crosswords shut down all the random “Things to Do” type stuff zooming through my head and then I can fall sleep fast and totally clear.
72. The game Bookworm on Yahoo games is annoying but totally addictive.
73. I don’t think I could live without this laptop. How did we survive before them? I’d have stacks of notebooks and post-its everywhere (and probably carpal tunnel from writing so much). Such a great invention.
74. I like funky socks. Right now my favorites are my blue giraffe socks – they make great conversation pieces at the airport when I’m waiting in line to go through the metal detectors. I have green sparkly “Lucky U” socks, pink and green polka dot socks from my brother that say, “You suck and that’s sad”, and 2 pairs of yellow monkey socks.
75. I want to run a triathlon.
76. I only like shoestring french fries.
77. I like Pudding Pops and pistachio ice cream. Both are hard to find.
78. One of the things I love most about NYC is being able to find funky new bands any night of any week in any neighborhood. In my opinion, when it comes to music, mainstream sucks.
79. When I was thinking about majors prior to starting college, I was seriously considering architecture. It wasn’t until I read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and completed a paper on it for my AP English class that I thought about being an English major. And I only chose it because it is what I hated least. Stellar, eh?
80. I chose to major in Secondary Ed – English because I didn’t have enough faith in my own abilities as a writer to go straight up English.
81. If I had enough money to never have to work, I would go to grad school forever. I would do degrees in art history, philosophy, literature, economics, US history, world history, ancient history, public policy, and a bunch of other stuff.
82. It’s all the stuff outside of learning that you have to do in order to get a job that ruins school for me. Here’s the classic sign: In order to eat you have to get a job, and in order to get a job you have to have a strong resume. Now, look at your resume. How much space does your degree take up on that page? One line? What fills the rest of that page? All the crap outside of classes and traditional learning. argh.
83. Spring semester I took an insane course load – 21 credits – but dropped all my activity in clubs and dismissed all the networking crap that I’d been forcing myself to do over the past three years. And I had a better time that semester than any other. I learned so much more. And I can honestly say that I completed more homework than in my past three semesters combined. I just never completed any homework before. I didn’t turn anything in. I just couldn’t get myself to do it.
84. I shave my legs every day.
85. I hate cats.
86. I’d like to own an art gallery some day.
87. One of my ears is a ¼ inch higher than the other one. It makes it really hard to wear sunglasses without them being all tilted.
88. If I had money to burn, I’d have my hair washed in a salon once a week. It just feels so good to have someone else do it.
89. My first time downhill skiing was in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It took me three hours to get down the mountain. (And for the record, going all the way to the top of the mountain was NOT my idea.)
90. My first ten-speed bike was a lavender colored Murray. I still have it.
91. I've been on the tour of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and it is really cool. I'm not lying, if you get the chance, do it.
92. My cds are alphabetized in big zipper books so I can find stuff easily. I also took the cd jacket out of each case and slid them in behind the cds. That way I know what cds are missing and can quickly look up lyrics, etc. Total geek.
93. My car is falling apart. One of the engine gaskets is disintegrating so it loses oil (but no one can figure out which gasket, so it can’t be replaced), the interior and exterior door panels have come apart (but Oldsmobiles aren’t made anymore, so in order to get a new door I would have to find one in a junkyard and have it painted to match – which would cost more than the car itself), the headlights turn off when you switch between dim and bright (not a convenient feature, especially when rounding curves in a road) and the speaker in the driver’s side door no longer works.
94. I hurt my neck earlier this summer and went to a chiropractor for the first time. I found out that my neck is curved backward and one of my legs is a lot shorter than the other.
95. I recently found out that my latest ex-boyfriend is a porn star. As if my life isn’t weird enough, now I’m wondering how many of my friends in NYC knew, but didn’t say anything. Argh.
96. Currently I am not passionate about anything in life. I don’t know what to do as a career or where to go. Nothing. I’m completely apathetic right now. Most of the time my daily meds level me out and keep me sane, but it’s times like these that I need the mania, the sharp feelings instead of numbness, in order to figure out what to do with my life.
97. I love taking macro photos with my digital camera – you know, the really close up shots of flowers and stuff.
98. I have a 1943 steel penny and a 1957 silver dime.
99. I like wearing heels.
100. I think women should be able to sort all the men of the world in an excel file (and vice versa). You should be able to find out who all the eligible people are – by, for instance, straining out of the file everyone under 6’2”, everyone that is married, everyone that’s gay, all the guys in prison, anyone who can’t read, and all the guys under the age of 25 and over the age of 50. How many are left? That’s what I want to know.
Posted by Amanda at August 27, 2005 01:36 AM
