100 Things About Me

Jme has an irritating ability to inspire me. Bleh.

Presenting "The 100 Things You Never Needed to Know About Me But Will Waste Your Time Reading Anyway"

1. I play the violin. Very poorly, granted. But I own one.
2. I quit taking lessons many years ago when my teacher suffered a stroke. Never found another teacher.
3. The first real concert I ever went to was Kathy Mattea. (eek!)
4. My first real rock concert was Third Eye Blind. They weren't very good.
5. My first album was Bette Midler's "Some People's Lives"- featuring the smash hit "From a Distance".
6. My first favorite artist, however, was James Taylor. (Mom and I sang Jellyman Kelly on the way to preschool!!!)
7. After Bette, I disowned pop and listened to nothing but classical music for about three years.
8. That would be from the age of 8-11.
9. My parents thought I was a weird kid.
10. They were right.
11. I wore a lot of sweatshirts with cats on them then too.
12. And the cutest boy in class called me "catwoman". I didn't mind. :)
13. I had a pair of "hammer pants" I liked to wear with my kitty shirts. (The fashions of the late 80s and early 90s still make me shudder!)
14. My mom still hates the way I dress.
15. But we wear the same shoe size, and she likes those well enough.
16. My feet have been the same size as my mom's since the fifth grade.
17. I was literally a foot shorter then. Eek!
18. I was also in safety patrol in fifth grade.
19. Shockingly, no one ever tried to beat me up in all of elementary school.
20. Ok, except one boy... but I won the fight, and he ended up with his head in a snowbank.
21. I did a lot of stupid things in the winter, like jump over the side of the hill I lived on when there was a good ice cover. Did I say hill? I meant... cliff.
22. Come to think of it, I leaped off the side of that cliff during the summer as well.
23. Sometimes I jumped over the side with a piece of cardboard to sit on. Sometimes I didn't.
24. Miraculously, I've never broken any bones.
25. Actually, I've never been admitted to a hospital.
26. And I haven't thrown-up since I was in 3rd grade.
27. I puked my guts out for a week, and decided I was never going to do that ever again. And I haven't.
28. When I'm feeling really nauseous, I tend to collapse or pass-out instead.
29. But I've only lost consciousness twice.
30. One of those times, I really clocked myself on the noggin.
31. Speaking of hitting my head, I slipped in the bathtub once, and cracked my head open on the toilet.
32. Incidentally, that was also in third grade. Rough year.
33. Bleeding on the bathroom floor, I dreamt up the flux-capacitor.
34. I slipped because I was dancing in the shower.
35. I have a big scar down the middle of my left eyebrow from that episode.
36. If the men in my family knew how to put the toilet seat down, it probably wouldn't have hurt quite so badly.
37. I was on vacation when it happened, in a hotel.
38. Later in the week, I took a dive on Stone Mountain (in GA?) and skinned my ankle up really bad.
39. I still have a scar from that too.
40. The worst part of all of it was that my parents wouldn't let me go in the hotel's pool with all my boo-boo's and I had to watch "The Wizard of Oz" while my brothers went swimming.
41. I've never liked that movie. The blue "Oh-eee-oh---yo-ooh" dudes freaked me out.
42. My least-favorite movies all seem to star Ben Stiller.
43. My favorite movies all seem to star Johnny Depp.
44. Or Alan Rickman. I dearly love that freaky man.
45. I love all men with British-derived accents (British, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Australian, etc.). Who doesn't?
46. I tend to place a high importance on very stupid things when it comes to the opposite sex.
47. I will most likely die a crazy old maid, and my fifty cats will feast on my rotting corpse for a few weeks before anyone discovers me.
48. Or they will bring me back to life, and I will become Catwoman.
49. "Meow".
50. I not-so-secretly enjoy wearing leather. But where does one respectably wear leather pants?
51. (Good God, I'm still only on number 51?)
52. I dance like no one's watching...
53. I sing like no one's listening...
54. I drop things, fall over things, basically make a fool of myself many times a day... and always pretend that I meant to do whatever it was I did.
55. I really do like myself. I like that I'm a big dork. I like that I'm not a poised, sophisticated woman. I like that sometimes I spill ketchup on my pants. I'm human, and I'm 100% cool with that.
56. My mom says I remind her of Meg Ryan's characters in chick flicks. She says I'm a cute loser.
57. I think she meant that as a compliment? ... moving on...
58. "Unsolved Mysteries" scared the hell out of me on a weekly basis.
59. I still have an irrational fear of/nightmares about aliens and yeti.
60. I also have an irrational fear of the late Robert Stack.
61. I think I would feel more comfortable if David Duchovney were my personal bodyguard.
62. I remember at least some part of my dreams almost every night.
63. Cannibal pygmies show up a lot more often than you would think.
64. As do lightsaber duels.
65. One time I had a dream that the devil was chasing me and everywhere I went, he was already there. I woke up wondering if it was just a dream- or not.
66. Oddly, I've never had a fear of ghosts.
67. I've always believed that departed souls have better things to do with their time than to bug me.
68. Considering the sheer number of potential souls floating around the Earth, my chances of running into a ghost have to got to be far better than my chances of running into either an alien or a yeti.
69. I'll let you know how that works out the next time I write one of these lists.
70. Yeti is a funny word. Funny or not, I don't think I'd like to run into a 10ft wookie-ape-man in the Himalayas.
71. I doubt I'll ever find myself wandering about the Himalayas.
72. I used to have a desire to climb mountains.
73. The guy who cut his own arm off with a pocket knife killed that dream.
74. Had I been in his position, I would have stood there and cried until I died of exhaustion, hunger, and blood loss.
75. I think I'll just stick to the Mt Everest IMAX movie. (This "list" doesn't resemble a list of things about me anymore, does it?)
76. I took five years of piano lessons.
77. I can successfully play "Pop! Goes the Weasel" reading the music.
78. I can play much more difficult pieces when not reading the music.
79. I learned to play by ear, memorized the songs, and faked "reading the music". Once we started pieces that were four and five pages long, I gave up and told my teacher what I had been doing. She wasn't too pleased.
80. I sank a lot of my parents' money into lessons without accomplishing much.
81. I still feel bad about that.
82. But I'm very well-rounded.
83. I never played sports.
84. I was frequently picked last in gym class.
85. I'm not that uncoordinated- I think it had more to do with being the weird kid... and I didn't realize I needed glasses until the 8th grade.
86. I still hate volleyball.
87. And I'm still not a people-person.
88. Every now and then we did the limbo- I was always picked first for that!
89. I'm still quite the limbo champ. :)
90. Hmm... I took seven years of Spanish classes and still can't speak it. I'm beginning to see a pattern of incompetence.
91. I have unnatural dexterity in my toes. I'm quite good at picking things up and catching things.
92. I'm ambidextrous. I was left-handed, then in kindergarten the teacher only taught writing right-handed, so I switched. I still have full and equal use of both hands. (Neither of which is very good at playing the piano! :) )
93. I'm colorblind, which is quite rare for a woman. Fully defeating all genetic probability, both of my brothers have normal color vision.
94. I don't have exceptional hearing, but I must be really good at picking up the lower registers. I've always heard cars at the bottom of our driveway before anyone else( my driveway is exceptionally long, by the way). I used to freak my mom out when I was little by saying "Daddy's home!" and then he'd show up a few minutes later.
95. Either that, or I'm psychic and I only pick up on really stupid things. I have a talent for wasting talent.
96. My earliest memories are of jumping off my brothers' top bunk bed onto the spare bed on the other side of the room. A real leap of faith.
97. I also liked to sit in a crate on that bed, and jump up and down. (It was my boat!) Once I flew off the bed and crashed, taking a chunk out of the wall (and my head).
98. I respect and love my mother and father more than anyone. It took a lot of patience to raise me.
99. It's amazing that I'm still alive. It's more amazing that I did such stupid things without consequences.
100. That is the number one reason I believe in God. I don't think I could have made it this far on my own.