because i can't think of anything else to write about, you get 100 things about me. i know, i know, it's an idea that's done to death, but i always enjoy reading other people's lists, so figure one or two of you will enjoy mine.

1. i play the cello, but have a less-than-stunning sense of pitch.

2. i also play the harp, which requires less intonation but more finger coordination. i'm still working on it.

3. given a choice, the answer is chocolate.

4. though smelly cheeses are a close second.

5. if my life had been different, i would have loved to have made a career out of horses--breeding, riding, training, showing.

6. i'm in 23rd grade. what this means is that if i had started over with kindergarten after i finished high school, i'd be a sophomore.

7. karl and i have been together for 3 years. he's my 3rd serious boyfriend.

8. the previous 2 serious boyfriends lasted 4 years each. will karl last past another year? yes.

9. i watch an embarrassing amount of tv. shows that i currently follow, in no particular order: coupling, er, joey, scrubs, the apprentice, smallville, the prisoner, F1 racing, will & grace, charmed, alias, monk, and south park. there may be others. luckily, their seasons do not all overlap. but jeezus, that's a lot of shows.

10. i am absolutely not cut out to be an academic. the self-motivation, the solitary hours, the lack of deadlines...

11. i am trying to play off my first back-up plan, the foreign service, as something casual that i'm trying for, but which isn't a big deal because it's not like it's my dream job and i don't have anything else i'd like to do. truth is, i *do* really want to do it, and i'm nervous about my upcoming (november 23rd) oral assessment. my dad passed his first time and went on to a foreign service career, and i want to live up to that.

12. my guinea pig, miss fergusson, is 6 1/2 years old, which is ancient for a guinea pig, and i worry a lot about how devastated i'm going to be when she dies.

13. if karl asked me to marry him, i'd say yes.

14. i just learned that my first ex-boyfriend, who got married <4 years ago, got divorced last year.

15. i love mustard, and always have a variety of mustards in the fridge. currently, those include: stone ground with stout beer, mol�, tarragon, basil, raspberry wasabi, raspberry honey, and lemon.

16. i am a horrible procrastinator, and can't work from home because i will procrastinate doing my school work by cleaning the house. while this makes my house look nice, it means i never get anything done on my dissertation at home since the housework is neverending.

17. i'm procrastinating right now by writing this list.

18. i went to my first baby shower over the weekend, and could do with never going to another one. grown women sitting around someone's living room in sorta dress-up clothes (church clothes, basically) sipping iced tea and talking about how much their kids pooped as babies. oy.

19. except that the hostess had hired a massage therapist to give 15 minute hand and foot massages to all the guests during the shower. the massage therapist had a spiral tray with assorted stones on it. when asked, she said she had brought them because they "are special to her."

20. i cannot understand why george bush is running even with kerry during this campaign. the media says that the most important issue for most americans is who will keep our country safer. let me remind you that it was george bush who made our country less safe by (a) failing to really go after osama, (b) committing over 100,000 troops plus the accompanying accoutrements (tanks, trucks, guns, bombs, armor, food, etc) to fight an unneeded, badly planned, poorly executed war in iraq, which leaves no resources to use to save tens of thousands of lives in sudan or be ready to defend against iran or north korea should they choose to have a go at us, and (c) making iraq, which used to be a little oil-rich nation where the brutal dictator and his sons were the only terrorists into a war-torn violent nation where terrorists are everywhere, water and electricity are scarce, and the only thing the population can agree on is how much they hate the americans.

21. i desperately need a coffee. i prefer it iced, with cream and sugar. hang on while i run down for one...

22. ok, i'm back. dunkin' donuts won over starbucks this time.

23. my taste in home decorating tends toward the modern and uncluttered. in theory. in reality, all non-ikea modern furniture is way out of my price range.

23. karl and i just bought this couch for our living room, and love it.

24. beer is not my beverage of choice. however, i recognize that there are some occasions and locations that require beer (e.g. sporting events, dive bars, microbreweries). in those cases, i have a bit of an extreme beer personality, and prefer either a non-guiness stout (or sometimes a porter) or a cheapass beer like pabst. nothing in between. i cannot, for example, manage to finish a sierra nevada or a sam adams or a yeungling. strong and black or practically water, those are my options.

25. in 1999 i got engaged to my then boyfriend. we picked 30 july 2000 as our wedding day. i booked the church and the reception location, hired a photographer, and bought a wedding dress. christmas of that year we "postponed" the wedding while i tried to figure out why i wasn't feeling it. moved out the spring of 2000, and we officially broke up that november.

26. i still have the wedding dress.

27. my engagement ring looked like this.

28. i would like to have a dog, but want a big one (lab or some such) and only want one when i have a yard big enough to let her run.

29. this is my current age.

30. all of my pets have always been female (except for mr. wiggles, the beta fish i had in college).

31. i prefer red wine to white, though not by much. chardonnay is my least favorite wine.

32. wait, that's not true. craptacular white zinfandels and super sweet riesling are my least favorites. then chardonnay.

33. my parents were raised southern baptists.

34. i was raised baptist, but not southern. the church i grew up in.

35. in my church, kids were usually baptized at age 12. i was baptized at 17. before that i wasn't sure i believed in god.

36. at 17 i started a brief period of belief in god.

37. shortly after that, i reconsidered again. i am now certain that there is no god.

38. i also don't believe in a soul, or heaven, or hell, or life after death, or reincarnation, or in "things happening for a reason."

39. i believe our conciousness is a result of the complex interconnections of the neurons in our brains. we are the sum of our parts. there is a well-written article by the always persuasive steven pinker in this week's newsweek.

40. i believe coincidences are just that.

41. my car is a white 1987 honda accord 4-door sedan with 193,000 miles.

42. last year, we spent over $3000 on it, fixing or replacing the catalytic converter, front brakes, distributor, rear wiring, alternator, front tires, thermostat, radiator hoses, and fuel pump. it runs great now.

43. but it isn't going to pass inspection in march 2005 because of a rust hole in the left rear wheel well.

44. the car is not worth enough to do body work, so this is its last winter.

45. i develop strong emotional ties to inanimate objects: apartments, cars, etc. i find it difficult to move, or get rid of stuff that has had meaning to me. our last night in our last apartment, i looked around and around, trying to memorize how the windows looked, or what other parts of the apartment i could see from bed. karl kept telling me to just go to sleep.

46. my mom and dad separated in march 1994, when i was a first year in college. dad moved out, his choice, because he had had affairs. my parents' relationship over the last 10 years has varied between not talking at all and dating.

47. last month, after 10 years, dad moved back in. though apparently, he's keeping his apartment, for now.

48. i started college an astrophysics major. hardly understood a lick of my astronomy class. realized too late that all the stuff i wasn't understanding i was learning the next semester in math class. too bad i had already given up on the astro part and decided on just physics.

49. for kicks, i took a linguistics class, history of the english language, and fell in love. dropped physics and picked up linguistics.

50. my favorite old english word is 'neorxenawange,' which means 'paradise.'

51. there are other good words for paradise: shangri-la, xanadu, eden, heaven ... but neorxenawange is clearly the best.

52. i have never seen "the godfather" or "forest gump." i only recently saw "jaws" for the first time.

53. i have 13 piercings. 11 in my ears and 2 in my tongue.

54. i have one tatoo, a crab, on my right shoulder.

55. yes, i am a cancer. no, that's not why i got the crab tatoo.

56. i prefer fountain pens to any other kind. preferably with an 18k gold nib. i splurged and bought one like that. other pens i own have less flexible steel or titanium nibs.

57. when writing with a fountain pen, i like to use brown ink.

58. i have one sister, 3 years younger than me.

59. we are not particularly close, and being in the same house with her for more than a couple of days drives me nuts.

60. my personal harbinger of spring is when i switch from hot to iced coffee.

61. i hate when i have to switch back in the fall.

62. i wear sandals all summer, as long as i can, because i don't like wearing socks.

63. my favorite color is red.

64. in high school, i was all gothy black, with half a shaved head (the underneath), an entirely black wardrobe, and lots of black eyeliner.

65. i listened to a lot of depeche mode, nine inch nails, and joy division/new order.

66. you'd never know it to see me now. mostly, i just don't think i can be bothered to keep it up.

67. my favorite bands include they might be giants and x.

68. i listen exclusively to NPR on the radio. i hope this makes up for all the crappy tv i watch.

69. i contribute money regularly to NPR, and (this election cycle) to anyone who is anti-bush.

70. howard dean was my choice for president. but i will take john kerry as a fine second choice.

71. the highlight of my musical career was when i won an audition to play the solo cello part in rimsky-korsakov's scheherezade for the charlottesville and university symphony orchestr (CUSO) in college.

72. i currently play with the penn baroque music ensemble. last semester we played the brandenburg concerto #5, which has a wicked harpsichord cadenza near the end of the first movement. you have not lived until you've seen a harpsichordist wail on that solo.

73. this semester we are playing a vivaldi recorder concerto, rearranged for flute. vivaldi is great and all, but didn't write anything good for the lower instruments (like cello). in other words, booor-rrrinnnng. on the plus side, there's not much practicing required.

74. the orioles are my baseball team.

75. the redskins are my football team.

76. i say that like i actually follow either of those sports in more than a casual "joe gibbs is back coaching the 'skins? rawk! maybe they won't be quite so embarrassing anymore" kind of way.

77. i follow everton way more closely. and i only learned about them from karl. (but seriously, how adorably british is their nickname, the toffees? i know!)

78. in one of the suckier moments in my life, i got my first period on my 11th birthday, which also happened to be the day i was leaving home for a week at sleep-away girl scout camp. misery is having your first period among strangers in the woods, where latrines are your only toilet option, and you can't go swimming without blood running down your legs.

79. discrete math was my favorite math class, followed by multivariable calculus.

80. mimi and the bix are my favorite diarys to read.

81. my favorite winamp skin is this one because it reminds me of the technics stereo my parents had when i was a kid.

82. i was the pitcher on my softball team as a kid. the team was called the roadrunners. we were in the ponytail division of the pigtail/ponytail league. dumbass name.

83. the best vacation of my life was the 5 weeks i spent driving around the country by myself. me, a tent, some books on tape, and the open road.

84. i have O+ blood. i used to give blood occasionally, until i was told that i no longer could, since i'd spend too much time in eastern europe/the UK. they were worried about mad cow disease, for which there is not yet a blood test, apparently. i am fairly certain i do not have mad cow disease.

85. when i was a kid, i thought that it was really rare to get a tootsie pop wrapper that had, among the images of kids doing sports, a native american shooting a star. so rare that you got a prize if you wrote in. i now realize that was silly. you get a prize RIGHT INSIDE THE WRAPPER, in the form of a tootsie pop!

86. food and drink that i hated as a child that i like now: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, red bell peppers, squash, snow peas, iced tea, spinach, wine, pumpkin seeds, cantaloupe, honeydew, catfish, and cranberry sauce.

87. food and drink that i hated as a child and still dislike: lima beans, broccoli, okra, beer (except either a malty black stout (but not guiness) or cheapass beer like pbr), flan, butterscotch, cauliflower, and marshmallow peeps.

88. things i have seen that have left me in awe, in the real sense of that word: the grand canyon, the sheer size of which is difficult to comprehend even when you're there; old-growth redwood trees, some of which have been around since BEFORE jesus was born; the roman baths of bath, england, which have survived 2000 years in shockingly good shape, including the *still watertight* lead lining to the main bath; the imperial palaces of tsarist russia, especially the winter palace and catherine the great's and peter the great's summer palaces, all of which are marbled and gilded and inlaid and carved to an extent that boggles the mind.

89. i have a birthmark/mole on my forehead, between my eyebrows, that is similar in size and position to a hindu's bindi, but brown. it's actually a bit off-center, but that didn't stop some kids in elementary school from calling me an indian. like i was supposed to be offended or something? anyway, i did hate it a little when i was a kid, and even discussed with my mom getting it taken off. but i've come to really like it, as part of what makes me me. so recently, when i thought it might be fading a bit, i was sad. maybe i'm just imagining it.

90. i don't like mangos. i like mango juice, mango ice cream, mango yogurt, dried mango, and mango chutney/salsa. no, i cannot explain it.

stop knocking

27 September 2004 - 1:23 pm

handwritten in sharpie marker on a piece of white paper taped to the door of a house nearish to mine:
To whomever it may concern: Michael Shockley Antone Canglington don't live here. His father died 2 years ago.