I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but seeing it on a few other
sites recently has inspired me. Let's see how far I can get.
- I was born in 1953. Proud 2 B a Boomer!
- When I was a kid, I used to tell people that I was born in Lebanon. I was
born at the Lebanon Hospital, Bronx, New York City.
- I moved to New Jersey when I was two and a half.
- I moved to the town I live in now when I was eight.
- I have one sibling, a sister who is four and half years older than I am.
- My mother was born and raised in New York City, mostly in the Bronx. She passed away in May,
2002, at the age of 81.
- My father was born and raised in Taunton, Massachusetts. He died two years
ago this week at the age of nearly 84.
- All four of my grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who
came to America during the first ten years of the 20th century.
- I have very short brown hair, gray at the temples (and here and there) and
green eyes. I wear glasses, usually rimless frames..
- I used to be 5'3" (almost) but now I'm closer to 5'2".
- I went on W8 Watchers almost a year ago and lost 20 pounds. I've gained
back a few, but not more than 5.
- I'm a high school librarian, and have had the same job for 28 years. It's
the only real, permanent job I've had in my entire adult life.
- I work in the same high school I went to as a kid.
- I have wanted to write all of my life.
- I wanted to be a teacher from the third grade on.
- I started smoking during my freshman year in college, but could always
take it or leave it until about ten years ago, when I began smoking like a
regular smoker. I stopped smoking on August 1, 2003, but I've had three
cigarettes since then.
- Oh, a big one! On December 17, 1991, an 8 cm. acoustic neuroma -- a brain
tumor -- was carved out of me during an 8-hour surgery, and I'm okay. I was
only in the hospital for a week, and came home on Christmas Eve.I was out of
work for ten weeks.
- As a result, I am 100% deaf in my right ear.
- To compensate for that, I wear magic hearing aids. Okay, they're not
magic, but they're digital and wireless and have a remote control.
- I had some facial paralysis as a result of the brain surgery, mostly I've had problems with my right eyelid�
and have had four surgeries to correct it. Now it pretty much works, and looks
normal, I'm told.
- In October, 2001, I got a tattoo of -- you guessed it -- a purple chai on
my left wrist. Chai is a Hebrew letter/word that means "life."
- In December, 2004, I got a tattoo of a purple peace sign on my right
ankle.
- I met my husband on the first day of 10th grade, but we hated each other,
and didn't really date until after we had both graduated from college.
- My husband is of Italian/Irish descent and was raised Catholic, but the
differences in our religious background have never been an issue for us or
for our parents, as neither of us practices any religion at all.
- We have been married since July, 1977. That's a looooong time!
- We have two daughters, born in 1981 and 1984.
- Both of my daughters graduated from the school where I work. Including
cousins and everything, fourteen family members have graduated from this
school, including my mother-in-law.
- I love spending time with my daughters. They hardly ever do that snotty
kid thing anymore now that they're adults.
- Both of my daughters can write, and love the theatre and films and TV and all kinds of pop
culture, as I do. My husband is a good writer, too.
- My older daughter is an inch taller than I am, the younger is an inch
shorter.
- Every woman in the family, old or young, has shared the same dominant physical
characteristic, the one that means we can never buy a bra at Victoria's
Secret.
- I was an English major as an undergraduate. I always loved to read, but I
don't have a great attention span anymore.
- I am a big Shakespeare fan.
- I am also a big Star Trek fan. My favorite show was The Next Generation.
- I lurve Patrick Stewart. I have seen him on stage three times.
- I like gadgets. Computers are the ultimate gadgets.
- I do more housework now than I ever did before, but in general, I don't do
housework. At least, no more than I absolutely have to.
- I have two old cats with poor personal hygiene. I am their litter-box slave.
- I've been to DisneyWorld five times, and Disney Land twice. DisneyWorld is
my favorite place to be in the whole world. My husband, however, hates it
there.
- My house is full of hidden, and not so hidden, Mickeys. I can see three
Mickeys just on my desk as I type, and there are probably a dozen more just
in this room.
- I love movies, especially movies from the thirties and forties. My
favorites are Hitchcock, and anything with Cary Grant, or Spencer
Tracy/Katherine Hepburn.
- I collect DVDs, especially cheap ones.
- I have been watching television continuously since 1953. I was born one
week to the day before Little Ricky on I Love Lucy. One might even make the
case that I am addicted to television.
- My musical taste is trapped in the sixties/early seventies. I listen to
the oldies station on the radio. The best band of all time is, of course,
the Beatles. How could it be anyone else?
- I am also very fond of show music, especially Rodgers & Hammerstein
and Lerner & Lowe.
- I love dogs, although I've never lived with one.
- I'm a big Harry Potter fan, a passion I share with my younger daughter.
- My best friend is my sister, even though sometimes she drives me crazy.
- I have four other very good and close friends. One is a friend from
childhood, and the others are all people I got to know from school. I mean,
work. The school where I work. I work with them. Or did. (One of them is
retired.)
- I had a bunch of emotional issues and especially self-esteem issues for
most of my life, but around the time I hit 50, both of my parents died and I
went to therapy and since then I am much happier being who I am because life
settled down and I worked through lots of stuff.
- I continue to miss my parents every day, but I am glad that they are no
longer ill or suffering.
- I was very close to the three grandparents I knew, but I especially idolized
my mother's father, who was a very influential presence in my life.
- I'm beginning to see that no matter how well you know yourself, 100 things
is a lot to come up with.
- I got my first master's degree in 1977 so I could be a librarian (an M.L.S.,
Master's of Library Science) and another one five years ago for salary and
keeping-my-sister-company reasons (an M.Ed., Master's of Education in
Curriculum). Since I didn't have to write a thesis or take comps for either
one, I usually tell people that I have two bogus master's degrees, but in
fact they are genuine and real degrees from legitimate universities and required a reasonable amount of
work, but no actual original research. I did create a 125 page website for
the second one, though.
- I've been to California a few times, but no farther west than eastern
Pennsylvania otherwise.
- I've been to England and Wales twice.
- I drove to Florida once with my sister and four of our kids and now I don't ever have
to do that again.
- I live in a little 1950 tract house Cape Cod, about ten miles west of New
York City, in the same community I moved to with my parents when I was 8.
- We could see the smoke from the towers on 9/11 from the hills here in
town, and from every other town nearby.
- I wear blue jeans to work almost every single day. Did I already say that
one?
- I've had insomnia, off and on, since I was about twelve. As did my father
before me, and my younger daughter after.
- One of my favorite things to do is to make other people laugh.
- I've been politically liberal all of my life. My grandfather practically
worshipped FDR.
- I used to be a hypochondriac, but since it turned out I really did have a
brain tumor, I just give in now and go to the doctor whenever I suspect
something. I'd rather hear it's nothing and look like an idiot than be dead.
My mother was a terrible hypochondriac, but never got over the surprise of
finding out she had cancer.
- I enjoy surrounding myself with images and items from my childhood. I have
a KitKatKlock on the wall, and a collection of books from different series I
read as a kid. I still have some of my dolls, and other trinkets.
- I wear my mother's wedding ring, and my half of my father's wedding ring
on a chain around my neck. (My sister has the other half of his ring.)
- I am not good at playing games.
- I cannot dance. I am absolutely incapable of dancing, or of most
activities that require physical coordination.
- I like to sing, but I won't sing if other people can hear me. I only sing
to babies, or along with the national anthem at a ball game. I will also
sing the high school's Alma Mater at the annual pep rally.
- I can remember very far back. My parents used to say that I have
"prenatal memory" because I once described a cousin's apartment
that they swore she moved out of before I was born. But I remember my
bedroom in the apartment we moved out of when I was two and half.
- I never had a really truly favorite color until about six years ago when I
embraced purple as a result of the poem by Jenny Joseph called
"Warning!" which is best known by its first line: "When I am
an old woman, I shall wear purple, with a red hat that doesn't go, and
doesn't suit me." I also wear a red baseball cap a lot. I also like the
color gray, mostly because I like the way it goes with so many other colors.
- I am so bad at matching clothes and picking outfits that I mostly just
wear denim or black with solid color t-shirts, so that everything goes
together. I am incapable of putting on pin on a sweater straight, so I just
don't do that.
- My feet are cold about 90% of the time in the winter, maybe 40% of the
time in the summer. I think my feet have been cold since 1962.
- I almost never drink alcohol, maybe a beer or a glass of wine every couple
of years. I got very sick drunk once in college and it was an unpleasant
enough experience to make me never want to repeat it, although I did get
very happily drunk once about 15 years ago.
- Sometimes I feel like I'm invisible to the other people around me. Not
with my family, but out in groups of people.
- I consider myself ethnically Jewish, although I practice no religion as
such. I think I would technically be described as a secular Jew, but many
people, including many Jewish people, do not believe it's possible to be
Jewish unless you're talking about the religion.
- I love photography and taking pictures, but I don't do it as much as I'd
like to.
- I do not own high heels, nor have I worn heels for more than 10 years, and
I plan never to wear them again in my life.
- I was once very caught up with needlecrafts, especially cross-stitching,
but all of that pretty much fell by the wayside when my kids were little,
although I still have some of the pieces that I made and really liked. I've
been trying to crochet recently, but to misquote the guy who does G.W. on
Saturday Night Live, "It's hard! It's really hard!"
- From about 1988 through 1991, I worked as a counselor at a snooty day camp
so my kids could go there for free. I was the assistant computer counselor
(!) for the first two years, and the head arts and crafts counselor for the
last two. This was my first real exposure to computers, and I learned a lot
from the head computer guy, who was a science teacher in real life.
- I can indeed remember very far back (#70) as well as a trove of trivia,
especially things like the names of bit players in movies and TV shows, but
I am terrible at remembering what I was about to do next. I tend to lose
words while speaking, especially nouns, which I understand is
menopause-related. I also sometimes just say the wrong word (other than what
I meant to say), which I didn't do before the brain surgery. I was
embarrassed about this at first, but I made peace with it a long time ago.
- I do not own my own
head.
- My mother had bipolar disorder and a touch of the OCD, and although I have
the family tendency towards depression, I'm in a very good place now, and
for the last couple of years. I don't do things like turn the lights off and
on and come back home again and again to make sure I've locked the door, but
I lean towards the OCD as well, which I've always just thought of as being a
control freak. But I think I'm less controlling now because of being in
therapy for three years, which I finished last fall.
- I've always wanted to write a book, and I wrote one in 1998. It's a
collection of family stories and legends that I heard growing up, and I used
family pictures, some of them quite old, as the springboard for each of the
stories.
- I am death� to plants. But the Hubs has magical green thumbs.
- I am terribly prone to clutter, and have only really attempted to manage
it in the last few years.
- I was a Girl Scout leader from 1986 to 1998. At one point I had two troops
(one for each daughter) and one of them had 45 girls in it. At that time, I
was also one of the co-leaders of the townwide Girl Scout organization, and
I was trained in all kinds of things, including camping and first aid. In my
last two years, I was also trained to work for the Girl Scout Council to
train other leaders, but I only did that kind of training a couple of times.
- I have been to two Star Trek conventions. I did not attend either one of
them in costume. (I don't even have a Star Trek costume, something of which
I am very proud.)
- I have had a bad back since I slipped on ice (but didn't actually fall
down) in 1974. I also have chronic sinusitis and IBS, which is an annoyance,
but not debilitating, as it is to some people who have it more seriously.
- I like to drive, but I'm not as comfortable being a passenger, unless the
Hubs is driving.
- I'm intrigued by things that are small. I drive an SUV, but a small one.
When I got a cat, I picked the runt of the litter. I like mini
versions of real things. I have no idea why, unless it's because I've always
thought of myself as smaller than most people. As a child, I would daydream
of a fantasy world where there were no grownups and children had house and
jobs and cars, but everything was scaled down for them.
- My developmental years (as in intellectual development) were heavily
influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. One of the most influential
pieces of literature I've ever read is the play "Inherit the
Wind," which I read when I was in 8th grade. I also read "Anthem" at
about that time, also a biggie for me.
- My idea of the great American novel is "The Grapes of Wrath." It
is not "Huckleberry Finn" (my cousin's choice) and certainly not
"Moby Dick", which is my sister's. We've had this argument dozens
of times.
- I have little hands.� Not bizarrely little, just small for a
grown-up.
- Because I've learned not to trust my memory in recent years (even though
my memory is one of the things I like best about myself and cherish), I'm
sure there's something really big and obvious that belongs on this list that
I've left but
I have no idea what it is.
- I don't like touching dirt, and although I am enchanted and entranced by
the out of doors, I also feel vaguely threatened by it.
- I still like the work of being a librarian, although sometimes it's hard
to figure out where that's going, and some of the traditional kinds of library
work that I used to enjoy don't even exist anymore. I often wonder, though,
why I picked a profession that's always the subject of jokes and stereotyping
and misunderstanding.
- Despite my difficulty in coming up with these 100 items, I am a compulsive
list-maker by nature.
- Although I like having my "stuff" with me wherever I go, I hate to carry
things. So I'm always looking for another "perfect" small bag or case for
something. My preference is always to carry things in my pockets, if I can,
and for most of my adult life, I didn't carry a purse, just my wallet in my
back jeans pocket. But I'm more of a purse-person now. (I guess I just have
too much stuff for my pockets.)
- I am amazed that I got to 100, and more so that it was so difficult to get
here. I wish I could thing of one last really good thing that would sum me up
in a nice neat little nutshell, but like so many other things, it's juuust out
of reach. Okay, last thing, although I've said this before. I am glad and
grateful that I have been doing this diary thing because it has been very very
very good for me, and continue to be so on a daily basis. Thanks for reading,
and for being there.
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I'm watching Dr. Phil
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Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
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