Eight

I was tagged for a meme a way-long time ago--in MAY, no kidding, and I have finished it. Finally. It's a pretty open-ended "list eight odd/ interesting/ et cetera things about you" type of meme. There are many things happening in the Land of Snee, but none that I want to discuss right now because the air conditioning has gone out in my office and it is so effing hot in here that I can't communicate well, and the things that are going on deserve to be communicated well. And this post was basically finished and ready to post, so it's a freebie.

I'm not tagging anybody else for it. Do it if you want. Or don't.

Begin.

1. In high school, I was a member of the National Honor Society, the Thespian Society, the Marching Band, the Swing Choir, the Art Club, the Spanish Club, the Speech Team, the United Methodist Youth Group, the Junior Rotary Club, the Mass Media Class, and the AV Club. I got excellent grades. I never snuck out. I never went to parties. I never drank a drop or even smoked until right before Senior prom. And yet still managed to be a complete slacker in college, lived in a bona fide party house, took a few drugs, had a few brushes with some ugly grades, told some hideous lies to get out of them, and somehow graduated five years and only one change in majors (Fine Art to English) later. I applied and was even accepted into two MFA programs in creative writing, one in New Mexico and one just outside of San Fransisco.

2. I didn't go into either program, because my father had recently suffered a heart attack and I didn't want to be so far from home, also because I would have had to take some bullshit summer algebra class to finish my B.A. on time (which scared me shitless after successfully avoiding math classes for 5 years), and largely because I didn't want to leave my new boyfriend. He is now my husband, and though I wonder sometimes how things would have been different for me, I have never regretted that decision.

3. I've been vegetarian since I was about eleven, when my mother took me to the doctor and explained that I was refusing to eat meat, and the doctor said, "that's okay." The only meat I have eaten since pre-adolescence is the very rare hot dog with sauerkraut and onions outside of a bar in college. Unless you talk to my brother, who swears that I eat chicken enchiladas, which is a big fat lie. I would no sooner eat a chicken enchilada than I would eat my own finger.

4. I keep my deodorant stick on the windowsill above my kitchen sink. And I don't have a reason for that. I just forgot to take the new stick upstairs to our bathroom after a grocery trip, and all subsequent sticks have just lived there on the sill.

5. I fell in gym class in the sixth grade, bonking my knee on the hardwood floor. I was a scrawny kid and I hated gym class. I fell, it hurt, and then everyone started crowding around me, so I made a pretty big deal about it. I went to the emergency room, there were months of physical therapy, et cetera. I will spare you the details, but the whole incident ended in knee surgery, and I'm certain it was all brought about by my exaggeration rather than any actual injury.

6. I have a very, very hard time making change. I mean like nickels, dimes, and quarters.

7. I had my gallbladder removed at the tender age of nineteen. It runs in my family, the gallstones at a young age.

8. I worked with severely mentally ill patients for many years, and one of my all time favorite patients was a schizophrenic woman I met on my first real caseload, who routinely called me "Tina" and peed in every chair she sat in. I used to take her to buy bright green and purple wigs at the costume shop, and she'd stare at herself all the way back to the group home in my passenger-side mirror, thrilled with her appearance. "Oh!" she'd say. "This is what the kids are wearing!" Most of the time she refused to leave the house for fear of Barbara Walters hovering around outside. She once told me that Lucille Ball ate the baby Jesus.

My daughter is named after her.