You Shall Sort Of Know Me By the Following 20 ThingsApr 19 '03 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line I have revealed much, and feel naked.
I really loathe write-offs, but the pathetic and repeated entreaties of Corpgent combined with a fondness for lists and a pathological need to talk about myself overcame my resistance to this one. Never again. 1. You know you have a favorite stall. Mine is the handicapped. 2. I like to start the weekday morning with a cup of strong coffee (Starbucks, almost inevitably, mostly for lack of other options – the coffee of the day, never the milder Breakfast Blend) with a good helping of nondairy creamer (I don’t like an overwhelming dairy taste in my coffee), and a peppermint Chiclet. The Chiclet tempers the assault of the coffee, and its candy coating breaks down nicely under the heat. 3. I have eaten squirrel and it is yummy. It tastes like you know what. I really love the smell of roof tar and gasoline fumes. 4. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I had a makeout dream involving Dominique de Villepin, the suave, diplomatically obstreperous, ("oleaginous", if you’re George Will, and if you are get the fuck out of my review, you snotty little adulterous hack) French foreign minister. There we were, gently freedom kissing like there was no tomorrow, except there was, and I woke up. This is only the latest in a series of erotic dreams involving diplomats and world leaders. In 1999 I dreamt I was having sex with King Hussein of Jordan. He was wearing dark brown high-waisted pantyhose, which he pulled down to reveal three penises. Two were on his abdomen. (I have kept a very detailed dream journal since 1990. The only task remaining is to convert it into a searchable database.) Of the other well known figures I’ve had sex dreams about, the largest number involve hockey players (Jeremy Roenick, Kelly Kisio) and old or washed-up actors (Ken Wahl, Robert Redford). I’m fairly astonished I haven’t dreamt about Jack Lord yet. 5. I have not slept with Christiane Amanpour! I would very much like to with Dan Harris, though. He's the non-embedded ABC reporter currently reporting from Baghdad. 6. My most unfavorite body part is my knees. 7. If I were a piece of flatware, I would be a spork. 8. I know I will never have short hair, at least on purpose. I have no explanation for this. 9. Writers that I keep meaning to read: H.L. Mencken, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Proust, Solzhenitsyn, A.J. Liebling, Tolstoy. Writers I keep meaning to read more of: Nabokov, M. Amis, Edith Wharton, Marquez, John Keegan. Writers that I never did, or no longer have any interesting in reading: Ayn Rand, John Updike, Hemingway, Michael Moore, the Dalai Lama. I had more. 10. I probably shouldn’t be given a firearm, because the likelihood is high it would accidentally discharge and kill Oprah and her best friend Gayle, John Stossel, Star Jones, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, this girl Vicki I know, and BBC reporter Tristana Moore. It might also shatter Tom Cruise’s teeth, leaving only a big gaping maw. 11. I spent seven and a half months of 2002-03 being unemployed after being laid off. This was both slightly stressful, and enormously liberating. Only slightly stressful, because I had built up an emergency fund; money wasn’t one of my biggest worries. I worried more about prejudices interviewers would hold against unemployed people, and about the growing gap on my resume, and there were many days when I wondered if I’d ever find another job. Towards the end, I wondered how long I could sustain the motivation to keep looking. But aside from the hideous two or three hours a day I spent job hunting (in general, I found that there weren’t enough jobs out there to spend more than three hours looking) and the occasional interview or meeting with a headhunter, I loved the freedom of being able to structure my own day. With the internet, you can conduct your search in the middle of the night if you want, leaving your days free for shopping, reading, meeting friends for lunch, studying philosophy, sculpting and painting, playing the viola da gamba, frequenting gentlemen’s clubs, quaffing mead at Medieval Times, practicing CPR on your golden retriever, taking day trips to the Illinois wine country or the racetrack, throwing on a flamboyant red cotton skirt and a pair of castanets and dancing gaily to the music of the 35 illegal Mexicans who live in the one bedroom apartment below you, or catching up on The View to see if those women are still as retarded as they used to be. Oddly enough, I still looked forward to the weekends whilst unemployed because they meant I didn’t even have to spend one minute looking. 12. My favorite font by a long shot is Gill Sans. There is a time and a place for the serif, certainly, but in general I prefer the clean, modern, unadorned look. 13. I have a nagging feeling that I should go back to school – you know, to better myself – but having a paycheck is highly addictive. 14. I am very picky about towels. I don’t like the velour ones, or the long-looped shaggy ones. They must never, ever have any sort of appliqué, fringe, embroidery, or decoration. I will never own any of the seasonal hand towels; you know the type, they always seem to hang in guest bathrooms. I don’t like towels to be particularly soft. I like a no nonsense towel that just goes about its business without leaving any towel lint on me. These are surprisingly hard to find. I did come across some in a hotel in Florence that particularly pleased me; they had no loops but were just a cotton waffle weave. If you know where I can get these in the U.S., please leave a comment. 15. Some of my favorite foods are arugula, green beans, peas, asparagus, spinach, onions, melons, rice, clam chowder, fresh mozzarella, chicken panang, anchovies (for making salad dressings), cilantro, Carr’s Poppy & Sesame Crackers, Banquet Frozen Enchilada dinners, Good & Plenty, diet Pepsi, lowfat chocolate milk. If the world ran out of meat I wouldn’t miss it too much. I used to have a serious addiction to Cadbury Crème Eggs, but now they are almost too sickly sweet even for me. (As a child, I used to eat sugar right from the bowl with a spoon.) 16. Dammit, why don’t we see more of Shannen Doherty? All of these crappy reality shows, and not a single one based on her life? 17. I think everyone must reach an age at which time begins to accelerate. For me it was around 1991. I look back on the past 12 years and think, “where the hell did they go?” Sometimes this is followed by the thought “and what the hell was I doing during them?” but I quickly suppress that question. It’s not like I’m old or anything, but more and more I find myself making mental lists of the books I really must read before I die, or the places I really must travel to (I feel like it would be a shame to miss out on India, Patagonia, Montana, and Scotland). I feel certain that I will be full of regrets on my deathbed. I guess I’d just like to keep the number as low as possible. 18. I don’t know how it is on college campuses now, but when I was in college identity politics seemed to be the biggest topic of debate. I remember one extremely political gay activist graduate student saying in a history class that sexual orientation was the most salient organizing principle for everyone. I immediately was struck by how narcissistic a statement that was. Another student said that he thought it was one’s religious identity. It was a small class and there weren’t any racial minorities, but I’m sure race is the most relevant identifier for a lot of people. The discussion was much too narrow, anyway. If you look at the entire globe, maybe what’s most relevant to identity is whether you’re living at a subsistence level, or beyond. Maybe the divider is between uptight people and laidback people, between the frugal and the wastrels, or the grateful and the ingrates, or people who believe in markets vs. people who believe in politics. It’s obviously a little ridiculous to set a binary constraint like this, but it makes for some interesting debates. But I am getting way off topic here. My point is that I have really tremendous breasts and a fondness for the elderly. 19. A few things I will never do: bungee jump, attend a NASCAR event or a magic show, take up rodeo, take a crap in a doorless stall, spit on the sidewalk, become a Scientologist or a golf caddy, kick an animal, lick the inside of Barbra Streisand’s ear. 20. The older I get, the less interested I am in science. I’m not sure why. I always enjoyed it in high school, and for a few years I assumed I would go to medical school. Maybe it’s because my suspicion keeps growing that the answers to the really big, important questions lie outside of science.  |
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