It’s been a hot minute since I updated this page. It’s interesting to note that things I once thought were quintessential facts about myself no longer feel quite so true or urgent. Anyway, this is the skinny on little ol’ me as of January 2022.
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- This blog began in 2009 as a chronicle of my brand new life as a wife to a physician.
- It’s not really about that so much anymore; moreso about the mundane ups and downs of a person trying to live a decent life.
- Decent as in “good enough” not as in “doesn’t swear or drink or watch R-rated movies,” because I do all three.
- I am a daughter as of 1981, a wife as of 2008, and the mother to one child (whose blog name is Carla) as of 2013.
- My child was born sixteen days past the due date my doctor assigned me, which is my biggest claim to fame.
- I hate tomatoes.
- I love snow.
- While I am extremely unathletic, I love to downhill ski.
- My biggest dream in life is to be a writer.
- I have an MFA in Writing, specifically poetry…
- …but my goal is to write fiction.
- My side hustle is as a freelance writer and editor, mostly for non-profits, though I have a background in copywriting and online publishing.
- I have a love/hate relationship with cooking: I love food, and finding/trying new recipes, but I also grow very weary of cooking day in and day out.
- I am a very picky eater, which means that I have been blessed with a child who is even pickier than I am.
- When it comes to food, I prefer spicy and salty to sweet.
- Chips and salsa, baby.
- Sriracha is my most-used condiment.
- Cats are my favorite animal, but I don’t own one because I am allergic.
- I learned how to ride a horse when I was seven years old.
- The horse was a stubborn seven-year-old Appaloosa gelding and he lived to be 34. This is not a fact about me, but it seems important.
- I am a Very Bad Sleeper, by which I mean I wake up at the slightest disturbance of the air currents.
- I love lists, but even so it is difficult to come up with 100 things to say about myself.
- Including my current home, I have lived in five different states.
- I am deeply, excruciatingly awkward.
- And I know it. So I overanalyze every second of every interaction until I am convinced I should become a hermit for the rest of my days.
- Making phone calls gives me hives.
- Things that give me severe anxiety: the dentist, public speaking, confrontation, social interactions, ambiguous emails, people who don’t wash their hands.
- I am a wee bit of a germaphobe.
- The Covid-19 pandemic only heightened my aversion to germs.
- And strengthened my belief that being ALONE (with my little family) is the ultimate way to live.
- I love TV.
- Primarily mysteries, police procedurals, sitcoms, and the category of dramas that includes things like Mad Men and Succession.
- I do not typically care for romances or the category of dramas that includes things like This Is Us or Grey’s Anatomy.
- I have similar taste in books: mysteries and thrillers all the way, baby.
- Speaking of books: I love to read.
- Some of my favorite authors include Louise Erdrich, Tana French, Sue Grafton, Anthony Doerr, Sophie Hannah, and Caz Frear.
- I read multiple books at a time.
- This includes multiple physical books and usually an audiobook and/or an ebook all at once.
- Because I worked for years as an editor, I can sometimes be a little hard on the books I read.
- Most books seem to be in dire need of a copyeditor.
- Grammar is one of my passions. I love to have in-depth discussions about commas and parallel sentence structure.
- Yet I am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist, and am fully on board with using “they/them” as a singular pronoun.
- Oxford commas for life.
- One of my biggest pet peeves is when people use “loose” when they mean “lose.” Or “breath” when they mean “breathe.” Or “lead” when they men “led.”
- Yes, I am willing to grant people grace – we all make spelling errors, especially online (see the previous bullet for a full irony example); but if you do it multiple times, it tells me your elementary school teacher has some explaining to do. Or that you rely too heavily on your word processor’s grammar/spelling software.
- I am also willing to bend a little for stylistic choices. I adore Emphasis Via Capitalization, for instance.
- I wildly overuse parentheses.
- And dashes.
- Clearly, I have no problem with sentence fragments.
- I was born and raised in a remote rural part of the country, surrounded by wheat fields and sky.
- Now I live in suburbia, which isn’t so bad either.
- Especially because I can get delicious, delicious Mexican, Indian, and Lebanese takeout any time I want.
- I can spend hours reading and re-reading a document to ensure it is free of typos.
- And yet I have ZERO PATIENCE for things like puzzles, Sudoku, or measuring ingredients correctly.
- I am a morning person, but my husband is a night owl so I tend to go to bed too late.
- My addictions include hot sauce, my iPhone, detective series (especially when the detective is a witty but flawed bad-ass woman), and Bookstagram.
- Laundry is my nemesis.
- Not so much the WASHING or the DRYING of the laundry, but the folding and the putting it away.
- My ideal day would include waking up early but feeling 100% rested; reading a great book outside in bug-free sunshine with a cup of hot tea; taking a long walk with more sunshine and abundant cool breezes, plus lots of dog sightings; having a few hours of uninterrupted and fruitful writing time; petting a cat; eating something delicious and flavorful for dinner that I neither had to cook nor clean up; playing a rousing board game with my family; watching something hilarious or heart-pounding; and falling asleep in my husband’s arms.
- I find Twitter appealing to read but terrifying to participate in.
- I took piano lessons for twelve years.
- Nonetheless I’m really bad at reading music.
- My favorite composer is Chopin.
- It follows that my favorite piano pieces to play are Chopin’s as well.
- My favorite to play is his “Raindrop Prelude.”
- My favorite to listen to is his “Berceuse.”
- While music is obviously wonderful – and very important to my husband and child – I am a person who can simply sit in a quiet car, no music playing.
- My thoughts are cacophonous enough without adding excess sound to the mix.
- That’s not to say I don’t enjoy music. I do; just not all the time.
- My favorite albums are Timberlake’sJustified, Swift’s 1989, Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, Garth Brooks’s No Fences, and Weezer’s Green Album.
- I used to sing “Hold Me” by Weezer to my daughter as a lullaby.
- While I used to sing – and even did so in competition during high school – I am by no means “a singer.” So you can imagine that she does not allow me to sing a lot these days. Unless she is humoring me.
- Sometimes I fear I peaked in high school.
- My closest friends live thousands of miles away.
- I am one of those people who has a very few close friends: one from my childhood, one from grad school, one from my work life.
- I had a very close friend from college, but she died in 2019.
- My husband, obviously, is my very best friend.
- Despite growing up in an outdoorsy state, I am not particularly outdoorsy.
- I do not want to go camping.
- Hiking is okay. Once in a while.
- I do love to ski. I think I said that already.
- And snowshoeing is quite enjoyable.
- Water skiing is also an acceptable outdoor pursuit.
- Once, I witnessed my cousin break his collarbone while jet skiing, so I am no longer a jet ski fan.
- There is no reason that “jet ski” should be two words.
- I have one sibling.
- There are six years and 4,000 miles between us.
- But I am quite fond of my sibling nonetheless!
- I have one niece, a brilliant charming adorable child to whom I wish lived closer.
- None of my family lives close, which is a bummer.
- But they all live in fun places to visit, so that’s cool.
- It is extremely difficult to find 100 even remotely interesting facts about oneself. Which is why I am basically repeating fact 22 instead of coming up with a new one! Some facts bear repeating, I suppose.
- My desert island food would probably be tacos.
- Or nachos.
- I am a Pisces, and I find that a lot of the horoscopic generalities about Pisces fit me to a tee.
- For instance, I am emotionally sensitive.
- I am also creative and imaginative.
- Though sometimes (often) my imagination gets away from me.
- I am an admitted perfectionist.
- And the pressure on this last fact is too much TOO MUCH I SAY.