At least, I don't think you do.
1. I was born in the city where the smiley face was invented.
2. Once I sang in Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris.
3. I love grapefruit. According to my mother, my uncle fed me pieces when I was an infant, before I was supposed to be eating solid foods, and I loved it then, too.
4. I also love lima beans. I don't understand all this lima bean hate.
5. When I was eleven, I leapt from a rock ledge twenty feet up into an off-shoot of Lake Powell, under Rainbow Bridge. I was operating under the influence of a middle-aged hippy woman my sister and I met on a tour boat, who enjoined us both to seize the day.
It was thrilling.
I'm glad I did it then, because now I'd be too aware of how stupid a risk it was. And because I don't think that part of Glen Canyon is still filled with water, or accessible to tourists.
6. I've never started a campfire with flint and tinder, or by rubbing two sticks together.
7. That being said, I build a good fire. Growing up in an old colonial, where the fireplace was actually used as a source of heat, lent me some skills.
8. I used to fantasize about going back in time, so I could tell people how to do things, like indoor plumbing, or cleaning wounds, or...
9. Generally, the dreams ended when I realized I'd probably be burned as a witch.
10. Maybe I'd deserve it, too. I mean, talk about some serious plagiarism.
11. I don't really think plagiarists should be burned alive.
12. When I was in third grade, I copied an article about Pasteur straight from our World Book Encyclopedia at home, and turned it in.
13. The teacher caught me when I couldn't tell him what "ridiculed" meant.
14. That's when I learned what plagiarism was. (And "ridiculed.")
15. As I've mentioned before, my mom was a school librarian. Which is probably why we had two sets of encyclopedias at home in the first place.
16. You'd think she would have told me about plagiarism herself.
17. Nope. She sure was angry at me for it, though.
18. I used to have a burning hatred of copycats. (Huh. See #11.)
19. The older I get, the more I realize we all copy. It's our nature.
20. We have some pretty intricate rules for which copying is acceptable, and which isn't.
21. I think about this sort of thing a lot.
22. There's another post in there. I'll come back to it. Maybe.
23. My favorite book in our World Book Encyclopedia set was Volume H.
24. H is a great letter, don't you think? Strong, upright, with a pleasing symmetry side-to-side and top-to-bottom.
I'm sure there are specific words for those two varieties of symmetry. But sometimes perfect words are less direct.
25. The H was in gold leaf, set in on the binding.
26. I liked that volume because there was a whole section of acetate pages under "Human Body," where the different systems were illustrated in layers, like the "Visible Man" in two dimensions. You could flip past the muscles to the organs to the veins to the nerves to the skeleton, then pile them back on again, watching the development from nothing back to flayed person.
27. I guess it was sort of like what little I saw once of one of the Hellraiser movies, where a man grows from some spilled blood or something. But I didn't like that.
28. I enjoy medical illustration. I've even enjoyed the little bit of dissection I did in science class back in the day.
29. But I don't like horror movies.
30. Psychological thrillers, sure. And yes, the occasional zombie film-- though "Shaun of the Dead" was my favorite of those, and I don't know if that counts.
31. I was thinking the other morning about times when I screwed up, back when I was a child.
32. I often got hit with the remark, "I wouldn't have expected this of you." Or varieties on that theme. Extra disappointment.
33. I think it's one of the real downsides of being a smart kid that usually follows the rules-- sometimes parents and teachers and other authority figures forget you are in fact still a kid.
34. I can see why it's effective from a disciplinary point of view, to hold the kids who tend to operate in a mature way to a higher standard, but I don't think it's fair.
35. Sometimes I worry about Sprog, because he's big for his age and making good progress, that people will be harder on him, or expect a level of accomplishment beyond his years.
36. I might be projecting. He's only six months old.
37. I think a lot of smart kids get damaged. They pull back from taking the risks that could lead to excellence because of that extra ration of disappointment they're handed every time they fail.
38. Well. I'll do my best not to inflict that on him. Or myself, for that matter.
39. I don't like to talk about certain projects I have in mind.
40. I wrap ideas like a furry papoose.
41. Do you ever wonder about papooses and other traditional back-pack baby carrying devices? I mean how mothers could hear their babies back there, in the wind and storm?
42. Do you think they ever just didn't?
43. I make up scenarios like these, where I break my heart thinking about an Inuit mother coming home to discover her baby had died (or some other situation, similarly terrible.) And I have to wonder, why? Does my brain just get bored if there's nothing sad to think about?
44. Well. I think about good things, too. But for some reason it seems I need to push my brain to be happy, whereas sadness is something it seeks out all on its own.
45. Speaking of which-- for the past half-week or so I've been feeling irritable and weepy.
46. And sure, there are life-events I could pin that on, but I was really starting to wonder about my mood.
47. I got my period today. Ohhhh, right. That.
48. My periods have only just started being regular since Sprog was born. And even before I got pregnant, they'd been a bit erratic. Still, you'd think I wouldn't find PMS quite such a surprise, me being a 36-year-old woman and all.
49. To be fair, back when I was on the pill I don't think I experienced PMS quite so much. I had some weird dreams, ate some ice cream, and that was about it.
50. And I wonder, is there a purpose to it? The emotional aspects of PMS, I mean? Are they adaptive, somehow? Or is Nature just an even bigger bitch?
Hmmmmm...