13 Things

Still on break.  Still relaxing.  Still sleeping in and enjoying coffee and wearing pajamas all day and being lazy.  It's all sort of fabulous.

Since I have nothing student-related to discuss, I thought I'd do something different.  I don't talk a lot about me as a person (with the exception of my political affiliation, which has been discussed quite a bit this year), as I try to stay as anonymous as possible.  In honor of 2013, here are 13 facts about me:

1. I like to drink out of straws.  I don't know why, I just do.  I blame one of my friends, who I've known since we were about 12, who always required straws.  I think she'd be OK with me blaming her.

2. If I could have any artistic talent, I'd want to be able to sing.  For reals, I'm a terrible singer, which so doesn't stop me from singing, very loudly, when I hear a song I like.  But I hear people who can actually sing and I'm very jealous.

3. It's such a cop-out to say "I love all types of music!", but for me it's actually true.  If I can a) sing loudly along with it in the car, or b) dance to it, I like it.  I've been known to do pirouettes in the kitchen while listening to hipster folk music.  It works, I promise (except that my kitchen is tiny).

4. I don't know if I really believe in ADHD (queue the angry comments, stern looks, and whatnot), but if it does exist, I think I might have adult ADHD.  I'm very distractable sometimes.  Today is one of those days.  I read like 5 pages of a book, then had to go clean the kitchen, then had to check FB and Twitter, danced around the house, organized my shoe shelves, read some more, watched 30 minutes of a tv show, and now I'm writing this post.  But then there are days where I can sit down to read and I won't get up for four hours.

5. I'm incredibly self-deprecating.  I'm very quick to point out my faults and sometimes find it hard to point out my good qualities.  Don't worry, it's something I've worked on in therapy and maybe I'll get better at.  But probably not.  Because I suck.  See what I did there? (Sidenote: I'm g-chatting with my friend right now and she replied to a comment I made with "You're weird".  I write back, "I AM WEIRD!  I just wrote that in my blog post!", her response, "Haha, yeah. You are."  It's confirmed.)

6. IKEA terrifies me.  There are so many people and no way out.  I'll only go when it first opens in the middle of the week.  That said, I went to IKEA yesterday.  It was my aunt's birthday, so she and my mom met me over there for a several hours long expedition in buying flurgs, snykops, and flitzerlipels.  No, none of those things are real.

(Interjection: This is harder than I thought.  I've been at this for a long time, trying to come up with witty facts about myself.)

7. I love cardigans.  Seriously, I have more cardigans than is necessary for about 10 people to have.  My standard outfit in the winter is a t-shirt, jeans, and a cardigan.  Or a skirt/dress, leggings, and a cardigan.  It's not my fault that Target makes awesome, and inexpensive, cardigans.


8. Once every two years or so I cut off all my hair.  I'll grow it out for so long that finally I'll just snap, and one morning I'll wake up and make the decision that it's time to chop it all off again.  I did this recent and the amount of compliments I got on the new cut was shocking.  The football coach stopped me in the hallway and raved about it.  Apparently I'm meant to have short hair?  I like it and all, but it's annoying because I can't just throw it up on a ponytail and go, which, I guess, is the point, to make me do something with it.

8.5. As an addendum to #8, I can't take a compliment.  For example, when someone was like "Your hair is so cute!", I'd get all self-conscious and say something like "Your FACE is so cute!!".  I need lessons in this.

9. My favorite candy is Haribo gummy bears.  One of my coworkers knows this, and about once a month I'll show up to work and there will be a bag on my desk.  It's always a thoughtful surprise.

10. I'm very detail oriented.  I'm particular about how my handouts for class are put together, font, formatting, and all.  For example, I just spent about 2 hours working on the new background for this blog.  I chose, organized, stacked, photographed, manipulated, resized, corrected, and put together the pictures from my home library.  Could I have just taken some pictures of books and thrown it up there? Sure.  But that's not how I roll. 

11. I can count at least four people who I talk to online on a daily, or near daily, basis who I've never met in real life.  Some people think that's weird, which is why I used to, when I told a story about an internet friend, tell people I met them in college.  It was just easier.  Now I can just say, "Oh, that's Blank from Blank, I met him/her online" and most people don't look at my funny.  It's not weird, it's the 21st century.

12. For someone who swore she'd never get a Twitter...I've fallen kind of in love with it.  Don't judge me.

13. I swear a lot.  A LOT.  I try not to swear on here, but sometimes I fail at that because the situation demands a good swear word. Two quotes I like about swearing:

"Swearing is a really important part of one's life and it would be impossible to imagine going through life without swearing and without enjoying swearing there used to be mad, silly, prissy people who would say swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary as such; utter nonsense! The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies!" -Stephen Fry-

“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a 'fuck.' I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, 'And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.' How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.” -Nick Hornby, from A Long Way Down-

OK, that took me the better part of the day, on and off, to write.  I hope you people appreciate it!  (What do you mean, YOU PEOPLE?!  Sorry, that's the first thing that comes to mind.)  I guess I'll get back to my book now and maybe have a drink or three, as break is slowly running out.

Also, tomorrow I'm going to work on grading CDs for those of you who responded and I'll work on getting those out!