Everything

Everything...perhaps nothing...100 things about me. I've been really enjoying these lists even though they're probably mocked all across the blogosphere. Thanks Nappy40 for working on your fantastic list as well as RLC who not only did his own version but also recommended yet another variation.

So...here I go...starting with no. 1 to get no. 1 out of the way, to remove the pressure of getting to the essential "me." I'm imagining this list will reveal things that are not immediately obvious if you bumped into me in a supermarket with my half-full-of-stuff basket.

1. I am profoundly insecure. Sometimes, compliments sound like a breeze rustling a spring time tree while insults sound as if I'm the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the bell tower.

2. I believe heaven would be incomplete without a library because everything can be found in a book.

3. When I was a child, one of my favorite books to read (hours and hours of reading) was Guiness World Book of Records. I'd buy it each and every year and never failed to be amazed, amused, and horrified at each accomplishment, at each oddity the book presented. I contemplated what sorts of records were in my reach. My oldest son reads it, too, without ever being prompted by me.

4. My sex education began with a Spanish language real-life "comic book" belonging to a childhood live-in Mexican housekeeper named Nadia (whose employment was swiftly terminated the day after she got drunk and declared her love for my father to my mother). The magazines were kept in her room (which eventually became mine) on the shelf and showed pictures of people romancing one another from the first kisses through various stages of undress.

5. I procrastinate way past the point of reason, sometimes even beyond that, on occasion to the point where I've developed a near-phobia for the thing I'm supposed to do.

6. The rest of my technical sex education came from a book called, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask," which my father kept in his study, a smallish room with one large window, a red shag carpet, a massive mahogany desk with drawers I loved to search.

7. I love to watch television.

8. Flying terrifies me and the book, "Fear of Flying" by Erica Jong didn't help me at all...with regard to flying.

9. I've been to England, France, Germany, Austria, Mexico, New York, Hawaii, Washington D.C., Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. I'm not done travelling.

10. The thing I dislike most about being a lawyer is the clientele. Makes me glad I never became a doctor because then for sure I'd have grown to hate sick people and that would just be bad.

11. I wanted to be a doctor up until the day I got a "D" in biochemistry in my junior year at USC which evoked an admonition from my father while sitting in his laboratory office at USC, with me across from him, "You're not going to medical school - choose another career."

12. I decided I wanted to be a doctor when I was 7, swinging on a swing in my best friend's backyard, after she said, "I want to be a doctor," which was said right after she sang out, "I don't like cheese."

13. I didn't eat cheese between age 7 and 8, changing my mind about disliking cheese when McDonalds wouldn't make the cheesburger without cheese.

14. The number 13 doesn't make me nervous in any way - I'm not superstitious.