Seven Things: The Meme of the Whatsit

I’m pretty sure avflox tagged me on this meme months ago, but I couldn’t think of anything at the time, so I didn’t post in return. I have now been tagged by jarvitron over at his blog, so it’s now or never. Put up or shut up. Or something else of that nature.

And yes, I apologize for referring to people by the Twitter handles, but since that’s how I seem to be getting all my news of the world lately (including pix from yesterday’s Hudson River plane crash), that’s how it goes. Deal with it.

Okay… Seven Things You Don’t (Couldn’t Possibly?) Know About Me:

1. My lips are always chapped. I’ve got about 9 million brands of lip balm, lip gloss, lip softeners, whatever, and my favourite is Burt’s Bees (which my sister first introduced me to), but I am rarely seen applying any of these products. I don’t know why, but I think it has to do with the fact that I am always terrible at keeping these products on my lips, where they belong. I smear them off onto people I’m kissing, onto coffee mugs, onto glasses of water or wine. I have to re-apply every time I brush my teeth or go outside wearing a scarf up over my mouth. It’s just too much effort. So even though I am stashing little containers of lip goop in all my bags and pockets all the time, I am rarely using them, hence my chapped lips. Good god, you could spend years dissecting that with a therapist, couldn’t you? Luckily…
2. I don’t do therapy. And I’ve lived in New York City, where everyone, literally everyone, had a therapist. Including their dogs and cats and little mice. Except me. I think that unless you’re out of ideas or suffer from genuine medical conditions like schizophrenia, you probably don’t need a therapist, you need a good friend who will listen to you talk, offer you friendly advice, and then not get upset when you refuse to take it. Hey, I could be totally wrong or even totally psycho here, but that’s my opinion. Then again, I’m a writer, so it’s likely that all the things so-called normal people chat with a shrink about for thousands of dollars per year is somehow getting sorted out in my obsessive journalling/blogging/writing for whomever will pay me and even some who won’t. To each his or her own.
3. Lately, it seems to me that anything with peanut butter as one of its main ingredients is gold. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, spicy Asian-style peanut sauce on noodles or dumplings, peanut butter straight from the jar… it’s all good. I could eat it every day.
4. I am a former vegetarian. I one day decided to stop eating meat, as all the news about bird flu and hormones in meat, cannibal cows being fed their own kind ground up in the feed, the shitty things people do to achieve commercial meats mass produced were getting to me. They turned me off completely, and it wasn’t a big deal for me to eliminate it from my diet. I didn’t want it, didn’t have a taste for it anymore. So I went for about a year as a vegetarian, learned how to cook, started eating a lot more variety. I even liked tofu, as much as one can like tofu. And then one day I started craving meat again, and it didn’t seem to me that vegetables were that much better off, what with the genetic modifications and pesticides and nastiness involved with the mass production of all food these days, so I was like what the hell? The system’s fucked, and I’m too poor to afford organic (i.e. clean) food, so fuck it. I’m not going to push it on anyone, but it doesn’t seem to me that most people—vegetarians or otherwise—know anything about eating healthily anyway. We just eat what we like. I’d love to see the system cleaned up by crusaders, but going veggie ain’t gonna change the meat industry or even the way farmers grow their crops.
5. I used to play the flute. And I was pretty damn good at it. I was usually in one of the first 3 chairs in our school’s band or orchestra in junior high and high school. But I hated it. Well, at first I loved it, as kids do when they start learning something new in 4th or 5th grade, but I always hated practicing. My mom was always on my case about it, especially in high school when I had a private instructor, but I would breeze through the stuff once and then basically sight-read when I had my lessons. I even had a nice open holed Gemeinhardt with a silver headjoint, and I would probably still take it out occasionally to see what I could do except some bastard fuckface stole it from me when he was “helping” me move. ADAM KELLY: I WANT MY FLUTE BACK, YOU TALENT-FREE MISOGYNIST ASSHOLE!
6. I think I need to pick up and move every few years to feel like I am doing something with my life. I don’t want to feel like I am “stuck” somewhere, like I have no options, the way I always felt when I was growing up in some nice safe suburbs where my mother tried to get me to feel like I was in danger every time I left the house to go for a walk. I know she meant well and was just trying to protect me, but it made me feel smothered, like I would live and die in the same nowhere town all my life, and do nothing of any importance, and that made me want to scream. I still don’t know if I am doing anything of any “importance,” but at least I feel like I am in charge of my own destiny, that I have options. I never, ever want to live in the suburbs again; I think I might literally die of boredom. Either that or of some horrid suburban ennui that causes me to slit my wrists in the bathtub. How Sylvia fucking Plath.
7. I feel like I can’t write fiction anymore, if I ever could. I’ve been reading some books, hoping to figure out what the problem is, but I think it might just be simple self-absorption: I’ve never really written anything that wasn’t, in some respects, about me. And I suppose all fiction is like that (no matter how hard the author will rail against the idea), but it frustrates me nevertheless. Aren’t I supposed to be using my imagination? Maybe mine’s broken, like Bender’s is in that horrible Futurama movie, Bender’s Game. Unlike Bender, however, I refuse to turn to D&D to work this out. I can’t deal with gamer geeks and RPGs, so you can bite my shiny metal ass.

So there you go. Time now to tag some 7 victims? How about a different approach: If you’ve read this, consider yourself tagged, and get to work!