100 Things About Me

So I know it's the cool thing to do a 100 Things post.  I haven't done one up until now, mostly because I'm too much of a slacker to try to put 100 things together at one time.  However, I've worked on this for a while now and finally here it is.  Besides I thought we needed to lighten up around here just a little bit, at least for a little while.

One hundred things nobody ever cared to know about Trueself.

1. I love to be in the spotlight.
2. In spite of #1, I am incredibly shy.
3. I’m afraid of just about everything except my own shadow.
4. When I’m in front of an audience, however, I am quite confident as long as I don’t have to ad lib.
5. I’m a wiseass.
6. My sarcasm gets me in trouble repeatedly, particularly with people with little sense of humor.
7. My dad has always used sarcasm, a lot, to make his point about things.
8. I learned from my dad how to be passive aggressive.
9. My dad and I both excel at passive aggressive behavior.
10. My mom is the classic martyr who sacrifices for others only to make sure those for whom she has sacrificed know just how much she has sacrificed for them.
11. I learned from my mom how to martyr myself.
12. Deep down, more than anything, I want to manipulate people into doing things my way.
13. I bend over backwards trying to please others.
14. The reason I do this is because I expect those for whom I have bent over backwards will turn around and do the same for me.
15. They don’t.
16. I want everyone to like me.
17. They don’t.
18. I am a walking pile of contradictions.
19. I love to play the piano.
20. I rarely play the piano anymore because every time I sit down to do so N is right there wanting me to let him play although he never wants to play any other time.
21. I wish BJ had shown interest in hearing me play the piano, but he never once asked me to play for him.
22. When I was in high school I was involved in almost everything musical and theatrical.
23. I miss being involved in music and theater.
24. I miss being on the stage.
25. I miss the costumes and makeup.
26. I miss the rehearsals every evening.
27. I miss the friends I had who were and continue to be very involved in fine arts.
28. I would love to find the time to get involved in community theater.
29. I am not a good pianist.
30. Being a good pianist isn’t the point of playing for me.
31. When I do play the piano it is very therapeutic for me and calms my soul.
32. I was 27 when I married W.
33. I was still too young to get married at 27.
34. I married because I was afraid of being alone.
35. That wasn’t a good reason for me to get married.
36. I very much want to marry again some day.
37. I am terrified to get married again.
38. I’m afraid I’ll fail again.
39. I wish N had a brother or sister.
40. But I only wish that because he wants it so badly.
41. It’s hard enough raising one child on my own.
42. Although I would love to have a little girl.
43. I love to read.
44. I rarely read anything that isn’t online anymore.
45. I ought to cancel my subscriptions to all the magazines I get and never read.
46. Since I’m too lazy to cancel the subscriptions and they’re already paid for I’m just not renewing them when the subscriptions run out.
47. My favorite magazines are the Utne Reader and the New Yorker.
48. I have a subscription for Utne but not the New Yorker.
49. I used to read the New Yorker in my therapist’s waiting room.
50. Before that I used to read old copies in the cafeteria where I worked.
51. For a while, due to a business W owned, we had a free subscription to the New Yorker.
52. Have I mentioned that one of my favorite magazines is the New Yorker?
53. Making a 100 Things list is a lot harder than it looks.
54. Sometimes reconciling an account is a lot harder than it looks.
55. Sometimes reconciliations are like trying to reconcile apples to oranges and figure out which one is more right or what adjustments one must make to make one equal the other.
56. Reconciliations are one of the things I love about the work I do.
57. Nothing feels better than getting a reconciliation balanced.
58. At the end of the work day I want nothing more to do with accounting, financial analysis or reporting.
59. I love a good numbers puzzle though like Sudokus, Kakuros, and the like.
60. I love all forms of math until calculus.
61. A poor teacher ruined calculus for me.
62. I have a desire to go back to school and brush up on my math.
63. I’d like to see if I would enjoy calculus this time with a different teacher.
64. I have toyed with the idea of going to law school.
65. I think I’m not jaded enough to be an attorney.
66. I have toyed with the idea of going back to school and studying psychology.
67. I like concrete ideas and hard and fast solutions to problems.
68. Psychology probably wouldn’t be a good fit for me as a course of study.
69. I want to enjoy my own uniqueness.
70. But I want to be like everybody else.
71. There is some appeal to me of having a job where I would listen to people as they talk about their problems and when they pause for a breath asking them, “and how does that make you feel?”
72. Then again, I think I would get tired of listening to people talk about themselves in about three days. . . or sooner.
73. When I started my job over two years ago we were supposed to have a new computer system in place within six months so I was told not to bother learning more than I had to about the old one.
74. We still don’t have the new computer system in place so I guess it’s good I ignored what I was told and learned as much as I could about the old system.
75. I have a ton of jewelry (not expensive).
76. I rarely wear any jewelry.
77. Most of my jewelry is still packed up from the last move.
78. I used to wear a lot of jewelry almost every day.
79. Somehow that changed when the depression hit.
80. I still don’t think my depression meds are right yet.
81. I certainly don’t ever feel as energetic or motivated as I used to pre-depression.
82. I wear socks to bed in cold weather even if I don’t wear anything else.
83. I feel slighted if a man doesn’t take his socks off when making love to me, as if it’s a message that somehow the event just isn’t that important to him.
84. There have been times when I haven’t taken my socks off for sex, and it wasn’t because of a lack of importance of the event. It was solely to keep me from being too cold.
85. I don’t know why I think that a man’s reason for keeping his socks on would be different from mine.
86. Sometimes I like to sit down and have a good cry for nothing in particular but just as a way of letting off steam in general.
87. I learned from my parents that crying is bad.
88. I had not let my parents see me cry for over 25 years, but I did when I told my mom about splitting with W.
89. I didn’t cry about the split because I didn’t want it but because it hurt to feel like such a failure in front of my parents.
90. I grew up playing the role of “good girl” in my family.
91. It’s a role I can’t seem to shake off of me.
92. It’s also a role which I cannot live up to.
93. That last sentence made me cringe a little because of ending the sentence with a preposition.
94. Although I like proper grammar, I refuse to become too much of a stickler about it.
95. One of my favorite words is “ain’t.”
96. I’m also a fan of “gonna.”
97. I ain’t gonna quit this list until I hit 100 no matter how painful it gets.
98. I’m only 5’7” but almost always have to buy tall sizes for pants to be long enough.
99. Sleeves on the other hand tend to be much too long on me even in average sizes.
100. It took me six months to compile this entire list.

Whew!  Glad that's over.  Now I can get back to regularly scheduled whining and shit.