My brother has a blog. (Infactorium.blogspot.com) It's about his recovery from alcoholism, but it's also about many random and funny things that float through my brother's fertile and active mind. He recently posted "Sixteen things which I haven't been keeping secret but which you probably don't know about me" and invited his readers to post their own sixteen things. Here are mine. Mine today, anyway. Tomorrow they'd be different. Some of them.1. I am incapable of returning a book, so don't lend me one. I don't have a library card for this reason; I owe them $14,283 from before I learned this lesson.
2. Not really $14,283. More like $42.
3. I need my alone time too, but this makes me feel guiltier than it makes my bro feel, because I am a mother of two small children (and one big one).
4. A lot of the time, I am a barely adequate mother. While my children are telling me important things I go "mmm-hmm" way more than the recommended amount. And that's not the half of it.
5. I quit smoking two and a half years ago. Before that I smoked a lot.
6. I quit biting my nails about a year ago. Before that, I just didn't have fingernails. I had little bloody stumps for as long as I can remember.
7. I have no idea why or how I quit those two things; I just mysteriously stopped.
8. I used to have lots of vivid dreams, but now I seldom remember my dreams. I miss my dreams.
9. I like to paint nudes.
10. All my best girlfriends moved away within the last two years. I'm really lonely for female company.
11. I rely on my sister way too much for female company.
12. Having accomplished my lifelong dream of moving to the country and getting goats and chickens and ponies, I'm just not sure what to do next.
13. I often feel that I haven't yet done anything of "importance" - that is, anything that matters to anyone who doesn't live in my house. Although I have no shortage of useful skills, I just haven't been able to turn them into a worthwhile enterprise on behalf of society at large. I am afraid that until I manage that (really pretty awesome) task, I will feel restless, unfulfilled, and angry at myself.
14. My painting and my poetry both might have been able to be part of that task, but I've been too chicken and/or lazy to make them public instead of private.
15. I am the best non-native Spanish speaker I've ever met.
16. There are so many things I want to do that I know I will never be able to do even a tenth of them, and that drives me crazy. All I can do is try to decide what I want to do NEXT. NEXT I want to make goat cheese cheddar.
