25

This business of getting 'tagged' to list 25 random facts about yourself is sweeping Facebook right now, so I finally succumbed. Then I thought it might be fun to post here. I think it's fun to read what others have to say. Feel free to post your random facts in the comments!

1. I've been tagged too many times to avoid this anymore.

2. I've always wondered whether J. Jill, J. Peterman, and J. Crew were somehow related.

3. I would like to look/live like an Anthropologie catalog, but in reality look like an Eddie Bauer catalog since they sell Tall pants/shirts long enough for me and I live in an Ikea catalog b/c that's the closest to 'free' we can get around here.

4. I want a sewing machine.

5. I love how E.M. Forster says the "air smelled of cold pennies" because I know exactly what that smells like. He restored me to reading fiction.

6. I paddled in an outrigger canoe race in the Hudson along Manhattan. Paddling close to the Statue of Liberty was a highlight, but I was scared wondering how gross that water really was.

7. Going around Halibut Point I once paddled crested on a wave so steep that my paddle reached nothing but air.

8. In that moment I had a lot of scary and weird thoughts go through my head. When our 400lb 6-man canoe smacked loudly into the trough I had a lot of those same thoughts again.

9. I learned to row in the San Joaquin Valley in Sacramento, California.

10. My team learned coordinated rowing as our coach took her launch and abandoned us when a large freighter came at us through the fog. It was one of the scariest moments of my life.

11. I'm determined to try to join the Marburg rowing club this year, even if it's 5km away from me and I have no car, and even though the river here is totally pansy. I will even submit to a 4 man.

12. I could spend hours upon hours just watching the blade of a paddle or oar dip in and out of the water. It's like mmmmagic. (said like how they say it on Sleepless in Seattle)

13. My husband and I end up wearing matching outfits a lot, but it's not intentional, and even if nobody else has seen it but us, I'm still mortified.

14. When I was 18 I was the youngest person in NC to have a naturally occurring detached retina.

15. Since then the other eye also had a detached retina.

16. I have plastic in both my eyes, and at least once every 2 months I actually think that one day, maybe a hundred years from now, somebody could open my coffin and see a pile of bones/dust and then 2 random pieces of plastic. I think it will weird them out. And then it weirds me out.

17. I suppose people who get buried wearing glasses could have the same thought, but glasses are kind of expected. Does anybody get buried wearing contact lenses? Sometimes I wonder if I did if it would really confuse whoever excavates me.

18. I carved my name into the inside of an Egyptian monument. I wasn't supposed to even be in there b/c it was off limits. Today I feel mostly bad about that.

19. I broke an air freshener in Maine once and I still feel bad about that.

20. Some places I've been to don't exist anymore because bombs blew them up. Things can be rebuilt, but THOSE SPOTS I touched aren't there and that sometimes weirds me out.

21. I was thisclose to throwing a banana peel at my German teacher in my junior year of high school. I had my arm back and then dropped the peel behind me when the teacher turned her head. I still feel mostly guilty about that.

22. I had a blind date to my senior prom. It was a minor disaster.

23. I honestly can't remember anybody's name in the class I graduated high school with. We had moved the middle of my senior year, so I suppose that's legit.

24. I'm pretty sure every long paper I wrote in college and beyond was with U2's "Achtung, Baby!" cd playing in my ears.

25. I never got less than a 'B' on a paper, no matter how last minute it was written.