100 things about me

This was originally written at the beginning of 2003, in my old journal toxicbunny.

1. I don't usually do LJ surveys because my mind always goes blank when asked for my favourite word/colour/poem/food/etc. For one thing, it's impossible to pick only one: words and colours and stuff are meaningless without the other words/colours/stuff around them. For another, I know the thing I pick on the spur of the moment won't be my actual favourite thing, and I'll remember it at 3am the following morning and smack myself on the forehead.
2. And anyway I'm very self-conscious and secretive about things I like. I'm slowly fixing this.
3. There is a little purple man with green hair sitting on my work monitor. He's made of Plasticine. We were bored in work a while ago and I made several of them. (I got the idea from my boss complaining she couldn't get a man.)
4. I used to have a whole city of Plasticine people. They had very tragic lives.
5. I have a major fetish for intellectual conversation.
6. My ears are almost as sensitive as a Ferengi's.
7. Speaking of Ferengi, I was an obsessive Trekkie between 15 and 17. I made myself a uniform and went to conventions.
8. Then I discovered Babylon 5, felt I'd seen the light, and obsessed about that instead for another few years.
9. I regularly get obsessed with things. The obsessions are all-consuming and last a long time.
10. I fall in love more easily with ideas than people. A lot of the symptoms are similar.
11. Celebrity culture irritates me. I know people who are *far* more interesting.
12. The front of my hair used to be blue. I'd love a full head of blue hair, but I think my boss would have a coronary.
13. Long before that, I spent one weekend as a blonde. It looked dreadful.
14. My favourite smells are old books, new books, cinnamon, lavender and damp soil after rain.
15. I can see very well in the dark. They told me I'd ruin my eyes but I never did.
16. Apparently I could read before I could talk. (I pointed to flash cards and stuff.)
17. When I was a toddler my dad used to stand me on tables and make me read newspapers to his friends and colleagues. One day I got so bored of this that I slapped him. He still brings it up.
18. When I started secondary school I was so small that I used a little metal-frame trolley to transport my schoolbag. I put up with the ridicule for three days before giving in and doing my back in like everyone else. Even the teachers took the piss. Hence, it gave me great satisfaction to hear recently that the school has brought the trolleys in as standard.
19. I discovered the internet in 1994. It was exhilarating. I've been spodding too much ever since.
20. The first thing I ever looked up on the Web was, um, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. *blush*
21. I'm a compulsive filker. I frequently filk songs in my head, usually highly inappropriately. (Anyone fancy a Jimmy Eat World song tweaked so it's about A.S.Byatt's "Possession"?)
22. Left to myself, I operate on a 26-hour cycle for several weeks, and then it starts to wreck my head and I try to fix my sleep patterns by staying up all night. This rarely works.
23. I love travelling alone at night with a notebook and a minidisc player.
24. I did two undergraduate degrees. I was very good at the first and very bad at the second.
25. I miss being a student. Someday I will do a Masters in something as obscure and non-careery as I can possibly manage.
26. I am a pathetic caffeine addict. I can pinpoint when this happened. In summer 1998 my housemate misread the instructions on the percolator and made me an at-least-quadruple-strength cup. With vanilla in it. Every hair on my body stood on end and I
haven't been the same since.
27. When I was 16 I ate nothing but grapes for three weeks. Subsequently I put all the lost weight back on, but never grew another millimetre. Oops.
28. I was once described as a nymphomaniac hobbit (by certain people on my friends list who shall not be named :) ).
29. I am not a hobbit, damnit. My feet are not hairy.
30. My favourite seat on planes is a window seat just behind either wing, so I can see the flaps doing their thing but also see down to the ground. Failing that, any window seat will do. I have been known to use force to get myself into a window seat.
31. When I need to calm down or escape I daydream about flying over a misty rainforest, at dawn or sunset.
32. I'm funny about names. People addressing me by my name makes me nervous, and I find it hard to use the names of people I have strong feelings about, as though the name was sacred (for people I love) or a charm to summon them in manner of Candyman (for people I don't like).
33. I used to always say the word "oven" when I meant "iron", and vice versa. I'm better now.
34. I have only ever been in doubt about the spelling of one word.
35. That word was "abscess".
36. I am a pedant, but spent years pronouncing "pedant" wrong.
37. Misplaced apostrophes enrage me out of all proportion.
38. I used to be very devoutly Catholic. I went to youth prayer meetings and everything.
39. After that I didn't really believe in anything, but I hated it.
40. Now I'm something like "rationalist eclectic pagan".
41. I still have a major guilt complex, though. But never about the things I really should be guilty about.
42. I have 'religious experiences' in woods, by the sea, on planes and on dancefloors.
43. I am a terrible dancer but persist in doing it anyway.
44. I once had a crush on Chesney Hawkes. My excuse is that I hadn't discovered real music yet.
45. The two songs which leaped out at me the first night I went
alternative-clubbing were "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode and "How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths.
46. On that same night I also had my first snakebite-and-black and was told about the Mecca that was Camden Market.
47. And was taken under the wing of a handsome, charming, amoral English student who wrote terrible poetry. Thus commenced a months-long dance, in which he tried to corrupt me and I tried to convert him. In the end neither of us gave in.
48. I used to ride horses a lot as a child. I almost acquired a pony at one stage, then we moved house and no longer had a stable. Probably for the best, as said pony was fat, lazy and ornery.
49. While backpacking in Thailand I learned to ride motorbikes too, very dangerously and illegally when I look back at it, but it was on a tiny island so it seemed OK. I want one of my own.
50. In fact I just generally like things that go fast.
51. I had never experienced homesickness till a couple of months ago, and even then it was mild.
52. But New Model Army's "Green and Grey" makes me uncomfortable: it sounds like the voice of my conscience, though my leaving Ireland wasn't really like that at all.
53. When things go wrong, I have a bad habit of keeping my head down and hoping they go away. Because of this they invariably get worse.
54. I deal badly with conflict and avoid confrontations wherever possible. When I do fight with people, I always conclude that I've lost them and they won't want any more to do with me. It feels like an unexpected gift if they come back. I don't understand friends who fight and make up all the time.
55. I have frequently been sitting at home wanting to get in touch with someone but being sure they won't want to talk to me, only to find out later that they were doing the same.
56. I have very little physical fear and none of the standard phobias. Spiders and mice are cute, heights are exciting; it is people who are scary.
57. I worry that I used up my entire life's quota of willpower before I was 18.
58. For example, I kept the Confirmation Pledge and didn't drink a drop till my 18th birthday.
59. This put something of a damper on my social life in first year of college.
60. But my first drink ever was champagne on my 18th birthday, which was kind of cool.
61. Thanks to my mum's crackpot religious friends, I grew up thinking the world was about to end.
62. I still sometimes have a panicky feeling of time running out, of "but I'm not finished yet!"
63. When I was eleven I badly wanted to be an Amazonian Indian.
64. I have a special relationship with a small patch of West Clare, on the limestone terraces of the Burren. My family went there for a week in July for 16 years, along with a couple of hundred others who came back year after year.
Nominally it was a prayer-week thing, but the stuff that really mattered had little to do with that.
65. It was in the pub half a mile down the coast from there that I had my first proper night out.
66. And in the sand dunes later that I had my first kiss.
67. According to my mum, my first word was "ice", when she put an ice cube in my hand.
68. When I was 14 I wrote* a dreadful novel about dispossessed fairies looking for a new home. I've been tentatively trying to rehabilitate it and running away in horror ever since.
69. Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs' changed the course of my life.
70. So now it's annoying that I don't even think it's that well-written any more.
71. I thought there were lots more than this on the list I made on the plane. Going to bed now.
72. I'm quite drunk at the moment, it now being the early hours of St Stephen's/Boxing Day.
73. I never had a cultural identity till I left Ireland. Now it's started to develop and I feel like a kid with a new toy.
74. Because of this, I have begun to get sentimental at Irish folk music.
75. I'm sitting up far too late yet again. But I want to finish this before I go to bed.
76. I did classical violin for almost ten years. I never really got to be any good.
77. I daydream often about being able to sing and play the guitar. I have a lovely guitar I got as a present several years ago. Despite these facts, I can still only play five or six chords, very slowly.
78. I can be stunningly tactless.
79. I am a terrible liar. I find it practically impossible to lie with a straight face. But that's all right, it's not a skill I want to cultivate.
80. I once addressed the European Youth Parliament. My speech sucked.
81. I had all the major childhood diseases while on holidays (mumps in Puerto Rico, measles in Las Palmas, whooping cough in California) except for chickenpox (two blissful weeks in bed at home listening to Sunshine 101, a Dublin pirate station sadly now defunct).
82. I once decided to read the entire children's section of the local library in order. Unfortunately, I got stuck on the second book, Chester Aaron's "Better than Laughter", which I think was about two boys in a dump and which I found deeply boring.
83. I hate direct sunlight.
84. My mind has now gone completely blank.
85. I have not eaten the vast majority of vegetables since I was two. I can't make myself eat them, and believe me, I've tried.
86. Most men I fancy have long hair. (Though there are exceptions.)
87. My brain doesn't multitask very well. I focus hard on what's in front of me instead.
88. This is why I've never mastered the art of spodding in work.
89. I hate it when something obscure I like becomes fashionable. (Shallow, me?)
90. Y'know, davefish, Kevin Warwick the cybernetic scientist used me as his surrogate wife once. (Thereby hangs an actually not terribly interesting tale.)
91. I have an excellent memory for random facts and useless trivia.
92. But a rubbish one for everyday practicalities.
93. I tend to have bad even-numbered years and good odd-numbered ones.
94. At the moment I am obsessively playing the Boards of Canada, Sigur Ros and the Foo Fighters.
95. I have a personal tradition of always dancing to Fields of the Nephilim's "Moonchild" if I hear it in a club. I stick to it even though it began for a silly reason.
96. I take people at face value too often. I'm bad at intrigue and subtleties.
97. I am finishing this up in a netcafe near my house.
98. I really really miss having ADSL.
99. I can't think of anything at *all* to go here.
100. I've found everybody else's 100 things really interesting. People seemed to dig a bit deeper than for the usual surveys and come up with very odd things that wouldn't normally get mentioned. It's nice to be reminded how much weirdness and individuality and general coolness people are carrying around in their heads. :)

*edited, June 2005: rewrote, really. I wrote the first version of the book about fairies when I was eight. So the Eliot quote is actually true, I have spent twenty years trying to learn to use words. Still not published. :)