Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 9:59pm
"25 Things You May Know About Me...or Don't Game"
Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you."
1. when i was in junior high and high school i told everyone that i taught myself how to read and write. i honestly believed this until i came across drawings and cards that i'd written as a child and discovered they were a lot of wavy lines and hieroglyphics. and my own name written over and over in different ways with the letters re-arranged.
2. once i did learn how to write i used to make books for my parents. i had a whole series of feelings books. "sad" and "happy" and "poor" and "angry" are still among my most popular. they were cardboard and scrap paper stapled together. my dad saved them for a long time.
3. this series spawned a counter-series among the other siblings: rival stories about being "sad" and "happy" produced cheaply, and to a much wider fanbase.
4. when i was 13, my family's house caught on fire and burned most of my early (dickenson-esque) writing away. this prompted a year of living extravagantly in hotels (with pools!) and fun rental houses. i was surprised to learn as an adult that this was not as fun and carefree a time for my parents as it was for us kids.
5. my family still celebrates "fire day" every year on May 27th and taunts rachael for burning our house down and dave for ignoring the obvious smoke pouring up from the basement.
6. i have six brothers and three sisters. i'm the fourth. i was born on christmas day. it is the coldest day on record in chicago and no one's car would start. the stocking my parents brought me home in was burned in the fire. i am still sad about that. but happy that i was born into a family where "pictionary" is a full contact sport.
7. when i was younger my older siblings convinced me i was adopted because no one can be born on the same day as jesus. they also used to taunt me to tears by adding "and jesus" everytime someone said happy birthday to me.
8. i taught myself how to ride a bike on my friend tedo's two-wheeler. he was my first boyfriend and we used to practice kissing under my front porch and in the boat in his backyard.
9. tedo used to try and bribe me to let him look up my dress. i kept saying no until he offered fruit-rollups. i said okay and started wearing shorts under my skirts.
10. he still gave me the fruit rollups.
11. which taught me that boys are easy to trick and started my penchant for cute undergarments that my mother refuses to let me live down. (mainly because i encourage it by buying her inflatable bras and other ridiculous accutrements to make her laugh)
12. my first best friend was arliss. she lived across the street from me. we used to con the snooty rich girls who lived on the corner into letting us play with their american girl dolls, which were much coooler then because no one had heard of them and they only available by catalog from a small company in wisconsin.
13. i was homeschooled from 3rd grade til 8th grade. i didn't really enjoy it, but enjoyed it much less when my parents sent me to an opus dei school in the suburbs for 8th and 9th grade. i got a lot of things confiscated and seemed to be in trouble a lot for doing things like wearing non-uniform hair apparel and rolling my skirt up. i also used to sign up for confession a lot to get out of class in the afternoon.
14. i still miss fr. peter though. he was awesome. but it was no surprise that i started tenth grade at a new school in the city. my mother blames the fact that i am a lapsed catholic on the fact that i went to public school. i blame it on the fact that i spent two years at an opus dei school.
15. i met my husband in a lesbian karaoke bar in lincoln square. we'd seen each other around the neighborhood and he tried to get me to "spare a second for Save the Children" a number of times. he used to go into the bar because they had free hot wings on friday nights. i went there because i was a certified man-hater. he sent a drink over to me and my sister after my startling rendition of "love is a battlefield." i told him i was a lesbian and he had no chance of getting me to go out with him.
16. i went on an archeology dig in Sal Salvador in the bahamas for my study abroad junior year. i signed up because it was a trip to the bahamas in the middle of a chicago winter and learned more than i ever imagined. it was unbelievable.
17. i moved out of my parents house when i was 18.
18. i've worked pretty much every job you can imagine from retail in a toystore (where i met my current bff, sara and absolute bestie, marge) to cater-waiter to bartender to nanny to nights in a funeral home. now that i am facebook friends with one of my former funeral home bosses, i find it cathartic to finally reveal that i invited people over to watch movies on the TVs in the wake parlors and that a few times i had rowdy get-togethers in the rec room on nights when there was no wake scheduled. i was pretty much the cool party person everyone knew because of this. and possibly because the street value of embalming fluid is through the roof because people use it to make "wikky sticks." which i didn't find out until after i had already quit. i hope no one stole any on my watch.
19. sometimes i would cry when i was cleaning up after really sad wakes.
20. one time my manager caught me juking it to lil Kim in a slip (so that i wouldn't get my fancy work dress dirty) while cleaning up after a night of three wakes at the same time. i was playing it over the loudspeaker and he made a joke about it being loud enough to wake the dead. which i was surprised about because i thought for sure he would fire me for playing gangsta rap in front of three old dead bodies.
21. i eventually quit after i had to work a wake for a dead baby and because i was incapable of getting the chairs in the wake parlours straight enough. they even got me a laser leveler to mark the rows with and still they were never straight enough.
22. i have no respect for people who live with their parents after the age of 21. zero. get a job, get a life, grow up.
23. i have very high standards for my friends and cannot tolerate disloyalty. because of this i have had basically the same friends my entire life and have also lost touch with a lot of people on purpose. sometimes i wish i was a little more tolerant and had more casual aquaintances, but i have a very low bullshit threshold.
24. i kind of have a love/hate relationship with facebook because while i'm glad to be in touch with my pre-adolescent friends, i'm sort of reminded why we lost touch in the first place. people grow up and they grow apart for various reasons. the ol "a reason, a season, or a lifetime" adage has been stitched on waaaaay too many pillows for me to repeat it now. also, i think one of the main driving forces behind people who get famous is that they want to beat out everyone they knew in highschool, so being in touch with all the people you knew in high school and seeing that they are in the same no-man's land that you are kind of undermines this process. also i am sick of seeing "YOU!? seriously? YOU got MARRIED?!? to who?"
25. Truman Capote once wrote of a charecter that she had "the habit of offering up useless personal information tirelessly so one would not pry into deeper, more useful aspects of her charecter." i identify with that statement a great deal, and have also wasted almost an hour writing this and am now extremely hungry.
COMMENTS:
Troy: *takes notes*
The sharing is much appreciated!
January 13, 2009 at 3:57pm .
Tranette: Once again Grace, I fucking love you and not just because you were jukin' to Lil Kim, if that's what you're thinking...
January 14, 2009 at 12:26am
Orion: Great, now everyone knows I'm a lesbian.
January 14, 2009 at 7:32pm.
Tranette: Yeah, the cat's outta the bag now...
January 14, 2009 at 8:06pm
Lily: That Jebus! My siblings also said that I was adopted. I feel your pain girl! I miss you too!
It's too bad your old masterpieces were burned but I'm sure you'll be one of the prolific writers one day. I can just see all those rich housewives having book clubs over your books.
February 1, 2009 at 8:38am
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