21. When I learn new things, I get really enthusiastic about them, and plunge in with gusto (which some might call an obsession). Things I've invested serious passion over the past five years: scrapbooking and lifebooking, blogging, yahoo groups relating to adoption, travel journalling, square-foot gardening, Norwegian, and Hebrew. And now, obviously, expandable posts. My new goal: to learn enough coding to play with the button I stole from Julie.
22. My own comment on that last post has got me thinking about my own version of an inadequacy shtick. I think one of the reasons I like doing these 10 by 10s rather than a full 100 things is that I find it easier to believe as I type that people would be interested in 10 things about me than 100. So 10 is doable, while 100 is not.
23. I find my version of an inadequacy shtick actually fairly appalling now that I'm a parent. When I think back, I realize that as a young child, I didn't really trust that people loved me. Yet if I ever were to tell my parents this, they would be completely, utterly confounded. They do love me. But somehow, I have never felt sure of it. And that lack of sureness has colored a lot of the rest of my life, and it has taken me a long time to come to terms with it. And I worry, sometimes, that CG is being similarly ill-served by me and I don't know it.
24. I can worry about a lot of things (Politica forbad me to watch ER anymore after a point when I would get tearfully anxious at 11:05 worrying about what if Obscure Disease or Situation Happened To Me/Us), but unless you are Politica you really wouldn't know that to talk to me.
25. Another thing you probably wouldn't know these days: I'm scared of dogs. My biggest parenting success: Curious Girl loves dogs. When my parents came to visit us and I saw how scared my mother was of our cats, I realized my own fears about dogs probably come from how my parents feel about animals (my mother is petrified of them, and my father--although he had dogs he loved growing up--just doesn't seem to pay much attention to them). I decided that if CG was going to be scared of dogs, it was going to be a fear she developed herself without any help from me. And so far, so good: she loves dogs (and cats, and animals generally). And I'm less scared of dogs, since when your 10 month old tiny daughter is lovingly interacting with dogs on the trail, it does get a little hard to maintain your own fear.
26. I am a little scared to go into our basement at night. I will do it if I have to, but mostly I try to avoid going into the basement if there's no other adult home. I'm not quite sure what that's about.
27. Something I am sure of: recycling is a good thing to do. I will recycle things even when it's incredibly inconvenient to do so. And I love cloth grocery bags (12 of which are currently hanging in an overcrowded hallway: I don't want to give them away because what if I need them again?) but I don't use them as much as I should because I haven't figured out a way to remember to put them back in the car after I empty the groceries.
28. Dairy products are my favorite groceries. I make hot cocoa almost every night for a pre-bedtime snack. Politica likes hers with marshmallows, but I like mine plain.
29. I never eat pie or cake a la mode; if I want ice cream, too, it has to be in a separate dish. And I do believe that vanilla is the finest of the flavors (because I am turning into my father, who always ordered vanilla ice cream, and who walks through the house turning off lights. Sometimes I turn off the light before Politica is out of a room.)
30. I love summer fruit: blueberries and peaches best of all. And I love tea and scones. In December we visited a college friend who had a scone recipe from another college friend. It was great to eat those scones again. I love recipes I can connect with people (Politica laughs harder at that last one than I do; they taste pretty good, no matter what your academic interests). I make notes in the margins of my cookbooks to help me remember what we thought of recipes and when and where we cooked them.
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4 comments:
I have actually injured myself trying to prepare items for recycling. If you were wondering, it really isn't worth it to try to open a large olive oil tin so that you can rinse it out for recycling.
Also afraid of dogs, but not so good about not transmitting my fears. I'm trying. I think I use my allergies as an excuse sometimes.
Tea and scones are my idea of the ideal afternoon. And blueberries are my absolute favorite food. We pick them off the mountain trails of Acadia every summer -- the highlight of my year.
I personally think I could read 200 things about you, but I guess I'll settle for 10 per day. :-)
I agree with Phantom. If you're going to do these ten at a time, then you should do them for twenty days.
I have a version of #23 too, except in my case it was actually true. And in a lot of ways I think I've dealt with it pretty well, but it is still a spectre that pops out of my psychological closet periodically and causes me grief. I know it's one of the major issues (really, probably the single most important issue) I have to deal with in my marriage.
I'm sorry you have to go through that. It sucks.
You are too kind...doing the ten at a time is actually nice as it is forcing me to post more frequently than I had been, which is good. I need to get my work writing on such a rhythm (I have formed a page-a-week club with one of my colleagues, which is a pretty measly goal I am not always good at keeping to).
#23 is linked to #19, Scrivener, in that I have turned to things, often, to represent relationships, and the things sometimes become a distraction from actually having relationships I trust. I'm getting a lot better now that I've seen the pattern. But this issue of not trusting relationships is just so very toxic. I've struggled at times for having felt so at sea when on the face of it my childhood was really fine--I know there are tons of people with far bigger problems than I ever endured. Yet the psychic harms of this lack of trust have been so huge.
My mother tells a story about when I was an infant, and she was home alone with me (my dad was at work) and I was in my crib. She saw a large bug crawling across the apartment floor and went nuts running to get to the bug before it got anywhere near me. I was an adult the first time I heard her tell this story and it nearly moved me to tears (except I never cry in front of my parents or sister, topic for another digression). It's the only story I have ever heard which illustrates my mother being willing to protect me. And I marvel at the story whenever I think of it, just because it's nice to know that at least one day, even if I can't remember it, my mother was fiercely protective.
But I wish I hadn't had to work so hard and long to realize that I'm worth loving fiercely, and worth protecting, and strong enough to protect myself.
I did the dog thing too: I was determined that my children not inherit my fear of dogs, so I pretended I wasn't scared, and they pretty much love dogs (they are scared at the beginning of new dogs, but then they get over it and romp in ways I never could have imagined). And a happy byproduct is that I am much less scared of dogs, and certainly never act scared of dogs--except when I'm running (alone)... Maybe I should pretend I'm not scared of death!
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