OLD MEMES NEVER DIE: They Rise in the Night Like Vampires
I found an unfinished draft of the 100 things meme and decided to dust it off and finish it.

1. My first paid job was as a Baptist missionary.
   
2. I started baking bread when I was 10 years old. (No, my mother didn’t teach me.)
   
3. My chief terror in life is not having something to read, so I haven’t gone anywhere without a book since I was five years old.
   
4. I have an abnormally acute sense of smell, which gives me a great deal of pleasure.
   
5. I love thunderstorms and high winds and seeing the stars at night.
   
6. It’s a lot easier for me to give than to receive.
   
7. Three of my four major romantic relationships have been with Californians — specifically people who had a strong connection to both the LA area and Santa Clara. This would be less impressive if I hadn’t started all those relationships in Pennsylvania. (The fourth relationship was with my husband. He’s from Long Island, and we met in Connecticut.)
   
8. Guitars, keyboards, and French horns. Yes.
   
9. I have specific landscapes I’ve dreamed about for decades.
   
10. My own mind is my favorite toy.
    
11. My lover’s body is a very close second.
    
12. I have an extraordinary memory, but I still forget what I had for lunch.
    
13. I love ghost stories.
    
14. I’m a packrat.
    
15. My epitaph, "Look at the light on the leaves," is from the conclusion of a vampire story I wrote.
    
16. When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be Granny Clampett.
    
17. My full name uses only seven letters of the alphabet.
    
18. The Peninsula has all the kinds of landscape I love best: mountains, hills, forests, and rocky ocean beaches.
    
19. My sisters and I used to play hide and seek in graveyards.
    
20. The way I eat grapefruit is transcendently messy.
    
21. If you must know, I rip them apart with my bare hands.
    
22. My eyes are two-tone: green in the center, deep blue/grey outside.
    
23. I’m either easy or impossible.
    
24. I lost on Jeopardy — came in second by a dollar.
    
25. I’ve had five books published, plus chapbooks, columns, stories, but only one story had my legal name on it.
    
26. When I first came to San Francisco, I went to Muir Woods practically from the airport. It’s what I wanted most to see.
    
27. I still haven’t seen a lot of the tourist stuff, though I’d like to.
    
28. My home town in Pennsylvania has 35 people in it. (Well, that’s downtown. There are a couple of hundred in the suburbs.)
    
29. I would rather be cold than hot.
    
30. Stories saved my life. They’re still sacred to me.
    
31. I’m not a gamer or a member of SF fandom (though I read a lot of SF), but most of my nearest and dearest are.
    
32. My dream house would be more like a dream village: a central big house with a vast kitchen, a library, and a gathering space, plus a barn with dungeons, game rooms, and a theater. Scattered around it would be small individual cabins where my friends and family and I would live. That combines privacy and togetherness. Ideally, it should also be a self-sufficient working farm with independent, environmentally healthy power sources and lots of open countryside.
    
33. I’ve gone through my life adopting brothers, since I don’t have any of my own.
    
34. Kitchen gadgets = good.
    
35. When I was very small, my older sister nicknamed me Brave Eyes because I could see in the dark and wasn’t scared of anything.
    
36. Sometimes I add a completed chore to my list just so I can cross it off.
    
37. I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was 28. I got the third piercing in 1998.
    
38. For most of my life, my family has had five living generations.
    
39. I’ve seen a ghost.
    
40. People who don’t know me well think I let it all hang out.
    
41. Until I was almost 30, all my cats were black.
    
42. I’ve read Tarot cards for a living.
    
43. I like hats — especially baseball caps and broad-brimmed hats.
    
44. In college, I played the Bad Angel in Marlowe’s Faustus and Thoreau’s mother in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.
    
45. I’m a better reader than actor, though.
    
46. I am very close to my family, which is impressive given our differences of lifestyle and faith.
    
47. I have a number of kinks, including a fetish for knives.
    
48. Also overalls. Mmmm, overalls. Especially men’s overalls, which have a conveniently situated fly.
    
49. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 24. I celebrate January 4 as Independence Day, because that’s when I got my license.
    
50. Yes, I have an amazing memory for dates. Just think of me as your friendly local idiot savant.
    
51. I still love Philadelphia.
    
52. I don’t do anything in cyber that I wouldn’t do in 3D.
    
53. I’m interested in Oulipian constraints and ways to randomize stories.
    
54. I can be tactful talking to other people, but I would much rather you were blunt with me.
    
55. I’m sexually attracted by people on the edges of the gender spectrum: lovely femmy guys and burly bearded men, butch dykes and curvaceous women.
    
56. I was bald for my first seven months, and then so thin-haired until I was 4 that my mother prayed that my hair would get thicker. It did.
    
57. I like playing with pain, power, gender.
    
58. I’ve always been a writer.
    
59. Fall is my favorite season, though I also love the chill and wind of March.
    
60. I don’t drink much, but when I do it’s usually straight bourbon, because I know exactly how it affects me.
    
61. I’ve never played Myst or Riven. I have played Adventure, though.
    
62. I remember JFK’s assassination.
    
63. I learned to do spontaneous song parodies from my mother. (Gramina says this is filking, but I doubt it.)
    
64. I have little respect for authority per se. Oh, all right. None.
    
65. However, I do respect individuals.
    
66. I’m a classic INFP.
    
67. I type 55 wpm without errors — but it’s not touch typing.
    
68. I don’t stop caring about people once I love them.
    
69. When I’m sick, I’m like a wounded bear. I crawl off to my cave and deal with it alone.
    
70. I may start writing poetry again.
    
71. Coloring books and crayons (plus colored pencils) are among my favorite toys.
    
72. You may not want to know what the others are.
    
73. I am a pen and stationery freak.
    
74. When I have enough solitude, I can be genuinely connected with others. If I’m not getting enough time alone, though, my time with other people is unsatisfying.
    
75. I have more cross-stitch fabrics, patterns, and floss than I can use in the next ten years. (Yes. I’m going to clear some of it out.)
    
76. My favorite color has always been purple, but I love all the deep, rich colors: greens (moss, forest, hunter), blues from smoke to midnight, rust, slate, gold.
    
77. My besetting sins are procrastination and self-doubt.
    
78. I don’t believe in attempting suicide.
    
79. None of my relatives came to the US through Ellis Island.
    
80. I’m a sucker for a pretty movie.
    
81. I love lilacs, yellow roses (actually any of the old-fashioned scented roses), springtime crocuses, begonias, and violets.
    
82. My socks must match either my shirt or my jeans.
    
83. I scored in the autistic range on that systematizing/empathic test, but I scored even higher on the empathic bit. Thus I apparently have a bisexual brain, which goes nicely with the bisexual crotch.
    
84. I’m polymorphously perverse — I get sexual pleasure from all over my body, and I can come from having my toes sucked.
    
85. I’m a perfectionist, but not in ways that drive other people crazy (usually) — in ways that drive me crazy.
    
86. I sing when I’m doing dishes or cooking.
    
87. I love to drive fast on empty roads.
    
88. I miss the grocery stores from back east: the A&P with its own line of herbal teas, the Acme, and the playground of Wegman’s, which has wonderful weigh-your-own produce stations. Punch in the code number and you get a stick-on scannable label. Look, dinner and entertainment!
    
89. Bugs Bunny is my favorite cartoon character.
    
90. I’ve never cared for Mickey Mouse et al., but I do love Fantasia.
    
91. Country fairs are one of my favorite pleasures — one of the few places where I don’t mind crowds.
    
92. Ordinarily I do mind crowds. I’m much more comfortable being with a few people I know.
    
93. Hell, I’m more comfortable giving a talk to a large audience than going to a party where almost everyone is a stranger.
    
94. When I was a kid I had a crush on Mike Nesmith of the Monkees.
    
95. I am not sure I can ever leave the Bay Area.
    
96. There’s not a year in my life I would go back to if I could. My life is better and better as I grow older.
    
97. I’m a devout, almost orthodox Christian, but I also believe in the Goddess as an essential element of the Godhead, and I celebrate the pagan festivals.
    
98. A minister friend of mine once told me he thought my mission in life was to show people that it was possible to be happy even after a rough childhood.
    
99. If I had to describe myself in one word: passionate.
    
100. The world is beautiful beyond words.
     

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