Wordsmoker

1. My favorite song of all time is “Ceremony” by New Order. I also really love Radiohead’s cover version.

2. Like many, many other women, I think Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy is the dreamiest.

3. I am 34 years old and, as of yet, feel no biological imperative to bear children. I would love to have a family someday, but I don’t feel like I’ll be an incomplete woman if I don’t give birth. That said, I understand women who do. I believe that everyone should create the family they want in the way that feels right for them. And it is in part because of this lack of biological imperative that, although I am a woman who has sex with men, I identify as queer.

4. I worship Mary J. Blige in a manner that some might find inappropriate. I would go gay for her. And I don’t care what those AT&T commercials tell me, I refuse to believe that she doesn’t use an iPhone.

5. I’m a literature professor (among other professions, currently), so it’s hard for me to name a favorite book. I can say that I read and liked Ulysses, I am in thrall to The Waves, and I cried when I finished Middlemarch because I wasn’t ready to go home yet.

6. I have never lost anyone close to me. Even my grandparents are still alive. Therefore, I am pretty certain that the way I conceive of death is very immature, because, as I grow older, I understand more and more that I really have no idea what grieving means. This is both a luxury that I wish others had the good fortune to share and a fault that I don’t necessarily want to rectify. Also, my parents are still married.

7. People regularly comment on my eyebrows. When you meet me, my eyebrows are the first things you will notice about me. A random stranger approached me recently in a crowd, grabbed me by the arm, stated “OMIGOD YOU HAVE PERFECT EYEBROWS” and then walked away. Humility be damned, they are pretty perfect.

8. My favorite place in the world is Paris. I also like a lot of places that other people don’t like: Los Angeles and Miami come to mind immediately. I have never been to Las Vegas, but I yearn to go.

9. Up until very recently, I was never really into The Smiths and that didn’t really make much sense but for some reason I just really didn’t want to stare into that particular abyss.

Well, now I know. There would come a time, which has since come to pass, when I would really really need “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” and when that time came, I would need for it to not already be a cliche in my mind but rather to be fresh and clean and available for whatever bit of meaning my demented little heart wanted to attach to it. Oddly, this moment is not nearly as pathos-laden as surely befits Steven Patrick Morrissey, but I’m trying to make the best of it. But I am pretty sure that it was “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” that did it. It was early Sunday morning, September 5th 2009, approximately 12:44 am EST, somewhere between the Kennebunk rest stop and Portland on I95. BAM! I love The Smiths!

10. I have always been of “sturdy” build, but until my early 30s, I was built like a boy. Then, I gained a lot of weight when I was in graduate school. When I lost it again, I had a whole new figure: more womanly, voluptuous, curvy, and, frankly, hotter. I am still getting used to it. I swim laps almost every day so that “curvy” doesn’t become “lumpy.”

11. I am a self-identified WASP but a large part of my extended family is Chaldean/ Iraqi-American. I lived in Detroit for many years and during that time, this was my family, so sometimes I still find myself thinking that I am Middle-Eastern, because they considered that if I was part of the family, well, I was.

12. I love beautiful clothes and shoes and jewelry and luggage and shampoo and beauty products. When I have money, I spend it on traveling and on these things, which, unless I am traveling, I unfortunately have no place to wear. My wardrobe looks mostly insane and ridiculous where I live. See below.

13. I have been single for one year after ending a five-year relationship. I live in Maine and here is a list of things we don’t have in Maine, which is not exhaustive (but it is exhausting!): Discount dry-cleaners, nail salons, cheap carwashes, available men, Indian food.

14. I was a privileged, wild adolescent and this lasted until I was about 25, when I decided to get my shit together and go back to college. I am now beginning my ninth and final year of higher education. And I am still not sure if it was worth it.

15. As a result of my Less Than Zero-esque youth, I stopped doing drugs when I was 25, and haven’t so much as toked a joint since. I did not “get sober,” I just got bored. I still drink socially – and sometimes anti-socially – and now that I am more mature, I’d consider giving certain drugs another try.

16. I’m not a huge fan of permanence in my residential surroundings. I don’t like to own furniture, and if required to furnish an apartment, I buy only the bare minimum and then give it all away when I move. I hang nothing on the walls and I don’t like curtains. Knick-knacks make my throat tighten. Right now I live in a furnished rental and I am perfectly comfortable here because none of this stuff is mine.

17. I love hotels. Ordering room service in a nice hotel and eating it in bed while watching television is my idea of erotica.

18. Before I went back to school, I worked in documentary and corporate video production and I am still partly convinced that this was the career I was meant for. I think I am better at it than I am at being an academic.

19. But really, really I want to be a Gentlewoman Explorer, old-school style.

20. I love Alice Munro: “I ought not to say that it was this which got me into difficulties, because the difficulties I got into were a faithful expression of my own incommodious nature – the same nature that caused my mother to look at me, on any occasion which traditionally calls for feelings of pride and maternal accomplishment (my departure for my first formal dance, I mean, or my hellbent preparations for a descent on college) with an expression of brooding and fascinated despair, as if she could not possibly expect, did not ask, that it should go with me as it did with other girls; the dreamed-of spoils of daughters – orchids, nice boys, diamond rings – would be borne home in due course by the daughters of her friends, but not by me; all she could do was hope for a lesser rather than a greater disaster – an elopement, say, with a boy who could never earn his living, rather than an abduction into the White Slave Trade.” I was, as a child, almost abducted into the White Slave trade in a restaurant in London.

Also, I should be working right now.

(Do you have 20 Things About Yourself you’d like to share with the rest of the Wordsmoker collective? WHY NOT? Oh, you’ve already done it? THAT’S A POOR EXCUSE AND YOU KNOW IT, WENCES, SHAME ON YOU YET AGAIN. If you haven’t done this thing and would like to, just send them into the usual address and Your Editor Who Is The Person Writing This Bit will judge them prior to posting them on your behalf. That’s how it works, so stop crying you big fucking baby and get with the program. NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 20!)