25 Things About Me

The members of my writing group have pledged to each write "from a prompt" and post it to our blogs by this Wednesday. This popular Facebook prompt was mentioned as an option, and since several people tagged me with it months ago and I loved reading theirs, I'll do mine now (here, because I don't get around to Facebooking much).

Technically I'm supposed to tag 25 people; for me, that's pretty much all of my Facebook and blogging friends. Tag! You're It.

Here are 25 things about me, randomly chosen for your reading pleasure:

1. To my very great surprise, I am not awful at decorating a house.

2. I adore houseplants. I put them everywhere.

3. Someday I want a bird feeder in my yard. Maybe a couple of bird houses, too. Birds fascinate me; I find them charming and cheery and delightful and hopeful.

4. Trees give me encouragement and comfort; I'm getting to know the ones in our neighborhood as friends. Looking up at blue sky through the leaves of a tall old tree is one of my greatest pleasures.

5. For a couple of years I tried very hard to be interesting and unafraid; I learned to climb rocks and got certified as a whitewater guide. I could not stop being afraid. Hopefully I have also not stopped being interesting.

6. Debate and conflict terrify me even more than whitewater rafting. Anything that resembles an impending serious argument can make me cry and shake till my whole body vibrates. I am not exaggerating.

7. When I was in sixth grade, I was the third tallest in my class. I was a year younger than my classmates.

8. I have a love-hate relationship with being tall. It's nice to be able to reach things on the top shelf, and it's nice when your girlfriends tell you that you look like a model. It feels weird to tower over half of all men, however, and with my enormous wingspan I am sometimes afraid to move for fear I'll hurt someone (or myself--I punched a low ceiling the other day). Also, I occasionally see cute little petite girls cower a bit when they get near me. I want to tell them that I'm harmless, but it seems awkward.

9. Until I was 28, no eligible--or even young--man ever told me I was beautiful. But I felt beautiful once: when my swing teacher used me as his dance partner while teaching swing dancing at Jade's wedding. Doug was a professional dancer and I knew just enough to follow. A male dancer can, by good leadership, make a girl feel all starry and graceful. I know.

10. Sometimes I do actually feel beautiful, and enjoy looking at myself in the mirror. It generally requires full makeup.

11. My husband will tell me I'm beautiful when I know perfectly well that no other person in the world would make it past the acne scars and the ponytail and the gangly arms poking out of an ancient t-shirt. It took me awhile, but I've come to the conclusion that he means it.

12. I honestly love being a girl and wouldn't trade it, despite the pain and mood swings and inconveniences, for the triumphs and tribulations and freedoms of manhood.

13. I am so grateful to have a husband--and so awed that he loves me in spite of my weaknesses--that I feel horrified when I say the slightest grouchy thing to him.

14. Writing forms such a thoroughly integral part of my life that imagining life without it is like imagining nonexistence.

15. The curse upon my writing is the tendency to overuse ellipses.

16. Part of what keeps me in the Christian faith is the tough moral teaching that everybody rails against. Call it what you will, but it seems necessary to the health of humanity.

17. Of all the things I've given away in my life, I regret my first doll, Mark, the most.

18. Most of the time I prefer silence to music.

19. I detest coarse language and the vulgar freedoms of modern conversation. When a girl says she "has to pee", or a couple says they're "trying for a baby", I recoil. Ew. Please. Do not make me picture that.

20. One of the highlights of my week is listening to John Derbyshire's Radio Derb on Friday nights with Lou. Seriously, if you're going to tell me the world is coming to an end, make it funny.

21. I live for sunshine, perhaps because I try to fill myself with light and warmth the way folks of the Goth persuasion fill themselves with severity and darkness.

22. I never thought I'd fall in love with a man who willingly wore slacks and ties and buzzed his hair. Now I find myself rather proud of my handsome, neatly-dressed husband.

23. Despite being shy, I am in danger of giving away too much information whenever I open my mouth.

24. The appeal of Christianity to my imagination is at least as strong, and possibly as important, as its appeal to my reason.

25. Many years ago--after reading George MacDonald's "There and Back", I think--I decided to hang onto childlike wonder all my life. Cynicism and depressive moments get the better of me at times, but for the most part I think I've kept it up so far.