100 Things About Me

I suppose this is the proper way to start my blog....

1. I live in Manhattan.
2. I am an actuary.
3. I am married (my husband being V.)
4. I have one child, a son born 7/11/04 (we call him The Wibbles).
5. I went to Stuyvesant High School.
6. My favorite color is vermilion.
7. My favorite book is Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alastair Gray.
8. My favorite food is lobster. But if I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be Sugar Smacks. I suppose that would end up being a pretty short life. But I wouldn't care.
9. I don't have a favorite movie.
10. I was raised as an atheist. At one point I became an Orthodox Jew, and stayed that way for 7 years. Now I'm an atheist again. Don't ask.
11. My husband is twelve years younger than I am.
12. I can't say the word "booger" without laughing.
13. The person I most wish I could meet is Douglas Hofstadter.
14. I am fluent in French. My Spanish is pretty good, too, and I also speak a bit of Japanese.
15. I double-majored in math and computer science.
16. I work in a tiny cubicle.
17. I like to paint, but I don't paint any more because I have a small apartment and I don't want The Wibbles breathing in the fumes.
18. Even though I can paint pretty well, I can't draw for shit.
19. It bothers me that I suck at chess.
20. It bothers me that my parents didn't give me a middle name.
21. I have a little brother.
22. He is my parents' favorite. This doesn't bother me as much now as it used to.
23. It bothers me that my son can't talk yet. I'm not worried (he's only 13 months), but it would be nice if he could let me know what he wanted without shrieking.
24. I miss my son terribly when I'm at work. I even miss the shrieking.
25. I haven't thrown up in over ten years. Not even while I was pregnant. This is in great contrast to V., who throws up at least twice a week for no apparent reason.
26. I talk in my sleep. Sometimes I laugh in my sleep and it wakes me up. The Wibbles does this too.
27. One of my coworkers recently got me hooked on SuDoKu.
28. Corin See recently got me hooked on the Set puzzle.
29. I'm running out of ideas here.
30. I go by my maiden name at work.
31. I have low cholesterol. Bet you didn't know that could be a problem.
32. I don't drink caffeine. This has nothing to do with the fact that I have low cholesterol. It's just a personal choice.
33. I lied about not having a favorite movie. My favorite movie is The Matrix. I'm just embarassed to admit it. So there.
34. I can't believe I'm only a third of the way through this.
35. I am 5'2".
36. My husband finds short women more attractive than tall women. I'm pretty sure he's not just saying that. He's the only guy I've ever met who had that preference without being short himself. His reasoning is that tall is masculine and short is feminine. Whatever.
37. I plan to run the New York City Marathon in 2007. If I can get in by lottery, I'll run in 2006. I just don't have time to run in 9 qualifying races this year to guarantee a 2006 entry. But I will guarantee myself a 2007 entry if I can't enter in 2006.
38. It will be my first marathon. The longest I've ever run so far is 12 miles.
39. I have green eyes.
40. I burn first, then tan.
41. I have never been on a cruise.
42. Yes, I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
43. I am really running out of ideas now. I've decided to stop at 50.
44. I think James Lipton is a pretentious fart.
45. I'm obsessed with lipstick. I must have 30 tubes. I never leave the house without it. I have a tube at my desk and I reapply every 15 minutes. Other than lipstick I don't wear much makeup.
46. My pet peeve is people who say/write "try and" instead of "try to."
47. I used to think I had straight hair. Then, sometime around the late 90s or early 00s (I have no concept of time... more on this below), female celebrities started straightening their hair pancake straight. Now I think I have wavy hair.
48. I have no concept of time. I have "today," "recently" (a week ago or less), "somewhat recently" (within the last three years), "a while ago," and "when I was a kid." I also can never guess how long something I need to do will take me to do it. This does not go over very well at work. I have learned to answer "about a week" to everything. If their eyes boggle, I try "about a month."
49. I have a better memory for names than I do for faces. I am the only person I know like this.
50. All my childhood memories are of times that I learned something that surprised me. My earliest memory is from nursery school. We used to get a snack of two Oreos and a Dixie cup of milk. I would alternate bites of Oreo with sips of milk. I would always run out of milk before I finished my Oreos, and one day I complained about this to my father. He said, "Well, you don't have to alternate!" I'm not as stupid as this story makes me sound.