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Sunday, June 28, 2009

100 Things About Me

Wow, this took a long time to write. If you read it all, I will give you a cookie. Or maybe 2.

1. I’m a country girl. Always was, always will be.

2. I run the farm during the summer. My parents both work off the farm, so it’s been my baby for a long time. I have a shirt that says “My Barn, My Rules.” I live by that.

3. I can drive a tractor or combine better than a lot of males. This surprises people and makes me laugh.

4. I have more than 20 John Deere t-shirts. They all have different phrases, but they’re all John Deere. I also have jackets, sweatshirts, hats...I’m sure you can see where this is going.

5. My current truck is my lover. I bought it brand new, with all kinds of fun options, and I love it more than I ever should.

6. I’ve been in competition for years now. I enjoy jumping.

7. I can break a horse. I’ve done it many times. If you think it’s cruel, ride an unbroken one and let me know how that goes.

8. I’m actually allergic to horses. And dogs, cats, pollens and dust. I give allergies the middle finger every day. Constant exposure to environmental allergens makes it a lot easier to deal with.

9. My favourite colour has always been blue. There’s so many shades of it to love.

10. I’m an only child.

11. I like being an only child. When I was 5, I told my mom that she and my dad better not be having sex (yes, I got the birds and bees talk very early) because “I don’t want any babies in. this. house.” (This was following visiting a friend, who had a colic-y brother. Do you blame me?)

12. I’m a Daddy’s girl. We have ridiculously different interests and different personalities, but we get along famously. I can spend an entire day with him and enjoy every minute of it.

13. My mom and I are hot and cold. One minute, we’re getting along great, the next we’re screaming at each other. Its not because we don’t love each other. Its because we’re too similar in some way, polar opposite in others and both very stubborn. It makes for epic clash sometimes.

14. My parents’ 25th anniversary is this fall. I want to be them one day. Their marriage is rock solid.

15. I have a huge extended family. My mother has 13 siblings, and my father has 7. This means I have a lot of cousins, particularly since one aunt has 15 kids of her own. Yeah, that’s right. Fifteen.

16. I want to get married one day. My wedding is important to me.

17. I also want to have children, but two is my maximum. After that, I run out of hands and sanity.

18. I have never been shy. I don’t actually know how to play shy properly.

19. I can argue with anyone. About anything. I’ll even take a side that I don’t believe in and argue it, just to play devil’s advocate.

20. That led a lot of people to push me towards law as a career. I thought it was the right path, until I spent a day in a courthouse for school. I realized I could never live that life that day.

21. Instead, I’m becoming a teacher. I’ve taught intuitively since I was a kid. In grade 8, I taught kindergarten one afternoon a week, and helped out for the other 4 days. I’ve tutored just about any subject since elementary school. I’ve been a teacher’s assistant in university. Guess I should have seen it coming, huh?

22. I go back to my high school on every break from university, to say hi to my old teachers and I teach a week of English and history classes. (I really should have seen that teacher thing coming.)

23. I want to teach high school, preferably the senior years. I like little kids but I don’t have the patience of Job to handle 20 of them every day, all day. Props to the teachers that do.

24. I don’t think teenagers are even half as bad as the rep they’ve got. A lot of them are quite intelligent and insightful. Sure, every basket has its bad apples, but they’re the ones that need more care, not less.

25. I loved high school. I know it was considered hell for a lot of people, but I loved every second of it. I had my finger in everything, from sports to committees to clubs to the spring musical.

26. I was also a troublemaker. Nothing severe like drinking or drugs, but I’d bend the rules until they broke and then use a dazzling smile, and whatever extracurricular I was involved with at the time to get out of it. Worked like a charm, every time.

27. If there was an age I could be forever (out of the ones I’ve lived), it’d be 17.

28. I would never do the years from 18-21 over again if you paid me.

29. This is because university has been my personal hell. I felt lonely, alone, isolated, stupid, and unwanted more times than I could count. I had numerous people tell me they thought I was depressed.

30. I never thought it was depression. I think it was hate of circumstances, because now that I’m out of them, I’m back to feeling like me again.

31. I’ve considered writing a book, specifically aimed at people who feel like they don’t fit into the university life. I’ve started and deleted it more times than I’d care to admit.

32. I’m a fiercely loyal friend. You cross my friends, you cross me. This is probably because my best friends have been my friends since we were in diapers. We’re as close to siblings as friends will ever get.

33. When I take internet quizzes about what percentage male and female my brain is, I’m always 80% male or more. This is because I love sports, cars, trucks, tractors, and many very masculine things.

34. I still look like a girl though. I’m not tomboy in the traditional sense. I have long, curly dark brown hair; I wear makeup and dress like a girl.

35. I hate pink. I don’t wear pink, I don’t buy pink anything. If there’s pink on something, you wrecked it. I really hate it.

36. As a rule, I like guys better than girls. It’s half because of the tomboy thing and half because, seriously, girls can be bitches.

37. I have no patience for catty gossip behind people’s backs. Have the nerve to say something to their face if you’ve got a problem with them.

38. I can play quite a few instruments. Piano, flute, clarinet, saxophone, guitar and drums. Most of them, I can play by ear by now.

39. I’ve sung and played piano at a few weddings, even though most of the time, wedding music makes me gag. It’s always so cliché.

40. Hockey is my all time favourite sport. If I’m watching it, you best not try to talk to me. I will either ignore you, swat at you, or both.

41. Every sport is better live than on TV. I dare you to tell me different.

42. I’ve spent the last two years working for the NHL during hockey season. I love the job, and the perks I get out of it.

43. My favourite player is Sidney Crosby. When people start ranting about how he hasn’t lived up to expectations, it sends me into a gigantic rant about how’s only TWENTY ONE, man. He’s got time.

44. I travel as much as I can. The long list of places I’ve been to includes: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, England, Switzerland, Holland, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Scotland, as well as standard tourist destinations like Mexico, the Bahamas, the Dominican, and a few states (NY, Michigan, Hawaii, California and Florida), as well as British Columbia, Alberta, New Brunswick, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Whew. I think that’s everything.

45. I love rollercoasters. I could ride them over and over again. Amusement parks are amazing.

46. I’ve bungee jumped multiple times. I don’t scream when I go over the edge like most people do. I laugh.

47. I love to scuba dive. I have a license for it so I can do “real” dives instead of the 20 feet underwater tourist junk. It’s fun and it’s a spectacular view you won’t ever get from a picture.

48. I’m a member of a skydiving club. I started when I was 16, with tandem jumps (where you’re strapped to another person and they control the jump and the chute). Now I jump alone and tandem for other people.

49. I may be a wee bit of an adrenaline junkie. Maybe just a little.

50. I’m not crafty. I can’t knit, crochet, or do anything like that. I can paint, but I don’t enjoy it, so I never do it.

51. I do not, will not, and will never scrapbook. I don’t like kitchy things like that. I’d rather have a nice photo book done by a professional printer, which is what I get done with all my trip pictures.

52. I think Photoshop is the worst thing that ever happened to photography. Other than red eye touch up, or small thing like that, I refuse to edit pictures. I prefer pictures that look amazing straight from the camera. At least they’re real.

53. I love black and white pictures. They’re classic and timeless.

54. My aunt decided to gift me her Canon Rebel XTI when she realized she was never going to learn how to use it. The day after that, I took her grandson’s 2 year pictures. They’re already printed, framed and hung on the walls at both grandmas’ places, as well as my cousin’s.

55. I did a newborn shoot at a (different) cousin’s house with her daughter (born last week) and she likes the picture I took better than the professional ones she’s had done.

56. Photos are always best when they’re taken with love.

57. Babies always wrap me around their pinkies. Give me a baby, a blanket and a rocking chair and I’m happy for hours. My friend has a picture of me laying in a hammock with her son on my chest and my arms around him and both of us are asleep. I love it.

58. Speaking of hammocks, I love them. They’re amazingly comfortable, and great to read in.

59. I cannot pick a favourite book, but some of my favourites are classic literature like Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights. I can read them over and over and never be bored.

60. That said, I also enjoy good courtroom drama novels, by authors like John Grisham or Jonathan Kellerman.

61. I enjoyed Twilight. Yes, I know its crap. I don’t pretend its not. But sometimes crap literature can still be an enjoyable read. So suck it.

62. I also own complete anthologies of Shakespeare. He’s my favourite playwright. I’ve been to the Stratford Festival so many times to see his plays, and I would go over and over again.

63. The best play I’ve ever seen on stage was a Stratford production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They used Cirque du Soleil acrobats for the fairies, and they came down from the lighting rigging on trapezes and bungees. It was nothing short of magical.

64. The best musical I’ve ever seen was, hands down, the Lion King. It was shockingly awesome, mostly because they went for the awe factor with a lot of the set and costumes.

65. I’m not a big fan of concerts. It may be that I’m a classically trained music snob but when someone is singing badly, warbling off key, despite how perfect their CD sounds, it annoys me. It’s also annoying when the person next to me sings so loudly that hearing the person on stage is hard.

66. I hate being touched by strangers. I don’t mind talking to them at all, but if they touch me intentionally, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My friends, however, invade my personal space on a regular basis and it doesn’t bother me.

67. I like cooking and baking, but hate cleaning up after myself.

68. Heck, I hate cleaning, period. It’s so repetitive. You’ll get all the cleaning done, and the laundry done, just to have to do it again next week. Drives me nuts. Someone needs to invent self cleaning houses and clothing.

69. On the flipside, I’m unhappy if things are messy.

70. I’ve been in two car accidents. One was a minor (3 car domino effect) fender bender that was nothing but an “Oops, gotta get that bumper straightened out.”

71. The other one was a bad roll over that totalled my vehicle. The truck flipped the back right corner over the front left twice, and then rolled over sideways three times, before finally landing on the wheels. We found pieces of the engine more than 50 feet from where it finally stopped.

72. I walked away from that with nothing more than one bruise on my knee, from where it bumped the steering wheel while the vehicle was upside down.

73. The police made me go to the hospital anyway, thinking I may have internal injuries. I didn’t. The doctors and nurses didn’t believe that I was the person that came from the bad accident. They prescribed me Tylenol 3 and offered to give me a Demerol shot because they said I’d be in major pain the next day.

74. I said no to all of it. I went home, had a hot bath, went to bed, and was on the tractor the next morning, thank you very much.

75. My friends and family tease me that I live hard. They’re probably right. I do dangerous things, have been all over the world, am rough on my body and push everything to the limit. I’d rather live like that now than regret not doing it when I’m old.

76. Because of this, i have a ridiculous amount of scars. I refuse to count them, because we’ll be here all day. I have one across the back of one hand from the top of a fence, one in my eyebrow from a baseball splitting my face open, LOTS from hockey, and all kinds from random cuts and splits from the farm. Life happens.

77. I have an unnaturally high pain tolerance. When I admit I’m in pain, its the type of pain where someone else would be in the fetal position, crying.

78. My favourite TV, currently, is House. I love that sadistic bastard. Its the one show I get mad about missing.

79. I also enjoy every single spin off of CSI. It’s so incorrect as far as how criminal investigations go, but even as someone who takes criminology classes, I don’t care. I don’t follow it religiously though.

80. I have never smoked anything, legal or illegal. I’ve never done any illegal drugs. I don’t see the allure. I just don’t.

81. I punched a guy in a bar once. He grabbed my ass and I told him to go away. He came back a few minutes later and went in for a boob grab. I told him that if he tried it once more, I would punch him square in the nose. He laughed and said I didn’t have the nerve. A few minutes later, he snuck up behind me, reached under my arms and grabbed from both sides. I whirled around and clocked in in the nose so hard that i broke it and knocked him to the floor.

82. Incidents like these are the reason i hate bars. I’d much rather have a few beers with friends at home.

83. I also hate public drunkenness. Heck, drunkenness of any type. Getting to the feel good point? Fine, go for it. Getting to the point of making a public ass of yourself or puking? You’re an idiot.

84. Speaking of puke, its the one thing I cannot handle. Seeing, smelling or hearing someone puke makes me come dangerously close to puking myself.

85. Blood, guts or broken bones, however? I don’t bat any eyelash. I have a ridiculous amount of first aid training. I’ve popped shoulders back into place, patched up big cuts, dealt with gushing blood, taped up broken bones until they can be set. No problem.

86. I have CPR training, and I’ve had to use it. I pulled a 3 year old girl, whose parents were nowhere to be found, out of the lake when I was 16, and had to perform CPR because she wasn’t breathing. Her mother didn’t show up until the ambulance was there, loading the little girl into it. That still makes me angry. The paramedics, however, told me that I saved the child’s life by doing CPR until they got there, because she still had a strong pulse when they arrived.

87. I hope I never have to give CPR ever again but gosh, was I ever glad I knew how.

88. I can be a pretty picky eater. I’m not a fan of very many vegetables at all. Its a very limited list.

89. I will not eat cooked carrots, if I have a choice. Raw, I eat for a snack. Cooked, disgusting. Ditto to peas.

90. On the flipside, mushrooms are gross raw, but if they’re fried, I’ll eat a ton. I don’t make sense. I know it.

91. I don’t like pieces of tomato, but ketchup and spaghetti sauce are quite welcome. Don’t ask. I don’t know.

92. Sweet corn season makes me unnaturally happy. I plant a few rows at my house every year, and go out, pick the corn, husk it, cook it and eat it. You won’t get it any fresher than that.

93. I love any type of seafood. People that are grossed out by it are missing out.

94. I am completely in love with Chinese dim sum. I could eat it every day for a week and still ask for more.

95. I also enjoy sushi. I tried it for the first time in university and was rather impressed.

96. I love getting mail, so I write letters. Its been a constant thing between my friends and I while we were away at university. Its nice getting mail that's not a bill, even if we talked to each other basically every day.

97. My cell phone (BlackBerry) is constantly with me. I’m lost without it. I have unlimited long distance to 10 numbers in my plan. They messed up one friend’s number and charged me for her calls one month. I had over 90 dollars in long distance to her alone. (It got removed when I called, don’t worry). Thats more than my bill is per month, and keep in mind I’ve got 9 other people on that list, plus texting, other long distance calls and regular calls. My cell company isn’t making money off me.

98. I always have polish on my toenails. Even in the dead of winter. However, I never do my fingernails. I chip it off way too fast and it looks like hell.

99. I love getting massages but I’m not a fan of pedicures. For some reason, I really don’t like people touching my feet.

100. The one cause I will campaign for is cancer. I’ve lost all 4 grandparents to it, as well as two friends, one at 19 and one at 20. I miss them every day, and hope one day, no one will have to go through that.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

You've lived alot of life in a short amount of time. Not many people can say that. Very, very nice blog!

1surlygurl (aka Suzanne)

bethany actually said...

Whew, it sounds like you are probably hard to keep up with! :-) I always have nail polish on my toes but never my fingers for the same reason.

Anonymous said...

Great list of things...

I'm so jealous of all the places you've visited. I'm also totally wowed by the fact that your only only child, yet you have twenty aunts and uncles. Wow. And fifteen kids? That makes my girly parts hurt.

Thanks for posting this.

The Grown Up Teenager said...

@ suzanne - Yeah, I guess the people who say I live hard are right, eh? That's alright. I like it like that.

@bethany actually - I do my best to be hard to keep up with. And I hate chipped polish too. :)

@marla - Yeah, I've done a lot of travelling. I may actually do a separate blog entry to explain some of it. And yes, my aunt and uncle collection is huge. Every one of them is married save one uncle, so if you count marriages, I've got 39. And 15 kids makes my girly bits ache too. (One set of twins, so 14 pregnancies)