2. 20 facts about you & 3. A favorite quote

[janet_carter]

2. 20 facts about you

1. When I was a kid in the midwest, I wanted to live closer to both mountains and ocean - moved to New England, success! But I wish my midwestern relatives weren't so far away.
2. I have a million cousins and every one of them is super-nice. Most of them are tall - on one side of the family, I'm the shortest, and I'm almost 5'8". Weddings are wonderful but slightly overwhelming business!
3. I used to be pretty allergic to cats, but happily I outgrew it or desensitized myself or something. It's a good thing, because I'm not sure my friendship with Giddy would have gotten as far as it did, let alone dating, if I hadn't been able to sleep over without it turning into an itchy nightmare. (One of said cats just settled in on my laptop very firmly. I wasn't going to stop her, but then she hit a keyboard shortcut to log off the computer in 60 seconds, so now that moment is over. They are not lap cats, for the most part, but I keep hoping.)
4. The first CD I bought was Ace of Base, which apparently came out TWENTY YEARS AGO now.
5. The next four CDs I bought, from BMG Music Service, were Salt-N-Pepa, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, and Yanni, because 12-year-old me prided herself on being eclectic.
6. I always remembered to send back the slip so that they wouldn't send me the monthly selection, except one time I ended up with the Breeders by accident.
7. It took me years of practice to be able to listen to audiobooks without losing track of what was going on; for a while it was just "kids' books I had read already" and "pop nonfiction". But now I have a commute with very little traffic or distraction and am upping the difficulty level. I'm working on Wolf Hall currently, and am losing track of the plot now and then, but I think that would happen in print, too.
8. When I was a kid, my family would go on vacation in Michigan, and during the car trip (two days each way) we listened to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, and the BBC Lord of the Rings dramatization, both of which my parents must have taped off of NPR. I would totally make my kids listen to both of those too, plus Welcome to Night Vale.
9. I took Greek, Latin, and Akkadian in college, and figured I'd have time later if I ever wanted to be conversational in anything except English. I loved what I studied, but now I wish I'd been maybe a little less anti-practicality.
10. My favorite class in college was a group independent study project (meaning we designed it and were only loosely supervised by faculty) on children's literature. That class got me some of my best friends.
11. I went into library school thinking I wanted to be a children's or teen librarian. I took (and enjoyed) a bunch of the classes, but I figured out that I liked reading the books but didn't really want to work with kids. Now I'm a reference/technology/adult programs librarian who reads a lot of middle grade and YA books.
12. I did really well in school all the way through. Right now I have zero interest in ever doing more of it, especially anything that involves writing papers.
13. My parents met in law school, and my dad worked as a lawyer up until my senior year of college, but then they went into the used book business. They like it much better than lawyering overall, but have also been pretty stressed out by a lot of aspects of running a store.
14. I had never lost anyone close to me until I was 25, and then four family members died in four years - three of my grandparents and my Aunt Nancy.
15. I'm grateful to have had my grandparents for that long. My one surviving grandparent, my mother's mother, was the oldest of them to begin with; she's not in the best health any more, but she's one of the sweetest, most generous people I've ever known. Both Giddy and my brother's wife have her same way of naturally thinking the best of people.
16. I like shopping, but am probably a nightmare to go shopping with - I'll have something very specific in mind and hold out for months until I find it.
17. I like to sew my own clothes sometimes. I'm actually much less picky about them if I make them myself, because I'm just so pleased to have completed something from scratch.
18. I like the idea of doing other crafty things, but I end up hoarding the supplies because I don't want to use them up - I still have, like, henna tattoo kits that I got as birthday presents in the 90s, that I'm saving for the right occasion.
19. Also I have a pretty short attention span for paying attention to detail on crafts, or baking with finicky bits, etc. But I like trying things anyway.
20. I like talking about delicious food while eating other delicious foods, reminiscing about previous roadtrips while going on new ones, and talking about how great friends are with other friends who love them as much as I do.

3. A favorite quote

I hate picking favorites, but this is an awfully good one - I was looking around for wedding-appropriate Kurt Vonnegut readings, and didn't really expect to find anything, until this turned up, from A Man Without a Country. Giddy's sister read it during the ceremony, and then people went around repeating it, which was pleasing every time.

And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

SORRY FOR ALL THE SMUG MARRIEDNESS, YOU GUYS?