1. I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.
2. I am not going to use the pronoun 'I' again in this list, unless I feel like it.
3. Subscribe to National Geographic, support PBS and a couple human rights groups.
4. Love my cat, love my fish, my Mary, every plant ever sprouted on this earth, and my family of course.
5. Am really a champion belcher. Really. Though it has brought me little fame and no fortune. Imagine.
6. Love to cook, hate to decide what to make.
7. Think food, if you're lucky enough to have it, should be something you enjoy, eating an act of celebratory worship.
8. Think diets often are thinly veiled ways to batter people's self esteem and then exploit that for profit.
9. Am a firm believer that a toasted cheese sandwich should be made with real butter in a skillet, should be crispy, crunch as it meets the teeth, suddenly yield and blossom.
10. Know grilled cheese sandwiches are not high culinary art, but like them. Especially with a huge sloppy pile of fried onions.
11. Am trying to appreciate tomato soup as Mary is so fond of it.
12. Am not overweight, surprisingly.
13. Believe in olive oil, especially extra virgin neat on great bread, but I also love butter.
14. Have to admit squeezing milk out of a cow, another species mind, and drinking it is bizzare.
15. Am not sure how to spell bizzare, but I use it anyway. This applies to many, many words.
16. Am very fond of sheep, loving wool and loving the silly gentle accidental nobility of sheep.
17. Love goats too, most of the same reason, but even better--goats have a sense of humor.
18. Think it's fairly nasty that male goats urinate into their mouths, soaking their beards all for romance.
19. Have just now realized that HTML is nothing but a word processing language. I know that's like realizing a cat has fur, but it just now struck me how it would almost be easier to produce documents that look exactly the way you want in a browser and print them, than in MSWord as you are building the walls and not just painting them.
20. Don't know dick god damn diddly about html, but am trying to learn.
21. No, I am not smoking marijuana.
22. Love words. Love the sound of them, the weight and the rhythym and the texture of words.
23. Love to watch a beautiful woman's lips move as she forms words. Love how a word will shape the mouth.
24. Love smile lines and laughing lines and crooked teeth.
25. Love the shape of Mary's eyes in her face, brilliant almonds and cedar stained pools and the dripping honey.
26. Can't help but like Song of Solomon.
27. Am baptised in the Episcopal Church and don't mind, as I love ritual, but don't care to be limited to one canon.
28. Was told by my mother that our people's gods lived in trees and I believed her.
29. Think HTTP was one hell of an idea. It is impossible not to think of the flow of information in evolutionary terms. Have only just realized that people have been thinking this for a long time. It fascinates me, comparing hyper-links and the flow of information to genetic transfer and the spread of traits through populations. Or, for that matter, to genetic drift. Er, this is supposed to be a list.
30. Am not good at making lists.
31. Love to read lists made by others, and forgotten. The book you pick up used and discover a theater ticket with a scrawled name and number on the back. Lists made by thick farmer fingers with a stub of a pencil. Nails, caulk, dog collar, Coca Cola, tucked into a Zane Grey then turning yellow for forty years in the cupboard by the bathroom. You can hear a man's breathing as you read his notes to himself, lists of trivial things. This century just past, from pencil to fountain pens, lists with thumbprints and such neat strikes--people without delete keys, women writing so neating just to remind themselves not to forget to pick up sister at the hairdresser's. Blotchy new ballpoints and crayon lists of best friends on construction paper. Not so fond of the list written in micro-fine-glittering-gel-smooth flow fuck off ink. Lists with notes about the plastic surgeon and carb counting and having the Lexus tuned. Between the lines women are dying, sweatshops are springing up, and, hackneyed but true, the rich just keep getting richer.
32. Believe in the need for and benefit of organized labor.
33. Think Wal-Mart is just the shittiest goddamn thing to happen to America since the Civil War.
34. Am a liberal, progressive democrat but have voted for the Green Party too.
35. Love music so much it makes my teeth hurt, but don't listen to it often enough.
36. Pearl Jam, U2, REM, Talking Heads, Teleman, Handel, especially Bach, middle ages, original instruments, rennaisance, Vivaldi, all favorites.
37. But I have almost no talent for producing music, though I'm told I have a lovely voice.
38. Sound like Barry White in the morning, Issac Hayes at lunch, and a fucking game show announcer at supper.
39. Worked the family farm for a while as a favor. Did ok. Liked my dogs. Was hunted by angry spirits.
40. Left the farm because of a woman, and also the hungry, angry spirits.
41. Had a dog get killed by a school bus and burried him in an orange orchard. Six feet deep with a red blanket coffin.
42. Hate to see an animal hurting, god I hate that.
43. Have just decided making long lists about oneself is kind of a pain in the ass.
44. Swear an awful lot, probably more than is required. But not around kids, or strangers or other people's grandparents
45. Was born in Washington, D.C., at home. They threw the cat off the bed there at the end.
46. Can cook for hundreds of people an hour, as long as they're eating hash, eggs, and cakes.
47. Have a mysterious relationship with punctuation.
48. Likewise with grammar and spelling.
49. Mispronounce a lot of words having only learned them from books.
50. Gave my mother a good laugh once as a grade schooler with 'it's as solid as the Rock of JILL-bruh-tar'.
51. Read compulsively, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes out of desperation.
52. Will read anything, from bad serials for kids to the back of the tissue box to Joyce.
53. Love Italo Calvino, but I can't read Italian. Love Pablo Neruda which I can read in Spanish, which is nice. Of course, I haven't read a Neruda poem in years, so what's up with that?
54. Was born in 1972.
55. Liked being a kid in the seventies. Nixon wasn't as scary as Reagan and my god Reagan wasn't as scary as Dubbya.
56. Thought the eighties were fun because of Atari but couldn't believe the depraved materialism and thought it peaked in '87 or so.
57. Honestly thought people would move away from such base greed toward a better, more sustainable future.
58. Fucking hah! Am a damn fool for believing that.
59. Live in my nose a lot, for years at a time. I love the smell of things.
60. Love the way Mary smells, just her, the blood and sun warmed skin and the pool of hair and heat in her throat.
61. Favorite perfume of hers is a local shop's blend of Patchouli and Rose. Also like Angel, a commercial perfume. Romance is a nice scent, so is Hot by Givenchy.
62. Also love the smell of a fox den, a distant skunk, pine duff in the Sierra Nevada, fresh trout and river rocks and dried salmon eggs carried on Pepsi bubbles. Cottonwoods have a very distinctive smell, once you've smelled it, you'll never forget it and a waterway just wouldn't be the same without it. Alders too, though theirs is more a complementary note.
63. God I love lemons and I hope everyone gets to smell an orange blossom just once. Oleanders turning brown and gardenias, good lord, with god swimming in your nose and the flesh cream petals, insane.
64. Mmm, the smell of coffee. Do love coffee, but might have to stop drinking it, good old anxiety.
65. Love doughnuts but have eaten less than ten this whole year. That's too bad.
66. Used to be able to eat a box of six Eggkvist chocolate, crispy with lard and sugar, in a day. What happened?
67. Don't know quite where I went wrong.
68. Have a tendency to let nature take its course. It's hard to look at the world and think, 'Oh yes, I'll make that better.' I admire formal English and Japanese Zen gardens very much, but find my hand balks at pruning, at training, at forcing nature.
69. I do love to garden though.
70. Am a firm believer in native plant landscaping and the elimination of the lawn, at least in the US.
71. Love to listen to kids talking to each other, not fighting, but inventing, explaining, or random babbling. I love the things they're not yet afraid to say and the easy way they adapt words to a purpose.
72. Have a very hard time listening to public speakers, especially regular folks having a go at the lectern. Can't stand it, start to tear up with a racing heart and feel like I'm dying every time the speaker says, "Um...." The killer for me is when I hear the falter in someone's voice or see a trace of flush crawling up his/her neck. When the speaker's eyes go slightly wide and get rigid and I feel the poor bastard's heart in my own throat. Hate it.
73. Don't mind speaking myself nearly as much. Don't like it, but it's much more comfortable to sound like an ass than to watch someone else be afraid.
74. Would like to take my mother to Wales someday. Also hope to smell a lavender field in France, have a pint in London, see B.C. and Vancouver and let's see, maybe Patagonia.
75. Have only been out of the US once, to Canada, and that was only in the border lakes region. The campgrounds were different on either side of the lake, but the toilet paper stuck to a high rockface was just as white and bleached as ours.
76. Support a woman's right to choose. Anything. Should it matter what?
77. Man do I love chocolate.
78. And beer.
79. Hate it when they dub movies. Much prefer subtitles.
80. Am standoffish. Not because I don't like people. It's just to keep their feelings out of my head. I pick up too much off people and get strung out and exhausted. Hope that makes sense.
81. Don't like live albums much.
82. Really have a huge problem with injustice. I could go on for days about this, but I think I'm almost done with this effing list.
83. Am not a prude by any means, but think exploitation is so fucking evil. In other words I've got nothing against nudity, erotica, what have you, but I think the porn and sex trade should catch fire and suffer a thousand years of torment. Or something like that. Don't like slavery, see, and even when we're not talking about actual slavery, social circumstances can make slaves out of people.
84. Love it when an author creates a character which lives forever in you mind as a mentor, a friend, a member of your family. This seems to happen when the character isn't quite realistic, perhaps is just more real than possible. I'm thinking of Atticus Finch or John Steinbeck's Doc from Cannery Row.
85. Get off on colors, colors together, blending mixing flowing. Colors alone and pure, colors bathed in sunlight. Colors bleeding off the edge of the paper.
86. Love to paint, on anything with anything. Am not trained though, which I sort of regret.
87. Have a lot of regrets in weak moments.
88. Have a lot of weak moments lately, which pisses off one.
89. Don't get Elvis.
90. Would love to have interstellar space travel or visit the moon, but would much rather children not be sold into slavery because their families can't feed them.
91. Respect the idea of cultural relativity but am so fucking against FGM, 'kitchen fires', stoning, and such practices, that I believe the broader community should intervene.
92. Believe that I've got more in common with any regular sap in any country in the world than I have in common with the richest five percent--or ruling class--of my own country.
93. Love Kofi Annan. Reading some of his statements during the lead up to our invading Iraq, I was deeply impressed by the restrained passion of his words, how carefully balanced, how graceful. Just beautiful. I had the good fortune to watch most of a program on PBS which followed him around the world and I couldn't believe the calm weight of the man. How he could see the suffering, the devestation, the human rights abuses and still try to get the work of diplomacy done. A beautiful man, full of grace.
94. Admire chickadees and crows. Love the way nuthatches work the trunk of a tree. Consider nighthawks to be special friends. Their peculiar call, the glide, the sharp sudden movements, the flash of their white bars in an urban night sky. Am really into nighthawks, which are in a group of birds known as 'goatsuckers'.
95. Am really running out of things to say but, let's see, I stand five feet eight inches tall and wouldn't convert that to cm if you paid me. Actually I probably would if you paid me.
96. Put my foot in my mouth a lot, so when I'm smart I keep it shut.
97. Enjoy a fresh fig.
98. Don't care much for cheese but wish I did. There is something exciting and comforting about a cheese shop. The names, the waxes and labels, wire and wood. The thought of families with their personal molds making cheese for centuries. The thought of lesbian couples getting a piece of land and a goat herd and finally having the life they want. The thought of men in a field with a knife, a loaf of bread, bottle of wine, and cheese. Cheese is a trip and I wish I liked it.
99. Can't believe how beautiful the inside of a pomegranite is.
100. Have brown eyes while my mom's are green, dad's blue, and my brother's this ethereal translucent green. Strange.

Oh my god. That's a hundred. I don't think I'll ever do this again. Not sure why I did. Just started blogging and everyone seems to have an about me page so it seemed the thing. If you read this far, well my goodness, thanks for sticking with me. I'm not sure if this gives an accurate picture or not, but it's all true, at least at 10:08 CST on February 15, 2004.

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