1. Born in Davenport, Iowa, during the Year of the Monkey. Does it narrow things down enough if I also cop to being a Sagittarius?
  2. My father is currently was once the mayor of Davenport. For two terms.
  3. I've worn glasses since (I think) the fourth grade. As someone with a last name in the late B's, I split time between being the first person in the second row and the last person in the first. When my parents discovered that I struggled in classes where I sat in the back of the room, glasses it was.
  4. I tried contacts for about 3 months, but never got over the feeling of having rocks in my eyes. Also, there was considerable anxiety about having a lens slide around to the back of my eye. (I know, I know, but fear's not rational.)
  5. Played a lot of soccer growing up, and a fair amount of tennis and racquetball. I'm fairly sure that I was pretty good at all 3--not great, but pretty good.
  6. I have a really bad memory for people, places and things more than a couple of years removed from the present day. I do great when I'm trying to remember things, but otherwise, it often just doesn't stick. I have friends who can do lyrics, movie lines, etc., and I've always envied that.
  7. It took me two swings through graduate school to discover that the life of a professor was for me. I'm still mostly glad that it took that second time.
  8. Indian, Mexican, Thai, Italian, Mediterranean, in that order.
  9. Since about 6th grade, I've been a fantasy/sci-fi reader. I'm more selective now than I used to be, but there's always one or two on my bedside table.
  10. My bedside table typically holds 9-10 books, all of which are in various stages of progress, at a given time.
  11. Since I'd brought the bed itself with me, a bedside table was the first piece of furniture I bought upon arriving in Syracuse.
  12. I don't spare much thought for furniture in general--my personal space tends to be more functional than decorative, and this despite the fact that I place a lot of faith in the benefits of design.
  13. I may very well have a personal sense of feng shui, but I've never actually tried to learn exactly what the general principles of FS are.
  14. I've always privileged common sense over rules, and this is partly why I resist feng shui, self-help, and to this point, therapy.
  15. I do remember when MTV first came out, and I remember specifically wanting to grow up to be one of the people who designed the 30-second logo segues that they used to run.
  16. Scooby Doo and the Superfriends.
  17. No tattoos, no piercings. It's not really been a conscious choice per se, but I've never managed to overcome my ambivalence about doing either to myself.
  18. Coke > Pepsi (over the holidays this year, upon pulling a 2 or 3 month old, unopened 2L bottle of Coke from the fridge, my mom asked me, "Does Coke go bad?" Me: "No, it just becomes Pepsi." Cracked myself up, I did.)
  19. I crack myself up more often than I probably should.
  20. I dream in color and elaborately, most often during the mornings when I can be flexible about my wakeup time. My preferred schedule would include turning in around 3-4 a.m. and waking up around 11 or noon.
  21. I've always written better late at night. I finally stopped believing that this was the only time I could write, but it's still the best.
  22. I'm not a particularly noisy person myself, but I need some kind of noise around me. Helps me focus.
  23. My dislike of silence extends to libraries, which aren't actually very quiet places, but because people are "trying" to be quiet, libraries grate on me.
  24. First time I ever left the U.S. was to study for a term in Ireland my junior year of college.
  25. Have been promising myself I'd get back there now for about 15 years, to no apparent avail so far.
  26. I don't make a lot of long-term promises to myself, in part because I'm not that great of a long-term planner. Although this sounds more Zen than I intend, I tend to live in the now.
  27. Living in the now makes it difficult to work out regularly and/or lose weight, among other things. That big dessert tends to overwhelm the future possibility of skinny.
  28. The only strategy I've managed to come up with for counteracting the whole now fetish is to try and emotionally reward myself for doing small things, and not focusing on how much is left to accomplish. This is currently working for me.
  29. The most resonant quote I've ever found in that regard comes from Michael Chabon: "The hardest part of writing a novel is the contemplation of the distance to the end." So that this is actually a Thing About Me, let me add that I've read Chabon's Kavalier & Clay.
  30. I collected comics in college, and still have a couple of boxes full of cardboard-backed bags of them in storage. I've gotten back into them, but am pretty selective.
  31. Most of my own storage space is taken up with books, books, and more books. I am trying to gradually cure myself of the bad habit of buying them faster than I can read them. That cure is scheduled for completion some time in the 2030s, I suspect.
  32. Reading intensity cycles for me, although it's a rare day where I don't throw down at least 50 pages or so of something.
  33. If there were such a thing as a professional book buyer, that would be the job for me. I pride myself on being able to match books to people, and while I'm occasionally a little off, I'm quite good at it by and large. I have a much better memory for books than I do for much of my life.
  34. This is another one of those "Now" things--I wish I were better at managing money, but frankly, money is one of those things that ranks pretty low on my list.
  35. This is not to say, however, that I don't do my share of Powerball fantasizing. Right now, I'd say that I'm split pretty evenly between opening a really good bookstore or a bakery. No reason I couldn't do both, though.
  36. If you read my blog, you already know that I really enjoy baking. I have a genuine appreciation for quality kitchens, not possessing one myself at this moment.
  37. I have to be pretty comfortable before I starting inching away from recipes, though. I'm aware that this runs counter to the whole disdain for rules mentioned above.
  38. My mother is the director of development, fund-raising, and/or marketing for the Quad-City Symphony (Davenport being one of the QC) a Catholic order of nuns.
  39. I work better when I have a goal in sight, and I can see measurable signs of progress. I think this has something to do with the fact that weight lifting is my preferred form of exercise. It helps me keep from "contemplation of the distance to the end."
  40. I will probably never grow tired of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
  41. Fall colors are friendliest to me, I think, and fall is by far my season of choice.
  42. This borders on insanity during a week of record lows, but I don't mind winter so much, either.
  43. I've been a smoker since my first stint in grad school, and the one thing that I do mind about winter is the fact that I'm an outdoor smoker. When the weather outside is frightful, I'm much, much less of a smoker. As of summer 2007, I am a quitter, much as it pains me to say that.
  44. I started smoking as an alternative to drinking when I was shooting pool regularly.
  45. I'd never owned my own pool cue, but that may change changed this year.
  46. I do better with a small group of really good friends than I do with lots and lots of acquaintances. Most of those really good friends are women. Not all, but most.
  47. I'm slow to acknowledge that other people are as capable of change as I am.
  48. Alias, Monk, The Daily Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Law & Order: Criminal Intent (Heresy, I know, but I've never really gotten into the Sopranos. I watch once in a while, but have never been hooked.) Add Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and while it lasted, Veronica Mars.
  49. Growing up, I used to hate my name because it wasn't "normal enough," whatever that meant to me back then. I have one vivid memory of feeling betrayed when a friend told a group of people at lunch that my middle name was/is Gifford. Collin was my great-grandfather's name, and Gifford is my grandmother's maiden name. I like and use all my names for official purposes now.
  50. I just checked to see how far into the list I've gotten (ordered lists are an editor's friend), and am trying now to figure out the important things that I'm sure I'm forgetting to include.
  51. In college, I took Latin for fun. (I don't offer this as an example of the aforementioned "important things.")
  52. I took piano lessons for a couple of months, but it never took. I now regret this. I also played trumpet for four years (high school). For some reason, I didn't start playing until I was a teen, while most of my classmates started in elementary school.
  53. My list changes regularly, and depends a lot on who's asking, but some of my top movies would include The Usual Suspects, Red (of K's Trois Couleurs), Brazil, This is Spinal Tap, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Run Lola Run, Ghost Dog, Lost in Translation, and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. Not much to add, as not a lot of good movies in the last 3 years.
  54. There aren't a lot of movies that I won't watch, but I'm not really big on war movies. I tend to be very immersive when I watch movies, and have always preferred the big screen in that regard.
  55. I always thought that I would have a wife and family by the time I turned thirty. Ummm...forty?
  56. Although I haven't abandoned that particular goal, I have learned (yes, the hard way) how much of my emotional health I am now unwilling to sacrifice to achieve it. Yes, there's a story behind this.
  57. When I was little, I slept with a Snoopy, and I'm pretty sure that it's still somewhere in my mom's house. I grew up with Peanuts. There have been great comics since, to be sure, but they're all competing for #2 as far as I'm concerned.
  58. I've never liked asparagus, but most of the other foods I hated growing up I now like just fine. Food likes and dislikes have always been tied to texture as well as taste for me.
  59. I appreciate most sports, but will always be a Cubs fan first and foremost. I've always had the bad habit of Male Sports Insight Syndrome, the tendency of boys to always spout about a sport regardless of how well they actually know it. It probably doesn't help that there are entire cable networks (ESPN, e.g.) devoted to perpetuating MSIS.
  60. I have never liked being the center of attention, for all that I like having people pay attention to me. This makes sense in my head, if nowhere else.
  61. When I first got into graduate school, teaching was what paid the bills so that I could read and write. As I've gotten older, I've really learned to appreciate what a good teacher can accomplish, and on my best days, I even manage some of it myself.
  62. B9 d++ t+ k++ s u- f i o++ x e l c--
  63. There was a stretch, about ten years ago, where I actively identified myself as a member of Generation X. Pity the fool.
  64. Through high school and college, my music of choice was almost invariably British post-punk. This made me "alternative," or so I heard. I followed alt-music until the early 90s, where I simply ran up against the brick wall of Nirvana, and stopped caring.
  65. I've started caring a little more lately about music, although my tastes don't seem to coincide with anyone else I know. I don't think I'm all that unusual, but for some reason, no one but me seems interested in most of the music I listen to.
  66. This is partly because I'm secretly partial to pop music, I think. No, not Britney and Justin or anything like that. I mean pop music as a genre.
  67. If I read a lot less contemporary and/or genre fiction, I could be a literary snob. I could say the same about my movie tastes, too, I guess.
  68. Junior Mints are simultaneously my favorite candy and favorite movie snack. I almost went apoplectic when our local cinema dropped them from their rotation. Now, I just have to sneak, with a box of them in one pocket of my coat and a bottle of water that costs significantly less than $3.50 in the other. P.S. York Peppermint Patties aren't far behind.
  69. I have always loved office supply stores, almost as much as book stores. When I was young, my brother and I went on errands with my father on Saturday mornings. We often stopped at the law firm where he then worked, and the office supply closet was enough to keep me entranced for hours. I remember spending hours making paper airplanes to fly out of the 7th floor office windows. I also remember making copies of our hands on the office copier (which we then folded into paper airplanes) and trying to replace the empty toner cartridge by myself, which resulted in spilling toner onto the carpet, and (probably) permanently staining it as we tried to clean it up with water and paper towels.
  70. This had nothing to do with my father's leaving that firm, which he eventually did.
  71. Oops. Yes, I have a brother, 3 in fact. One by birth, and two by my father's second marriage.
  72. I have far more pens than I could ever use, mostly because it's hard for me not to buy more when I visit Office Max.
  73. I'm not a very neat person, and this despite a sometimes compulsive fascination with organization and alignment. The best I can figure is that I'm very neat when it comes to specific, local things, but more globally, I'm the opposite. For example, I'll line up a stack of books so that they're even and/or centered, even when that stack is sitting in the middle of a big, messy pile of junk.
  74. I'm sometimes neater in response to others, as I assume we all are. It's harder to be a mess around people who aren't.
  75. It's been close on three years since I actually paid someone to cut my hair. It's not that I don't care about it, but I don't care that much about it, and find that I do just fine with clippers, especially with guides and some sense of touch. There are always other things I'd rather spend my money on.
  76. One of the few things that causes me to wish I had more money is art. I love those little shops that offer art by various local artists, and I wish that I could buy those sorts of things more often, and that I had the money to support those artists.
  77. Crossword puzzles have always appealed to me. In fact, in my sophomore year in college, I had a paper turned back to me ungraded because, according to my professor, I "treated poetry like crossword puzzles." It wasn't until later that I learned that this was not something to be ashamed of.
  78. Nowadays I do the cryptic crosswords that appear in the back of Harper's and the Atlantic.
  79. Reading the end of a book first is something I simply cannot do.
  80. I would visit NYC much more often if I could afford to do so.
  81. There's a certain point in my friendships with people where there is nearly nothing that I wouldn't do for them. There aren't a lot of people who make it to that point with me, but once they do, I'm fiercely loyal.
  82. Macintosh, for nearly more than 20 years now.
  83. Not having had pets growing up, I don't really weigh in on one side of the eternal cat v dog question. Both species get along with me pretty well and I with them.
  84. Although it sees far less use, I actually saved the box that my iPod came in. It's almost sublime in the design that went into what is simply a temporary holder for the product itself. If nothing else, I'd be loyal to Apple for that reason alone. Threw it out when I moved offices.
  85. I have friends for whom this is far more acute, but when I get a little tired (or drunk), I sometimes catch myself slipping a little Texas into my speech patterns.
  86. When I was in college, choosing grad schools the first time around, Texas was the one place I decided I wouldn't go. This may have guaranteed that I would eventually end up there, as in fact I did for a few years.
  87. My schools, in order: Eisenhower, Sudlow, Central, Carleton, Miami (Ohio), U Texas-Arlington, Old Dominion, Syracuse. From my perspective, almost all of these were a result of a set of coincidences or happenstances.
  88. In college, I was only a few courses away from a Minor in East Asian Studies. 5 terms of Japanese, and courses in the culture, history, and religion of Japan.
  89. I don't really recall ever being especially religious, although I grew up going to church every week. When I became capable of consciously making those kinds of decisions, I found myself much more interested in so-called Eastern religion than Western. This was before college, but continued there.
  90. I'm right-handed, but have never really understood the big deal about people who are left-handed. Ambidexterity, now, there's something I was fascinated by.
  91. There were two lasting legacies from several years on high school and college debate teams: the ability to think abstractly and the similarly useful ability to spin pens. As far as twitches go, pen-spinning is a pretty fun one.
  92. Although I'm a decent typist, I've thought seriously about retraining myself to type on a Dvorak keyboard (DHIATENSOR as opposed to QWERTY).
  93. When I got to #85 or so here, I started thinking seriously about what major things I must be missing, esp since I'm trying to do this all in a single(ish) sitting.
  94. Reality television will never really make sense to me. Still, nope. Pirate Master? WTF?
  95. One of my very real flaws is the ability to sense what people expect of me, and to adjust myself accordingly. I think we all do this to one degree or another, but I've come to realize that I do it far more deeply than I should. There's a lot of backstory to this.
  96. One of my corresponding strengths is the ability to see the big picture, to see how things connect, and often to draw unusual connections that other people don't see.
  97. I memorize phone numbers using the patterns my fingers follow when dialing them.
  98. More and more, I have come to appreciate the value of telling a good story. I don't lay claim to any special ability at this, but I admire people who have that talent.
  99. There are days where I feel capable of seeing the underlying beauty in just about everything and everyone around me, and I'm filled with awe when that happens. These days don't happen often, but they happen more often now that I'm a little older.
  100. As obvious as this may sound, I think that I would be a much happier person if I could focus more on who I am and who I am working to become, and less on who I'm not. That's as close as I can take you to the reasons behind this little exercise which, if I've counted correctly, is now complete.