A Few Random Things About Me

1. I am the youngest in my family. The one phrase that was a constant in my upbringing was "you're too young," or , "You have to wait until you're older." I felt so frustrated at my lack of independence that, at the age of eleven, I decided to run away. One cool summer morning, as the sun began to peek out from behind neighborhood rooftops, I took a hobo sack full of stuff, put my dog, Princess, on her leash, and started out the back gate with my ten speed. I never made it past the driveway.

2. I hated middle school in Texas. I was still fresh from California, and some of the kids at Hedrick were incredibly cruel and mean to me. At the end of seventh grade, during P.E. class, I experienced excruciating menstrual cramps for the first time. As I lay curled up on a fold-out table crying, some girls in my class taunted me for being a baby. I realize now that those girls probably hadn't even started their periods yet. But the taunts, the jeers and looks of sheer disgust on their faces left me with the realization that even when you're in the throes of agony, people can still be insensitive pricks.

3. I have always wanted to write a novel but get impatient at the thought of having to revisit the same story day after day, wracking my brain for the words and phrases. I tend to prefer writing short stories. They're brief, to the point, and mentally satisfying. What I like most about them (and what I learned from my college creative writing class) is that if a story is well-written, it can give the same insight into a person's character in a smaller frame of time as that of a rambling novel. They can create an aura of mystery, intrigue, and curiosity about the reasons behind a character's decisions or thoughts. The trick to a successful short story is concise, yet creative wording. I've written two so far that I love. One of them was lost in a move and I've considered re-assembing it lately.

4. When I was twenty-six my self-esteem hit rock-bottom and I decided I wasn't worth being alive. A close friend had turned on me. My hearing was getting worse. My job was crappy and I couldn't afford my rent. So many things seemed stacked against me and I couldn't see a solution to the problem. So I decided to kill myself. I mulled over the options I had. Jumping off a bridge into on-coming traffic? Too messy and would probably end up killing someone else. Shooting myself? Waaayyy too messy. Drowning myself? I couldn't stand the sensation of suffocation. No. The answer was sleeping pills. It was easy, just take some and go to sleep. But where to find them? Having no car, my options for offing myself were limited to the local grocery store and surrounding convenience stores. So there I went, walking in a big circle from Belt Line Road to 635 or thereabouts, looking for the blasted sleeping pills. What I didn't realize in the fog of my great depression was that sleeping pills hadn't been an over-the-counter drug for quite some time. Being the innovative person that I am, I improvised and bought a bottle of Tylenol PM. I took a healthy dose of about ten of them, and proceeded to fall into a haze. Apparently, I called an ex-boyfriend to tell him what I'd done. He didn't come over though, no. He just called his brother, who called some suicide hotline, who called me, and told me the pills wouldn't kill me, but might leave me with liver damage. (Thankfully, they didn't). After all that effort, all I got was a damn hangover the next day.

5. I sometimes have extremely vivid dreams. For example, I have dreamed that I blew my nose and out came golden snot. I mean, bullion-type gold. Yes, instead of the goose laying the golden egg, I am the girl who blows the golden snot. I have often assaulted my husband with vivid depictions of my dreams, to which he responds by yelling, "La la la!" and covering his ears as I follow him down the hall describing the latest hairy-monster-as-gentle-lover tale.

6. During my freshman year of high school, I was picked on incessantly by a girl named Virginia. I never let her get to me even though I was deathly afraid of her. She was damn mean. Then in spring semester sophomore year we had P.E. class together. One beautiful day she plopped down next to me in the grass and said, "You know, Trina. I was always mean to you last year, but you never got bitchy or tried to fight. You're ok. You're a cool girl." I just sat there silently. I mean, really, what could I have said? "Yes, Virginia, you were a bitch?" She actually wasn't so bad after she decided she liked you.

7. When I was four years old, my big sister had a white pet mouse. My parents and sister both warned me not to touch it because it wasn't mine and belonged to Bonnie. One day I discovered myself alone in what appeared to be an empty house. I tip-toed into my sister's room, looked at her mouse. As I stood there contemplating whether to defy my parents' orders, I remembered watching our neighbors playfully throw their baby in the air. Their son had laughed and gurgled with glee as his parents swung him up and caught him skillfully. It was then that the overwhelming urge to "make it laugh" came over me. I quietly slipped it out of its cage, snuck outside and began to throw it into the air. The first few times I caught the mouse and all was fine. (I'm sure the poor thing would disagree though). The last time, however, I threw it high. As it came down it slipped threw my fingers and landed with a distinct little thud on the pavement. I panicked, picked up the stricken creature, and petted and talked to it. Nothing. I managed to get back inside the house and into my sister's room without being detected. I put the mouse back into the cage and thought if only it would eat it would get better. The lettuce didn't revive the poor thing, and so I carefully locked the cage and fled the scene.

I got caught, though. How, I'll never know. Perhaps it was the unnatural way I had posed the mouse with a piece of lettuce dangling from its mouth. In any event, my sister was crying that her pet mouse was dead, and my parents pulled me aside and asked if I knew anything about it. Of course, I confessed. And when they asked me to demonstrate how the crime had been committed, they were shocked. Horrified. I cried and said I'd only meant to make it happy. And so, I was convicted of negligent homicide of a mouse in our house. Naturally, after that, I didn't go within ten feet of Bonnie's very big and very heavy new hamster.

8. I sometimes keep my husband awake at night with my random musings about the existence of an almighty being. Personally, I think humanity is one big game of Sims, and we're at the mercy of our super-smart, super sadistic alien creators. I should know. I used to play The Sims all the time, and I sometimes made my characters suffer just to see how they'd react. It got boring after a while because the behavior was so predictable. If my aliens-as-god hunch is correct, this does not bode well for humanity.

9. I am deathly afraid of cockroaches. I've been known to remove toads from the family pool, keep lizards as pets, terrorize my mother with daddy long-leg spiders, and play with mice (see #10); but cockroaches just make me scream and quiver with disgust and fear. There is something absolutely frightening about a creature that could survive a nuclear holocaust. Seeing a cockroach makes me think of "The Metamorphosis."

10. For years I was convinced I could not have kids. This is for several reasons too numerous to name here. But needless to say, when people told me that "It would happen with the right person," I would just shrug it off as some sort of wishful thinking on their part. I mean, what did they know, right? They didn't have to live in my persistently childless shoes! And after years of yearning and wishing myself, it's finally happened. I admit it now. I'm happy to say, "I was wuh-wrrrrrrrfff..." ("You were wrong, Fonzie?" ) Yeah, I was wrong.

11. I love to travel and stay in hostels. Hotels are over rated and if you're traveling to a cool place, what's the point of a fancy hotel? You're there to see the sights, unless you have a thing for fancy hotels, which I don't. To me, they're just places to sleep, shower, and change before heading out for adventure in a new place! In 1994, I traveled to Hawaii and stayed in a multi-story hostel and met a large group of people there, from stuck-up gay Frenchmen (they wore hot pink!), to an ass-pinching Aussie who blamed it on the Italian. I also stayed in a hostel in Leadville, Colorado at over 10,000 feet in the middle of the Rockies. Ahhhh, good times!

12. I hate it when I see people's "info" on dating sites or myspace, or fb, etc., where they list their favorite movies. Usually, they list something strange or obscure like "Through a Glass Darkly," or "Cry, the Beloved Country," in order to make themselves seem more intelligent or eccentric than they really are. While I have seen both movies and liked them, I must admit that neither is my favorite. My all-time favorite movie is "Young Guns," from 1987. Emelio Estevez as Billy the Kid? Total hotness. Not to mention the awesome camera work. "Ace Ventura, Pet Detective" comes in a very close second. In fact, it was this movie where I fell in love with the comedic genius of Jim Carrey.

13. I am a roller coaster addict. If I'm at an amusement park, I must ride at least two or three of them. I love the feeling of being thrown around with abandon. The lingering sensations afterwards are even better!

14. My mom was born and raised on a farm in Wisconsin. I always felt jealous about that because I wanted to live on a farm, too. To this very day, I still feel deprived of my heritage because I never properly learned how to milk a cow.

15. I pretend to really like doing library research. I also pretend I enjoy reading scientific journals. (By journals, I mean only stuff true academics would read, not National Geographic, or Discover - those are cool to read) Truthfully, they both bore the hell out of me. Writing the research papers using the information I've gathered, though, is way more fun.

16. I still want to become an Archaeologist someday. I want to study North American pre-History. In college, I wrote a research paper about a Hopi sex god; Kokopelli. With stories like "The Long Kwasi of Kokpelli," and petroglyphs of extremely well-endowed figures peppering my paper, my professor, of course, loved it. I got an A. Ok, I take it back. I do like doing library research, as long as it's about sex gods and long kwasis.