memes are fun! well, for me.

[fearlesstemp]

1. My favorite number is eleven.

2. This is probably because my birthday is on the eleventh of June, and I always feel like this makes me vaguely egotistical, but I can't help it!

3. I also love signing my name and have since I was a little kid. On almost any piece of scrap paper within reach of me, you will find at least three scribblings of my full name.

4. But my signature still isn't as cool as I wish it was.

5. My favorite sports team is the New York Mets.

6. But I also really like the New York Jets.

7. Yes, partially because they rhyme.

8. I am also one of those boring people who picks all their favorite sports teams based on location.

9. Except the Yankees. Because I don't like them.

10. But some of my best friends and family members are fans, so I can Get Past the Yankee hate.

11. A little bit.

12. I do have a favorite word, but I can never think of it when I want to. Like right now.

13. The most annoying sound in the world to me is fork tines on clamshells.

14. I also am not fond of the buzzer sound of my alarm clock.

15. I used the buzzer setting for years but had to stop because it sounds just like the warning beep on a bus/truck/massive SUV backing up and I kept having minor heart attacks whenever I was in any big parking lot.

16. So now I use the radio setting.

17. It almost always wakes me up.

18. But I need at least three snoozes before I can get out of bed.

19. And another half hour or so until I'm anything resembling human.

20. Okay, more like an hour.

21. Or three.

22. The best proof that JC and I have anything at all in common was the statement he once made about sleeping, that it wasn't that he loved to sleep, it was that he absolutely hated getting up.

23. Which, thinking about it now, is probably a sentiment shared by all people, so maybe JC and I don't have that much in common after all.

24. I still love him, though.

25. No, I don't know why. He's my favorite. He always has been. It transcends reason or taste. He wore a mullet and I didn't care.

26. You know what songs off the first album I love? Just about all of them.

27. But especially I Need Love and Here We Go.

28. I almost died when the latter came on in the middle of the climactic Caucasovision scene in Undercover Brother.

29. Which is, by the way, a fantastic movie that I highly recommend.

30. It was one of my top ten films of 2002. Along with Chicago, The Bourne Identity, and...others that I can't recall now.

31. And I should be talking about me more, right? My favorite color is red.

32. And my favorite month is October. If I get married, that's when I'd like to do it.

33. This is only in part because of the wedding I was in this past weekend. 95 degrees. Super high humidity. No air conditioning. It was hell in formalwear. But I just think October is such a pretty month. Nice temperature, fall foliage, and the playoffs! What more could one want?

34. Despite my general klutziness, I often wear heels and am not prone to falling down in them.

35. Well, any more than I am in flats or sneakers.

36. I had a professor in college who'd been hit by a car ten years ago and suffered a brain injury that went undetected at the time who, because of this, became a huge champion of discussing brain injuries. He said that most people who have had brain injuries as children aren't aware of it, but it affects them later in life. I kind of wonder if this is true for me, as I am quite uncoordinated, but especially on my left side. I'm bad at judging distances on my left and constantly walk into doorjambs with my left shoulder/arm/knee. It could be genetic, though, considering the fact that my father missed most of his senior year baseball season because he broke his toe trying to kick a bug in the backyard. Genetic klutziness or brain damage, that's what I've got.

37. Unsurprisingly, I am quite prone to thinking every horrible medical ailment applies to me.

38. Which is why I had to stop majoring in Psychology, as I kept self-diagnosing myself with every psychological malady known to man.

39. Also, I hate lab reports.

40. And so I majored in History.

41. And even though I have a B.A. and am considering pursuing a higher degree, I still never know whether I should capitalize it.

42. I will worry about whether I should or shouldn't have for the rest of the writing of this list.

43. I met the best friends I made in college my first week there. The first day, actually.

44. I really think I was too young for college when I went, but I'm not really sorry I did go then, because I met great friends and generally had a good time. And also hey, it's over. Can't go back.

45. We're already at college at 45? God! Must backtrack. My mother was in the hospital for almost three months while pregnant with my brother, and because of this I was always terrified of leaving her side growing up. I thought she'd disappear again.

46. Again with the huge ego: When my mother was pregnant with my brother, I told everyone that if it was a girl, they were going to name it Jessica. After me, I guess.

47. After all, I had named my own doll Jessica. After me.

48. Instead, I got a brother named James.

49. Who is my buddy as well as my brother, and also one of the funniest people I know.

50. And the best judge of character I know.

51. But also prone to borrowing money and not paying back.

52. Ultimately fab, of course.

53. I have my father's family's coloring.

54. And my mother's family's height. My Dad says I'm the tallest MyLastName girl he's ever seen. I'm 5'6". My Dad's family is not known for their towering stature.

55. I think my parents are great, and I hope to be the kind of parent they were to me.

56. They're the type of parents who have, since Jimmy and I have been old enough to speak in sentences, treated us like equal conversational partners.

57. My Dad would always ask us to tell a story, and then stop paying attention ten seconds in if it was at all boring.

58. Because of this, I talk way too fast most of the time, and generally have a good eye for seeing if people are bored with what I'm saying. Or at least I think I do. I try to pay attention to it, at least!

59. This doesn't work so well online, which is why I'm always neurotic about being boring. I can't see your FACES! I don't know when to shut up!

60. I'm neurotic about it right now.

61. Can you tell being boring is one of my greatest fears?

62. Because I truly believe that anything can be made interesting if you try hard enough.

63. And anything can be made boring if you don't try at all.

64. I also believe that it's more important to be compassionate than clever.

65. And that being more compassionate will likely lead to one becoming cleverer, while I'm pretty sure it works the opposite way with trying to be cleverer.

66. Which reminds me that the thing I'd like to improve about myself most is to be more compassionate.

67. Well, that and my upper arms. Just got the wedding photos back and OH MY GOD, the ARM FLAB. THE ARM FLAB!

68. I try not to freak out too much about my body image, though, like just about every girl on the planet, I have issues about it.

69. I try to be cool and have a sense of humor about it.

70. But really I'm neurotic and have to force myself to do lame things like stand naked in front of the mirror and force myself to be comfortable with what I see.

71. Why yes, I do buy into many cheesy self-help concepts.

72. In fact, you can tell I'm under stress because I start talking to myself in phrases right out of a Stuart Smalley skit on SNL. ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.")

73. I'm not sure I'll ever get past the need to have people like me, though I think I'm getting better about it.

74. I'm shy by nature, but I work really hard at getting past it.

75. Am I supposed to be talking about things that happened to me or things that I am? Breaking news: Am obsessed with getting things right and, also, always convinced I'm doing things at least a little bit wrong.

76. When I was seventeen I had my appendix out.

77. It was really embarrassing because I had to tell them what I ate that day and I'd eaten breakfast and then went into school and, since I had a free period first, went to the cafeteria with friends and ate cookies. At eight in the morning.

78. I genuinely liked high school. I know, I'm a freak! It was a small, Catholic, all-girls school. It was good for me, but I understand why the same environment didn't work for others.

79. Before that, I went to a suburban elementary school and an urban middle school. Well, as urban as upstate NY gets. Even though middle school was pretty hard for me (but isn't it for everyone?), it was an invaluable experience because it showed me how different so many people's lives were from mine, which I hadn't known from my experiences in elementary school and wouldn't have learned in my little Catholic high school.

80. So I'm a big believer in public education, not just for academic reasons, but for how it provides an environment for people from different areas of life to meet and interact and understand each other.

81. The subject of my college application personal essay was "I'm Not Cool". It turned out pretty well. My teacher, Sister Judith, had me read it aloud to the class.

82. I hate public speaking and the stress of that almost killed me. Even when I was a senior in high school, my hand would shake when I wanted to raise my hand and say something in class.

83. I'm not sure if my parents were odd or if I got in just under the Crazy Overprotective Wire, but I had a lot of freedom as a little kid, when it came to running around with friends. I really feel bad for kids today, who can't just take off at eight in the morning and be told to come back when the streetlights come on, like I did from the time I was five or six.

84. When I was six or seven, though, some guy tried to get me to go into his van with him when I was walking down to my friend Angie's house to see if she could play. The thought of it creeps me out now. I can remember running home as fast as I could, even though he didn't chase me. It could have been nothing, a kid playing a prank or something, but it freaked me out and ever since I've had an irrational fear of being abducted.

85. I love nicknames. There are a couple of people who insist on calling me Jessica, and that's fine, but I like nicknames. Mostly Jess, but I've been known to answer to J, Jessers, Honeybunch, Smush, Sloppy Jr, Jessie, and others I've surely forgotten.

86. I drive way too fast and suck at parallel parking.

87. I've only been pulled over once, for running a red light. It was on a bridge! Not at an intersection! I do remember wondering why there were so many pedestrians on the road, though.

88. My family on both my mother's and father's side have lived in this same area since the mid-1800s and there's a good chance I'll stay here too.

89. Whenever I have a night alone and can make my own dinner, it's almost always exactly what I had tonight: popcorn, M&Ms, and Diet Pepsi. YUMMY.

90. I've always been a bit obsessive about TV. I cried when Quantum Leap was cancelled and wrote to my affiliate to get Swans Crossing put back on the air when it was canned.

91. I used to write lots of fan letters, but never sent any.

92. Except one, which my father found and sent for me. It was to my favorite actress on Swans Crossing, Carisa Dahlbo, who wrote me the nicest letter back and sent an autographed picture. She gave me advice on public speaking! I still secretly hope she'll make it big because she was so nice, but the last I saw of her was on some board game commercial ten years ago.

93. I love bad jokes and puns.

94. My first soap opera was, I think, As the World Turns, but it doesn't count because I only was into it for a little while. My real first soap was Another World, which my mother had watched when she was a kid and started watching again with me when I got hooked on it.

95. I'm kind of addicted to entertainment magazines. I shudder to think how much money I'd save if I didn't buy them.

96. I rented To Have and Have Not when I was fourteen and developed a love for old movies because of it. I'm so glad I randomly picked that out of the classics section at Screen Gems and not something lame.

97. But I still haven't seen Citizen Kane. I've rented it four times and every time, never gotten around to watching it. It's weird.

98. If I come across something on the Kennedys on TV, I have no choice but to sit down and watch it through to its bitter end. And probably cry at one or several points.

99. I tested into Mensa. Which I feel lame mentioning yet do anyway because what's the point of being in Mensa if you can't mention it? I secretly think it was a fluke, or possibly a marketing ploy -- has anyone out there tested for Mensa and NOT made it? Maybe it's all a huge scam to get more dues!

100. I wish I could be as interesting as my friends, good as my maternal grandfather, strong as my maternal grandmother, kind as my paternal grandmother, intelligent as my paternal grandfather, cool as my parents, self-assured and sweet as my brother, and satisfied with the simple things in life as my cats. And also that George Clooney would arrive at my door in the next ten minutes with a Miracle Arm Flab Remover and a smile, ready to whisk me off to his Italian Villa. Did I mention I'm secretly in love with George? Because I so am. He's so dreamy!