16, turned 25 things

There’s a tell-me-about-yourself listing thing circulating around the Internets. The idea, if you haven’t been “tagged” to do it yet yourself, is that one person writes a list then “tags” a group of friends and acquaintances to write their own list and share it. Kind of like a virtual way of playing tag, minus the running in circles and skinning your knees in the schoolyard.

Kathryn tagged me over a week ago to put together a list of 16 things about myself. Then on Sunday, Sandy tagged me to do the 25 things about myself list. Woah. These things make me nervous for some reason (probably for some of the reasons I listed below). But I sat down yesterday and wrote it out and, in the end, I thought it was really interesting to cull through my memories and goals and thoughts and dreams to come up with 25 things worth sharing with you all. I left a bunch of things out, and some of these items aren’t even the most important things I’m thinking about or doing right now, but they’re what came to mind.

Here they are for you to read. (Again, for some of you on Facebook, who I tagged to do this, too!) And I’ve discovered that I really love reading other people’s lists, too. So share them, if you haven’t already!

1: I wrote this out last night only to have my computer close my browser for no good reason, thus annihilating all the things I had thought up to share with you all. Moral: I don’t save my work enough.

2: Having to think up things for these lists makes me worry that my life is boring.

3: I’m a private person.

4: Once, when I didn’t know what to do anymore about anything, Kathryn told me to come up with a daily routine and follow it, that sometimes following that routine helps more than anything else can. It’s the only piece of advice ever given to me that I try to follow nearly every day.

5: I love North Carolina, and even though I wish/dream about moving out of my home state, I know I’ll probably never move away or leave it again for long periods of time.

6: I love big cities and daydream about living in Chicago or New York.

7: I love red velvet cake with reckless abandon. Relatedly, I need to go to the gym more.

8: I miss my mom and dad every day. I especially miss my mom’s cooking and endless questions and my dad’s amazing hugs and sense of humor. I think I act more like my dad (sensitive, stubborn) but I look more like my mom.

9: Pat and I are godparents to ALL our nieces and nephews. (Two girls and soon to be three boys.) Pat’s siblings and their spouses joke that they shouldn’t ride in a car together, in case there’s an accident and we end up with a bunch of kids.

10: I’m amazed at and by circumstances — mainly other people’s. I’m starting to believe in fate.

11: I want to be the best writer/journalist and photographer I can be, but I sometimes lack confidence and/or focus (I want to do it ALL, RIGHT NOW) and/or faith.

12: I have a secret, embarrassing fascination with the Bravo shows “The Real Housewives of Orange County” and “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Now it’s no secret. (I’m working on an essay about them…)

13: I both take myself too seriously and not seriously enough. I often think I’m doing the wrong one.

14: My first “real” kiss (from a boy who drove a red Mustang, good lord) was under the sycamore in the pasture at my parents’ farm. Standing under that tree, especially in the springtime with Pat, is one of my absolute favorite things to do/places to be in the world.

15: Still, I really love to travel. I love walking around streets that are completely unfamiliar and getting lost. I love the architecture and food and art and talking to people and trying to speak their language. But, planning for a big trip makes me anxious. 

16: I don’t hide my feelings very well, though I try to.

BONUS (Are you still reading?)

17: When I was a kid, I found a baby woodpecker in the churchyard next to our house. I brought it home and my dad helped me find a shoebox to keep it in. We tried to feed it baby worms, but it really liked liquified peanut butter that we pushed into it’s mouth with a needle-less syringe. We kept it for several weeks, then I put it back under the tree where I’d found it. I didn’t stick around to see what happened, but several hours later it was gone.

18: Also, when I was a kid my parents would get a bunch of chicks, which we kept in an incubator and later raised in our backyard and on the farm. Huge black snakes (we called them King Snakes) would crawl through the fencing and eat the chickens. It was really weird. I’ve been thinking about those chickens and that woodpecker a lot lately.

19: I love that I grew up in Davie County (NC). I often miss rural North Carolina.

20: I’m not so in love with Asheville, even though I’ve lived here — for the most part — since 1990. I think I may be the only person in the city limits that feels that way.

21: I love people who have those two concentration/worry lines between their eyebrows. I think they’re cute.

22: Ruby, my grandmother, is turning 100 years old in less than a month! She lives in a nursing home in Burnsville, but only because getting someone to stay with her at her home in Mitchell County was impossible. She is such an amazing woman. 

23: I don’t know where I’d be without Pat.

24: When I was 16, I spent a summer camping from North Carolina to California and back again. I think that trip really changed the way I became an adult, the things I believe and how I am.

25: I’m 50 percent perplexed by and 50 percent amazed by my life. I think a lot about where I’m going, what’s to come.