1. right now i am listening to �never meant� by american football. it is 3.50 in the afternoon.
2. i am making a list because i like to make lists. i like lists because i like to number things. i like to count.
3. my liking to count has been a point of disproportionate interest for several doctors and therapists.
4. i am six feet tall in my stocking feet.
5. i will be twenty-six years old at 5.11 pm this saturday, the feast of saint john of the cross.
6. my desk, where i am writing this, is littered with empty plastic bottles which each at one time held 20 oz of coca-cola.
7. i am vowing not to put any quotations from songs i like or books or poems i like, or any quotations at all, into this list.
8. this makes me a little worried that the list will not get very long.
9. my cats are named after the first two r.e.m. records.
10. i am named after my great-grandmother, who was from iceland and whom everyone called ricka.
11. at least three people, including addie, have started calling me ricka spontaneously without knowing about my great-grandmother.
12. here is what else i got from my great-grandmother: an old yellowishing bible & a hymnbook (s�lambok), in icelandic, & a passed-down recipe for sugar cookies.
13. my mother has forbidden me to disseminate the recipe for sugar cookies, as there is a secret ingredient.
14. i prefer to think of secret ingredients as special ingredients.
15. across the house, i have some chickpeas cooking. there are no special ingredients about them.
16. ever since i moved to columbus, i have lived within a four-block radius.
17. i very nearly did not graduate from college. my name is not in the graduation program.
18. i am the first person in my family, on either side, to move north of the ohio river and to stay.
19. i was born in lexington, kentucky, the birthplace of more kentucky-derby-winning horses than any other city on the damn planet.
20. i am not a horse but when i was small i wanted to be one.
21. i learned to read before i was three years old.
22. i will turn 26 before i learn to drive a car.
23. my favorite numbers are eleven, twenty-three, and eighty-six.
24. i have a great dislike for numbers that end in 0 or 5, and will go out of my way to avoid using them.
25. i have studied french, japanese, spanish, italian, german, & (halfheartedly) greek.
26. i have forgotten nearly everything useful i once knew in japanese, except for �let�s go!� and �i used to study japanese but now i can�t speak it at all.�
27. i would rather eavesdrop than ask blunt questions.
28. i have four tattoos.
29. they are all stylized, and they are all all-black.
30. my favorite things to cook with are lime, sweet potato, coconut, oranges, peanuts, and pink lentils.
31. i subscribe to the nation & the other side.
32. i tithe.
33. i hate being made to guess things.
34. i like to be awake during the hours when it is dark, especially the very early morning.
35. my parents hold fast to a hope that i will be a published writer one day.
36. not an academic writer, but the kind whose books you can buy at your neighborhood branch of some conglomerate mega-bookstore.
37. i avoid such stores on principle.
38. my handwriting varies depending on what type of pen i am using.
39. i read once that women with psychiatric disorders tend to have handwriting like mine: never the same on two different days.
40. i keep a paper journal, very erratically, in red ink in a spiral-bound sketchbook.
41. to calm down, i like to do a crossword puzzle in one sitting.
42. i think i like to see each little letter centered in its little square.
43. i majored in art history not because i wanted to be an art historian but because it was the only discipline offered at my school in which you were encouraged to take more than two foreign languages.
44. i don�t like museums very much at all.
45. my favorite word in italian is pipistrelli, the word for bats.
46. i like bats in general as long as they are do not surprise me by flying up at me out of nowhere.
47. when the revolution comes, i will join a catholic worker community. i will build things and i will cook.
48. when i was eighteen, i asked my father to use his broadcast-journalist training to help me lose my kentucky accent.
49. i didn�t want people to presume i was stupid or slow or backwoods just because i pronounced i as ahh.
50. i hate beer.
51. i like chardonnay.
52. i like gin.
53. i like girly cocktails involving vodka & fruit & double-entendre names.
54. i like listening to the BBC at night, if i am up that late.
55. i find it very difficult to be vegan.
56. i always step over cracks in the sidewalk or in the pavement.
57. but whenever possible i will step on painted lines, as in a parking lot, so that the arch of my foot fits the width of the paint exactly.
58. i am sort of annoying to walk beside, i think.
59. i like my tea with soymilk & with honey.
60. i was expelled from preschool for what my teachers called insubordination but what my family calls already knowing how to read.
61. i hate when people misuse the word irony, & the word tragedy.
62. i fall in & out of love with little things & with people passing by me on a more or less constant basis.
63. i have been mired deeply in love with two people in my life. which is more than enough for me, thank you.
64. i taught myself to read music & to play the piano when i was ten.
65. i�m not any great shakes at the piano.
66. i tend to get obsessive crushes on brilliant men who are dead and/or queer.
67. i have a great fear of being published posthumously.
68. when i was twenty my school sent me to a psychiatric hospital in columbus for a weekend. tec went on the drive with me so i could get checked in okay. while i was there i ate only haagen-daazs strawberry ice cream because they had nothing else vegetarian for me to eat, & they wouldn�t let me bring any books into my room. because of the ice cream & the books, my mom drove up to ohio & sprang me after only a day or so. we checked into a hotel in town & ordered in food & watched tv. it was easter weekend so they were showing ben-hur.
69. my first boyfriend was the great-great-something-grandson of the man who wrote the novel, ben-hur.
70. when i was at kenyon i wrote a lot of poems with tea in them, & little art-historical references, & a lot of porcelain. lots of people took baths in my poems & got themselves killed (not necessarily in the same poem).
71. i like to write in iambic pentameter, much more than is probably chic.
72. when i am bored, i like to challenge myself to speak only in iambic pentameter, usually only if i don�t have something handy i can read instead.
73. my life changed the first time i heard nevermind.
74. one of my earliest clear memories is the day john lennon was killed, just before i turned four. my parents were stricken, heartsick. i remember my father telling me what a brilliant, beautiful person john lennon had been. he (my father) told me that some day he would play me some of his music. i remember thinking that my father must really, really love this man�s music, if he was willing to learn to play an instrument just to share some songs with me.
75. my first job was teaching �disadvantaged� fourth-graders how to write well. i was sixteen.
76. my parents don�t remember what my first sentence was. my brother�s was �turn fan on.�
77. i have never seen a dead body, even at a funeral.
78. i rarely order drinks when i am out, mostly because i don�t want to look like an idiot while doing so.
79. i was such an uptight child that my mother bought me a thich nat hanh book on meditation when i was eleven.
80. of all the characters in all the things i have ever read, i would most like to be rosalind in as you like it.
81. but i think i am actually most like the fillyjonk in the moominbooks.
82. i don�t like things to be loud.
83. i think the only legitimate excuses anyone has for being loud are playing music & having sex.
84. unless you are my neighbors, who don�t sound as if they are very talented at either effort.
85. in high school i had this recurring nightmare that this boy i had had a crush on was a serial killer. in the dreams his weapon was a pair of scissors. how lurid! how embarrassing, when he found out about it!
86. i have never read macbeth.
87. i think of myself as an activist, although i dislike the aspects of activism that involve being around other activists, not just because i generally don�t like being in groups of people, but because i think people talking about their activism make poor conversationalists.
88. the first record i ever had was she�s so unusual by cyndi lauper.
89. the last records i bought were accumulation: none (smog), time travel is lonely (john vanderslice) & tallahassee (the mountain goats).
90. jobs i wanted as a child: writer. jockey. teacher at a school for the deaf. veterinarian. stargazer. resident of nepal. painter.
91. other jobs i have wanted: governess. breadbaker. calligrapher. translator (not to be confused with interpreter, like at the UN, which i find utterly overwhelming). midwife. punk-rock vegan-bed-&-breakfast operator.
92. i suppose the last two are entirely possible, if you�re sort of liberal with your application of the term �punk-rock.�
93. when i was very tiny, probably pre-verbal, we lived on a farm in fayette county, kentucky, & i still don�t know why we did. it wasn�t our farm.
94. the farthest i have ever travelled was from kentucky to fukushima prefecture, japan.
95. i have never crossed the atlantic ocean.
96. when i am cooking, i like to listen to music very loudly & sing along also loudly, usually with plenty of rockstar posturing.
97. for this i especially like �total eclipse of the heart� by bonnie tyler.
98. i had planned to save this list for my 500th entry (imminent) or my birthday (also imminent), as a sort of celebration, but i decided to make it entry #491 because four hundred ninety-one is prime.
99. i have a very bad habit, when i am talking to my friends in my own home, of running over to the shelves with all my art history books on them so that i can have visual aids for whatever i am going on about.
100. i say �fuck� rather more than is called-for.
101. when i play chess i can�t hold any strategy in my head, so i just lean over the board so that i am looking straight down at it, & make whatever legal move will result in what i think is the prettiest composition on the board. this probably has a lot to do with reading what marcel duchamp had to say about any chess game being a four-dimensional work of art.
102. i have never won a game of chess in my life.
103. i pray.
104. i consider myself an existentalist radical catholic.
105. probably plenty of catholics would consider me hellbound & depraved.
106. i am the only person i know who has been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
107. i know plenty of people, though, who extend the OCD-label to themselves, sometimes justly, sometimes in ways that betray they don�t really know what it�s like to have all these rules in your brain.
108. i have never broken a bone.
109. when i am bored at work i like to do ultrasound exams on myself.
110. i have been known to cry in museums, just standing in front of a c�zanne.
111. i am now listening to cat power, �the colors and the kids.� it is 5.35 pm.
112. during the course of this list i have listened to twenty-five songs without stopping.
113. next i will continue to make dinner. we are having harira, which sounds like a future-tense spanish verb, but is in fact a moroccan stew with chickpeas & my friends the pink lentils.
