Here are 65 things about me.

1. I am a professor and a mommy, and trying to figure out how to do both.
2. I live in Southern California, by the sea.
3. I like the taste of ginger and coconut milk.
4. My bedside table currently holds the ten books I am reading now, plus one box of Kleenex. Five of these books are novels (Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero is the best of the bunch), one is a classic exploring memoir (Apsley Cherry-Gerard’s The Worst Journey in the World), three are academic books I might teach from, and only one is for turning my dissertation into a book manuscript. There’s also a pamphlet on camera technique, because I’d like to be able to use my husband’s camera.
5. I am heartily sick of my dissertation.
6. I was so active in my old small Connecticut town, trying to get bike-lanes and bike-friendly planning, that when I left, my friends gave me a bike parade. I still miss that gritty little city, even though I now live in paradise. I know no one will ever give me a parade again.
7. I love my colleagues. This is incredibly unusual in academia, I’m afraid. I got lucky.
8. Sometimes I also love my students. Not in that way.
9. I am trying to figure out how to be more than only a mommy – but this blog is mostly about mommying.
10. I used to rock climb nearly every weekend.
11. I am moody.
12. I am terrible at following, but I’m a good leader.
13. I love the taste of homegrown tomatoes.
14. I had my heart broken in 2003. I spent most of that year crying. But I also moved to a tiny apartment ten feet from the ocean, and found incredibly sustaining friends, and look back on that year as one of the best of my life.
15. The next summer I planted ninety-eight trees, by hand. These were five-year-old trees or so, weighing about 800 pounds each. I usually had helpers. It was my favorite summer job
16. I used to live in Asia.
17. My first job after college was teaching American Studies in Hong Kong.
18. I have also worked as a camp counselor at a Native-American-themed environmental camp that I now think was cheesy but wonderful, helping ghetto residents turn vacant lots into parks, and teaching in an urban public middle school. Oh, also as a professional proofreader.
19. I try to turn off my internal comma-checking, who/whom and it’s/its alarms. It annoys me that I can’t stop noticing grammar.
20. My unpaid jobs have included tutoring Tibetan refugees in India, rejecting unsolicited manuscripts at a publishing house, and taking homeless teenagers rock-climbing.
21. I used to travel so much that my passport had to have extra pages sewn into it, to hold all the visas. Sometimes I miss that travelling life, even though I also think there was an emptiness to endlessly staring at the lives of poorer strangers. Also, an extra-thick passport is awkward to carry in a money-belt.
22. Some inner-city youth whom I was tutoring once threatened to beat up anyone who called me a nerd. I told them that I call myself a nerd.
23. I am also a feminist.
24. I grew up in Boston.
25. I met my husband rock-climbing. At the base of the cliff, not actually on it.
26. I have two cats.
27. I have bicycled from Quebec to Vermont, around Prince Edward Island, through the Canadian Rockies, and from Oregon to San Francisco.
28. I drive a Prius.
29. I am afraid this list doesn’t actually describe me.
30. I have been Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Buddhist. I am now Unitarian Universalist so that I can still be all three and more.
31. On Sunday mornings, my husband usually goes to the church of surf. Lately it’s also the church of mountain-biking. I don’t think I mind.
32. I once met Mr. Rogers. Also the Dalai Lama. I think those were my two favorite famous people to meet.
33. I don’t understand People Magazine, or all the rest of pop culture that describes supposedly-famous people whom I don’t know.
34. Sometimes I feel un-American.
35. If there were a People Magazine about American Studies professors, I would read that.
36. I am addicted to The New Yorker.
37. I will never live in New York City.
38. I live in a surfer/hippy/old-people town right now. It used to be the poinsettia-growing capital of the United States.
39. I like my town. I don’t surf, though.
40. I live in a typical California ranch-style bungalow, built in 1965 in a subdivision of then-identical houses. I hate suburbia, but I like my neighborhood. It’s comfortable.
41. I am grateful that there was no Home-Owner’s Association here, so now most houses look mostly different.
42. This is the first house I have owned.
43. My mortgage scares me. So does home-ownership in general.
44. When we moved in, sitting around on boxes, with two other young couples and our new babies, I had a moment of panic. This is the first scene in so many dystopian novels of the 1950s, I told my friends. It’s all downhill from here. Depression, desperation, alcoholism, affairs, angst, and horror: we know how these novels all end. My friends didn’t understand. They thought I was afraid of ghosts.
45. My husband thinks it’s strange that I get emotionally involved in books.
46. I have never been a waitress.
47. My favorite radio station is kcrw.
48. I am probably a typical NPR listener, except younger.
49. One of my high-school boyfriends accused me of being “age-ist,” because I took him to see a foreign-language film where we were the only ones under 20, or maybe even 40. He told me that I was prejudiced against my own age cohort. I think he was wrong, but I’m not sure.
50. I didn’t have very many high-school boyfriends.
51. I was valedictorian. This may have scarred me.
52. I had no idea that I enjoyed athletics until I was almost 30 years old.
53. My husband is a high-school dropout. But he went back later to get his GED, then eventually to college. He is one of the smartest people I know.
54. I am terrible at feigning respect for people I don’t respect.
55. Fortunately, I like most people. Sometimes.
56. I am trying to learn how to be quiet.

57. I am a bad driver.

58. My teenage hero was Henry David Thoreau. I still like him, even though I now know that Walden Pond wasn’t an isolated retreat (that actually makes it better), and he took his laundry home to his mom
    once a week (that’s not so good). Last semester, I wandered off-topic in one of my intro classes, and ended up having my intro students enthusiastically repeating some of Thoreau’s aphorisms for weeks. “I have never yet met a man who was fully awake. How could I have looked him in the eye?” “How can you kill time without injuring eternity?”

59. I think I’m a pretty good teacher.

60. I am not good at shopping, housecleaning, putting on makeup, or wearing high heels. But I am a damn good cook. Especially if what you want to eat is international ethnic comfort food.

61. I bake bread.

62. I even sew quilts, by hand, when I’m in the mood, although I will not make quilts with puppies or whitespace or any sort of fussiness. My quilts look more Gee’s-Bend-ish.

63. I am a middle child, but it didn’t make me particularly diplomatic or balanced.

64. I like salt more than sugar.

65. I am shy, but no one believes me about that.