100 Things About Me

The Yankee Blogger started this '100 Things About 100 Bloggers in 100 Days' so I thought, why not? Here's a little, er, a lot about me.

(Oh, the spaces seem kind of random, but they're necessary for sanity's sake if I want people to actually read this. Otherwise it's just a block of un-ending text and who wants to deal with that?)

1. I’ve been blogging for less than a month. I love it!
2. My boyfriend gave my domain name to me as a gift and set up my blog for me.
3. Yes, he is kind of a geek. It’s okay; he knows it.
4. I am constantly amazed by the fact that people are actually reading this.
5. I love when people leave comments for my blogs. Love it.
6. I have a brother and a sister who have provided me with a total of two nieces and three nephews.
7. John Lennon was killed on my eighth birthday.
8. At the time, that didn’t mean a whole lot to me.
9. I share my birthday with Jim Morrison and Kim Basinger.
10. Oh, it’s December 8.
11. I was born in 1972. Jim & Kim were not.

12. My grandfather, grandmother, and sister all share the same birthday. My grandparents also got married on that day. Three of my friends and one of my co-workers also have that birthday.
13. This all means that every year I spend a lot of money on cards in the middle of July.
14. I’m going on a cruise to Alaska in a week and a half.
15. I’ve never been on a cruise before.
16. I’ve also never been to Alaska before.
17. I can’t wait! I want to watch otters cavort in the wild.
18. My boyfriend didn’t know the difference between a beaver and an otter.
19. I can’t figure out the difference between a sea lion and a seal.
20. As a child, my favorite holiday was Independence Day.
21. As an adult, my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.

22. I am a pack rat. As such, my room is a sty right now. Oh, and I desperately need to do laundry.
23. I am a dog person but my lease doesn't allow for pets, so I live vicariously through the dog owners in my neighborhood.
24. I am an asthmatic, an epileptic, and I only have one lung.
25. Okay, I have one and a third lungs.
26. I had part of my right lung removed when I was 21.
27. I have a metal chain that hangs down in my chest to hold the rest of my lung up.
28. It doesn’t set off metal detectors.
29. I sort of wish that it did. That would be cool.
30. But I do have cool scars!

31. I love a capella music.
32. I love classic rock.
33. I’ve spent way too much time recently downloading both.
34. Anywhere between two and six days a week, I do improv comedy.
35. Yes, that sometimes is a lot.
36. I recently lost 36 pounds.
37. I have a mole on my left shoulder blade and another on the back of my left ear.
38. My dad has moles in the exact same spots.
39. I consider my dad one of my very best friends.
40. Not because of the mole thing.
41. My mom and I are not nearly as close as my dad and I are. Growing up, my mom and I had a very adversarial relationship and it’s only in the past five years or so that we’ve really come to have an understanding of each other.

42. I met one of my closest friends when we were dating the same guy. Neither one of us stayed with him much longer after we found out about the other.
43. I am still close friends with my best friend from junior high school
44. I had several different majors in the course of my college career, including art history, psychology, American history, molecular genetics, and political science. If I were to go back to school now, I would major in anthropology.
45. I have a B.A. in Technical Theatre – which I really don’t use.
46. I have a job in financial services market research.
47. The best part of my job lately is the fact that I have a view overlooking Boston Harbor.

48. I have a metal crocodile in my room – it’s actually a candleholder, but it’s huge and it’s fun.
49. I have a glass cactus on my desk at work. It’s made out of squares of cut glass placed on top of each other at different angles and it’s very sharp.
50. My favorite band is The Tragically Hip. They’re Canadian. I’ll forgive you if you haven’t heard of them.
51. My all-time favorite sit-com is Taxi.
52. My all-time favorite movie is The Breakfast Club.
53. I could probably recite nearly the entire movie if asked to do so.
54. A friend and I once quoted The Princess Bride back and forth to each other via e-mail for ten days. We figure that we covered about 95% of the movie.
55. At any given time, I am usually reading two to five different books. Right now I am reading five.
56. Yes, occasionally that gets confusing. I try to read several different genres at a time so as not to get plotlines mixed.
57. My favorite authors include Pat Conroy, Marian Keyes, Stephen King, John Irving, Nick Hornby, Sharon Shinn, and oh, the list goes on…
58. I like to read books more than once. I have read a few books more than ten times.
59. When I was young, my favorite book was Roald Dahl’s "Danny, the Champion of the World." I could never convince people how good it was. Last year I got five copies and gave them to friends as Christmas gifts.

60. I am a grammar freak. Poor grammar drives me insane. If there are spelling and/or grammatical errors in this blog, e-mail me immediately.
61. My favorite punctuation mark is the ellipsis. It is the only punctuation that I tend to misuse... and I guess it's not really misuse... it's just overuse... you know?
62. I have two middle names – Mary and Sylvia, for two of my great-grandmothers.
63. My parents spelled my paternal great-grandmother’s name wrong. Should have been Silvia.
64. My first name, Joy, has a story behind it. There is a bible verse that says, "Weeping may tarry in the night but joy cometh in the morning." I was born just before noon. Also, I was the first girl born in my father’s family in over 65 years and they were pretty thrilled.
65. All four of my grandparents were still alive when I started college, and I knew two of my great-grandparents as well.
66. Nationality-wise, I consider myself Italian, primarily because my last name is Italian. In actuality, I am only a quarter Italian. The rest is German, Irish, English, and just plain mutt. Technically, I guess I'm American though.
67. I do speak Italian, albeit poorly. I can understand it and I can read it, but trying to form sentences to someone who is fluent gives me language stage fright.
68. I don’t get stage fright on stage. I used to, back when I was doing straight theatre, but improv cured me of that.
69. I have performed onstage in seven different states.

70. I have blonde hair and really blue eyes.
71. I love baseball, but I kind of wish the players had gone on strike. Then I wouldn’t have to watch the Red Sox spiral down into late-season crap.
72. No, I don’t think that makes me a fair-weather fan. I still love them; they just disappoint me.
73. My favorite Red Sox player is Trot Nixon. He’s not the greatest player, but he’s got spirit and he’s seems like he’s always trying. He doesn’t phone it in.
74. I think I might be addicted to risotto. I love the stuff. Crave it.
75. I prefer Aquafina bottled water, which is really just the waste product of making Pepsi, to most spring waters.
76. I’m allergic to shellfish and erythromycin. Apparently this is a common allergy combination.
77. When I eat shellfish, my throat closes. When I have erythromycin I get hives.

78. When I was eighteen months old, I ran away from home. They found me three houses away, asleep under a bush.
79. When I was three, I crashed my dad’s car. He stopped at a Fotomat and I decided to pretend I was making pizza. I put the car in reverse and it smashed into a pole.
80. When I was in sixth grade, I got in trouble for bringing a ‘sex book’ to school. It was “Our Changing Bodies, Our Changing Lives.” The note that my teacher sent home said that the book caused much “bewilderment and consternation” in the classroom.
81. I still find that phrase – “bewilderment and consternation” – endlessly amusing. I’m not sure why.
82. I have a tendency to lose umbrellas.
83. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. When I picked colleges to apply to, I chose only schools that were at least 400 miles from home and only schools that were co-ed.
84. I enjoyed college more than high school.
85. It’s sad and pathetic and cheesy, but I really love The Monkees. I loved the TV show and I still love the music.
86. On one of my first dates with my boyfriend we went to a Monkees concert. It turned out that it was just Micky and Davey and I felt somehow cheated.

87. I’m near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other. I also have extremely severe astigmatism.
88. I am collecting the complete film libraries of John Cusack, Janeane Garofalo, Scott Cohen, Edward Norton, and Bonnie Hunt. My roommate is collecting those of Drew Barrymore, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Aniston, and Dwight Schultz. I think I have better taste.
89. I like reality TV, despite the fact that it has little to no connection to reality.
90. When I was a kid, I wanted to write a baby name book when I grew up. I used to keep lists of names I liked and I started collecting baby name books when I was about eleven. That freaked my parents out a lot.
91. I once found a three-hole punch in a ladies room. I kept it.
92. I enjoy traveling by train.
93. I am a pop culture freak.
94. I love having a cell phone.
95. My favorite mammal is the cheetah, but I think my favorite animal over all is the butterfly. I also like otters, as I mentioned in #17.
96. I’m terribly sarcastic.
97. I think pirates, cavemen, and beekeepers are intrinsically funny.
98. I don’t really have a favorite color. It sort of alternates between purple, green, and blue.
99. I’m kind of hungry.
100. I’m in love... and it is fabulous.