and other things that make life sweet

one hundred facts about me

all in one tidy post:

100. I don’t like the term “making love.”
99. All I did in middle school was read Harry Potter, watch Charmed, and listen to Good Charlotte.
98. I love cinnamon applesauce.
97. I have an awful temper, and my degree of anger is usually entirely unhealthy, to the point that my hands shake until I have to throw something, to the point that I scream until my head hurts. I once threw a fork at my brother at the dinner table, and it ended up in his arm. He still has a scar.
96. I don’t really like Christmas songs, but I love Good King Wenceslas.
95. I once told my mother that my sister was my real mother.
94. I love to sleep in late.
93. I don’t particularly love animals. They’re cute, but I’d prefer chocolate, thanks.
92. I rowed Crew for three years, and the best part was my friends, those who joined with me and those I made in the club; the actual act of rowing was only fun when I didn’t have a coach breathing down my neck.
91. Ulysses S. Grant is my favourite historical figure. I even have a bobble-head of him my mother bought for me when I was accepted into college.
90. I’ve never been able to keep a diary for more than a week at a time, despite several attempts.
89. The only cereal I really like is Cheerios, just plain, regular Cheerios.
88. On sleep bingo boards in high school, I was always the center piece, because all the kids in my classes knew that I was a sure bet to fall asleep in any and every class.
87. My first real job was as a cashier in a grocery store for a summer.
86. If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born. The way all my relatives talk about him makes me certain I’d adore him.
85. I really like my full name, Margaret Edith. But I never plan to go by Margaret.
84. My favourite time of day is meal time, hands down.
83. I really love Russian literature, the great works and modern books.
82. I like to compare all situations in life to situations in books, movies, and television shows.
81. I started to write fanfiction the summer after my freshmen year of high school. The first person I told was my sister, two years later, the summer after my junior year. It took another year before I told anyone else in my family, and I only recently told my high school friends.
80. My right foot is fucked up, because according to my doctor I let endorphins hide my pain so I can continue to run, and I’ve turned a strain into a fracture that easily resurfaces because it’s never been allowed to heal properly.
79. I chipped my front tooth running into a basketball pole when I was eight in a neighbourhood flashlight tag game; my sister redid the restoration a few years ago and spent four hours on it, and every once in a while she still randomly comments that she’d like to redo it again.
79. For clarification, my sister is a dentist. Also, I worship the ground she walks on.
78. I don’t like ketchup, mustard, or any other condiments. I’m a Plain Jane on all counts.
77. I wrote my college essay about one of my brothers.
76. My family had a pet snake when I was little named Cupcake. I loved him, but I could never be convinced to feed him, especially since mice were my favourite animal when I was little. After he died, we found out he was actually a she. I still think of him as a he in my head, though.
75. It makes me uncomfortable to see my siblings show PDA with their significant others, although one is married, one is engaged, and one is in a serious relationship that’s on it’s way to marriage. Luckily for me, no one in my family is very physically affectionate.
74. I was kicked out of the girl scouts when I was fourteen and my troop was unceremoniously disbanded. But I signed up as a rural, individual girl scout so that I could still earn my Gold Award, and my troop signed up as a boy scout troop, just so we could have an official group status when we went on trips. Thus, I am both a girl scout and a boy scout.
73. I hate all green vegetables except cucumbers.
72. I have the grace of a club-footed duck.
71. I like to read my thesaurus when I’m upset about something.
70. My first kiss was in a parking garage the summer after my freshmen year of high school, and it was a disaster. I came to hate the boy, and I wrote a slick, “evil” character into one of my Harry Potter fanfictions with his name. Two years later, I wrote an English paper about the experience.
69. I want to have four or five kids someday. I love kids, and I think siblings are the greatest thing a parent can possibly give a child.
68. I can admit that college has made me much more socially liberal, but I’m still a Republican.
67. I used to have a reoccurring nightmare in which my mother was turned into a lamp.
66. My college friends have taught me how to laugh at myself more so than anyone else, and I’ll always be grateful to them for that.
65. I love country music.
64. My favourite chick flick will probably always be either Sweet Home Alabama or It Happened One Night, and I’ve seen them both too many times to count.
63. Diet Dr. Pepper Cherry is my favourite soda by a large margin.
62. I hated my dad with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns in high school. When he told me once “to get the fuck out of his sight,” I left the house and spent the night with my friend Lauren, and my mother called to apologise for my dad the next morning before school. He never did apologise himself; instead, he bought me a season of Gilmore Girls on DVD.
61. I have trouble falling asleep if I don’t go for a run that day.
60. I really, really love peanut butter sandwiches.
59. I wrote my first story when I was in the seventh grade. It was a fantasy novel called “The Not Disease,” featured four magical teenagers and a talking pine martin, and was 68,000 words long. I wrote a sequel of equal length called “Saving Abbate,” in which I daringly killed off one of the original characters. I started a third to complete the trilogy, but before I finished I became invested in another novel that fell to the wayside in favour of Harry Potter fanfiction.
58. I like the soundtrack to the movie Gettysburg, because it makes me think of home and my mother.
57. My brother and I used to ride down the giant hill of our neighbourhood in a wagon in our best attempt to bobsled a la Cool Runnings. I even used to put an egg my mother gave me in my pants. She didn’t tell me until years later that she always gave me a hardboiled egg. I’m still surprised she even let us ride down in that wagon time and time again at all.
56. No matter how cliché it is, Pride and Prejudice will always be my favourite Jane Austen novel.
55. I have a tendency to make bold assertion of dislike for things, only then to eat my own words.
54. My most prized possession is my stuffed pink bear, creatively named Pink Bear.
53. I love pink champagne.
52. I have awful allergies, to dust as well as to pollen.
51. I kick ass at Mario Kart.
50. I learned to drive in my sister’s truck, and I want to own a truck of my own someday.
49. I have a pretty dirty mouth.
48. I’m sarcastic, and I like to tease people, and this only drives how shy I am, because I’m afraid to act like myself in front of people who don’t know me for fear they’ll misinterpret. I tend to tone myself down on tumblr a lot for the same reason.
47. I still like and respect George W. Bush.
46. My brother and I used to push all the furniture in the living room up against the wall, spray the wooden floor with cooking spray, and then slide across it in tube socks. We usually weren’t able to cover up the evidence and were spanked for making a mess, but it never deterred us from doing it again, because fun times are fun times.
45. I read the screenplays of the first two season of Veronica Mars before I actually watched them.
44. I love The Bronze Horsemen trilogy by Paullina Simons, and I’m scared for them to make them into movies for fear they’ll mess up the books I’ve read a dozen times over.
43. My best friend from high school and I theorised before the sixth Harry Potter book that the Half-Blood Prince would be Hagrid. We were positive it would be.
42. I love steak so much it’s unreal.
41. I’ve never met a celebrity before, and the only kind I’ve ever cared to meet are authors, because I idolise them in a way that I can’t seem to care about movie or television celebrities.
40. I spent most of my freshmen year of college mad for a boy that all my friends told me was gay. He has a girlfriend now, and I haven’t talked to him since the start of sophomore year.
39. I really love my sister-in-law, but I secretly like when my brother drives up for holidays or events and she stays in NC because he’s more like my brother, a kid again, when she isn’t around.
38. My sister used to bribe me if I gave her a certain number of “plucks” to pluck my eyebrows, an experience my young self considered absolutely and totally excruciating—literally comparable to the crucifixion of Christ.
37. I don’t like hugs. They’re awkward.
36. I can swallow a sneeze. I’m very proud of that fact.
35. When I write stories, I tend to mumble the dialogue to myself, often make the faces I imagine the characters to make, sometimes even crying when they’re supposed to cry. This never fails to amuse my friends endlessly.
34. I hate class outdoors, and I don’t understand how anyone likes it.
33. I find caterpillars creepy.
32. I’m not big on holidays. I don’t like holiday music, I don’t like fireworks, I’m not big on parties or having to deal with large groups of people, and I’m not a big fan of breaks from the routine.
31. I have never wanted to travel anywhere. I hate to travel, in fact.
30. My mother used to sing me one Lutheran hymn every night before bed. I never had an actual bedtime, but I had to be in bed by 10:00, when she turned into a pumpkin, if I wanted a song.
29. I’ve had a baby boy pee on me while I was babysitting.
28. I loved to play out doors when I was little. I have lost any and all interest in the outdoors now. I’m a domesticated creature.
27. I can enjoy almost any genre of movies, with the exception of horror movies.
26. I like to chew gum when I run.
25. I really like trinkets, and I want to have a house full of them someday.
24. I can’t go in Yankee Candle stores, because all the smells make my head hurt.
23. I love history as much as I do because it’s all just a big, complex, colourful story, and who doesn’t love a good story?
22. I’m insanely moody, as is my sister, to the point that she says Katy Perry’s Hot ‘n’ Cold should be our theme song. She’s not really far off the mark.
21. I’m a pretty anxious, impatient person.
20. I was the head of my college’s Harry Potter club last year.
19. I tend to prefer hate of fiction characters rather than love, if for no other reason than people who really love a character are more often self-righteous about it, and self-righteousness is pretty much my least favorite quality in a human being.
18. I love the cheesy bread at my school an immeasurable amount; it’s responsible for my freshmen fifteen. And, for the record, cheesy bread from anywhere else is just not as good.
17. I really, really value loyalty.
16. I like making lists. I make a to-do list every day, and it stresses me out if I don’t complete absolutely everything on it.
15. I don’t really care for rap music, except for the occasional running song.
14. I have random nit-picks on grammar, such as split infinitives.
13. I hold grudges, despite how exhausting they are.
12. I don’t like when people whine, especially when I like them, because it makes my heart hurt a little to know that they’re upset, to the point that if it goes on for too long it annoys me.
11. I’m actually very conservative on matters of sex, despite the fanfiction and the television that I enjoy. It’s one thing to read and to write and to watch it; it’s another entirely for it to be real life.
10. I asked a boy to prom my junior year, and he said yes. It’s one of the few real risks I’ve ever taken in my life.
9. I don’t like to take risks at all.
8. I hate to cook but love to bake.
7. In the privacy of my own home, my favourite guilty pleasure is to sing songs from Sound of Music in the shower. My brother thinks it’s hilarious, but he sings Toby Keith and takes bubble baths, so he has no room to speak.
6. I started to skip school a lot my second semester of senior year of high school, or parts of the day, at least, such as leaving early or coming in late, just because I stopped really caring. It was awesome.
5. Occasionally, when I’m upset, I’ll really, really want to see my sister or my mother, but it only lasts for small periods of time. The only person I’ve ever missed so much it hurts is my best friend from college, Kristen, who took this semester off.
4. I’m partially dyslexic, and I hate to read aloud for that reason. I also have terrible pronunciation.
3. I don’t really laugh; I only smile as loudly as I can.
2. I can’t watch the Olympics because I’m always worried that the people will mess up, and it stresses me out. I can’t watch embarrassing moments in movies or television shows at all, in fact, even if the characters aren’t even embarrassed for themselves.
1. My sister is named Katie, but when she was in college there were several other girls on her freshmen hall called Katie, so they all ended up with descriptive nicknames, like Dancer or Runner or, my personal favourite, Beaver, because the girl had a stuffed beaver. My sister’s nickname was after a scholar’s dorm that she opted out of living in despite being awarded that scholarship. Whenever I would visit her, all her friends assigned that nickname to me, with the addition of “little,” and I used to love that, because growing up I was so insanely proud of being my siblings’ little sister. I used the name when I created a livejournal account in seventh grade. If you haven’t figured it out, it’s Monroe’s Little, or simply monroeslittle :)