25 Things (1/28/09). (Anne’s facebook post)

So I keep getting tagged for this (& like reading everyone else's), so here you go. If I've successfully tagged you, please only participate if you want to.
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Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right-hand corner of the page), then click Publish.)

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1. I once spent a night alone in an Alcatraz island prison cell. This was a Girl Scout field trip. I slept pretty well, too.

2. A few years back, I almost won the Ithaca ChiliFest Mechanical Bull-riding contest. A feat of skill & bosom. But an 8 year old girl took the trophy instead.

3. I can’t decide. I’d like to do both.

4. Yesterday I dreamed I was a tiny, speckled octopus. At the ocean’s surface, I transformed into a blue dragonfly and flew away.

5. That may be my oldest unconscious hobby: asleep, I sample the proprioception of really alien bodies. Like octopi & dragonflies. Like an octogenarian mailman. An oak tree. Wind.

6. At my next birthday I’ll have been a vegetarian (pescatarian) for half my life. I marked it by eating a duck, a rabbit, a buffalo burger & bacon at five star restaurants. They were good.

7. When I was a kid I climbed trees in my yard to pick cherry-plums, green apples, pomegranates and loquats.

8. That was a good tree, too--the best loquats I’ve ever had. I carried their chestnut stones in my pocket. Then a man named Wren Morningstar poisoned the tree—on purpose, they said, vindictively—part of an argument I never understood. For that treason my father ran him off our property and never spoke to him again.

9. I pray.

10. During a month-long trek through the Death Valley desert, I hiked ten miles out to a single payphone in the stark barren howling middle of nowhere, only to learn I’d been wait-listed at a graduate school. “Can I call you back tomorrow?” the director asked me.

11. Mostly, I don’t mind shoveling snow.

12. In the throes of back-country dog-sledding, I had the thought (a common one, this life): ‘This is really not fun at all, but I’m very glad to be here.’ Looking back now, I love every part of that trip.

13. I played defense on a soccer team called ‘Sloth Explosion’.

14. During the 1980s California drought, I participated in a rain dance choreographed by my great aunt, a magnificent grand dame who played the organ and sang and smoked from a long cigarette holder. We danced, we sang; it didn’t rain. But we all felt a lot better about life. I believe things like this matter.

15. A psychic once told me I was a cheerleader in a past life. I was 16 and took offense.

16. Once I played the carillon bells from a tower over Cambridge, MA. I did it badly—total cacophony for miles—but it was really fun.

17. Around the age of 9, I woke up with a powerful sense of déjà vu: I had been this age before, had done things like this already, long ago. I wondered then if THIS might not be my fabled second chance. I’ve never lost that feeling.

18. I spent about seven sleepless weeks fastening electrodes onto people’s scalps and analyzing their brainwaves while they slept.

19. In the outback of Australia, a horny jackaroo gave me a t-shirt he’d blown to shreds with a shotgun. “I shot it twice,” he said hopefully, a little shyly, as if that extra shot just might make the difference. I turned him down. But I still have the shirt.

20. In my late twenties, a truly ancient, toad-like Turkish woman molested me in a Parisian bathhouse. I had no retort.

21. I once waded across a clear, ocean inlet, the water to my waist—the only way across—only to discover two hours later the water cloudy with feeding sharks.

22. I hate bar soap.

23. The Eolian volcano Stromboli erupted while I was camped on its black-ash cone. Both guys with me at the time—including the Aussie we met on the trail & have not (yet!) seen since—recently found me on Facebook. We’re thinking of a 20-year reunion.

24. Though I hated the town of Irvine, CA itself, the trailer park I lived in there remains one of my favorite ‘neighborhoods’ yet. They bulldozed it soon after I left & paved it into a parking lot.

25. I once broke my foot jumping for joy. A challenging omen. So far, it’s the only bone I’ve broken.
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