1. I am weird about food – The list of foods I hate usually comes as a shock to everyone and makes birthday parties and office to-dos a huge pain in the ass. So here we go, once more….I hate ice cream, cookies, cake, pie, cheese, pasta, chocolate, The Olive Garden, “home cookin’” (Black Eyed Pea/Dixie House), pancakes, anything sweet for breakfast really. That being said I loves me some eating so don’t go, “well, what DO you eat?” because the answer is pretty much anything not on that list. I am a goddamned raccoon and will eat almost anything other than the things I just listed. I might even eat bugs as long as you don’t dip them in chocolate.
2. My mom is my best friend – Sometimes when people ask me on Saturday night what I did during the day, I say, “I just hung with my mom all day” I think people think I am either saying that to sound like a good daughter or to hide the fact that I was doing something unsavory. The honest truth is that my mom is like a sister to me. I tell her everything. My mom and I talk politics, we discuss movies, she tells me when clothes look dumb, we watch nerdy history documentaries on TV together, we help each other rearrange furniture. If you know me well, you know that there are few things that I hold truly sacred and you can pretty much make fun of anything and I am cool. But don’t fuck with my moms, yo.
3. I would take a bullet for my close friends – I’m not saying that in a “my friends are awesome and mean a lot to me” kind of way. I mean that no fight with a boyfriend or lost pet or financial meltdown I have ever had can hold a candle to how bad I feel if a friend and I are in a fight. I don’t know if I say it enough but I would drop a dude in a hot minute if he didn’t like one of my friends. This is the part where I start mouthing along to “You’re the Inspiration” and staring off into the distance….
4. I like sports more than I like music – I always liked sports. Even when I was going to shows every night. It wasn’t a dirty little secret or anything but I didn’t wear it on my sleeve like I do now. But you may have noticed recently how if I am at a show (rare) and there is a TV in the corner with even the most obscure and banal sports highlights playing, I always err on the side of watching the highlights. I mean, I can still HEAR the music, right? I am still bitter about The Theater Fire having to showcase at SXSW during the triple overtime Suns-Mavs game three years ago. Very bitter.
5. In keeping with that theme, I really dislike it when people say, “I hate sports” – I know that sounds judgmental of me but let me explain. I understand that there are some people who just don’t get into sports. But in response to that, I will say that I know people like that who will watch sports and randomly pick a team based on preferred uniform color or better team mascot and root for that team like how you root for a penny you drop in one of those spiral penny racers at The Science Place. You don’t have to have some deep love of the game or the team or intricate knowledge of stats and players to enjoy a spirited match. But what REALLLLLLY annoys me to no end are people who say they hate sports because either they think it makes them sound more artsy or intellectual or sensitive or because they look down their noses at people who like sports as being beer-swilling rednecks. The worst was someone who backed up his hatred of sports with a convoluted diatribe about how all professional sporting events are rigged (like the moon landing, he said….yeah) and people who watch them and invest any emotional interest are no different than people who think WWE is real. Yeah, that bugs me.
6. My best friend (not my mom, the other one) and I ate SweetTarts off the ground and took pizza from a man crying on the subway while living in New York City when we were really poor.
7. (I am changing my phone number and address after I post this because of this one alone) I CANNOT GET INTO “THE WIRE” – Seriously, please lay off me about The f’ing Wire. I promised my friend Danny that I would watch four episodes at which point he promised me that I would be hooked. I watched 50 minutes of the first episode. It felt like the scene from A Clockwork Orange where they pry his eyes open and force him to watch ultraviolence over and over again. I know I promised but I just…….can’t. It’s just not my thing. I don’t understand why every character is trying so hard to sound so tough and mean all the time. Normal sentence: “Hey man, I’m going to Subway for lunch. Want me to grab you something?” The Wire version: “Hey you lazy motherfucker, I’m going to motherfucking Subway for some motherfucking lunch, you stupid piece of shit. Do you want me to grab your fat ass a sandwich while I am there, motherfucker?
8. I have a cat but I am a dog person - I like my cat. I probably don’t like your cat though. My cat is named Izzy Stradlin after the guitarist in Guns n Roses. He likes to walk on the top of doors and give out high fives if you ask him for one. He sometimes eats his own vomit which is both doglike and considerate. If I had a yard and didn’t live in an apartment, I would have a dog. And Izzy.
9. I don’t think I know how to decorate like an adult – I don’t mean that I have Dora the Explorer (it’s really hard to not spell that as Dora the Explora) sheets on my daybed. Hell, I don’t even have a daybed. But when people refer to Ikea as being cheap-looking or generally being for college kids, I get really quiet because I’m like, “Oh shit, really?” My mom (who is on my Facebook and potentially reading this and won’t mind me saying this) is not really a master of interior design but she said to me the last time she was at my apartment “Do your friends ever ask why your apartment décor is so, ummmm, eclectic?” I am assuming she’s referring to the fact that I have never purchased a single piece of furniture or a wall hanging. Yet I have many of both of them. I just get given things. And I like them. It’s not like I make do with them. My grandmother gave me a beautiful cream colored 50’s velvet loveseat. The big couch I have wouldn’t fit out the front door when the previous tenants moved out so I inherited it. Over my couch hangs a huge framed print of Eddie Money that Danny salvaged from the bowels of 93.3 The Bone’s prize closet. I think he thought he would give it to me and I would laugh and then put it in a closet. I don’t have it up for kitsch value. I like Eddie Money. A lot. My mom grew up for a while in Iran so I have tons of weird Iranian prints and cartoons that I found in closets in her and my grandmother’s house over the years. I have one of those free bamboo calendars for 2009 that I got when I ordered Chinese food last month. I have a needlepoint my mom made of a bowl of fruit back in the late 1970s. Apparently this is not how you are supposed to decorate a dwelling. I tried to subscribe to Domino magazine to right my wrongs but they just went out of business.
10. I’m liberal to the point that I think I might be Scandinavian or even a socialist – It’s true. I want toddlers to get free condoms. I want reparations. I want the entire military budget to be spent on the arts.
11. I can’t figure out why in the world I think Jeremy Shockey is cute – Seriously, re-read #10 then try to figure out what the fuck my attraction to Jeremy Shockey is all about? Glutton for punishment? I guess.
12. My favorite number is 87 and my favorite color is red
13. My favorite musician of all time is Elvis and my three favorite Elvis songs are “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care”, “Put the Blame on Me” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and I have, sadly, never been to Graceland
14. My favorite actor of all time is Robert Mitchum and my two favorite Mitchum movies are Night of the Hunter and Two for the Seesaw
15. Like Barack Obama, I am hopelessly addicted to my Blackberry and am somewhat ashamed of it. I compulsively check it like I’m waiting on news about my organ transplant list status. I’ve been through a few of them. Memory leaks, battery pulls and freezing aside, my Blackberry and I are BFFs.
16. I inherited my crush on Meat Loaf from my mom – When I was little, Saturdays were house cleaning day and we would open all the doors and windows on a nice day and my mom would play Bat Out of Hell while we were cleaning the house. My mom had a crush on Meat Loaf. I remember reading that he had a daughter named Amanda when I was like 10 and thought, “What if Meat Loaf is my real dad?” He wasn’t. What makes this story even creepier is that now as an adult, I have a crush on Meat Loaf. Freud yourself out of that one.
17. I want to grow up to be Tina Fey – Obvious. Also, if I were a little girl, I would soooooo want to be Sasha and/or Malia Obama. I’m totally jels of them.
18. I secretly want to be a car nerd – I know it’s the least green thing I could possibly say but there are times when I see a ridiculously ridiculous 12 cylinder early 80’s Jag and kind of sigh and whimper a little. The ones with the flying buttress back windows? Yeah, one of those. Sigh. Whimper.
19. I am so excited to be a godmommy that I am about to burst – Even though I lost out on my effort to convince Chrissy and Gaz to name their unborn baby boy Jersey City Evans, I will console myself with the fact that I get to be the happiest Auntie Amanda in the whole wide world come this summer. The baby might even share a birthday with Clint Eastwood AND John Bonham. Oh dear. I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.
20. I love doing things by myself – I am an only child raised by a single parent so it’s just always been that way. I don’t get when people talk about being lonely or hating having to do things by themselves. I wake up on the weekends and do my errands and relish the chance to do everything on my own schedule without having to consider other people’s opinions, thoughts or schedules. It’s rad. The other night (after a day of being told that Dallas was about to break off like a glacier and we would have to start fighting off rabid polar bears because of a weak ice storm), I decided that I wanted to go to a Mavs game. No organizing or making plans or scheduling. I went home after work, changed and grabbed a bite to eat and went to the AAC. Walked up, lucked into a ticket and sat really close. Made friends with the guys sitting next to me who bought me a beer and we talked sports. It was the most fun I have had at a Mavs game in…..ever. Seriously, doing stuff by yourself is rad.
21. The rudest person I ever met in a band in my whole time around the music industry was John Davis from Superdrag - Yep. True story. Not only that but I was a fan. Big time fan. I hope he is enjoying whichever shift he has been able to pick up at the local Arby’s. Dick.
22. I am still learning the correct meaning of very basic symbols and phrases - A few examples of this: I made a reference to the shamrock on a car’s air conditioner control panel a few years ago. It’s apparently the symbol for the fan. I asked why people threw down drinks during challenges in the olden days. Was met with blank stares. I further explained that I didn’t understand why people refer to “throwing down the gauntlet” and didn’t that mean, like, throwing down a some sort of goblet-like cup full of wine when you have been insulted and feel the need to challenge that person to a fight? Finally, I once told my mom that a song written by John Phillips was written by “John. From Peter, Paul and Mary”
23. I have a horribly embarrassing tattoo – If you are 17 years old and a Manic Street Preachers fan, PLEASE LISTEN TO ME…..just wait. Wait a few years. Just wait. Please.
24. I am sad that I don’t speak to any of my family in Georgia anymore – I miss going to Georgia and I miss my family there but unfortunately, since my grandparents died so too did my final ties with my dad’s family there. I have nothing but AMAZING memories of my childhood in Georgia and all of my relatives save one. In some ways, it almost seems better that way.
25. I am painfully shy – I know that sometimes if you cross my path after a few drinks or if you get to know me well enough for me to show you my Leon Lett dance (always injuring myself in the process), it may not seem that way but once a fat kid, always a fat kid. By nature, I tend to keep to myself and not want to bother people and like to keep a very low profile. Sometimes people say that I seem snotty because of it. Trust me, I’m not. If you think that’s the case, just come up and say hello. Unless you are eating something made of both cheese and chocolate because that’s just nasty.
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