100 Things About Moi (I of IV)

1. I really like baseball. This is defined by relishing the memory of the Athletics in the 80's and going to Ranger games with my family as a kid. My brother collected the baseball cards, and I organized them. We once counted over 10,000 cards. So, I guess, really, I like to organize, and baseball got in the middle.

2. I witnessed Nolan Ryan's 5000th strikeout from the first baseline at Arlington Stadium. My dad bought me a t-shirt, which I no longer own (dangit!). This may or may not have been the same game that I told God that if Ruben Sierra got a base hit, then that meant I was supposed to marry Rueben Foster (my second grade love). Ruben rounded to third base. All in all, it was a good day for everyone.

3. One of my pet peeves is radio commercials that have cars honking in them. I usually only listen to the radio in the car, and my heart skips a beat, I check my rearview mirror, and I completely lose my train of thought. This irritates me because . . .

4. Most of my brilliant ideas come while I am vacuuming, showering, or waiting in the drive thru at Taco Shop.

5. In second grade, I wanted to invent a typewriter that typed in cursive. Second grade was a big year . . .

6. My first job was as a ride operator at Six Flags over Texas on the Log Ride. I don't think that's the technical name of the ride, but I had called it that since I was a kid. It had always been my favorite.

7. The only time in my life that I have ever enjoyed black coffee was a nine-month stretch last year of opening Starbucks at 5:00 a.m. I was a regular opener, and my tastebuds weren't awake enough to protest. Or maybe there was a lot of lobbying . . . I plead the fifth.

8. I LOVE Roald Dahl. When my mom found out, she began to buy up his entire works at Half-Price Bookstores across the Dallas metroplex. My favorites to this day: The BFG, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and The Twits. I checked out The Twits at our local library at least half a dozen times. (That was just a very wordy sentence for "I really liked it.")

9. As a kid, I owned about five goldfish, one at a time, and I named three of them Virginia.

10. I wasn't allowed to have pets as a child, except for the Virginias. So I collected porcelain cats. I had a space on top of my dresser reserved for their rompings, and I loved to arrange so they had optimal interaction with one another so they didn't get lonely. (See #11)

11. Jim Henson's "The Christmas Toy" changed my life. I had always been sure that my stuffed and porcelain animals came to life when I left the room, and now I had proof.

12. I love Diet Dr. Pepper, even though it is probably eating through the lining of my entire digestive system. Yum . . .

13. To me, ellipses denote sarcasm &/or humor . . .

14. I intend to quit drinking Diet Dr. Pepper and its cousins when I get to Germany--they're more expensive there, and harder to find--to borrow the immortal words of Tom Petty: "I'm taking the easy way out."

15. The very first non-Christian concert I went to was at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver to see The Allman Brothers. It's been a semi-illustrious five years.

16. After publishing my blog, I read my own post at least three times for editing purposes . . . and to chuckle at my own fine sense of humor.

17. I don't think I look good in yellow, but I love yellow so I wear it anyway.

18. I love mornings, even though I don't often get up to enjoy them when I can.

19. Spiders scare me, and I can't kill them--but only when I'm around someone who is not scared of them (or they're big-ass spiders). If the other person is the wienie, then something clicks and I can squish away.

20. I taught my dream-self how to wake up. I was sick of getting bullied by all the monsters, zombies, and my brother in my dreams and not being able to scream to wake myself up. So one night in my sleep, I just said, "Come on, Suzanne, swallow!" And after I swallowed, I could scream--which, I think really came out more of a mellow "Ungh . . . " but did the trick nonetheless.

21. My Barbies always suffered natural disasters when they were in my care--hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis. You think they would've picked up on their meteorological circumstances and worn more clothing.

22. I'm a hoarder. Hmm. That sounds a little harsh--I'm very sentimental.

23 & 24. My first known super power was being able to see through walls. In first grade, I always raced to be the first one done with bathroom break so I could be at the front of the line. Now, I am naturally competitive and that deserves its own number, but this particular race was so that I could practice seeing through "the wall." The front of the line was a corner in the middle of a dog-leg hallway (there's some golf terminology for ya). And if I leaned out just so, the wall became half-way transparent. I didn't tell anyone because I didn't want to reveal myself just yet--I mean, you just don't know who you can trust, right?

25. My sixth grade science teacher revealed to me that I, in fact, did not have a super power when he had us hold toilet paper tubes next to our hand and un-focus our eyes. Evil villain. I crushed a homemade confetti egg on his head later that year--bet you didn't see that coming, did ya, evil science teacher? Ha.