"What we play is life."

16 random things about myself? Okey dokey.

1. Uh-oh, I'm having trouble thinking of a number one. How am I going to come up with sixteen? Let's see... I hate my parents' house. HATE IT. It's huge and spacious and in the country, and I hate it. It's lonely and far away from everything and there are bugs EVERYWHERE. In the last three weeks there have been four spiders in my bathroom, a spider still chilling out in my closet, and some weird bug in my drawer. Fuck living in the country, I'm going to live in the city for the rest of my life and walk to work and only have to deal with one bug at a time.

2. I am so unspeakably happy to be going to college. I work at Quizno's and I think man, this sucks, I miss retail... then I work at retail and some customer insults me and I think man, this sucks, I hate retail... the truth is that if I really thought I would have to work at a retail or food service job for my whole life I think I would shoot myself. I am so happy that even though I have no idea what it's going to be like, when I get my Ph.D. I can spend the whole rest of my life as a counselor or an experimental researcher or a professor or any number of other professions. No more sandwiches and shirt returns for me.

3. My favorite color is green. I am very fond of white, though. Despite this, I have twice as many black articles of clothing in my closet than any other color. Ths is because I am ridiculously self-conscious, so when it comes to a choice between a red shirt and a black shirt, I'm going to choose the black shirt because it will hide me better. Hopefully my wardrobe will become more colorful by the summer. We'll see.

4. I love books. It really sucks that I haven't read very many books for pleasure in the last year or so. I kind of miss the days in high school where I would check out ten books from the library, read three of them, and fall in love with one of them.

5. As much as I love dogs, I am not going to get one of my own for many many years. They are far too much responsibility and take too much time and care, which I simply don't have. I don't want to feel bad every time I have to write a paper or see a client and leave behind those sad puppy dog eyes.

6. I wish I was better with technology. I'm way better with it than my parents, thank god, but not nearly as good as I wish I was. Jeff is majoring in computer engineering, so whenever he starts to talk about intense computer stuff I desperately wish I knew what he was talking about so I could talk to him about it without first needing him to explain everything.

7. I am fascinated with homosexuality. I get really excited when people tell me that they're gay, and I'm more inclined to say "oh that's so cute" about a gay couple than about a straight couple. If it's still in there by the time I get to grad school, I want to get Gender Identity Disorder off the DSM. I think it's a substitute for homosexuality, and who are you to decide that a little girl who likes GI Joe better than Barbie is mentally disordered?

8. I used to think that I always thought the best of everyone and never assumed that people were deliberately shafting me. Now that I'm getting older, I am afraid that that side of me is slipping away. These days if something bad happens I do look for reasons instead of just accepting that something bad happened. I don't want to become as judgmental and rude as almost everyone else I see. I wish I could hold on to that sort of innocence a little longer.

9. I hate listening to people eat. It drives me nuts. Especially if they eat loudly by intention, like my dad does. So unbelievably annoying. One of the scary things about relationships is that you're going to eat meals together, and I'm going to have to listen to you eat; and if you eat loudly, I'm going to want to shoot myself.

10. In order to avoid focusing all my repressed anger from my own childhood onto one of my own children (which is what my mom did to me, pretty much) I want to have five children. That way I'll be so busy taking care of all these kids and making ends meet and trying to still have a love life with my husband that I won't have time to be insidious and hurtful to any of my kids. Good plan, right? Plus, I love the idea of a big huge family. All that love in my house... what a great feeling that will be. But I don't think I'll get married until I'm at least 25, so I doubt I'll have kids until I'm almost 30.

11. I use this LJ way too much. I rely on it to write down my thoughts and feelings about everyday events and people, and to make plans about things like grad school and relationships. I used to write emo, melodramatic entries almost every day about how terrible my life was... thankfully I don't do that too much anymore. It still happens, but not as often as it used to.

12. On that note... my life is kind of amazing right now. Everything is going so well for me: school, grades, psychology, classes, work, friendships, living arrangements, money, and even an amazing boyo who for whatever reason seems to like me as much as I like him. Even though there will always be things to complain about--that jackass at work, my parents, time, commitment phobia--the truth of it is that my life is a really happy one right now.

13. I really hate women who fail to be independent. This customer today freaked out over something tiny and immediately called her husband to say she'd be late and blamed the salesperson (that would be me) very childishly and needlessly. Um, fuck you. You're thirty years old, way too reliant on your husband, and freaking out over a return at JCPenney. By the time I'm your age I'll have my Ph.D. and a family, and I'm not going to call my husband to childishly blame the teenaged retail worker. Grow up and be your own person. [And this ties in to number 8... she is rude to me, and I immediately think bad things about her. Gotta stop doing that kind of stuff.]

14. I hate competition. Hate it. So much. I don't want to lose, because I will feel bad about myself. But if someone else loses and I win, then I forget about how bad I feel when I lose things and just feel like gloating. I try to limit the instances in which I encounter competition, but it's not always possible. The only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore winner--someone who takes their success and flaunts it right in your face. I never, EVER want to be that person. If I get something that I worked hard for and am really proud of, I'll be excited about it, but the more I talk about how excited I am the more I feel like I'm rubbing it in somebody else's face, even if it isn't my intention. So the older I get, the less I talk about that stuff. [I write about it on livejournal instead.]

15. If I could go for the rest of my life without ever driving a vehicle again, I would be really happy. I hate driving. I never actively wanted to learn how to drive when I was little, and now I'm just afraid of it. However, since a life without driving isn't very plausible, I am going to have to get over my fear of driving and just do it. I want to be a good driver, and good drivers aren't afraid, they're confident. Therefore, I need to believe that I am a good driver, and then I will start to be one.

16. Psychology is the love of my life. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be in another profession, like a professional musician or a German studies major... but the loss of psychology feels like a pang in my stomach. When I was little and fancied myself an author, I stopped writing those silly stories about horses and cute boys that little girls write because I didn't know how to make the characters act like real people... and thus my love of psychology was born. My life without it would be so radically different, I can't even imagine it. So even though it might be cool to play in an orchestra for a job or tackle something like engineering, I never ever seriously consider straying from my plan to get my Ph.D. in psych.