I enjoyed this exercise… I liked the lines from Viegener most when he was telling me something he’d learned from visiting places and hanging out with people, like hearing it from a friend in conversation. That said, most of mine are I-oriented, but if it weren’t on a blog, I may have written more things about people I know and experiences we’ve had.

1. It took me 13 years to feel comfortable saying I was an editor.
2. My hand usually starts to cramp up within about 12-15 lines of manual writing.
3. I’m always categorizing things as fair or unfair.
4. I wish I’d been breastfed as a child. If I had, I think I’d have a much better immune system and memory.
5. When I hear working mothers make fun of stay-at-home mothers, I cringe.
6. My mom’s favorite saying is, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”
7. My grandmother on my mom’s side’s favorite saying was, “Only boring people get bored.”
8. My sister and I text each other a lot. Most times the texts are psychological reviews of our upbringing where we are looking for corroboration. Other times, they’re just about things we watched on Netflix.
9. Lots of people believe good luck and bad luck both come in threes.
10. Last year, I had to stop eating all citrus and chocolate because they started giving me migraines with aura.
11. I’m not naturally an explorer. I have to force myself to go out.
12. My mind always goes to the worst place first.
13. There was a point a few years ago where I started curbing my exposure to glorified horrors. I stopped watching scary and/or violent movies and network TV news.
14. There should be more time to think and do and dream, and less time spent working for the man.
15. Whenever my dad orders food at a restaurant, he never likes what he orders. Then he sits and drinks coffee for the rest of the meal with this adorable, disappointed pout on his face.
16. When I was a child, we would visit my grandmother on my dad’s side once every few years. She came from a family of Carneys and had an amazing collection of elephant tchotchkes. I remember looking at them for hours while my dad visited with her and talked. When she died, I wondered what happened to them.
17. My brother and I look a lot alike.
18. I wish I were smarter so that I could understand NASA’s website and my sister’s boyfriend when he talks about nuclear physics.
19. When I found out the universe is flat, I had a hard time believing it.
20. When you’re in a relationship for a long time, you can instantly tell how the other person feels without words because you feel it, too.
21. Everyone’s at war. Everyone’s at love.
22. There seems a point in people’s lives when they don’t want to be reminded of the past anymore, especially by photographs. It’s usually when they are older and have lost their partner and/or someone in their family/circle of friends.
23. I believe in the serial comma.
24. These days, when trying to give a sense of a band’s sound, people always compare them to Wire (but none of them ever actually sound like Wire).
25. I always want to skip over text set off by parentheses and em dashes when I read, but I can’t bring myself to do it for fear I’ll miss something important.