First 17 things

18. I was recruited into the Hoorah Cloggers largely because I have high arches. That makes for good percussive dancers.
19. My brother has flat feet. I took my own arches and his from our genetic pool, best we can tell. He got to be a foot taller and much better at math.
20. I also took some percentage of his tendons and ligaments, because mine are all too long. I am flopsy (aka hypermobile). This has led to a number of injuries. Prior to the injuries, I could do some good circus-inspired dislocation and contortion tricks.
21. Gross things are funny whether you want to admit it or not, nerdo.
22. I had a pet skeleton as a kid. My Mom got it when she was in college and used it for a number of classes she taught over the years. His name was Oscar, and he was seven or so when he died. I didn’t realize this was strange at first.
23. Once, when I was about four and we still lived in New York, I accidentally outed us as a skeleton-in-the-car kind of family to a local elderly woman. Up to that point, she had assumed my Mom was a nice person with nice children. Upon seeing Oscar in the car as we strolled out of the Baskins Robbins, she decided my Mom was an axe murderer and my brother and I (and neighbor Sam, by extension) were evil trolls. Her initial opinion was the more accurate one.
24. Some jerk stole Oscar before we moved from New York to Virginia.
25. You can’t replace friends who disappear, even if they are inanimate (post-animate?).
26. I am still fascinated by skeletons and bones, human or otherwise.
27. Some good friends gave my husband and me a bobcat skull as a wedding gift. My mother was not surprised.
28. Nor was my mother surprised by my toddler-ly obsession with the Ramones, nor my blue haired 15 year-old punk rocker 9:30 club attending self, nor by my tattooed and pierced friends. Her refusal to be phased made her the mother my friends turned to for aid, comfort, and birth control advice. I’m pretty sure several friends would donate organs to my Mom if the need arose.
29. Nevertheless, my seemingly unshakeable Mom really really doesn’t want me to ever have any tattoos ever. She says it is because she is afraid that shops re-use needles, but really she associates tattoos with unsavory people.
30. The fact that many people viewed me as unsavory in my youth, what with the whole blue-haired, punk rock thing, has never occurred to my mother. She is better than most people in many ways.
31. I am a kindergarten drop out, and I was thrown out of the Brownies.
32. As a four-year-old kid, I was forceably removed kicking and crying from my first Easter Mass for asking loudly about the connections between Communion wafers and wine, Jesus’s weight at death, and cannibalism.
33. At 15, I was artfully coerced into taking my first communion unshriven and unconfirmed so that I didn’t make the crazy(er) side of my family look bad. So was my step-mother, the ex-Nun.
34. I am not good at being Catholic. I may be an accidental heresiarch, but am blissfully unlikely to be subjected to the heresiarch’s fork.
35. Despite my uncomfortable relationship with the Church of my forebears, anti-Catholic bias makes me foaming-at-the-mouth angry.

Just for kicks, here is a leather book I made once upon a time. It’s well loved and used, so less perfect than it once was. I use it as a songbook–it’s big enough to hold standard sheets of paper. This was my second or third tooling project, and still one of my favorite.

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