Fifty things about me, Part 3

Part one. Part two. Part four. Part five. Part six.

17. I generally eat only fresh or frozen vegetables, but I have a secret place in my heart for the vegetables of my childhood–Green Giant canned green beans and Niblets corn. Whenever they’re on sale at the supermarket, I can’t seem to resist buying them. Two for eighty-eight cents? I’m there! I don’t care that they have almost no nutritional value. I love ’em.

Corollary to the above: I loathe peas. The garden peas, the shelled, rounded balls of green that are packaged in so many mind-boggling disgusting ways. I hate them canned, I hate them frozen, and I hate them designer frozen. The only peas I can eat are in the shell — sugar snap peas and snow peas. Keep those little green garden things. Ew. Ew. I say: Ew.

18. I can’t stand drunks. I’ve had more than my fair share of alcoholics in my friendships over the years. If you can’t stop at two or three drinks at a social occasion, I don’t want to know you. If you’re an angry drunk, I don’t want to know you. If you’re a weepy drunk, I don’t want to know you. If you’re a boring drunk, I don’t want to know you. In fact, if you’re a drunk, I don’t want to know you. However, when you get sober, I’ll be happy to be friends with you again. There are some who might call this being a fair-weather friend. Those people obviously don’t know any alcoholics.

19. I don’t panic in emergencies. I do what needs to be done, and when the emergency is all over, then I start shaking and wishing I had a cigarette or a drink. (I’m an ex-smoker.) I also have pretty good presence of mind. When the fire alarm went off quite suddenly while I was in class at the Chubb Institute, I grabbed my coat and unplugged my laptop as I got up to leave. No sense losing a $1500 laptop, and it was cold outside. I don’t believe in taking the chance that it was a false alarm, or wouldn’t burn down my classroom. It was a small fire somewhere else in the building, but still — I don’t feel that I wasted my effort.

20. I do not blush. I can’t remember the last time I blushed. It’s a phenomenon that occurs once every three to five years, perhaps. And when I do blush, it’s for really stupid things that no sane human being would blush over. Oh, I can be embarrassed. But you generally can’t see me blush.

21. The fried potato is God’s second-greatest gift to mankind. (The Torah is the first.) I worship the fried potato in all of its forms, and it is almost exclusively responsible for my weight gain this past year. Potato chips, latkes, Tater Tots, the myriad Ore-Ida products, homemade, store-bought, fast food — I really like fried potatoes. And fried onions. Ooh, and fried chicken, and fried vegetables, and fried squash blossoms, and, hell, I’m pretty convinced that if you bread and fry cardboard, it’d probably be good, too.

22. I don’t like pizza. Yeah, yeah, I’m un-American. But I don’t care for garlic much, don’t like tomato sauce, and I’m not fond of cheese. That leaves bread. I like bread.

23. When I really like something, I tend to go through obsessions. The Babylon 5 obsession was replaced by the Buffy/Angel obsession which was replaced by the Gilmore Girls obsession. Before that was Sisters and China Beach, and there will doubtless be new ones to come. Sometimes it’s a movie: T2 was a big enough obsession that it got me to exercise and work out in the hopes of looking a bit more like Linda Hamilton. Though I got to the point where I could carry four full bags of groceries up three flights of stairs without so much as needing an extra breath (hey, ex-smoker here, remember), I never did get anywhere close to her physique in the movie. Must have been the lack of a personal trainer and working out six hours a day on a program designed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. But hey, the movie’s still good.

Oh, I know why I go through these obessions. I figure it out about halfway through them. But it’s always too personal to tell.

24. When I was in high school, my then-best friend’s boyfriend got us tickets to see Leslie West and Mountain in Asbury Park. We hadn’t heard of the opening group. I remember thinking, “Wow, great guitar player, but man, that lead singer has a weird voice.” The little-known group was called Rush.

I still don’t own a single Rush album. All their stuff sounds alike to me.

25. I didn’t eat a tomato until I was in my twenties. Now I don’t consider a salad a salad unless it’s overflowing with them. I didn’t eat broccoli until I was in my twenties, either, and it’s one of my favorite vegetables now.