Schmutzie's Eight Things Meme

Long ago and far away ... back when she was young and foolish, the blogger Schmutzie graciously tagged me with the Eight Things meme.

Now, I've participated in the Eight Things meme before--more than once--so I'm not being faux modest when I say I had difficulty coming up with eight new things to say about myself that didn't verge on being very indiscreet.

I mean, hey, here I am laying my life wide open to the Internet--and loving it--but is it right to drag other beings into the spotlight with me? So forget it, Internet. I'm not telling you what a cocktail named the Capecodder, a red-headed boy from Lynn, Massachusetts, and the Rathskellar bar in Kenmore Square did to make me into a middle-aged woman who wonders how on earth she ... but enough of that.

So anyway. Me: Eight things about.

1. I am not at all interested in beet sorbet, so the 29 of you who came here hoping to learn about it had better go elsewhere.

2. I love photography and want to learn how to take pictures. So far I've made the following progress: I bought an expensive camera--the dooce camera, in fact--and I'm producing a lot of blurry images. This?



was not on purpose. So I set myself a task, which was to manage to take a picture of a rooster for Schmutzie's cockroll. A picture that was in focus. (Just so you know, these pictures will appear from time to time in the rest of this entry. Feel free to tell me which you like best. And don't fear the rooster.)

3. I neither like nor dislike dogs, although I do find many of them kind of smelly.



4. I'm physically lazy, which is why I'm sitting here blogging instead of going out for a long walk. And so, I am also large. But not, unfortunately, scary.

5. Some people express surprise that I actually am as old as I claim to be. They think I look younger. (Hey, don't we all?) I attribute this to my very talented colorist and the fact that some tiny percentage of my body weight serves to emplumpen my cheeks. (Of course, being incredibly immature helps, too.)

6. I'm jealous of people who pick up foreign languages easily. I don't. I can bumble along a bit in French only because it was banged into my head for eight years.

7. I've never understood women whose life's ambition is to have children. To me that's like having your life's ambition be to start growing hair under your arms. OK, maybe having a baby isn't as inevitable as growing hair where you don't want it ... but it's not that hard.



8. I disapprove of people who swear a lot. I swear a lot. Amazingly enough, enduring my own disapproval isn't as bad as you'd think. Because what makes me think I'm so smart, anyway? I'm such a fucking know-it-all. I wish I'd just shut the hell up.

Eight (weird) Things

Blackbird tagged me with that eight things meme. Which I already did. I'm supposed to post the rules and then post eight things about me. But I'm not going to. Because I'm also on a quest to discover the weirdest thing about me.

So I've decided to post eight weird things about me, and then people can vote for the weirdest in the comments box. And I'm not tagging anyone because it didn't work the first time, so fuck it.

1. I don't watch television.

2. I don't understand why everyone is so interested in sex. Come on, people. It's just an orgasm. Sheesh.

3. As a consequence, I've never watched a single episode of Sex in the City. I understand it's about Sarah Jessica Parker having sex with Manolos, which is so nasty I simply can't believe you people.

4. That whole get married/have children/move to the suburbs trajectory? Totally my husband's idea. It's true. If you don't believe me, ask That Stud Muffin I Married. I was dragged kicking and screaming up the altar. I distinctly remember asking him. "Are you sure you're ready to get married? Don't you want to sow some more wild oats?"

5. I feel almost no affection for my mother. In fact, she drives me batshit crazy for, among other things, demanding that I write her a letter a week. So I print out blog entries and send them to her. (OK, I get rid of the swears and shit like that, OK? I don't just mail her a screen dump ... but yeah. My mother reads my blog. She just doesn't know it's a blog.)

6. I don't like gossiping. I mean, sure, OK, I can do it, just the way I can make small talk to the boring guy next to me at a dinner party, but I don't find it compelling or anything.

7. I don't like to talk on the phone. OK, people are fucking howling at this one, I can tell it. But people from the internet to whom I have talked on the phone--when we talked, did I call you? No, I didn't. YOU called ME (except for that one time with Badger) and naturally, I didn't want there to be one of those awkward silences, so OK, I kept you on the phone for two hours. But it's still your fault.

8. I didn't learn to drive until I was 35.

That last one is how I know I'm actually female. Because in a lot of other ways, I'm a man. Or maybe I'm in drag. Or at the very least, from time to time, I rustle uneasily in my transvestite clothing. To borrow a phrase from Laura Mulvey, whom I've only read

BECAUSE I'M WEIRD.

Andrew ate eight thousand

In case you're wondering, that was part of a carpet commercial I used to enjoy. And it works as a segue into yet another peek into the Sargasso Sea that is my brain. Yes, I've been tagged, so enough with the procrastinating. Time to stop all this half-assed, feckless time wasting and get down to some back-breaking, excruciating, Total Time Annihilation!

Here are the rules: • Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about him/herself. • People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. • At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. • Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So. Eight things you didn't already know about me.

Of course, I could be lazy and pretend that everyone reading this is reading my blog for the first time, whereupon I could admit that I have two children, live in Illinois, and am a cradle Episcopalian. And that would be three things already--hey, look! I'm practically half-way done!

But let's pretend I care enough to give you people some of the richer, rarer, stranger things about me.

1. I fall asleep pretty much as soon as my head hits the pillow, and sleep through the night. I never remember my dreams, and I never get up to pee. No, not even when I was pregnant.
The first thing I do upon awakening is head into the the bathroom to empty my bladder, and rabid coyotes gnawing on my calves wouldn't be able to stop me.

2. I've spent the past 10 years trying to forget most of the stuff I learned in graduate school. This is easy and enjoyable, and involves reading books and watching films I actually like, instead of books and films that other people think are important. All while drinking my beverage of choice, which very often, is alcoholic in nature. I recommend this.

3. I utterly refuse to become interested in any story that could be described as "tragic." Even "tragi-comedies" are pretty much off my radar. If I want to cry, I can just re-read the part of Little Woman where Beth dies. Works like a charm.

4. Speaking of which, by the time I finished second grade, I had read all of Louisa May Alcott's books. This means that Louisa May's ideas of what constitutes good behavior had inveigled themselves into my brain cells and imprinted themselves there when I was too young to stop them, sort of like the way a baby duck will decide that the first moving object it sees is his mother. As a consequence, I will never be as mean as I'd like to be. My friends often remark on how kind, nice, or generous I am. It's sad, but I just don't seem to be able to become consistently snarky, sarcastic, dark, or bitter.

5. I've been contributing to Mamarazzi for over a year, and still feel inadequate, mostly because I don't know who half these so-called "celebrities" are. Like "The Hoff," of whom I had never heard until his daughters released the hamburger slobbering video, or "Denise Richards," whom I confused with that woman who used to make all the aerobic tapes.

6. I am extremely put off by other people's vulgarity. But not my own.

7. My husband rakes in the dough and we have no credit card debt. Consequently I feel that I have nothing to complain about, and therefore I could get kicked out of the blogosphere any second. Since mostly people appear to blog in order to do a lot of whining, and most of the time, I don't think I have anything to whine about. This might be because of Number 5 up there, where I learned the virtue of Hard Work and Cheerfully Shouldering One's Burdens and the like, but I suspect that Louisa May Alcott herself would admit I have a pretty nice life.

8. Almost everyone I've met through the internet has been weirder in real life than you'd think they'd be, judging from their on-line personae. And incredibly talkative. And I'm sure they'd say the same about me.

I hereby tag: Babelbabe, Major Bedhead, RW, Sarah Louise, SarahO, Susie Sunshine, Suzanne, and Tut-Tut. But feel free to ignore me. I'm nice about things like this.

About Poppy

My name is Poppy Buxom. (OK, it's not, really.) I live in Newtopia, IL (which is a suburb on the north shore of Chicago, and yes, that was a pseudonym, too), in a tear-down house that could use some TLC.

I live with That Stud Muffin I Married, our 11-year-old son, our nine-year-old daughter, and my son's Malayan box turtle.

Many people consider me a Stay at Home Mooch, because while I don't work for a living, my husband does.

However, I prefer to think of myself as a housewife. (There. I said the "h" word. How boldly outspoken of me! I'm the Lenny Bruce of mommybloggers!)

But see, I really spend quite a bit of time keeping house. Or more accurately, thinking about keeping house. Once my children are safely at school, I can spend hours obsessing about interior decorating. I have a library of books that allow me to learn about outdated housekeeping practices (if you ever need to learn how to iron a bra, let me know.) I also have a lot of antique cookbooks (if I let it, it could be a real cream-of-mushroom soup-arama around here). Basically, I'm a font of knowledge about things nobody has cared about since your grandmother was in Home Ec class.

Yet I'm no Martha Stewart, or even a wannabe. I don't actually do much Good Housekeeping, I just read about it a lot. (I do manage to do some tidying up. And laundry. Lots of laundry.)

Before I started spending all my time dusting and then vacuuming (never the other way around) I was a graduate student in English Literature. For over a decade. Well over a decade. Being A.B.D. for almost 10 years capped a brilliant career that consisted of every loserish, slacker job ever invented (except maybe Starbucks barrista, because that hadn't been invented yet). I was a waitress, a secretary, I taught English to high school and college students, I temped, I processed dental insurance claims, and, in my best job ever, helped stupid computer users in the Biology department at MIT. Basically, where'er I walked, I flirted with failure.

Despite my efforts to persevere in my splendid career, I got promoted. In order to maintain my slacker status, I was forced to quit that job. I moved to Chicago, and while I was at it, robbed the cradle married the cutest MIT alumnus in the world. Then (much later) we had kids. Who are either high-functioning autistic or have Asperger's syndrome. Or something. No one is precisely sure what's going on, but all are agreed that something is off, neurobehaviorally speaking. All I know is that for me, child-rearing involves lots of testing, IEP meetings, therapy, and worry.

So--even if from a certain distance, I look like a soccer mom--I'm not. I don't foresee myself spending much time watching my kids playing soccer.

In this blog, I'm doing my best to portray the humorous side of my world, which is so often overwhelmingly about kids with special needs. (I know what you're thinking; what fun!)

And guess what? My husband and I have both been diagnosed with depression. But I figure you guessed that, already, didn't you? After all, this is a blog. I am a mother. Which means I'm a mommyblogger. It goes without saying that I'm mental--except that since it's my blog, I thought I'd say it anyway.

Also, I just outed my husband. How's that for telling it like it is? Take that, dooce! I can be confessional, too.

I like blogging, MST3K, Hollywood films of the 1930s, British humor, singing, Emily Post, early music, New England, the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey/Maturin novels, disco, Elsie de Wolfe, gardening, E. F. Benson, roses, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Draper, P. G. Wodehouse, engraved stationery, the Episcopal church, Lord Peter Wimsey, the Boston Red Sox, Georgette Heyer, opera, and cocktails. Not necessarily in that order.