Flotsam

Gracious, you know you’ve reached the bottom of the pun barrel when you’re reduced to Ashley Simpson songs…
Anyway, I have been tagged by the lovely Avonlea.

So here you are:

Seven things to do before I die (not in order of priority):
1. Write a book of essays—I don’t need it to be wildly popular, or lauded as a critical masterpiece, but I want it to be to someone, at least one person, what my favorite books are to me—a comfort and a revelation and sad and amusing at the same time. My favorite passages in books clarify my own experience at the same time they make it bearable (often by making it funny, sometimes by making it poetic), and I think of my favorite authors as friends, really. I want to give that to someone else. I would like a person to read something I wrote and think “Yes, that is exactly how it is.”
2. Raise children–preferably all the way from baby- to adult- hood. Imagine being able to watch a whole person make itself!
3. Teach writing to people who love it, at the graduate level.
4. Teach writing to people who need it—younger kids, adults for whom English is a second language, at-risk teenagers.
5. Go to Switzerland and see the places my family is from, ride the train through the mountains, eat copious amounts of fondue, etc.
6. Write a book for children (fiction)
7. Build a house with the Nearly

Seven things I cannot do:
1. Wait patiently
2. Delegate
3. “Diet” Although I think if there were a cheese and champagne diet, I would ROCK that.
4. Read a book without peeking ahead—not at the end! Just at a sentence or two a bit further in… I suppose that probably falls under “Wait Patiently.”
5. Eat cold luncheon meat
6. Listen to certain scratchy, nails-on-chalkboard sounds—they hurt my teeth.
7. Shut up

Seven things that attract me to my spouse (in random order):
1. He is funny in a bizarre, slightly inappropriate way. I like that.
2. He is smitten with our cats—really, it is quite endearing.
3. The way his shoulders are wide, but his hips are sort of slim, giving him a “Y” shape
4. He is ambitious—not in the heartless, Sigourney-Weaver-in-“Working Girl” sense, but rather he expects a lot from himself, and is passionate about what he does.
5. He buys the best gifts—not that they are fancy, but they demonstrate a consideration that is charming. He seems to file tiny comments I make away in some gift-idea file-folder in his mind. When we had been dating only a month, I made offhand mention of a book by an author I was fond of–I had never read it, as it was 75 years-old, out of print, and nearly impossible to find. Several weeks later the Nearly presented me with a first edition. I had mentioned it only in passing, people.
6. When I got the call last December that my HCG levels had fallen, he held me without saying anything while I went slightly mad with grief, and then went straight out and brought home pasta from my favorite restaurant. It sounds small, but it was just what I needed at that moment.
7. He loves me.

Seven things I say most often:
1. “I’m sorry.”
2. “Well…”
3. “Lovely”
4. “Oh, my!”
5. “Please don’t.”
6. “Honestly!”
7. “Slut!” {all-purpose expletive—if I stub my toe: “Slut!” If I get a call telling me my Whip will be a week late: “Slut!”}

Seven books (or series) I love (in random order):
1. The Fran Lebowitz reader
2. The Stories of John Cheever
3. The Portable Dorothy Parker
4. The Blandings Castle books (by PG Wodehouse)
5. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries (esp. from the 30s and 40s)
6. The Pursuit of Love (by Nancy Mitford)
7. Jenny and the Jaws of Life (stories by Jincy Willett)

Seven movies I watch over and over again (in random order):
1. Bringing up Baby
2. Amelie
3. Top Hat
4. Swing Time
5. Topper
6. The Thin Man movies
7. Waiting for Guffman

Seven people I’m curious about that I’d like to join in:
1. roo
2. Lori
3. Kath
4. Nico
5. You!
6. And You!
7. And You!

I put down a few people whose blogs I have only just started reading, and I put down Nico, because she is an enigma, but I couldn’t choose after that, because I am curious about all of you, and some people don’t like memes, and some people I might have tagged (wessel, for instance) have already been tagged.

SO—if you haven’t been tagged and would like to share these 49 things about yourself, please do. And feel free to trackback to this entry–I believe the URI is: http://flotsamblog.com/2005/12/15/pieces-of-meme/