And now, a Quiz.

I took a couple days off from posting here, so let’s get back in the swing with a Sunday Stealing quiz! This one looks pretty benign:

1. Are you double jointed?

Nope!

2. Are you ticklish?

I know I used to be, I don’t know if I still am. Honestly, you reach a point in life where tickling isn’t a thing anymore, and looking back on all the tickling that went on in college, I’m wondering if that maybe shouldn’t have been a thing at all.

3. Cookies, cakes, or donuts?

Yes.

Honestly, the biggest impediment to my health right now is my undefeatable sweet tooth. The only area of life where I’ve really been able to conquer it is coffee: for years I took it with a lot of sugar, but now, I can’t abide sugar in my coffee. But other than that, I love sweet stuff and I have very low resistance to it. Not great. I’m better than I used to be, but I’m nowhere near as good as I should be about it.

Oh, and Roger‘s right about how wonderful pie is! I am always ready to second someone else’s endorsement of pie. And that’s not even referring to pie as facial accessory.

4. Did you go to prom? 

No, and I have never once regretted not going, either. I didn’t understand the fuss then and I still don’t get it. I wasn’t one who detested my high school years, but I didn’t see them as a font of Wonderful Lifelong Memories, either, and I was realistic enough to know then that I was unlikely to ever see any of those people much again once high school was over, so…why bother with a dance?

(One thing that I’ve noticed people making a big deal of is “seeing their kids off to Prom”. I don’t really get this, either. I don’t judge it, but I don’t get it.)

(Another thought: when I was a kid, Prom was all about couples, or one boy and one girl going together, even if they weren’t a “couple”, strictly speaking. I know now that Proms can be more about going as a group of friends, without the whole “couple” thing at all if you don’t want it, and if that had been the vibe, then maybe I would have gone.)

(Ultimately, though, not going to Prom felt like an act of rebellion against all the “High school is the best time of your life!” crap that I was hearing constantly back then. I believed even then that if you can honestly look back decades later and conclude that you really did peak in high school, you have made a colossal error or a sequence of errors at some point.)

5. Do you bite your nails?

No. I did as a kid, but that habit went away also when I was a kid. Playing trumpet and piano, as well as typing a lot, always gave me incentive to just keep them trimmed, and as nervous habits go, nail-biting was never one of mine.

6. Do you enjoy dancing?

No, but I think that’s because I’ve never done it enough to get beyond the point that I feel really weird when I do it. Maybe if dancing had been a thing in gym class when I was a kid…well, actually it was, briefly, when I was in third and fourth grade, and we did square dancing. (Years later, I learned that there might have been some less-than-great reasons for square dancing in schools.) But once I got to ultra-conservative small-town Southern Tier New York? Dancing in gym class? You must be joking! Get in there and wrestle, kids!

Now, watching dancing is an absolute joy.

7. Do you forgive easily?

Not super easily, no…it usually takes me a bit of time and distance to get there. I usually do, though.

I don’t forget super-easily, though, and if something happens that requires forgiveness, then once I’ve done the forgiving, I’m still likely to incorporate some extra distance into the relationship.

8. Do you prefer to bathe or shower? 

Shower.

9. Does your name have any special meaning? 

Not that I am aware of. And now, well, if there was, I’m never going to know it. But I’m sure the subject would have come up at some point. (In fact, it probably did and I just never bothered retaining the information.)

10. Have you ever gone camping? 

Yes, when I was a kid. It was our standard means of lodging when we were oot-and-aboot. My parents always owned a camper, and in fact they owned one up until they started downsizing their “estate” in the early 2010s in anticipation of moving to the Buffalo area to be nearer us.

11. Have you ever won something?

Yes, here and there! Winning stuff is nice. The best thing I won is probably the Short Fiction Contest that the Buffalo News used to run every year. In 2007 the subject was the assassination of President William McKinley (which happened in Buffalo), and my story won. You can read my winning entry here!

12. What did you last eat?

A chocolate chip cookie from our favorite local bakery that we visit each Saturday morning. My last meal was the Baja Chicken Penne that I got from Poppyseed, a local restaurant that’s been around forever and there’s a reason for that.

13. What’s your longest relationship so far? 

Excluding my father and my sister, obviously, I’m still connected (via Facebook) with people from grade school, including one girl I knew way back in Second Grade when we lived for one year in Elkins, WV.

14. Have you ever been on a diet? 

Yes, and I don’t bother with that anymore. It’s a waste of time and energy and they always eventually fail. I do find myself needing to recalibrate my daily eating toward healthier options and mixes once in a while, but I don’t go on “diets” in the sense of “I’m not eating any of that” or “I’m only eating this.” 

My favorite dietary advice came from a chiropractor we saw for a while, back in the 2000s. He was anti-diet for the reasons I state above, and what was more, he advised indulgence on small levels. He said to me something along these lines: “If you have to eat chocolate every day, fine! But don’t make it a full-sized mass-produced Snickers bar. Eat one smaller portion of very high quality chocolate. Compensate for the small serving by making the quality outstanding.” I like that advice a lot.

By the way, I have recently decided to restrict my alcohol consumption to only nights where I do not have to work the next day. I never indulge enough to the point of a hangover, so that’s not the issue. But it’s almost certainly healthier–and absolutely less expensive–to cut that aspect of my weekly consumptions down a lot.

I end this topic with a quote from James Bond, in the novel Casino Royale:

“I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad.”

15. Do you enjoy DIY or crafts?

Meh, not really. I admire everything I see that’s along that line, but never enough to want to take any of it up myself. DIY, in terms of house maintenance, just makes me feel like I’m working because my day job at The Store involves a lot of that kind of thing, so if I’m getting out my tools and stuff at home, I feel like I’m just working more, and nobody wants that. And crafting is a great creative outlet, but for me, writing and photography are always filling my creative outlet needs, so I’m good. I’ll leave the painting and the wood carving and the pottery to others. Give me a pen and a camera!

And that’s the last question. Here endeth the lesson!

 

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