1. I have had many jobs. My first one was at Dairy Queen when I was fourteen. For six months I remembered no un-jumbled single event from that job, a kind of shift amnesia. I do remember, I finally learned how to run the mellorine machine on my third day of work, making 5-cent cones on Fourth of July Weekend. (Hell!) No other job, under any stressful condition whatsoever, has caused me shift amnesia.
2. One day I told a co-worker I was taking a psychological test to find out if I was an extrovert or an introvert. She smiled a tiny smile and walked away. Two minutes later, I found her and said, �I guess I don�t need the test. If I was an introvert, I would never have told you that.�
3. For many years, if I woke up in the middle of the night, I would hold my husband�s shoulder and pretend he was a dolphin, taking me down into the deep. I would fall asleep instantly.
4. If he left for work before me, I could wake up and know what his mood had been that morning. If it was bad, I would call him.
5. Whatever the received opinion in the room, I am against it. Not because I like to argue, but because I think the room has left out something important. If they only stick with one platform, conceding no rightness to others, then I really want to leave. I struggle with this.
6. Another central struggle in my life: how to tell the truth and still be kind. How to be kind and still be accurate. And when to shut up.
7. Eventually the student must be the teacher. Eventually the novelist must try for publication. I can do the first one, right away, but I am deathly afraid of the second one.
8. I believe in empathy, right up until someonesteals my purse. At which time I pursue them, screaming at the top of my lungs, until four guys, one in a suit, two in coveralls, and one from the parking garage, land on his butt.(Thanks, guys!) I will then press charges: Merry Christmas, dumbass, although, that�s not what I called you at the time.
When they find him, after he ran away, I went to the grand jury. They thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. He went to trial, and I still have my favorite hot-pink handbag, at the time with less than fifteen dollars in it, plus the litter of change I scraped out from under his hand as he lay prone on the pavement. He did not get a nickel out of me.
So now, readers, you know: that largeness of spirit I have been pretending to is tempered by, ah, a temper, and some pretty small change.
9. I am starting over, halfway down a road . . . .
Anyone who reads here and wants to do this, send me a note and I will tag you for it!
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