The answers to the earlier quiz are here 🙂 I limited myself to things I could put in a public post, since that one was public, as well.
1. Spent a day busking in a Parisian subway with a cute guy I met while there during spring break of my junior year in high school.
2. Been kicked out of a high school dance for “inappropriate behavior.” I was “dirty dancing” with several partners at once, which was apparently much worse than the way the couples around us were dirty dancing.
3. Appeared as a guest on Oprah. I was also on 20/20 Downtown, .Net, a BBC special, Unsolved Mysteries, Hard Copy, the local channel 2 news, some Swedish show, and a bunch of others. I’ve done interviews for lots of print media, too.
4. Broke a bully’s nose with my flute case in 6th grade. He’d been punching me on the bus every day for a week, leaving bone-deep bruises, and I finally snapped. I happened to have gotten my flute that day. I never had another physical problem with a bully after that, as the fame followed me right through high school.
5. I’ve failed to learn to sew, knit, crochet, tie bows (the decorative kind), play chess or poker, or do cartwheels, despite having tried to do each of those things at some point in the past.
6. Been married (3 times).
7. Been divorced (also 3 times).
7, Was baptized three times before I decided that it just wasn’t going to work for me.
8. Bitten my dentist as a teen, drawing blood (he SAID it wouldn’t hurt!), leading him to file down my eyeteeth a bit.
9. Decided after spending hours trying to get a game typed in from a magazine to work on a TRS-80 that programming would never be the right career for me (I think I was 11 or 12).
10. Was paid for flirting (while setting appointments for a dating service).
11. Quit a job because I wouldn’t sign financial statements I couldn’t read (they were in Japanese).
12. Was a National Merit Scholar.
13. Have a concealed carry permit.
14. Lived in an RV for a month.
15. Was fired for taking time off to deal with the death of my daughter’s father.
16. Spent five years working for a fundamentalist Christian foreign missions board (longer than I’ve worked anywhere else).
17. Was the president of the first PC users’ group in the south Georgia town where I lived.
18. Pretended (successfully) to be an automated recording while working as a Sprint long-distance operator. For several hours during a power outage.
19. Chaperoned a youth group trip to Six Flags over Georgia when I was 19.
20. Worked for a madame in a whorehouse (fixing her computer).
21. Taught craft classes for a store as a teen.
22. Babysat a kid older than I was on a regular basis.
23. Contested my high school’s sex-ed curriculum on a factual basis (they didn’t listen, but I did contest it).
24. Played the ukelele in a school concert.
25. Served on the advisory board of a health insurance organization.
26. Identified a criminal in a police lineup.
27. Was required by my employer (a bank) to take lie detector tests regarding a series of bank robberies (wholly unrelated to #26). And pissed off several test administrators for being “too relaxed,” leading them to believe I was hiding something. Apparently not being worried about the results plus biofeedback training plus naturally low blood pressure messes up such tests.
28. Spent the summer traveling around northern Alabama promoting ice cream for Meadow Gold Dairies when I was 14.
29. Played Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (because I was the only person who could carry a tune, and we had to sing Queen Titania to sleep).
30. Was sent to the principal’s office as a 6th grader for having a Southern accent. In Georgia.
31. Was offered a job by Dolores French because of my phone voice.
32. Learned word processing on a Coleco Adam.
33. Was an active member of Mensa for several years.
34. Won a baby goat in a raffle.
35. Began telecommuting in 1990.
36. Asked President Reagan a question during a televised press conference.
37. Seriously attempted suicide.
38. Played Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote in one of those interactive murder mystery things at a Mensa convention.
39. Been a custodial and non-custodial mother and stepmother.
40. Been a step-grandmother.
41. Fallen in lust with a guy online, only to learn later that it was his wife I was talking to instead of him (he didn’t have nearly as much personality as she did, though he was damned good-looking).
42. Defied a doctor’s insistence that I wouldn’t be able to walk if I didn’t have a knee replacement within a year (that was, hmm, 8 years ago?)
43. Learned to play the oboe and bassoon in high school. I doubt I could play either now. I normally played the flute.
44. When I marched with the percussion corps, I carried the big set of cymbals because the other cymbal player (Mark) cried when he tried to carry them. No, he never did live that down. I didn’t say anything to him, but everybody else certainly did.
45. Was mistaken by my girlfriend for herself. In person.
46. Took one week of training in Boston on an accounting system for an HP midrange computer and one week in Rockville, MD on GE Information Systems’ Enterprise server. That’s the sum total of my formal technical education. Oh, wait, I think I had to attend some sort of ADP payroll training for a few hours decades ago.
47. Set several women’s strength test records at a gym at my initial fitness assessments back around 1986.
48. Physically carried a friend to the high school office to get help when he attempted suicide, and held him and made him stay conscious until the paramedics arrived and made me let go of him so they could use the defibrillator. I was 13, and have had a very strong negative reaction to any and all suicide threats since (to the point that I simply didn’t tell anyone when I tried it myself).
49. Was a successful member of the school math team despite having a serious math phobia.
50. Won academic awards in every subject except math (I dropped it to fit chorus in my schedule). No, I wasn’t taking math while I was actually on the math team.
