Reluctant blogging . . . You people just won’t leave me alone, will you? (THANK GOD FOR THAT!)

So I did that link up thingie over at Jill’s blog, and it’s a wonder anyone even still talks to me for fear of catching the plague or Ebola or some other dread disease that could jump right off me and scurry through the internets.

But no, it’s a different scourge that’s infecting us all in blog world: The Meme. Da Da DUNNNN.

Who am I to complain? It’s not like I’m just brimming with post topics (bet you hadn’t noticed). Well, actually I have, like, a dozen post ideas that I’ve been just too lazy or busy or lazy or something to develop into even a respectable draft.

I got an AWARD from A Sassy Blonde, and I think she has me confused with someone else, because creative blogger? Um, have you seen my blog? I’m taking it anyway, because by the time Sassy B figures out her mistake, I’ll hopefully have published my acceptance and then it’s no takesies-backsies because once it’s on the internets it’s out there FOREVER. So, anyway, here I am, belatedly after the fact, thrilled to be accepting this most prestigious award that I’m pretty sure someone just made up and I’m receiving under false pretenses.

TA-DA!

And now for the damn rules. (Just once I’d like to get one of these things that was, you know, like a actual prize that you didn’t have to DO ANYTHING to accept. I kid. Mostly.)

Rule #1

Thank the person that gave you the award. Yeah, yeah, thanks a bunch, Sassy, you peach, you. No, seriously, I am flattered and confused but quite happy to be even considered by a friend and fellow blogger. Really. No, REALLY.

Rule #2

Post a photo of the award. Well, that was fairly easy. Stupid blog actually cooperated with uploading the pic.

Rule #3

Tell readers 10 things that they don’t know about you. Okay, honestly, I just copied and pasted Sassy’s answers. Ha! But then I thought that might be kind of obvious and someone might actually try to pry my award from my cold, dead laptop, so I edited them to reflect my own experience. Still not terribly creative, OR IS IT? Creatively lazy, maybe.

1. The first dentist I ever visited was truly evil and filled seven cavities and put a crown on one of my molars when I was eight years old. ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It HURT, yo. When I cried and then started coughing because I couldn’t breathe, he told me he was going to slap me if I didn’t breathe through my nose. I told my mother and she did some yelling and then I went to another dentist who was wonderful and surprisingly I don’t have a dental phobia. My mother spread the word and that first dentist left town six months later.

2. I am not allergic to anything I know of except sulfa drugs, but the thought of eating Reese’s Cups makes me throw up in my mouth a little. And sushi. This is sad, because I once loved both these things, but on two widely separate occasions I got a stomach bug shortly after eating these items, and neither is something you want to taste the other way around. The Reese’s incident happened over twenty years ago and I can’t abide the smell of chocolate and peanut butter together to this day.

3. I worked as an English tutor in high school and it’s a true irony that I ever became a teacher because I hated every damn minute of it. Pay was awesome, though.

4. My first concert was Rick Springfield. I don’t even remember who the opening act was. Who cared? Rick Springfield. My boyfriend at the time took me. I was a freshman in college, and we went with my roommate, a girl I knew from high school, and her boyfriend, whom I had had a crush on for two years (one of which while she was dating him) before I started dating my boyfriend. Did you follow all of that? Anyway, for some reason we got a motel room afterward, a double, and while my boyfriend and I expected the sleeping arrangements would be boy-boy, girl-girl, because we were all four conservative and secretive and shy about shit like that, the other couple hopped right into bed like they had been sleeping together for years. Which was actually fine by us, because while I’m pretty sure all that went on in that other bed was sleeping, my boyfriend and I did a little surreptitious “Human Touch.” (Seriously, watch this video. It’s hilarious. The year 2016? We are soooo behind on that.)

5. I regularly talk in my sleep for hours at a time. I even yell in my sleep. Usually I’m yelling at my mother, really ripping her a new one. I obviously have issues with my mother, which explains why I have not spoken to her in almost fifteen years. Long story. Don’t lose any sleep over it.

6. My grandma (mother’s mom) was nuts. Really, really nutso. She was a lifelong hypochondriac and even as a child would fake illness to get out of going to the fields to work with the other kids. Then she would do things like sneak out of the house and go pee on their lunches where they had left them under a tree. It’s a miracle I’m not a goddamn psychopath.

7. Or am I? Just kidding. That’s my brother. He has consistently displayed two of the three characteristics of the sociopath “trinity”: fire-setting and killing animals. He just lacks the bed-wetting, and that was my other brother. Hint: Psycho brother might have something to do with why I don’t speak to my mother.

8. I don’t think I hoard anything, but my husband just informed me that I do. KEEPING YOUR CHILDREN’S TOYS AND CLOTHES AND EVERY SCHOOL PAPER AND ART PROJECT THEY EVER COMPLETED IS NOT HOARDING. And I don’t think I “hoarded” cats. I just went through a period of “collecting” cats, and the fact that at one time there were 13 cats around here had less to do with my collecting and more to do with SOMEONE (not me) failing to keep the vet appointments to have the collection spayed and neutered. After I got a striped cat, an orange cat, a calico, a black cat, a part-Siamese, a Manx, that one that had that interesting “C” on its side, a polydactyl, a solid gray cat, a solid white cat, a tortoiseshell cat and that big one-eyed cat and the one that looked like he had a Hitler mustache, I was done collecting cats. (I am SO TEMPTED to include pics of, if not the actual cats, representations of these cats, but in the interest of brevity and my own did I mention I’m lazy? I will refrain.)

9. I was the only tenth grader in my class who did not take some kind of phys ed. I had taken P.E. in ninth grade, thank you very much, for the express purpose of not having to take P.E. in tenth grade when the classes became coed. I had also read my graduation requirements very thoroughly, and they plainly stated that only ONE phys ed class was needed to complete my matriculation at that particular institution. It still took my mother having heated words with the guidance counselor and the school principal and some nonsense about religious beliefs (um, we had none?) to get me out of it.

10. I did not go to kindergarten, because there was no kindergarten where I lived at age five, because yes, I am just that old. However, I started reading at age four and can remember quite clearly my mother pointing to words and telling me “That word is ‘Dick.’ This is ‘Jane.’ This is ‘run.’” And yes, I learned to read from the original Dick and Jane books, BECAUSE I AM JUST THAT DAMN OLD. Oh, how I wish I had those books now. Have you seen what those things go for on ebay ? If you can even find any on ebay. AND I HAD THE WHOLE SET. (Click the link. Go look. You will be SHOCKED.) But my dumb mother lent them to my uncle’s flaky hippy on hindsight probably drug addicted but at least alcoholic girlfriend–like she was going to teach her Frankenstein monster kids to read! ha!–and we never saw them again. Thanks again, Mom, you bitch.

And the fourth rule of my acceptance is that I give this award to six other bloggers, but I’m not, because I’m stingy, and I desperately need to update my blogroll, and hasn’t everyone had to answer to someone already anyway? And since I’ve broken Rule 4, that negates Rule 5, because if I’m not awarding anybody I hardly think I need to tell them about it.