What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
This one is easy.
When I have the time to do what I want to do as opposed to what needs to be done, I prefer to write, read, listen to music, or take part in awesome conversation. Or some combination there of.
Think back on your most memorable road trip.
Oh good grief.
As a kid, I had plenty of road trips that would have been memorable and absolutely fantastic if i wasn’t under the age of 5. Yuma, Arizona to Brockton, Massachusetts for example. Holy hell, the sights I must have seen but was too young to remember!!
This next thing started with my father, and will always be my favorite kind of road trip. He would decide, on some random day, to put the entire family in the car and just drive around. He’d take turns asking me or my mom or my sister which way to turn at intersections or exit ramps or whatever. When I would ask where we were going, he’d say, “we’ll see when we get there”. And that was completely acceptable and perfectly logical. There were times we wound up hours into another state! We saw awesome landscapes, farmer’s markets/farms, and had awesome conversations about the stuff we would see, and met some pretty cool people along the way.
After getting my drivers license, I would do this kinda thing on my own, or with select friends. Just stop beforehand for munchies and drinks, then drive for hours, converse, and see where we would end up. One such outing that I remember involved a very heated debate as to whether or not trees have souls.
These are my favorite types of road trips because there is no schedule, no agenda, no itinerary. You just go. See where the random takes you. There is something beautiful and liberating about that, and I kinda miss it. I used to just go for drives, pretty much local, but I have stopped doing that almost completely the past few years.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit old habits….
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
I had a pink care bear, about six inches tall, with two hearts on her belly. “LovesAlot” was her name. She was a gift from my grandfather. I carried her everywhere. I even slept with her and another teddy bear, from my grandmother, through my mid teens.
Now, she is packed away in the basement with several other childhood memories; things that will never be forgotten, but that can’t be part of the day to day, because we all have to “grow up”.
It is a sad reality – being an adult strips away things from childhood that perhaps should be clung to.
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
It’s great, as long as you are happy.
If you are sad and miserable? Not so much.
What could you do differently?
I don’t like this question. Just wanted to put that out there.
What could I do differently? Literally everything.
I could brush my teeth left handed. I could drink my coffee black. I could become a drug addict. I could eat a “healthy”, plant based diet. I could go back to school. I could be a raging, nit-picky bitch. But I don’t do these things, because I don’t want to.
Then I think, “well, what should I do?” I really don’t like the word should because it implies obligation. And in many instances where people use that word, there is no obligation, there is only want. The only thing you really have an obligation to is yourself, your children (if you have kids), and to keep your word when you say you’re going to do something. And for the record, the order of priority of those obligations, as far as I am concerned is kids, self, then promises. Though some of us make a habit of confusing the last two priorities.
So yeah, that’s my non-answer answer.
Have a great night!
If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?
Be kind, even if you don’t feel like it.
What colleges have you attended?
I have been enrolled in four different colleges, actually graduated from three of them. These include Alfred University, SUNY Orange, DeVry University, and Walden University. The most important thing I learned as a result of my time at various colleges is the fact that a piece of paper is just that – a piece of paper. A degree in no way, shape or form says anything definitive about what or how much you know about a given topic. It says everything about how well you perform on tests for that knowledge, but doing well on a test absolutely does not signify long term retention.
I have learned and retained far more from experience. In life, learning takes many forms. If you spend hours and hours in a class, take the exam, do well, great! But it is quite possible that in six months, a year, five years from that exam – you’ve forgotten half of what you remembered in order to do well on the exam in the first place. If you fuck something up that you are doing, you will learn more from that than you will from any number of hours spent in a classroom. Why? Because when you fail, you don’t forget why.
College is awesome, I learned a lot of things during my time in college, but only about half of it (and that’s generous) is related to the degrees I obtained. For example, I took an acting class as an elective, and learned more from that and the resulting experiences than I did from some of the “core”, required classes for the degree I was pursuing.
My father was a working man, a laborer. He grew up on a farm. He got horrible grades in high school, from an academic standpoint. But at the same time, he was one of the smartest men I have ever known. He asked me one time how long it would take to flood a field of some dimension to have a certain amount of standing water with a pump that had a flow rate of whatever it was. I was 11 or 12. I had no clue, but he explained me how to figure it out. It wasn’t until 10 years later, and about 6 years after he had passed, that I realized, when sitting in a Calculus 2 class, that he, an uneducated man by most standards, had explained calculus to his 12 year old daughter. My father did not know calculus. But he knew how to solve that problem.
I guess what it boils down to is that the best, most prestigious education that you can receive is from living life, doing things, trying things, failing, and persevering.
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
I don’t know about this one…
I was never really one to play. Explore, maybe. But even when I was little, I wasn’t into sports or long sessions of playing tag outside. Games, sometimes, but I would lose interest pretty quickly, especially when things got predictable. There was a point where my mother would literally beg me to put my books away and go outside to play. In my teens, I would play table top RPGs, but that was sorta like reading a book, so I’m not sure that counts. 😉
As an adult, I’ll play silly games like Cards Against Humanity, but rarely. And I will always play with a dog if they are feeling frisky!
There was a prompt yesterday from Day One, and I was super excited to write about it, but fell asleep because I was exhausted from other stuff, so here it is….
Prompt: You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
Oooooh….. this would include a space for drawing as well, but here goes. Please note: factors of cost, feasibility or practicality are not being considered. At all.
Ok, to start, this would be a stand-alone thing, located in a wooded area near a creek or river. The sound of water moving (or falling, like rain), calms me. The building would be made of wood and potentially brick, a log cabin type thing. It would have large windows to allow for lots of natural light if desired, but with shutters or black out drapes for those days that light just irritates the shit out of me. It would also have a fireplace, and generously sized skylights for star gazing on frigid nights. Also, the skylights would have covers to block out light when desired, because, yeah. I’m weird like that.
Inside the structure would be cozy but not crowded. It would contain a few different things.
In one corner, a wooden desk built in/attached to part of two walls. The desk would be made of hard wood, like oak or maple, and have a darker stain color. Dark cherry perhaps. The desk would have spots for storage on both sides, especially for notebooks/drawing pads and writing/drawing implements. The edges of the desk would be bark. I love that unfinished look.
One side of the desk would have a space for my computer and notebooks. This would be the writing side. The other side would be for drawing, and would include some kind of draft table type functionality that can be concealed when not in use.
In the opposite corner, I would have a simple, overly cushioned chair, where I could sit with my book in hand with my elbows resting on my thighs/knees. I know this doesn’t seem comfortable for most, but it works for me. Also, this area would have a large, pillow stuffed lounging area. This whole thing would be the reading area.
I would have lots of bookshelves, and various pieces of art hung on available wall space.
So, yeah. That’s my ideal reading/writing/drawing space.
What is your all time favorite automobile?
Mid to late 80s Ford Escort, hatchback, 5 speed.
It’s what I learned to drive stick in, it is little, fun to drive, minimal to maintain and easy to fix if something did break.
Close second was an early 90s Dodge Shadow. Also pretty easy to maintain, though good luck if the fuel pump takes a shit! What a pain to get to!! I tell you what though, it’s a freaking tank in the snow!
😝
A Peculiar Cerebral Tangle 