True Stories

I’m ambidextrous because of my first grade teacher, Mrs. Stear, who made me sit on my left hand to stop me from writing with it. I guess she wanted to save me from the pain of using scissors awkwardly later in life. Anyway, it only half-worked: I now write with my right hand, but I do nearly everything else with my left.

When I was younger, one of my relatives mentioned that some of our family came from Bohemia (as in, pre-Germany, pre-Prussia), and for years I thought that “Bohemian Rhapsody” was some freakish musical documentary of my relatives’ struggle for happiness.

I have a terrible sense of smell. Don’t ask me to identify things by smell; I’ll punch you in the head.

I’ve had a favorite Beatles song for every academic year (August – July) of my life since third grade, and I can still tell you what each one was. This year is “Carry that Weight.”

I can control nearly every single muscle in my face, including wiggling my ears and my nose and make my pupils shake, and I can curl my lip (only on one side, though) and roll my tongue up all sorts of ways and raise each eyebrow independently. I can also stick my tongue up my nose from inside my mouth. All of these life skills can be chalked up to having far too much free time as a child.

We call my mother “Marmot,” and people think that it’s because one of us couldn’t say “Momma” as a child or something, but it isn’t; I started calling her that when I was fourteen as a joke to make her mad and it totally stuck. If I ever have kids, I will absolutely make them call her “Gramarmot.”

My dad is a doctor, but I have reason to believe that he is ACTUALLY a spy. Here are the facts: He was an infectious disease specialist. He now works as a Dean at FSU’s Medical School, where he teaches classes on Bio-Terrorism. Despite the fact that I attended FSU, my dad and I almost NEVER saw each other on campus. This is because any time I would wander down to his office for things like lunch money, his secretary would greet me at the door and say something like, “Oh, your dad’s not here; he’s in Kazakhstan for the next month.” UM WHAT? He used to be in politics, was a State Representative for years, and then became the Florida Secretary of Health -- BUT -- he turned down the offers to be the U.S. Secretary of Health and head of the CDC. My guess is that they are too time-intensive, and he wouldn’t be as free to do spy-things. Oh, did I mention that he speaks German and Russian, and that I didn’t find out about the Russian thing until I was _13_???? My dad is totally a spy.

In fifth grade, we all had to join band, and the teacher gave me a trombone. Unfortunately, I was so small that I couldn’t stretch my arm out long enough to reach the notes at the bottom of the slide. I developed a technique of hooking the spit valve under my shoelace and kicking my foot out quickly any time there was a note that I couldn’t quite get. I think it’s why my right leg is longer than my left leg now. Also, I switched to trumpet the year after that.

I cannot watch the video of Paul Potts’ first “Britain’s Got Talent” audition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA) without SOBBING. Like, becoming a complete mess of a person. Someone sent me a link to it online one day and I watched it at least five times and just cried and cried. Sean sat behind me, completely incredulous. Other things that make me cry: The movie Ratatouille, the song “Both Sides” by Joni Mitchell (the “older Joni” version), and that part in Transformers when Optimus Prime first transforms in the alley. Also, the scene in Dumbo where the mother elephant reaches out to Dumbo through the bars of her jail cell and he climbs up into her little trunk-swing and “Baby of Mine” plays in the background and I completely lose my mind.

I am horribly afraid that someday I’m going to have to have something amputated or go blind/deaf/mute. Seriously. It’s my number one fear in life. When I was little, for YEARS I would pray the same thing over and over again every night, and I always included following: “I pray that my eyes don’t fall out and that none of my body parts will break off.” There was also a part about praying for “the Poor, the Sick, and the People Who Smoke,” that they would “Get Richer, Get Better, and Stop Smoking.” Aww.

I’ve had four concussions, and each one is, looking back, a pretty epic and hilarious story. Two of the stories involve glass doors, one involves a snowboard and a pack of small children on skiis, and one involves a Swiss street sign.

If I don’t get a nap every afternoon, I become completely belligerent. It doesn’t even matter how long the “nap” is – I could just lay on the bed for five minutes – but I HAVE to do it or I will turn evil and destroy everything in sight.

I’ve had a crush on Adrien Brody since I was seven years-old. My whole family went to see “Angels in the Outfield” at the theater, and I made them all sit through the credits until I found out who Danny Hemmerling was. When I was in middle school, I found a picture of him in a newspaper (his mother was a photographer for the Village Voice) and I put it in a tiny heart-shaped picture frame and carried it with me EVERYWHERE.

When I was really little, I liked to sing the song “Natural Woman” to show off for people at parties, but I didn’t want to LOOK like a show-off, so I would pull my sister aside and beg her to ask me to do it in front of everyone. I have since given up on discretion (and Lani started demanding bribes).

Once, I memorized Pi to the 120th digit because I am SO EMBARRASINGLY BAD AT MATH that it was the only thing I could do to get extra credit.

I live with two British women who, while being completely opposite each other, are totally wonderful, and have unexpectedly begun to sway my speech patterns. I catch myself dragging the inflection up at the end of questions, and sometimes I even slip and say things like “bruvah” (“brother” – one is from London) or “summat” (“something” – the other is from Manchester). I’m gonna be a total linguistic nightmare when I’m released back into the wild.

I hate cooked salmon with a fierce, burning passion. I will sit at the dinner table until four in the morning. I have done it many, many times. I am not eating that shit.

I have actually had all of the following: e.Coli, Scarlet Fever, Conjuctivitus, Chicken Pox, Ascorbic Acid Deficiency (that’s SCURVY, to you laymen), GPC (the one that made me go blind for a day!), and Ebola. Okay, kidding about that last one. But really, how much of a coincidence is it that I got all these outrageous ailments, and my dad is an INFECTIOUS DISEASE specialist? He is totally testing out new strains on the Middle Kid. Thanks, dad.

I changed my major seventeen times in college. Seven of those times were in January of my freshman year alone. The woman in the Registrar’s office would see me coming in the door and scowl, then she’d pull the “Major Change Request Form” out of her drawer and just shove it across the desk without looking at me. Whatever, I still made it out in four years, and with two degrees, to boot.

I’m a terrible cook because I’m really, really impatient, but also, I generally like things to be raw/undercooked anyway. I love sushi, of course, but I mean weird things like pizza and cake. You can just give me a ball of pizza dough. It’s fine. I’ll eat it. I really like waffle batter, too. Hello, I beat e.Coli; Salmonella is a big freaking joke.

As a kid, I wanted to be the person who made sound effects for shows like Rugrats and Doug. I do an awesome clown car horn, a pretty good lasso sound, a mean water-drop, and various other noises that are totally useless in polite society.

I used to drink a lot of coffee, and so to compensate and ensure that my mouth didn’t turn black, I became totally obsessed with brushing my teeth. However, despite eighteen long, hard-earned years of being an upstanding member of the No Cavities Club, my two front teeth finally failed me during my sophomore year of college, and succumbed to the very first (and hopefully, last) cavity to enter my little post-pubescent mouth, which, according to my dentist, was caused by drinking sweet liquids through a straw. It was for this monstrosity that I underwent my first dental filling, a process which I pray I may never again be forced to endure for ever and ever amen, especially because I am afraid of shots and therefore didn't want the needle bearing anesthesia to enter my gums until I had already borne the pain of the primary drill and actually simultaneously screamed and sort of half-threw up in my mouth when the slow-moving drill was brought out. So now I floss five times a day instead of my usual three.

I love fruit. I eat way more fruit than most people. One night, I ate a pound and a half of cherries on my own while watching a movie with my family, to the horror of my parents, who explained that it was dangerous to do that because cherries contain free radicals. Of course, being around seven or eight and unable to remember the term “free radical,” I preached against the threat of cherries to all my friends who would listen at lunchtime, claiming they would give you “a rebel alliance.”

This is the meanest thing I have ever admitted: sometimes in college when I was having a bad day or feeling particularly vicious, I used to like to get out my car keys and stroll around the floors of one of the busier parking garages, ignoring the people driving one mile an hour behind me trying to get the parking spot I didn't actually have.

I got into a cappella by accident, because I went into the wrong classroom on my first day at FSU, and it turned out to be an audition. I pretended like I had planned on being there all along, and sang “Part of your World” from The Little Mermaid because it was the only thing I could think of in my complete panic. Four years and three consecutive ICCA finals appearances later, my group is now ranked #2 in the WORLD, and I’m hooked on this a cappella business for life.