one hundred

It’s sixty degrees and balmy here in Zoo York. I’m wearing my new grass-green cotton blazer and Stuart’s enjoying his new job and we’ve got friends coming to dinner to celebrate, well, anything we want to celebrate. So I thought I’d give you guys a treat, should you want it -
- an 100 Things for the new season. My last list, written in 2003, was so hopelessly outdated and childishly pretentious that it was time to write a fresh one. Hopefully this one has a little less posturing, a little less structure, and is thus a little more enjoyable and honest.
Interested?

1. I cannot pronounce the word “drawer” correctly. Everyone else says “droor” while I say “drahhr”.
2. I like to read the dilemmas in Randy Cohen’s Ethicist column, cover up Cohen’s answer, see what I come up with, and then compare.
3. I’m proud of my cute feet.
4. I watch Katie Couric in the mornings. She reminds me that there are chirpy people that have been awake for hours.
5. I asked Jason to give me a Thing about me, and he said, “you laugh like you mean it.” I thought that was good.
6. I’ve only had two bee stings in my life: one, on the mountain roads of Crete in 1988, and the other, at the McDonald’s on Memorial Drive in Houston in 1994.
7. I am a quick liar and very good at it, but it’s karmically balanced, because I almost always get caught.
8. I won a speech competition in 1996 with a dramatic piece about child abuse. It was SO DRAMATIC.
9. I’ve kissed 42 men in my life. Most of them were frogs. I married the prince.
10. I’m addicted to cheddar cheese.
11. I know how to square dance, having learned at the age of 9 from my Texan grandparents at a now-defunct barbeque place called Texas Tumbleweed. I loved that place.
12. My family has the following three nicknames for me: gorda, titiu, and zuzuca. No, I won’t explain them.
13. My earliest memory of career ambition was wanting to be an architect, before I found out how much math was involved.
14. My dumbest injury is this: I was making pancakes, and I leaned down to look at the underside of the pancake and touched my nose to the edge of the hot frying pan.
15. My mother likes to tell people how I recognized some pewter spoons at the British Museum because Roald Dahl wrote about them in The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar and Other Stories. Secretly, I like this story too.
16. I was born at 2:30 am, on August 31, 1980, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
17. I know how to knit, make pasta, print color and black-and-white photographs, play squash, ride horses, play the piano, and bake a perfect quiche.
18. I have a birthmark on my stomach that I think looks like a maple leaf.
19. My future pet names are Caspian (for a dog) and Albion (for a cat). Steal them and I will totally cut you.
20. I climbed Mount Kenya and complained the entire way.
21. I love getting new cell phones.
22. I was a cheerleader and a drill team dancer in high school. This is often a source of taunting or blackmail among my friends.
23. One of my pet peeves is people treating me condescendingly because I’m young.
24. Even though I know nothing about cars, I really love Car Talk on NPR.
25. I like the smell of someone smoking pipe tobacco.
26. My mother wanted to name me Samantha and craved oranges while she was pregnant with me.
27. I’ve been known to rip up a page of notes if I don’t like the way my handwriting starts out.
28. I’ve lived in: Argentina, Aruba, Morocco, New Jersey, Cote D’Ivoire, Tunisia, Houston, Kenya, and New York. I’ve been to: Uruguay, Brasil, Mexico, France, England, The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, and most of the Eastern United States.
29. Most people, when they hear this list, say, “Military? Diplomat?” It’s oil – my dad worked for Exxon.
30. I grind my teeth in my sleep.
31. I’m not much for video games, but I’ll go a couple of rounds on any game I can drive or beat people up in.
32. I smoked for four gloriously irresponsible years. It’s been 3 months. I miss it, and still consider myself a reformed smoker.
33. I sing aloud in the car, and I don’t care if other people see me, which drives my mother batty.
34. I have two older half-brothers, both of whom epitomized “cool” for me, during most of the eighties.
35. I snobbily ignored The Simpsons until college. I was an idiot until college.
36. I’m finally learning how to sew from my mother, who has been the undisputed genius of the sewing machine for my whole life.
37. Being married to a Brit is awesome because we can eat cheese on toast with baked beans once a week and I get to say “BUGGER!” around the house in my awful American accent and he loves me anyway.
38. Until I was about 20, I fought my curly hair every day. Now I encourage it to do its thing and it looks great.
39. I’m terrified to the point of paralysis by even the most harmless of bug life.
40. Here is a spectrum of things I hate, from the marginally disliked to the violently loathed: cold pizza, broccoli, Ann Coulter, Catholicism, tapered pants, Jimmy Buffet.
41. I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 11. I said it was because I liked rollerskates better but the truth is, I was scared. This is a pattern of denial and stubbornness that you can find running rampant through my life.
42. I have read the Douglas Adams books. My life is consequently better.
43. I can be a real hypocrite sometimes.
44. I think there’s a fine line between appreciating the good things in life and being a spoiled snob. I like to think I walk that line every day.
45. When I was four, some kid pulled out a chunk of my hair while playing duck, duck, goose. It was really traumatizing.
46. When people tell me I talk a lot, I usually brush it off but deep down, it hurts. It implies that what I’m saying isn’t worth hearing, otherwise they wouldn’t have noticed.
47. I have very vivid dreams that I will immediately tell Stuart about, first thing in the morning.
48. I have a natural aversion to all things cultish, like Star Wars and comic books, even though most of my friends are unabashed geeks of this stripe.
49. I wish I knew how to: drive a manual transmission car, sail, install lighting, garden, play the drums or the fiddle, speak Italian and Greek, and make bread.
50. My maternal instinct is a force to be reckoned with. I call this force “my ovaries”.
51. I’m learning to drink two litres of water a day.
52. I used to want to be editor-in-chief of the New York Times. Now I want to be a good person with close friends and a family, a novelist, and happy.
53. Even though I’ve complained about my last name for most of my life, when it came time to switch to Stuart’s, I became suddenly attached to it. Thankfully, he understood.
54. My favourite flowers are tulips, lilacs, and magnolias. I also like hydrangea, snapdragons, and irises. I even like roses, provided they’re the cheerful English kind.
55. When I’m having a bad day, I like to buy People Magazine or US Weekly. It’s crap, but it’s comforting.
56. My eyes turn greenish when I cry.
57. When I was a teenager, I used to sneak sips of port from my parent’s liquor cabinet.
58. I used to think my parents were kidding when they said my Russian piano teacher in Cote D’Ivoire was working for Moscow. Now I realize they weren’t.
59. I always quicken my pace when I’m half a block away from our apartment.
60. I have an agent. This never ceases to amaze me and makes me feel like a complete and utter hack when I say it aloud.
61. My two best friends from high school, Erin and Rachel, are still two of my best friends. Two of us are married, two of us are in law school, and we all share a serious affinity for the Police.
62. Once, at a restaurant during a one-day layover in London, my chicken-breast exploded herb butter all over me. My mother and I still laugh when we remember this story.
63. Aside from everything I’ve said about cultish pop culture, I’m a die-hard Buffy fan. Remember what I said about hypocrisy?
64. I’ve never had much interest in going to California, and until I have a good friend in every city, I probably won’t go. It costs the same to fly to Europe.
65. I’m still a little surprised that I’m living in New York and making a life here, just as I said I would when I was 13.
66. Once, Erin lost a word for a whole month, and she finally remembered it, but every time I try and tell the story, I forget the word. She never does – I just asked her. It was “speculate”.
67. When I was little, my favourite color was lavender because I thought it was cliched to like pink. Now, I love all colors but am partial to crisp shades of green and warm shades of yellow.
68. “But I am le tired” never isn’t funny.
69. Stuart was one of my blog crushes way before any of us met him.
70. I don’t worry much about the world, because I think it’s the height of arrogance to assume all the catastrophe will happen during my puny lifespan. That said, I wish someone would do something about diabetes.
71. When I say I don’t like seafood, most people (correctly) assume it’s because I’m stubborn about trying it. However, this is, in this case, untrue: due to respect for my seafood-loving friends, I have tried almost every single thing that swims.
72. My favourite shoes in the world are Brazil’s Havaiana flip-flops. I have three pairs and I can’t get enough.
73. I like really violently gruesome threats, like, “I’m going to rip your arms off and beat you about the head with them” or “fuck that in the EAR”, mainly because I’m 5’2″ and who would believe me?
74. I saw my first snowfall in the Atlas Mountains, in Morocco. This is indicative of the weirdness of my life.
75. My dad and I used to “speak Spanish” when I was a toddler, which meant we’d just babble back and forth incoherently. We thought it was very funny.
76. Galoshes are good for keeping your feet dry from rain. Also, from my killing rampages. See? Violently gruesome threats.
77. I dated a gay guy once. Yes, I knew he was gay. Yes, HE knew he was gay. In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid idea.
78. I have “vaults” with some of my friends, where we can be as cruel and catty as we want and it stays within the bounds of the “vault”. You don’t want to look in there.
79. I love llamas. It’s inexplicable. I just do.
80. In the eighth grade, I played Lucy in “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown”. It was the pinnacle of my acting career.
81. I love summer downpours, driving in Texas, and running at sunset.
82. I probably quote Eddie Izzard too much, but I don’t care.
83. I vote democrat, inform myself on the issues, and then get on with my life as best I can.
84. My favourite authors are, in terms of sheer quantities read and enjoyed and in no particular order Roald Dahl, John Irving, Phillip Pullman, Michael Chabon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, JK Rowling, Kate Atkinson, Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and then John Irving again.
85. I am immensely proud of how much I’ve read, of how addicted to reading I am, and so is everyone else with as prolific a habit as I have. If they’re trying to be humble about it, they’re lying.
86. I only like white towels.
87. I know next to nothing about sports, but I particularly like attending baseball, soccer, and tennis games.
88. I love England, but everyone loves England, except I love England in the sense of it being Stuart’s homeland and thus someplace new to explore and eventually understand.
89. I wear a men’s watch because I like the weight.
90. The idea of homeland, while I’m on the subject, is very complicated to me. My blood is Belgian, Irish, and Greek, while my adopted cultures are American and Brasilian and my childhood was spent mostly in Africa. Like I said – complicated.
91. Stuart and I have this thing about the letter E. My phone texted him an “E” one day, for no reason, and ever since then, we say it to each other every day. We don’t really know why.
92. When I meet new people, I have to quell the impulse to talk at a mile a minute, especially if they’re quiet.
93. I don’t like the word “nice”. I don’t think it describes anything, and I think it should be exiled from our vocabulary.
94. I think if there was a song about me, it’d be Billy Joel’s “Vienna”.
95. I love the Bronx Zoo.
96. My mom and I have talked about pot, and traded stoner stories. This is awesome.
97. I wrote a short book when I was six about a mouse named Emily. It was very detailed, stapled, and illustrated.
98. I’ve had five dogs in my life – four German Shepherds (Jade, Mouschka, Aquaba, and Champion) and a Jack Russell (Kirby). Four of the five died young, 2-3 years. Champion lived to a ripe old age and proved Darwin wrong because he was dumb as a bag of hair.
99. I’m an accessory fiend, currently in possession of about 50 pairs of shoes, 28 purses, 3 pairs of sunglasses, 6 wallets, 6 hats, 8 pairs of gloves, 3 brooches, and god knows how many scarves.
100. My real name is Christina.