Stolen from Trista, Bri, Calliope, and maybe others…. Answered over the course of approximately two full days, in the odd moments when Noah was sleeping.

1. Who was your first Prom date? Oh god. What WAS his name? I met him at a high school model UN conference where I was Liberia and he was East Germany. He was a total dork, but I wanted to go to prom, so…. And he periodically tried to get me to go out again, for the next 3 or 4 years, but I never did. He wrote the WORST, most harlequin-romance-esque, embarrassing love letters I’ve ever gotten. But I did learn the proper use of the term plethora from those letters.

2. Who was your first roommate(s)?
Jayne. She smoked 2 packs/day, took over the whole closet, and stole the RA’s boyfriend about 2 months into the academic year. I moved out at the end of the semester.

But I did have The Best Roommate Ever about whom I must brag. Levi’s Mama Melissa was my housemate for 1.5 years, and she was The Best Roommate Ever. I even started calling her that when we had a 3rd roommate move into the apartment after our crazy landlady raised the rent insanely high. It is true, that 3rd roommate may not have appreciated my bestowing that title on Melissa, but she was, er, not the best roommate ever.

If my yentaing efforts between Mama Melissa and Mama Mindy had failed, I would have been delighted to be Melissa’s roommate again. But ‘happily ever after’ beats ‘best roommate ever’ hands down, especially since I got a ‘happily ever after’ too. Eventually.

3. What alcoholic beverage did you drink the first time you got drunk? Some concoction involving rum, lime juice, and raw sugar. I was in the 8th grade, and Laura’s Dad took me, Laura, her brother, and one of his friends, to the Club Med in Guadaloupe.

4. What was your first job? Not counting babysitting — which does not mean it shouldn’t count, I just don’t want to count it because then I get a funnier answer — my first job was working as a trap setter and puller at the local gun club.

Really.

My pro-gun-control parents were convinced that they’d never hire me because they’d recognize the name, but in spite of the fact that 80-90% of the people who shot at the gun club in question were union members shooting on their union teams, no one did.

It was a very funny job, mostly involving sitting in a bunker off the edge of Lake Michigan, dropping oily orange clay "pigeons" onto a machine that fired them off at 60 mph, and hurt like hell if you didn’t get your fingers out of the way fast enough. For variety, after dark we used oily white clay pigeons.

The scariest thing about the job was not all the guns, although I find those a little scary. It was the way each team would arrive, have a beer, shoot a round, have a beer, shoot a round, have a beer, shoot a round, and then drink until the club closed. And then drive home. The club was NOT local for 99% of the people who shot there.

But I developed a much greater background in heavy metal music than you might think I have — and the one I had when I got the job was also better than you’d probably guess.

5. What was your first car? A 1983 Renault Alliance. When I got it, it had 168K on it, and it would have gone much further, but at around 180k, I had the misfortune to drive cross country with someone who had grossly exaggerated her ability to drive stick shift.

6. When did you go to your first funeral? Age 7 or 8, my godfather. I was fine at the service and the burial, but… My mom suggested that I take a rose (his last name was Rose) and dry it so I’d have something to remember him by. I didn’t realize that dried flowers shrivel up and look dead. So when I came downstairs to look at the "preserved" flower the next morning, and saw it all shriveled up on the radiator, I completely freaked out.

7. How old were you when you first moved away from your home town? 17. My goal was to move as far away as possible, so I went to Oregon. That turned out badly; it turns out you can go too far away. A year later, I transferred schools and wound up only 800 miles away, at the same school with one friend, half an hour and a free bus ride from a very close friend/ex, and 2 hours from other friends.

8. Who was your first grade teacher? I skipped first grade.

It was an awful, awful experience. Not at the time — I did know enough to move on to second grade. But as kids in your class start to hit puberty, the differences become more pronounced. And smart kids are sufficiently inclined towards being dorks anyway.

I had such a miserable time in fifth grade that I demanded my parents and teachers let me change schools and repeat it. I told them I hadn’t learned enough to move on, which is funny since I wasn’t flunking anything. Even PE, where I got my first "D" that year. But I had been sufficiently miserable, suicidal in fact, that requests like that were somehow accommodated.

Lucky for me, our city was going through creative desegregation experiments, which let me end up back in school with friends from kindergarten when I went to fifth grade the second time.

9. Where did you go on your first ride on an airplane? Jamaica, I think. I was only 2. That’s the first one I have any recollection of anyway. I spent a lot of time in the summers visiting relatives who lived far away, so I took a lot of plane trips.

10. When did you sneak out of your house for the first time, who was it with? It must have been Katie, but the only vivid time I remember was HER "running away from home." That was about 5th grade. The next time I remember was my first year of high school. Mostly it involved my hanging out at a boy’s house around the block, instead of the girls I said I was hanging out with, who lived around the block the other way.

11. Who was your first Best Friend and are you still friends with them? Katie. See the other meme.

12. Where did you live the first time you moved out of your parents house? The dorms.

13. Whose wedding were you in the first time you were a bridesmaid/groomsmen? My friend Colleen. We’d been incredibly close in middle and high school, and stayed in touch in college. She got married the September after we graduated from college, and was the most "grown up" of my friends for many years.

Sadly for Colleen, I was going through a fairly radical phase at the time, and was probably a very unattractive bridesmaid. I didn’t protest any of the outfit elements, which in retrospect were extremely reasonable. But Colleen’s sister, who had not yet come out, protested all of them with great vigor. We wound up not wearing the hats, and if I remember right, possibly having freedom of shoe choice as well. And the dresses, though long, pink, and fluffy, were also cotton, inexpensive, and very mild on the spectrum of bridesmaids dresses.

14. What is the first thing you do in the morning? Tell Noah that I’m coming to feed him, but I have to go to the bathroom first.

15. What is the first concert you ever went to? I think it was Peter Gabriel. It was supposed to have been The Ramones, when I was in the 8th grade. Unfortunately, I got very sick and wound up in the hospital the night of their show.

16. First tattoo or piercing? I got my ears pierced in 5th grade — the second round of 5th grade. But they got infected and the holes closed.

Then I got them pierced again in 7th grade. That time, I went by myself, to a nice jewelry store owned by some friends of my parents. I hung out there, and at the store’s sister store that sold cheaper jewelry and random fru-fru (stickers, cards, gag gifts that I didn’t get at the time, smelly soaps & candles…). The staff knew me.

Because they knew me, I really wanted to be brave and hide the "childish" fact that I have a huge needle phobia. So I held my shit together after they pierced my ears, walked out of the store onto the main downtown street, took a few steps towards the bus stop to go home, and blacked out.

I came to with about 5 people, including a police officer, standing around me. I insisted that I was fine, whilst actually dying of embarrassment. They went away, I took another few steps toward the bus stop, and blacked out again.

Fortunately, that time someone from the store saw me fall. She and the police officer helped me back into the store, where they called their boss and made him take me home. And they made me sit in the back of the store, drinking water, and waiting for him to come get me.

I doubt there are any more piercings in my future. Or tattoos, although I have occasionally contemplated getting one.

17. First Celebrity crush? Hmmm. I’m not that much of a celeb crusher. I guess probably Matt Dillon, but I can’t tell you if that was a sincere crush, or a manufactured crush because I thought I needed a celeb crush to be "normal." Call it 7th to 9th grade.

18. Age of first kiss? 7th grade, probably 12.

19. First crush? I’d have to go with Eric, son of my parents’ friends who lived about a mile away when we were little. I had a huge crush on him when we were 6 or 7. But I would have been mortified if he’d known. Or if anyone else had known, for that matter.