Four by six

Mushi, whose site is totally down and will probably restore itself when the husband-unit ceases playing with the new shiny, did thusly tag me with this meme I’ve seen on cool places like Fraser’s blog, and well, why not? I don’t want to be a chain-letter breaking loser. Like, ahem, other people I know.

Anywho, read on for six lists of four.

Four jobs I’ve had:

  1. Head lifeguard

    As a kid, there was nothing I wanted to be more than the tanned, fit, goldilocked girl of summer, high on my lifeguard stand, doing whistle tricks and impressing small children and handsome young men alike. I joined the swim team, worked the snack bar, taught swimming lessons, and made my way up the ranks. My last year “at home,” I was pool manager and head coach of the swim team, and in charge of the lifeguarding staff.

    But did you know if you open a wet canister of chlorine sticks, the gas can literally knock you out? Now you do.

  2. Researcher at the Duke University Medical Center Comprehensive Cancer Center Laboratory of Ovarian and Breast Cancer Tumor Biology

    In between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent my summer working in a lab over at Duke. I was a little lab monkey, with my own part of the research. It involved inserting a vector (section of genetic code) into a bacterial plasmid (round DNA, used because it’s simpler than twisted-pair). The sequence I was working with was one that caused a type of cancerous growth. It kept disappearing after a certain number of generations when grown in the lab. My job was to see if it could be put it back in, so the strain could be used for research. It didn’t work, but nobody really thought it would. We just had to provide evidence one way or the other, and that was my job.

    I also probably got radiated, as my advisor had very, um, relaxed lab safety skills.

  3. Box-builder, some random pharmacutical plant in Greensboro

    I ended up with a crappy temp job the summer that I moved out of my parents’ place and in with this guy I was dating. Young love makes one do foolish things–in my case, leaving a decent job with decent pay to stand on a concrete floor all freakin’ day taping together cardboard boxes. The paper cuts were ungodly. I can emphatically state this was the worst job I’ve ever had. But I had no money, and no secretarially-appropriate clothing, so even though I could type a million words a minute and work any office app known to man, the nice lady in the cheap suit told me I’d have to pull manual labor gigs. It SUCKED. The boy? Worked at a sock factory. We were high-class, yes we were.

  4. Web monkey at ibiblio

    Coolest job ever for the coolest boss ever. R&D-type stuff, building web sites, helping users maintain their web sites, etc.. Good times.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

  1. Platoon, because it’s an amazing film.
  2. The Nightmare Before Christmas, because it’s Tim Burton and Danny Elfman.
  3. What Dreams May Come, because although it’s a very melancholy film, parts of it are truly dreamy.
  4. Rocky Horror. Hundreds of times. Still amuses me. The same thing is true of The Princess Bride.

Four places I’ve lived:

  1. The house on Hutchins Drive

    I lived in the same house from the time I was a year old until fifth grade. It was a ranch with grey wood siding and red shutters. My favorite part of the house was the big bay window in the formal living room and the built-in shelves in the den.

    I saw this house again, about a year ago, when it was for sale and I was looking at houses. It was destroyed inside–filthy, broken-down, almost unrecognizable. The giant backyard with my mother’s flower garden and the split-rail fence to all my friends’ houses’ yards… was cut into tiny plots by tall fences, with the spaces in between overgrown and untravelled. Good fences make good neighbors? Not in this case.

  2. The house on Shadywood Lane

    Where we moved to, and my parents’ home now. A two-story traditional with cream-colored vinyl siding and red shutters. With trees all around.

    Now that the children have finally left the nest, my mother has started getting some quite nice (and, thank gods, neutral) decor and furnishings.

  3. The apartment off Airport Road

    My first place by myself–a teeny tiny efficiency apartment with one bedroom and a u-shaped great room that served as both living and dining. I was fortunate that it had a full-size stove, and I think there was a dishwasher… and ok storage–it fit what I had at the time, anyway! However, the management company (Fisher-Fisher for those who might care) sucked enormous amounts of cock. They gave complex keys to the shadiest of individuals, and once when the ancient and crumbling water heater exploded (soaking the carpets in both rooms thoroughly), they opened up every window and door in my place (while I was away) and left them standing open, completely unattended.

    BUT, it was dirt cheap ($375 a month, I think, when I signed my first lease) and it was all mine, so I loved it. Had a great big grassy knoll out back with a concrete patio and gazebo covering up the hole where the old swimming pool had been. Friends of mine lived in the other scattered buildings, and it was walking distance to campus and many local hotspots.

  4. Saint Anthony Hall East

    An old house that was converted into four apartments, on campus where I went to college and less than a half-block from my fraternity’s home. I shared the bottom right 1-BR with this guy who was friends with my friend K.. I hadn’t actually met him before I moved in. We had a ten-minute conversation on the porch, smoked a cigarette, agreed to disagree on politics, and I moved in a little while later. He graciously gave me the only bedroom and took a curtained-off portion of the living room as his pad.

    The door into the living room was his door, and the one in the kitchen was mine. We had a dining room that we just used to store crap–mostly booze and books. The kitchen and the bathroom were the only two carpeted rooms, and that carpet was FUNK-y. You couldn’t go barefoot in the house because the varnish on the hardwood floors had worn through–you’d get splinters.

    We had a miniscule screened-in porch that was only one butt wide, because the stairs leading up to the upper apartment (where, incidentally, J’s girlfriend lived) took up most of what was once a modest screened-in porch. We used to sit out there and smoke endlessly.

    And, regardless of the size of this old house, there were always people around, and always something insane going on. Whether E. and I were making crepes for 15 people on a hungover Sunday morning, or J and three of his drunk friends lit a couch on fire in our gravel parking lot… it was certainly never dull.

Four TV shows I love:

  1. 24, because Keifer Sutherland is still enormously hot.
  2. The Muppet Show, which is timeless. And out on DVD. I bought it in Disney. We should stage a viewing party!
  3. Skating with Celebrities. Hey, I admit it. Trashy TV amuses the hell out of me. And you really can’t go wrong with Dave Coulier, Nancy Kerrigan, Deborah Gibson, and Kristy Swanson (The original Buffy). It’s awesome.

    The positively ancient-looking Bruce Jenner is really turning into the man of the hour, what with his wooden but technically-impressive-even-if-he-wasn’t-in-his-fifties skills. I mean, seriously. The guy looks like he’s got a stick up his butt, but he’s jumping and flipping and turning without stumbling all over himself or his partner. He was doing SPINS. True, he got 16 stitches in his face because he fell learning how to spin, but give the geezer an ‘A’ for overachievement.

  4. MacGyver, because one never forgets a first love. I thought Mac was the smoothest dude I’d ever seen. Him and his giant scientific brain. Mmmmm.

Four places I have vacationed:

  1. Disney

    The Mouse is incredibly cool, though I am ambivalent about him.

  2. The Caribbean

    It’s really unbelievable that there is water that blue.

  3. The Lake

    I vacation each year with my closest friends. We go to The Lake and swim and sun and play games and enjoy our combined and tangled histories.

  4. In my own home

    Occasionally, one just has to take a vacation to video-game-land, if one is honestly a true and proper geek.

Four of my favorite dishes:

  1. soup, in general. I love soup, and I’ll throw just about anything in the pot to turn it into warm and liquid goodness. Especial favorites are things like split peas, potatoes, or caramelized onions.
  2. stuffed grape leaves, falafel, hummus, and baklava, especially from Neomonde.
  3. curry, of all different kinds, from my mom’s Americanized version (to use up chicken or turkey leftovers–popular after holidays) to a spicy Thai Massaman.
  4. sushi, also of all kinds. From tempura (dragon) to veggie (Count Basie) to straight up toro–yum!

Four sites I visit daily:

  1. I Blame the Patriarchy

    Because one can never have enough patriarchy-blaming or dinner. Twisty is acerbic, intelligent, and makes a mean taco. She is also a spinster aunt, which I sometimes aspire to be.

  2. Salon

    My favorite place for editorial news, though lately I’ve been reading a handful of columns I like and skipping a lot of the rest. Weird.

  3. BoingBoing

    Some people have the knack for finding weird things. These folks totally have that special ability. And now people send them links, too, so this site is completely awash in… bizarro shit.

  4. My friends’ blogs

    Blogging is the new letter-writing. Some days I can’t believe that this many people have gotten into what was, essentially, BBSing in the 80s and early 90s. Back then we were total dorks.

    Ok, so we’re still total dorks, but there are more of us? Oh well.

Four places I would rather be right now:

  1. Somewhere where there is snow on the ground and it is still coming down and I am inside and cozy and warm.

    I LOVE snow. There has been absolutely no snow this winter and that disappoints me. Deeply.

    I don’t even want to play in it, really, or go out in it much beyond observing and enjoying (and perhaps snapping a few pictures for permanence), but there’s something so peaceful and lazy about a snow day. Even as an adult, I look forward to a day spent in my pajamas, curled in bed with the blinding white world outside and a book stretched in front of me. Sitting by the fire, making soup, keeping an eye on the weather… mmmmm…

  2. In the lap of wealth and luxury

    I mean, duh. I could finance whatever sort of creative endeavor I and my friends desired. Like moving to a tiny town and perhaps opening a combination book/coffee/movie/gaming shop. That sells clothes and possibly candles and other, um, stuff. No worries, no careful calculactions–just a good money manager and some amount of common sense.

  3. On vacation somewhere new and exciting

    Vacation is always awesome, unless one has just gotten home from vacation.

  4. asleep

    Why am I still awake again? God.

Four people I am torturing–er, tagging–with this meme:

  1. Robust McManlypants, because he knows he wants to.
  2. Katastrophes, because she’s never the last pick at dodgeball.
  3. K, because it will give her a post for this week and something to do while she’s home sick.
  4. Anti, because he loves memes.

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