Sassy’s 32 factoids

1. I was born on December 4 in Alaska. Brrr.

2. The doctor’s words when I was born, “LOOK at all that hair! It’s a redhead !”

3. My mother’s response, “Oh no,” stemmed later into gratitude when a hospital mix-up led to me being breastfed by and passing for another woman’s baby.

4. I knew how to read before starting school, which I began a year early. I was kicked out of my first kindergarten class for spending too much time with my nose squished up in a book.

5. I used to believe that I was a little boy, and that everyone was playing a joke on me by making me think I was a girl.

6.  My second grade teacher was Jim Henson’s sister in law. To me she was the coolest cat in the world.

7. I once participated in the Little Miss Junior America beauty pageant. I think that I was the most freakishly awkward kid in it. In the middle of my ‘interview competition’ I got so nervous that I forgot how to talk.

8. I was the tallest girl in the whole wide universe by the age thirteen. I wished I was invisible.

9. I was the worst student in my high school French class yet am today bilingual.

10. At fifteen, I spent a year as a foreign exchange student at this school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Many people, including my French teacher, warned me not to go, that I’d never make it. I’m stubborn as a mule and did make it. Partly just to prove them wrong. That year marked the shift from freakishly awkward phase into awkwardly rebel phase.

11. The following year, in keeping with the awkward rebel motif, I was at the center of a family conflict that endures to this day. Gazillions of people stopped speaking to each other and it was is still a big mess.

12. I went bazonkers and ran away with my first love. We were gonna live free and young forever. Instead he turned my heart inside out with brokenness. I took my little dog and left.

13. I didn’t go to college.

14. I spent a year working in a youth hostel in Amsterdam when I was 22. I had a bike painted like a cow and was completely gaga for the city.

15. The following year I spent backpacking through Asia with my roomate. We hit ten countries in twelve months, in this order : The Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, China, Pakistan, Nepal, India, Singapore, Malaysia.  We crossed uniquely over land with only 2 exceptions – in places where there was a big old ocean dividing us from our destination, duh!)

16.It was the craziest adventure of my life and I almost died.

17. I even got bit by a monkey.

18. I have a revulsion to monkeys.

19. I got really sick of other travelers who thought that visiting interesting places was all they needed to be interesting people.

20. I’ll talk about my experience, but usually only when I’m asked, which is not very often. Part of the reason I started this blog was to help work some of these things out in my head.

21. Like suffering.

22. Upon returning to the States I went through the greatest culture shock I had yet to experience.

23. After a short break, and a bit of normal life, I moved to the woods in Virginia and joined a wacko community. Not Waco, wacko. There I sought answers and peace and God for a year, living as a recluse, barely acknowledging those around me. I needed to.

22. I believe in God and have a bone to pick with him.

23. This is not an evangeblog.

24. I met my Manboy during my period of near hermitage. I am amazed to this day he fell for me.

25. I so was not interested in him. Too young and his mama did his laundry. She ironed pleats into everything. Eeew.

26. He went back to France and left me his card. I thought it was weird that someone without a job carried business cards. Maybe it’s a French thing, I thought.

27. I never wrote.

28. I came to France planning to stay for three months and work as a nanny. I met lots of people, unemployeyed and otherwise, that carried business cards. It turned out to be a French thing.

29. Manboy just happened to be friends with the family I nannied for. Not planned. Neither of us knew in advance. We fell furiously in love and got hitched less than a year later. Manboy isn’t one to beat around the bush. He made me melt in spite of those starchy blue jeans.

30. My past jobs in this country include nannying for miniature monsters, teaching English, and selling really, really, really expensive windows. Selling windows was the drinkingest, lyingest job I’ve ever done. I earned tons of money but was becoming an alcoholic and couldn’t handle lying so I quit.

31. I spent half my life wasting birth control, until an unexpected infertility diagnosis leading to subsequent treatments shocked me silly with tunnel-vision like remorse.

32. Still, all I ever really wanted out of life was a teeny white dog. And maybe an island where I can hang out and eat coconuts with Manboy. I’m still waiting for the island and the coconuts.

33. I am trying to expand my family through IVF,  ‘trying’ being the operative word.