the stolen “a jar of balloons survey,2014 edition”

 Via Simple Minds, and created by james ensor; just the thing for a loooong dullish afternoon when I should be doing a lot of other things but don’t want to.

1. Will you agree to let a lover use your toothbrush? Why or why not? Well, I have shared a toothbush with Baker B, but I am not crazy about it because …. well, just ewwww. I always scald it with hot water. Never mind that we’ve been sharing our germs for many, many years.

2. In your bad dreams do you ever throw the slow motion punch? I do not recall that ever happening. I have done the slow-motion run thing in dreams, while trying to escape from… whatever I was escaping from. I also dreamed once that a bunch of huge fish-creatures were advancing towardsme in slow motion, walking on their tails, veeerrrrrryyy sllllooooowwwwwly. We were under my parents’ carport, and I was terrified but just kept letting them creep up towards me and did not do the sensible thing, like, oh, RUN AWAY. Even slowly.

3. Do you eat or give away pickles? Eat. I LOVE pickles. I will also be happy to eat anyone else’s who isn’t a pickle fan. This reminded me of horrifying my brother years ago, after I’d been seriously ill for an entire week and unable to eat anything. Suddenly I felt better, and he found me in the kitchen devouring pickles. Which he declared to be the last thing he’d ever want EVER EVER after being so sick, and then informed me that I was making HIM sick by doing that.

Great. Now I’m craving a pickle.

4. Do you match and ball socks or just dump them, en masse, into the drawer? I match them, and roll them up, and jam them into my sock drawer that currently contains around 5,470 pairs of socks. And then I complain that I don’t have ANY SOCKS I LIKE and I HATE all my socks and I need to buy some more socks.

5. Do you bisect your sevens with one of those squiggly hyphens? When writing the number 2 do you loop the bottom? I don’t bisect the 7, although I am often glad other people do when the 7 could be mistaken for some other number. I do usually loop the bottom of my 2, but not always. I’m changeable. That probably means something quite dire about my character.

6. When eating out, do you set your knife atop your plate and change hands? …. no. And apparently I am even more uncouth than I realized, because I do not know why you would do this.

Okay, an edit to say I just realized why you’d do that. OH. Of course I do.

7. Do you tear into wrapped presents or open them neatly with the spoken intent to save the paper? I open them neatly, although somehow the paper never gets saved. Sadly, I’ve just realized how few wrapped packages I get these days. Generally presents come in bags with colorful tissue paper.

8. Would you rather drive or be driven? Oddly I was just thinking about this. I realized yesterday afternoon, while driving home in somewhat bad weather – snow, scary looking roads although not that bad in reality — that I rarely drive in bad weather anymore. Because Baker B and I work at the same place and we always ride together if the weather is bad, and he always drives because he is a nervous control freak. Despite the fact that he is no better a driver than I am.

Of course that doesn’t really answer the question. I’d actually rather be driven because I like to ride. I like to ride in cars, in trains, in planes…. I like being transported. This is probably due to my many past lives as royalty.

<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;”>9. Do you engage strangers in conversations on airplanes? If no, it’s odd, isn’t it, when the time comes to accept peanut packets or order sodas and you hear their voices? I do not. I am not a fan of talking to strangers. I am a fan of planting my ipod earbuds in my ear and immersing myself in a good book if I am flying alone. I like to exchange the basic pleasantries, and then I want to be left in peace. As for the second part, I suppose it is odd to hear their voice later on, but I’d never thought about it. Probably because generally there is at least a "hello", and/or "excuse me" before the ipod is slapped into my ears.

10. Do you own a bathrobe? I’m sure I do somewhere in the Horrifying Den of Chaos that is my closet, but I never wear them. I don’t like bathrobes. I like PJs.

11. Are they still there, those ascending horizontal lines that marked your growth as a child up a wall or a door? My family never did that, sadly. I’m sure they’d still be there if we did – my dad lives in the house I grew up in and not much has changed.

12. Can you write at all with your opposite hand? I can, a bit. When I was in college I had a Traying Accident that tore the ligaments in my right middle finger (we would steal trays from the cafeteria when it snowed and ride on them down the snowcovered hill behind the dorms as if they were sleds. I trayed over my finger.) I had to have my finger operated on and it was in a cast for weeks, so I practiced my already-pretty-impressive ability to write with my left hand. (Yes, I AM ancient, and this was loooong before computers and keyboards and one-handed typing). I haven’t written with my left hand in a long time- I probably should. I think it’s good for your brain.

13. Do audiences affect your attempts to urinate or parallel park? … What?!? WELL, I do not generally cultivate an audience when I am engaging in private bathroom activities. I’m sure having onewould have quite the effect on my…. outcome. Wait, actually I DO sometimes have company in there, but it’s in the forms of my cats. Who don’t make me self-conscious about it.

BUT, I just remembered this hilarious incident right after we got the kittens, when they were just teeny little things. I’d let Eddie come with me into the bathroom, and as I sat there he squatted down on the bathmat right in front of me, with this terribly proud, "Look what I can do, Mommy!" expression on his face, and proceeded to pee on the bathmat. I thought that was pretty darned clever of him, although I also snatched him right up and put him in his litterbox.

As for parallel parking, yes. An audience makes me very nervous because I am not good at parallel parking, despite having lived in the city in DC years ago, where for a short time I became a parallel parking pro. Because you had NO choice there. It was parallel or nothing.

14. Do you bookmark or dog-ear your books? Bookmark. I used to be terrible about dog-earring them, but now I am conscientious and use a bookmark.

15. Do you mind fighting losing battles? I hate fighting period. I’m the Queen of Non-Confrontation. And I really hate fighting if I’m not even going to win.

16. Do you check the dates on coins? I do if they look old.

17. Do you like to be the one who holds the tickets (for airplanes, movies, etc.)? I like to hold my own, but not anyone else’s. Because I am scatterbrained and careless and I don’t want to lose mine AND the other person’s too. Although when we went to England last summer I was real tempted to make Baker B give me his. Because he’s worse than I am.

18. Can you sleep with socks on? I can and do, although on the very rare occasions that I feel it’s too warm, I’ll kick them off.

19. Are you a sucker for foreign accents? I do like accents. I especially love UK accents. I like the variety of accents in the US too, although I don’t find all of them attractive.

20. Are you skilled at giving directions? Hahahahahaha!!! No. I am skilled at giving nonsensical gibberish, usually containing extremely unhelpful landmarks like "turn left at the old house that used to be on that corner back in the 70s, but I think it’s gone actually and now there’s a… parkinglot there? Maybe? or is it a big tree?? OH, it’s a bank! I think." And then I watch the poor confused person drive away in the complete opposite direction.

I can draw a good map, though. Unfortunately it’s always verbal directions that are asked of me.

21. Is your name frequently mispronounced? It is, actually. My last name is. Which is not a difficult name at all and is also the name of a country, but for some reason people insist on putting the accent on the second syllable instead of the first. Which is not at all how you pronounce the country. It does have one extra letter in the middle that the country does not have, so maybe that’s the reason.

22. Do you attempt to pronounce foreign words correctly, such as calling a crescent-shaped roll a cwaSAHN? No. I don’t want to sound like a poser.

23. Do you think grades in school mattered? To an extent. I think the current educational system is completely fucked, though, and I don’t have nearly the time to go into that.

24. Can you tie a tie? What about a bowtie? Oddly enough, I had to do a presentation on "how to do something" for a class years ago, and I did mine on tying a tie. I guess Baker B showed me how, since that’s certainly not something I ever learned as part of my life skills. Now I don’t remember at all how to tie one, and the last time Baker B wore one he had to enlist help with it, as it had been so long that he’d forgotten how to do to.

As an illustration of how little I know about ties, I assumed bowties came pre-tied. So, no. No clue how you do that.

25. Does making a good list ever feel like an accomplishment in itself? It does, because I loooove making lists. I am one of those people who delight in lists. And then I never do anything on them. It’s like the list is complete in itself… the list will do all the actual work!

Again. Reincarnated royalty.

26. Have you ever been on fire? Not literally. Figuratively? I am a Gemini, and I am always getting on fire about this project or that project. And then I make a list! And then I wonder why the hell nothing on my list ever gets done. And then I abandon it so I can get fired up about another project and make another list!

27. Are your faucets tricky to the point where were an out-of-towner to use your shower, you’d feel the need to give a tutorial? No, but my bathroom is so frightening that I hesitate to let anyone use it. The wall is rotting out, and the window is going to fall in at any minute. It’s awful. We need a handyman. Hey, I’ll put that on a list!

28. Do you tend (or did you tend) to date people older or younger than yourself? I haven’t dated in quite some time, but I ended up with Baker B who is almost exactly two years older than I am. Actually, I did usually date somewhat older people. One guy was seven years older– I was in college at the time and that was way too big an age difference. Now it seems like nothing.

29. When walking or driving with a companion in a place where your companion is familiar and you are not, do you tend not to pay any attention whatsoever? To my surroundings? I always pay attention to new places. I love new places.

30. Do the number of beaches you’ve been on exceed your fingers? Way exceeds. I’ve always lived on the East Coast, and although I’ve never lived really close to the beach – I think 2 1/2 hours was the closest- I’ve always been a big fan of going to the beach. As was my mom. So we went to the beach a lot when I was a kid.

Oh, that’s it! That was not nearly as annoying as surveys usually are.