Sharing My World 78

There were no new world sharing questions this week.  Normally this would not be a big deal for me since I am generally clueless about stuff like what day of the week it is at the best of times, and it could be construed as surprising that I even noticed.  But I did.  And consequently I’ve had some remorse about my silence.  I needed my question-answering fix for the week.

So I searched the internet for some random questions that didn’t hurt my brain.  I hope my answers won’t hurt yours too much.

Are you the person now you thought you’d be when you were little?

When I was little I never once imagined myself as anyone’s grandma, that’s for sure.

Now that the grandma thing is happening I realize that all grandmas have a finite number of stories to tell and they just keep on telling them because what the hell else do they have to do?  So if you’ve heard this one before, too bad.  I’m old and I don’t care.

When a teacher asked us to paint a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up, I imagined myself as a brilliant and beautiful blonde singer on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Sadly in real life I had extreme stage fright, a less than stellar singing voice, and what I considered totally the wrong face for blonde hair.  “Brilliant” and  “beautiful” on their own alas turned out to be insufficient traits for this particular ambition.  Plus Ed died before I could get my shit together.

I guess none of it was meant to be.  But the childhood friends who laughed at me when I shared this dream will forever live in my memory as little jerks.  I knew myself it was not realistic, but could you not have humoured me for five minutes?

Have you ever had your heart-broken?  Have you ever broken someone else’s heart?

Heartbreak is such a subjective thing.  Little things break your heart when you’re little, like when your brother pulls the head off your doll and demands money from you for revealing its current whereabouts.  It’s all about loss, and the losses get progressively bigger and more serious as you grow up.  You lose a good friend, you break up with a boyfriend, you have to abandon an unrealistic dream.  But wait, life has way more heartbreaking stuff to throw at you. A lover moves on and leaves you grieving for what might have been, opportunities disappear, a grandparent dies.  Then you lose your parents and a sibling and you wonder what you were so upset about before those things happened.  And then you wonder how much more breaking your heart can actually take.  Or if it will eventually get so hard and calloused that it just rolls with the punches, because you know those hard knocks aren’t going to stop.

If I’ve caused a broken heart I am truly sorry.  But I believe,  because I can’t think of a specific instance off the top of my head of ever doing it deliberately to anyone,  that maybe it hasn’t happened a lot.  Huh. Well, no doubt there’s still time.

When you think of home, what comes to mind?

After W and I first got married we both thought of where we grew up as home.  As in ‘let’s go home for Christmas.’  It took a long time for us to refer to wherever the two of us currently lived together as our REAL home.  Having kids helped with that because it was their home.  Is that weird or normal?  I seem to ask myself that question a lot and rarely know the answer and probably won’t believe yours anyway, so just ignore that bit.

Now I think you just take home with you wherever you go.  It’s a feeling, more than a place. A sense of peace and love and being safe from harm.  It can be as big as a country or as small as a backyard.  And the people who have broken my heart by leaving were simply on their way home.  I need to suck it up and be thankful I got to walk beside them and share so many small parts of their journey.

Name one of your greatest strengths, and one of your greatest weaknesses.

Adaptation is a big strength.  Because everything changes.  Everything!   Might as well get used to it.

Worry is my most crippling weakness, not to mention a royal pain.  Sometimes when something I’ve been fretting about finally happens it’s a colossal relief because then I can just move on and adapt to it.  And yeah, that one is definitely weird.

What did life teach you yesterday?

It taught me that many people who want to cut sugar out of their diets still want to pretend they are eating things that contain sugar.  They post sugarless, wheatless, grain free, gluten-free, dairy free, diabetic friendly recipes for brownies and cookies and cheesecake and bread.  Why don’t you weirdos just stop eating cupcakes and chocolate mousse and bogus donut shaped things that no one in their right mind can be fooled into believing are bagels?  It won’t kill you to cut desserts out of your diet and just eat a completely un-messed with banana or something.

I’m sorry but “bread” made with sixteen eggs and almond flour is not even remotely close to being bread-like.  Do you really need toast that smells like burnt eggs?  I know I can live without it.

I can also live without eating shortbread and butter tarts although I made them both for W because it’s Christmas and I didn’t want him moping around whining about missing them.  Believe me, no one wants that.  I did not attempt to make a pastry-less, raisin and nutless,  no brown sugar, no corn syrup, butter-substitute loaded tart although I’m sure someone in the world has tried it and will be posting the godforsaken recipe on Facebook shortly.  Do not fall for it.  Some things are meant to be coma inducing sugar bombs and we should just accept that and let them be.

Deep down, who are you really?

Well if all this didn’t give you at least a couple of clues and an ill- informed opinion, I don’t know what to say.

I’m pretty ordinary as humans go.  I guess deep down I’m my mothers daughter, least likely person to ever want to break your heart.  My mother did not laugh at my goal to become a famous singer, she simply told me the picture I drew was nice.

It’s not that hard to be kind. We should probably all try it more often.  And if you’re one of those people trying to make the things we eat healthy, I’m sorry I was snarky, and good for you.  My mom tried to make pie shells once with whole wheat flour.  They were disgusting, but we all knew her heart was in the right place.

Ask A Silly Question

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” ~Rumi

Publicity photo of The Supremes from The Ed Sullivan Show. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Daily Prompt:  When you were 10, what did you want to be when you grew up? What are you now? Are the two connected?

Art class was one of the things I loved most about elementary school, a close runner-up to reading everything I could get my hands on and making up long and involved (very loosely based on reality) stories of my own.  I remember the day our teacher gave us big blank pieces of art paper and told us to paint a picture which illustrated the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

In my short little life so far I had been asked that question about a billion times and was really sick of the people pleasing answers I felt compelled to come up with in response to it.  I usually said whatever I thought was most likely to get the adult harassing me to smile and nod and then go away and pick on somebody else.  It was my experience that grown ups really didn’t care what you wanted to be when you grew up, it was just a thing they asked kids when they couldn’t think of anything else to say.

This art assignment was less structured than normal, almost like being asked to paint whatever popped into our heads. So here’s what popped into mine.

I painted a stage across the bottom and a beautiful sparkly gossamer curtain across the back with lines and lines of flowing folds.  On the stage stood a beautiful blonde woman in a gorgeous white evening gown which looked like a wedding dress without the veil.  So I added a couple of gigantic red roses and a bow for clarification.  In her hands she held a microphone attached to a long black cord that coiled off to one side and out of the picture.  This was back in the day when microphones could be taken off their stands allowing performers to walk around trying not to get tangled up in a bunch of wires.  The lady’s eyes were closed and her mouth was a big round red O taking up half her face. There were musical notes floating around above her head.   It was a beautiful picture and I was incredibly proud of it.  Because that was going to me – drop dead gorgeous, blonde, dressed to kill and singing my heart out on the Ed Sullivan Show.

So how did that work out for me?  Actually, not well.  I can’t sing.  I don’t look so great with blond hair – tried it once and didn’t have any more fun than I’d had as a brunette.  Never in my life have I owned or felt the urge to purchase such elaborate formal wear. Or one of those big poufy wedding dresses either. Red lipstick makes me look weird.  I have never used a microphone or done anything on a stage where I was the center of attention unless you count being handed a diploma. And Ed Sullivan died before I could be discovered.  If he was alive today he’d still be waiting.

Today I work in the medical field and wear a lab coat at work every day.  Hey – it’s white!  So that part of my vision of the future was bang on.  The rest, not so much. Even as the picture took form all those years ago I’m sure I knew it was just a silly dream and simply an excuse to paint a beautiful lady in a stunning dress.

I try to make a point of never, ever, asking a young child what they want to do with their lives.  How can they possibly know?  What a kid does know is what’s fun, what makes them laugh the hardest, what games they like to play, which books are the best to read.  They’ve got years and years to live and so many things to experience and even then their life work decisions may never be carved in stone.

Now I’d answer the question by saying simply that I just want to be happy.  There’s time enough to discover all the ways there are to make that happen.

Egg On and Early TV

(Perry and Della – the unbeatable team)

These topic suggestions have egged me on.  Such a strange expression – makes me think of someone pelting me with raw eggs to set me in motion.

What’s the best way to find out about new books you might like?  Go to the Word Press Home Page and click on the Books topic.  Lots of people out there are reading like crazy and sharing their experiences.  All of the e-books on my Kindle come from Amazon of course, and the reviews and suggestions there are great.  The “customers who bought this item also bought”  thing can be very helpful too if you’re looking for books that are similar to, or just as interesting as, the ones you’ve already enjoyed.  It never hurts to have friends who read a lot and like to make suggestions.  And I love bargain book tables.  Although those aren’t piled high with new books, they’re usually new to me and there’s always the possibility of discovering some obscure gem.

How do you spend the majority of your non-work time? Non-working.  Eating, sleeping, reading, blogging, playing games, keeping up a house, washing my hair.

If you were going to redecorate your home, what would you change? A better question might be, where would you start?  But frankly I’ve spent a lot of years changing things up and around, and now I’m at the point where I don’t really care that much about it anymore.  Our house is too big for just the two of us.  If we ever move to something smaller I’ll think harder about the whole decorating thing.

Are you an early bird or a night owl?  Nope I’m not really either one.  I don’t get up excessively early, and I don’t go to bed ridiculously late.  So I’m one of those boring intermediate chronotypes with no sleep disorders, unless you count liking sleep a lot as a disorder.

What creeps you out?  Unexplainable mystery noises in the dark. The kind of strange sounds you’re not quite sure you actually heard, because they might have been part of a dream, so you listen so hard you stop breathing but you don’t hear anything else.  And so you drift back to sleep.  And promptly hear something slightly different that could have come from the same unidentifiable source so you have to start the whole listening without breathing process all over again.  Or you get up to investigate and make your own mystery noises in the dark because you only knock over extremely cacophonous objects when you’re trying really hard to be quiet.

You can pick one chocolate from the box.  What kind of filling do you hope is inside?  Deliver me from sweet cream fillings that burn my throat and hard chewy centres that stick to my teeth for three hours.  Just give me chocolate covered nuts – in fact, how about a whole box of them so I don’t have to read the quide and try to figure out the pictures and decide what exactly might be inside a Himilayan Pink Salt Peanut Butter Red Velvet Dark Chocolate Truffle From Hell.

What’s your most treasured possession?  My brain.  Such as it is.

Who are your all time favourite authors?  Absolutely impossible to say because I have no idea even where I might begin.  Every single person who writes has something to say, ideas to get across, stories to tell, insights to share.  If I read a book I particularly like, I’ll always see what else that author has written but it’s not good to get bogged down in any one particular genre.  There is brilliance everywhere.  And complete garbage too, but how would you recognize the great stuff without the crap?

What were your favourite tv shows when you were a kid?  We didn’t get a tv until I was nine years old and then we had only one channel so we watched whatever stupid thing happened to be on.  We especially liked staying up later than our normal bedtime to watch a show, which meant that The Ed Sullivan Show and Bonanza (on Sunday nights all the way to ten o’clock) became our favourites by default.  Later on I liked to watch Dr. Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare, and argue with my sister about which one was more sexy and swoon-worthy.  I liked Perry Mason a lot too, because he never lost a case, and I was convinced that Della Street was the main reason why.

        

Now seriously, who would not prefer those sexy hairy arms and Ben’s brooding good looks to Dr. Hairless Wonder there on the right who looks like he’s fresh out of grade eight?  (My sister isn’t here to defend her heart throb from the ’60’s so I feel like being a bit ruthless).  We argued about hockey players too, pretty much just for the sake of arguing because it rarely had anything to do with the game or their hockey skills.  And then we moved on to male singers (Mick Jagger vs. Eric Burdon, for example).  It’s an endless list for a fun game of ‘have an opinion and defend it, no matter what’.   All in the spirit of egging eachother on.