four things

I don’t do 43 Things, but I’m happy to do four things–I was, in fact, going to consider myself tagged by Mark, but then I got tagged by Heidi–such riches! I have adapted the categories to some extent and excluded video games, which I do not play (I know–I dare to conisder myself a teen librarian and I don’t play video games. I suck.)
jobs:

• security guard (four years with Vassar College Campus Patrol, three days at the Coral Ridge Mall before it opened, right after I finished college)
• graduate instructor (three years at the University of Iowa; two in Rhetoric and one in English)
• dog walker
• youth services assistant at a public library (for another three days)

movies:

• Pump Up the Volume
• The World of Henry Orient
• Casablanca
• Ladyhawke

places I’ve lived:

• Iowa City, Iowa (my hometown, though I lived till age four in Mount Vernon, about half an hour north of IC)
• Indianapolis, Indiana (during junior high; a dire mistake which we soon corrected by moving back to Iowa)
• Poughkeepsie, New York (during college–I lived off-campus the last year and a half and thus saw perhaps a bit more of the town than some at Vassar)
• La Grange, Illinois

TV shows I’ve loved:

• The Tomorrow People (my favorite show when I was six, when it was shown in reruns on Nickelodeon. It’s quite possible I would no longer find it quite so entrancing.)
• Wall Street Week, during the years it was hosted by Louis Rukeyser, who wore the best ties and did wonderful opening monologues about the past week. An odd choice for someone of my political leanings, I grant you, but we all have our peculiarities.
• The X-Files
• The Daily Show (the only thing, aside from Washington Week, that I watch on a regular basis these days)

places I’ve gone on vacation (the first three with my mother; the last on my own):

• Colorado, to Grand Junction from Chicago and back by train, with a stop in Denver
• Acadia National Park
• Peru
• New York City

foods:

• any kind of fruit pie except cherry
• pesto
• guacamole
• flourless chocolate cake

sites I visit daily:

• Bloglines
• FastMail.fm
• Chicago Indymedia
• some library catalog or other

places I would rather be:

• any watering hole, anywhere, with my friends
• anywhere I’ve never been
• Wyoming (yeah, I know, I’m moving there in three weeks, but I’d still like to be there now)
• Wohelo (where I went to camp for many, many years)

books:

• Goodbye Without Leaving, Laurie Colwin
• Walden, Thoreau
• The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley
• Openings, Wendell Berry

songs:

• “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” Bob Dylan (the Bootleg series version, not the one from Empire Burlesque)
• “Tougher Than the Rest,” Bruce Springsteen
• “The Iowa Waltz,” Greg Brown
• “The Brownbird,” as sung to me by my mother when I was young. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from a Maxine Sullivan record belonging to her college roommate.

cars I’ve owned:

• 1984 Chevy Cavalier (“The Octopus”), the car I drove in high school, inherited from my mother. I always meant to paint it purple, but I never did.
• 1986 Volvo 740 GLE station wagon (“The Sphinx”), overrated, but useful for hauling large quantities of crap and/or people when I was in college. I totalled it about a year later. Yes, it is possible to total a Volvo station wagon by bumping into the back of a pickup truck. The pickup (and its driver, and I) emerged unscathed.
• 1987 Chevy Nova “Maximus,” inherited from my grandmother and named for the Maximus Poems by Charles Olson, not the movie. This pile of rust carried me to Georgia and back, to DC and back, and on various trips around the midwest. I ended up passing it on to a friend when I was told I could no longer drive “that rusty tin can on wheels” around the country on long trips. Last I heard, it’s still running.
• 1992 Toyota Tercel “Sally,” purchased to replace Maximus. Sally held on till about a year ago, when she finally pooped out at 205,000 miles. She was replaced by Viktor, an innocuous green 1998 Honda Civic which I can only find in the Dominican parking lot thanks to its Iowa plates.

bloggers I am tagging:

• explodedlibrary.info
• Blisspix.net
• Feel-good Librarian (I mean, we all want to know more about her, don’t we?)
• Lethal Librarian