Stolen Meme

I stole this from Sara, who didn't tag me, either, but who needs to be tagged when you're trying to avoid actually doing productive things, like reading for classes? Not me!

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Ten years ago I was a high school freshman. At school I was taking Theatre I, Dance, English, and Algebra. Interestingly, the Theatre class, which you would think would be the most interesting, is the one that I have almost no memories of at all.
I loved that dance class, where my friend Jessi would make me laugh every morning until my stomach ached. In true fifteen year-old fashion, she and her boyfriend were perpetually breaking up and getting back together, and whenever they were together they celebrated their anniversary weekly. Which is I guess what you have to do when you can only manage to stay together for three weeks at a time. Eventually they started having sex, which I found very exciting and scandalous-in-a-good-way because I hadn't even had a serious kiss at that point. Despite the hours of goofing off with Jessi in dance class, I did audition and make the dance team at the end of the semester. The team was fun, too, but nothing was as fun as that first semester.
It was about this time ten years ago that my English teacher had an actual mental breakdown right in the middle of our class. She was ranting about how terrible our assignments had been, and she finished up the rant with something to the effect of, "You people don't even know what an apostrophe is!" and then she slammed her hands on the podium and stormed out of the classroom, leaving all of us sitting there, staring at each other in open-mouthed silence. She never came back that semester. In retrospect, I am sure there were much bigger issues going on than our issues with apostrophes. We had a substitute for a while after that and then got transferred to another teacher. We learned about archetypes and read The Once and Future King and Homer.
My Algebra class was utterly horrible. The teacher had absolutely no control, and none of my friends were in the class with me since they'd all taken Algebra in 8th grade (I was too busy doing artsy electives instead because I've always disliked numbers). Very little learning went on in that classroom because people were too busy flinging stuff out of the second story window and lighting notebooks on fire. I am not hyperbolizing, those things actually happened. It was like spending 90 minutes in the madhouse every afternoon. I was kind of afraid of 3/4ths of the class and everyone else wasn't at all interested in me, so I mostly hid out in a corner. There was only one guy that I ever talked to in that class, but we ran in completely different social circles and my high school was huge and I never talked to him again after that semester. Last year, he found me on MySpace and left a sweet message saying he has always remembered me and how funny and nice I was to him in that class.
I was still eating lunch every day with most of the girls I had been friends with in middle school, but it was becoming increasingly clear that most of us would drift apart, not because of fighting but just because we had less and less in common all the time. I spent more and more time with Kristen and Melissa, who would stay my closest friends throughout high school. Since we didn't drive yet, Kristen's dad drove us to and from school, even though I lived close enough that I could have walked. Every single afternoon he would say, "Hi girls! How was school!?" in the exact same tone of voice and in unison we would reply, "Fine," and that would be the extent of the discussion most of the time.
We were all members of the Teen Volunteer Club (mostly because Melissa had a crush on the president) and we were some of the only freshmen that went to freshmen class meetings (again, more because of the chance that certain guys would be there than because we actually cared all that much about fundraising). We were still young enough that the biggest event in our social lives was having sleepovers at each other's houses or maybe having someone's mom drive us to the movie theatre once in a while. The three of us all had crushes on the same guys, but dating was just a theory and not remotely a fact for us at that point, so it didn't really matter. Guys and who was dating and who wasn't dating wouldn't become an issue for a few years yet. We were lucky to get to be friends for a long time before we started having those kinds of fights. Freshman year, I had a mental list of about six guys that I "crushed on" to various degrees, and a single smile in the hallway was something worth analyzing. [I should point out that I don't think I would want to date the adult version of a single one of those guys.]
I wore baggy jeans and carried a purple backpack and I hadn't yet made peace with the fact that I have curly hair so I used to sleep with it in Velcro rollers every night so that I could make it into a smooth pony tail in the morning. Sometimes I could talk my mom into french braiding it, and that was my favorite.
I still have my journals from that year, and when I read them now I'm amazed at how they tell me everything about what other people in my life were doing, but very little about how I felt about it. I'm glad I'm confident enough now to be happy with my hair. I wish I could recover the part of me that was capable of having heart-fluttering crushes on half a dozen guys at once.

What are 5 things on my to-do list?
My actual to-do list is quite boring at the moment, so here are five things on my lifelong to-do list:
1. Earn the PhD
2. Visit at least one location on every continent including Antarctica
3. Have a baby
4. Become a leading expert on something so that I get called to speak on NPR or the History Channel
5. Publish something (book, article, short story, whatever)

What would I do with a billion dollars?
First of all, I'd invest a lot of it really well so that there would be no way I could accidentally blow through it all and so that my entire family would be set for generations. Then I'd start spending. I'd buy my dad a boat and a lake to put it in. I'd make my brother the owner of the Chicago Cubs. Mom and my sister can have whatever lavish gifts they decide they want, too. I'd give a million or two to each of my friends with student loan debt. I'd staff a private jet and a yacht and spend lots of time traveling. I'd still finish my degree, but there'd be no stress about finding a job. I'd do a ton of philanthropy. I'd give money to dog rescue, I'd establish regular and study abroad scholarships at each of my universities, maybe I'd even donate a building or two. I'd give a ton of money to science and arts funding. I'd get a chef, a personal trainer, a driver, and a masseuse. And I'd never look at a price tag on a clothing item again.

3 of my bad habits:
1. I fidget pretty much non-stop with my rings and earrings and my hair, if it's down.
2. I'm the queen of saying, "I'll be there in five minutes," when I actually mean "twenty five minutes."
3. I text message while driving.

5 places I have lived:
1. Hometown
2. College City
3. MA Town
4. London
5. Here

5 jobs I have had:
1. Valet Captain [I did not text message while driving other people's cars]
2. Box office manager
3. Waitress
4. Bartender
5. Teaching Assistant

Things people don't know about me:
There's not much that people don't know about me. I honestly can't think of a single event in my life or element of my personality that you wouldn't eventually find out about if you knew me long enough. I kind of wish I had secrets, but I don't. I mean, there are certain things I don't tell certain people. I obviously would rather my professors not know about my sex life, for example. But in general, nothing is completely and utterly off limits. Here are a few things you may or may not know, depending on how well you know me.
1. The last two times I voted, I voted for Bush because that is who my father suggested I vote for (Republican fiscal policies are always better for small business owners), and I didn't really care enough to actually decide who I wanted in office. This time around, I'm going to cast my own vote.
2. I let my dog lick leftovers off my plates and silverware before I put them in the dishwasher, and if my cat sneakily manages to get a few laps of the milk in my cereal bowl, I'll eat the rest of the cereal anyway. It hasn't killed me yet.
3. Whenever I'm in a new relationship, or am doing well in my classes, or basically whenever anything good is happening, I don't want to talk about it at all for fear that the minute I talk about it, it will stop being true.
4. I really want to be on Jeopardy!, but I'm afraid if I ever actually got on the show that I would never buzz in on time, or that I would miss something pathetically easy and all of my colleagues would mock me forever.
5. I highlight my books as I read, then go back and type up reading notes based on what I highlighted. I don't believe in the sticky note method, or in writing notes in the margins of books. I don't believe in highlighting novels or plays, however. For some reason I only highlight non-fiction.