More fours

The event last night was interesting, if a little awkward at first, given how astoundingly ignorant I am of military wifedom. I'm not used to parties where no one ends up crammed into the dryer, where everyone sits nicely in chairs and smiles and eats cubes of cheese and is able to walk at the end of the evening.

I guess I'm finding that refined adult affairs have a lot more in common with the rich kid birthday parties I went to in grade school-- lots of social manuevering that I barely understand and me standing in the middle of the room smiling nervously and suddenly realizing how old and cheap my clothes are.

But I'm glad I went even though I never was able to fully relax. Everyone was very pleasant (and beautiful), and even though it seemed like they were speaking some vaguely familiar dialect of English, one I mostly understood but whose subtleties were a mystery, I felt a current of commiseration running through them-- every one of them had been lonely at some point, I felt sure. I just didn't quite know how to talk to them.

In an entirely different vein, I've discovered additions to the "lists of four" meme on this brilliant blog here, and I'm adding my own answers and tagging Ryan, Steph, Lily, and the Leopard again:

Four childhood memories/dreams

1) sitting at the top of the stairs in our second house in Scotland with my baby brother and clapping him on the back so that he bounced and plopped and tumbled all the way down. My mother screamed in horror, but the stairs were carpeted and now D. has a master's degree whereas I only have a bachelor's. So no harm.

2) my father in his underwear, in the middle of the night, heaving imaginary boulders at the triceratops menacing me from my bedroom closet. Would I pantomime in my underwear at 2 a.m. for a neurotic child? Would you?

3) my imaginary enemy, a floating spaceman named Bructi who always hovered just out of sight behind my head, suggesting that I dump out all of my mother's expensive bath gel.

4) walking around the house in my dad's glasses because the distortion effect made me feel like I was 19 feet tall. Today I have terrible vision!

Celebrities I worshipped/ names I wished I had

1) Princess Leiea

2) Cyndi Lauper (I begged for a checkerboard shaved in the side of my head)

3) anything but Rachel

4) especially anything but my middle name, Susannah, which immediately made people sing that song about the terrible hillbilly woman crying for her banjo-playing Alabama hick boyfriend. Once when my dad and I were in a fender bender and the cops came and asked me questions to determine if I was ok (I had bopped my head on the dashboard), they thought I had a concussion because I claimed to have forgotten my middle name. Really I was just too embarassed to say it.

Four injuries I have sustained

1) Does appendicitis count? It swelled up and became evil one weekend afternoon during my senior year of high school when I was supposed to be painting murals to decorate the band hall for our band banquet. I ignored it for hours until it made me faint into a bathroom door and then puke up my (free-- first job) Subway meatball sandwich. Now I have a teeny laproscopy scar that people always think is a bug bite. No, I am quick to point out, it's where they stuck a hose to pump me full of two liters of CO2, essentially a giant carbon dioxide fart, so that the camera could see where my appendix was! And then they yanked my appendix out the same hole!

2) thrice broken index finger, all within one three month period: once from punching a wall, once from slamming it into the side of a pool table when making a shot, and once from a douche bag guy who was pretending to snap it sideways while asking, "Is this that finger you always break?"

3) horrific smiley-face slice on the upper arm from landing in trampoline springs while trying to jump from the trampoline to a plastic chair, which splintered upon impact and also sliced open my Merithe Francois Girbaud shorts, the only pair I would ever own, which was a way bigger deal than the cuts, even though the one on my thigh barely missed my nether parts. Girbauds!

4) dislocated shoulder from falling drunkenly out of a tree and into a river and trying to catch myself by looping an elbow around a branch. Once I washed up on a shore, stood up, and took a gander at my weirdly dangling arm, I promptly fainted and whacked my head on a stump. Why this was not taking place in sped-up black and white with a piano jangling in the background is anybody's guess.

Four celebrities I've bothered

1) Honestly: Timothy Dalton, who came into the bookstore where I worked and who, when asked politely for an autograph, replied in his starchy British accent, "Only little children want autographs." I promptly paged Dale, my coworker with an all-fast food diet who could fart on command, who then bent over and straightened the shelf directly behind Mr. Dalton.

2) David Sedaris, who has signed two of his books for me and politely nodded at my stammering.

3) Bill Clinton, who shook my hand after I'd spent three weeks fielding calls from every whacko in central Texas prior to his arrival to give a speech at my university. It was so worth it. Even the guy who called me four times one day and on the final call, told me he was so lonely and then pretended to fall out of his wheel chair and bellow for help until I threatened to call him an ambulance-- "They won't come for me anymore," he said, almost sounding bored. But I totally shook Bill Clinton's hand.

4) Billy Hatcher, who used to play for the Astros in the 80's. My family went to a ball game and I yelled his name repeatedly from the sidelines until my mom told me to cram it.

And there you have it, more fours. Tell me yours.