A Few (Very) Random Facts About Me

1) I love musicals.  I was in the drama club all through high school.  When I was in college, I was active in community theater.  I’ve never allowed the fact that I’m tone-deaf to prevent me from breaking out into a song.  Taking all that into account, I really should love Glee.  And yet, I don’t.  In fact, I hate it.  Whether it’s Matthew Morrison’s creepy smile or the way Glee pretends to be more quirky than it actually is, the show just annoys the Hell out of me. 

2) When it comes to selecting a favorite color, I’ve always been torn between red or green.  I finally settled on one of them about two nights ago but, for the life of me, I can’t remember which one.

3) I am a German-Spanish-Irish-Italian mutt with a little French thrown in for good measure.  I probably identify most with my Irish heritage even though I’m definitely closest to the Spanish-Italian side of my family.  A part of me wishes that my background was 100% Cajun. 

4) I have a degree in Art History so, of course, I’m currently working as a receptionist.

5) Along with being asthmatic, I suffer from heterochromia, i.e. my left eye is a lighter shade of green than my right.  Unlike asthma, heterochromia is actually kinda cool. 

6) I tend to talk a lot.  I mean a lot.  My sister Megan once said, “Lisa can tell the longest stories about nothing…”  At the time, it actually hurt my feelings but in retrospect, she’s right.  What people often fail to understand, though, is that the main reason I won’t shut up is because I’m actually very shy.  Rambling is my way of avoiding the dreaded awkward silence.

7) For close to a year now, I’ve been writing — off-and-on — a novel called Mizmoon.  It’s been one of the most frustrating and rewarding experiences of my life.  My plan is to have a rough draft completed by the end of 2010. 

8 ) If I had a time machine, I’d go back 11 years and tell my younger self to “wait” and enjoy being innocent for a few more years.  What’s sad is that I know my younger self would probably respond by telling me that I don’t understand how she (I) feels and that it’s her (my) life anyway. 

9) Often times, when I’m having trouble finding any inspiration for a more substantial blog post, I’ll handle the situation by writing down a few very random facts about me.

10) I’m not anti-marriage.  I just have serious doubts as to whether or not I could ever be a part of a succesful marriage.  I’m a romantic at heart but, at the same time, I hate the thought of one day waking up and realizing that I’ve sacrificed my own identity just to be “so-and-so’s wife.”  A friend of mine recently told me that “a succesful relationship is built on trust.”  I don’t know if I’ll ever be capable of trusting anyone that much.

11) I’ve often been accused of engaging in a bit too much TMI for my own good (especially when it comes to my twitter account) but there are certain things in my life that I don’t talk about even though I want to.  But I don’t because I know that if I do, people will no longer think of me as Lisa Marie.  Instead, they’ll simply see me as an object of pity or as a victim.  As much as I sometimes need to express my pain, I don’t want it to define me.

12) At the same time, I do find that it is sometimes to helpful to vent (or sometimes even cry out) on a site like twitter because 1) you can block anyone who acts like an asshole about it, 2) others can block or ignore you if they don’t want to hear about it (which makes me feel less guilty about my occasional emo moments), and 3) sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone will actually offer up either some good advice or come up with a response so perfectly absurd that it’ll snap me out of my angst.

13) Yes, I have in the past occasionally posted a risqué picture or two on twitpic, tweetphoto, and plixi.  And yes, I have occasionally had to deal with the total stranger who has taken it upon him or herself to tell me that I need to have more “respect” for myself or use better judgment.  But you know what?  It’s my body and I’m not ashamed of it.  Why is it that society continues to insist that a woman cannot be independent, intelligent, and/or liberated unless she’s also some sort of humorless, sexless celibate?

If I want to show off my body, I will.  Even more importantly, though, if I don’t feel like showing off my body, I won’t.  No matter how many DMs, YMs, and e-mails I get asking me when I’m going to post another “thong shot.”  The minute anything starts to feel like an obligation is the minute that I start to lose interest.

Someone once asked me how I’d feel if, some day in the distant future, I discovered that my daughter was posting racy pictures of herself on the Internet.  I didn’t have an answer for him then and I really don’t have an answer now.  I know it would upset me but I would also hope that if my daughter was doing that, she would be doing it because she wanted to and not because she felt like she had to.

14) Yes, I do want to be a mom someday.  If I have a girl, I’m going to name her Gloria Elena after my mom.

15) When I first started this post, I thought it was going to be a lot shorter and a lot less serious.  🙂

16) I am an obsessive list maker.  Not only do I continually make lists of everything I need to during the day but I tend to hold on to the lists even after the day has passed because the list, if nothing else, will at least help me remember the day.  Yes, I know this is probably an indication of a tendency towards hoarding.  However, I am capable of throwing aways my old lists … just as long as I’m given one last chance to read them before I do so.

17) Continuing on the obsessive compulsive theme, it’s very important to me that any numbers in my life be even numbers.  I can never, for instance, feel secure if I’m in a building that has an address that ends in an odd number.  That’s also why I’m going to end up listing 20 random facts about myself in this post.  (It’s also why, for my Lisa Marie’s Favorite Exploitation and Grindhouse Trailers series over at Through the Shattered Lens, I always include 6 trailers per post instead of 5.)

18) I used to love that Chanel commercial where Nicole Kidman was the actress having the romance with the — well, I forget what he was supposed to be but he was hot and that’s all that really mattered.  Except, for some reason, I always thought that Kidman’s character was supposed to be terminally ill and dying in the commercial.

19) I love old school Italian horror films, the gorier and more sordid the better.  Yet, in real life, I can’t stand the sight of blood.

20) Okay, one last random fact.  Hmmm…alright, I get about two to three hours of sleep a night and I like it that way.  Life fascinates me and I can’t experience it if I’m asleep.

Fear of Bieber

Yes, this is another one of those silly and ultimately pointless online surveys that, for whatever reason, give me so much joy.

I have to admit though that I’ve noticed a disturbing trend whenever I go searching for silly online surveys.  Along with the expected purity tests, when-will-you-die predictions, and “who is your celebrity boob twin” reports, I’ve discovered that all of my favorite quiz sites have been infected by thousands of different surveys all concerning one human being.

That human being is Justin Bieber.

Every site I go to now seems to be full of surveys designed to let me know just how likely it is that I will some day end up as Mr. Lisa Marie Bieber.  What’s disturbing is that, if the surveys are to be believed, the chances are pretty good.

Now, to be honest, I have no desire to marry Justin Bieber.  First off, I don’t know that I ever want to get married, secondly, I tend to prefer older men and third, from what I’ve seen on TMZ, he kinda sorta appears to be a little dumbfug toadsucker.

Still, it disturbs me that I’m going to be 25 on November 9th of this year and already, I find myself thinking “What’s wrong with kids today?”  When did I become an adult and why didn’t anyone warn me ahead of time?

Anyway, considering that I’m apparently getting older, it’s perhaps appropriate that I took a survey of my fears.

Measure Your Fears – Would You, Wouldn’t You, You Did Created by beindthecurtain and taken 62405 times on Bzoink
Pet a snake:	Wouldn’t
Spend a week in an empty room:	Would
Ride in a hot-air balloon:	Did
Sky dive:	Wouldn’t
Sing in front of a huge audience:	Did
scuba dive:	Wouldn’t
Sit in the front seat of a roller coaster:	Wouldn’t
Deliver a baby:	Would
Swim across the Amazon River:	Wouldn’t
Change careers:	Would
Disappear for a long period of time:	Did
Walk through the forest alone at night:	Did
Join a space mission:	Wouldn’t
Tell everyone what you honestly think of them:	Did
Call off your wedding:	Did, kinda. Long story.
Walk naked through New York City for 10 minutes during rush hour:	Would
Walk up to Mike Tyson and call him a girl:	Wouldn’t
Disarm a bomb:	Wouldn’t
CLean the outside windows of a skyscraper:	Wouldn’t
Draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa with a permanent marker:	Wouldn’t but not because of fear. I don’t deface art.
Go on tour with Elvis:	Wouldn’t
Go swimming during a thunder storm:	Wouldn’t, can’t swim
Preform surgury on your best friend:	Would but my friend would die
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A Few Thoughts On Resentment

They apparently did a study over in Germany that indicates that older people enjoy reading negative stories about younger people.  They say that the study suggests that old people are jealous of young people and get some sort of comfort out of hearing about how stupid we all are.  I’m not totally sure who “they” are but whoever they are, I’m jealous.  I’d love to have enough free time to actually conduct and publish a study about something as obvious as generational resentment.

Then again, it’s probably a mistake to just assume that all resentment can be linked to age.  We resent and fear those who have what we don’t.  The old resent the young because the young still have a life ahead of them.  The poor resent the rich because the rich have money.  The rich resent the poor because the poor have the whole street mystique.  The middle class resent the rich and the poor because at least they have an identity beyond just being bland. 

Unfortunately, with each passing the day,  it becomes more obvious to me that resentment is the major motivator behind most human actions.  Sometimes, that resentment leads to greater things.  Sometimes, you get a case where someone strives to do his best just to prove that he is worthy of success.  Far too often, however, it seems like that resentment is turned into either a life philosophy or a political ideology.  That’s one thing about human beings.  We’re very good at finding excuses for our own selfishness.  Suddenly, class resentment is renamed “populism” and paranoia and self-righteous anger is defined as “independence.”

Me, I resent whoever’s currently competing on Dancing With The Stars and So You Think You Can Dance.  Because up until seven years ago, I fully believed that my entire life would be about dancing and standing on stage while waves of applause crashed over me.  But then one morning, I missed a step, tumbled down a flight of stairs, and ended up breaking my ankle in two places.  So much for dancing.  And that’s probably for the best because, even before that, I wasn’t really that good at it.  Once I stopped dancing, I started writing.  So, I think I can say that, in the end, it was a pretty good thing that I fell down those stairs 7 years ago. 

Still, whenever I hear anything negative about anybody who has ever been involved with either one of those shows, there’s a part of me that secretly smirks and thinks, “That’ll teach them to live my dream.”

The final paragraph of these type of essays are always supposed to offer up a solution for the problem or maybe some sort of dire warning about how the world’s going to wither and die if we don’t change our ways.  Well, I’ll offer up neither.  The fact of the matter is that there is no solution and there is no apocalypse.  There’s just human nature.