1) I have always loved my name, which comes from the song My Cherie Amour.
2) I wanted an easy-bake oven when I was little . . . cooking a cake with a light bulb—so ingenious!
3) I am amazed and grateful that my parents let me spend 2 weeks as an exchange student in Mexico even though I was only 12, had taken just one semester of Spanish, and couldn’t conjugate a verb yet.
4) I can type (in English) almost as fast as most people talk.
5) I know from personal experience that it is possible to intend to go to Kansas City and end up in Nebraska instead. I am hopelessly, perpetually lost—even (especially) in a parking lot.
6) I enjoy thinking—especially on a meta-level (and yes, I suspect that has something to do with #5).
7) I have never been hospitalized, but hospitals fascinate me. I used to want to be a nurse and even volunteered in the blood bank at the Red Cross for awhile, where I quickly determined I didn’t have the stomach to make medicine a career. Still don’t, but I do enjoy helping other people.
8) I like to camp (in a tent), fish, and waterski (slalom), but I don’t like dirt.
9) I tend to be somewhat reserved, very task-oriented, and rather perfectionistic, so people often express surprise when they discover that I can be extremely playful and witty.
10) I have always had an affinity for the aesthetic and enjoy creative pursuits, but I am rather clumsy when it comes to translating what is in my head into something that others can understand. One of the reasons I love technology so much is that it makes it possible for me to be more “myself”—by extending my reach and compensating for my lack of artistic skill.
11) I care deeply, so things hurt deeply.
12) I put myself through college by working as a live-in housekeeper for an incredible woman. My family jokes that it was a private finishing school, with lessons in domesticity, deportment, and social graces. I'm not sure how "finished" I was when I left, but I definitely learned a lot.
13) I love talking about ideas—to be deeply immersed in a scintillating conversation for a long period of time with someone who can make quantum leaps from concept to concept is one of my greatest pleasures in life (although unfortunately a rather rare one).
14) I worked as a customer service/security dispatcher for a mall--it is scary when you call 911 and the phone rings 9 times and no one answers!
15) I really want to begin every reference section in my academic papers with the following epigraph from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems: “How dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog, to tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog.”
16) Some of my high school friends’ parents used to worry that I had an eating disorder because I have always been very thin, but I have just been blessed with a very high metabolism (a fact I never fully appreciated until I hit graduate school and gained 20 pounds).
17) I love to read and sometimes feel like I’m “Johnny #5”—on a constant quest for input. I am generally full of questions, much to the chagrin of my friends.
18) I absolutely LOVE to sing—especially where harmony is involved--but dropped out of choir in high school because I disliked the teacher.
19) My favorite time of the day is when the world shuts down, funneling my concentration into a single, focused beam.
20) I loved my debate and drama classes in high school because they gave me permission to be myself.
21) Presently, one of the great ironies of my life is that I love to write, but academic writing currently makes me physically ill.
22) Spiritual things have always been important to me, but are also an ongoing source of great personal struggle. My understanding of such things has come at a very high price.
23) Teaching is truly one of my greatest passions and my deepest joys.
24) The mentors who have been most influential in my life taught me simply by being themselves.
25) The things I like best about myself are also the things that most other people don’t understand.
