So kimberleylittle tagged me for a meme and since I'm in the memory mood right now, here goes:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.
What were you doing ten years ago?
I had just moved back to California and was wondering if my now husband was going to propose to me or not. I was waiting for CAN I PRAY WITH MY EYES OPEN? to come out and wondering if I made the right decision to transfer instead of looking for a new company in the Silicon Valley.
What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order):
1. Finish the ESL book that is due this week.
2. Call the closet place to come out and give us estimates.
3. Call the wood floor guy to come out and give us estimates.
4. Answer the interview questions that have been waiting for me for too long.
5. Mail out books to about 5 people that have been waiting for me for too long.
What are some snacks you enjoy?
chocolate
vanilla ice cream with my husband's hot fudge sauce
almonds and walnuts
chai with extra pepper
What would you do if you were a billionaire?
Quit my dayjob!!!
Set up a trust to take care of each of my kids and my mom.
Move to Santa Cruz.
Adopt as many dogs and horses as I could and donate to take care of more.
Set up some literacy programs.
And the list could go on and on...
What are three of your bad habits?
Procrastination. Procrastination. Procrastination. (This really trumps everything else.)
Beating myself up for things that aren't my fault.
Not trying because I don't think I'll be any good at something
What are five places where you have lived?
Concord, CA
Oakley, CA
Norfolk, VA
New Orleans, LA
San Jose, CA
What are five jobs you have had?
Woolworths Drug Store ( I had to take a math test)
worked on a horse ranch, cleaning, feeding and giving riding lessons
bookkeeper for a taxi cab company
worked in the warehouse for oil field services
Project coordinator in R & D for a tech company
What six people do you want to tag?
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This week's memory challenge - your first car.
I turned 16 in 1974 but I didn't get my driver's license at 16 like so many other kids did. For one thing, I only lived a couple of blocks from the high school so walking was easy. For another thing I was a girl who dated guys who usually had cars. But the main reason I didn't get my license right away was because there was no car for me to drive. My mom worked for a car dealership and drove a company car which I wasn't allowed to drive. Eventually a friend of hers allowed me to borrow his car for the test and I got my license when I turned 17. Which meant, of course, I wanted a car. I was going to be a senior and I had visions of upping my coolness factor for at least my last year of high school.
I had a job at a local burger joint but would have to borrow the money for a car from my grandmother, which, according to her, gave her a vote in the car I bought.
My way cool aunt had a car for sale and boy did I want to buy it - a blue 1965 Mustang that looked something like this:
I refused to admit that I was too short for the car and that I would be looking out through the section of the steering wheel instead of over the top of it. I sat in that car and imagined pulling into the parking lot at Mt. Diablo High School (after driving around a while "to be seen" of course) and suddenly being someone who mattered at school.
Alas my grandmother and my mother consorted to keep my coolness down in the freezer section and insisted, instead, that I buy this, a 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger.
Sigh. Granted, in later years when drag racing at the Fremont raceway was a part of our life, that car might have made me a little more popular. But as a fairly invisible senior in high school, it didn't help a bit. And when I married my first husband, the only thing insisted was that I sell that car ASAP.
So what was your first car and how did it come into your life?
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annemariepace has created a fun new meme! After chatting with her about it today, I'm giving it an official start. You can read her answers here.Anne Marie Pace's Memory Meme
Examples: Writing Life, Books, Pets, Jobs, Relationships, Food
So here goes mine:
Give me some random number between 1 and 49 and a category and I'll tell you something I was doing or something I experienced at that age in regards to that category. My categories are Writing Life, Pets, Relationships, Food and Jobs. (feel free to ask more than one - this is helping me prime the writing pump.)
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As I plod through this plotting process I set up for myself I've been finding odd bits of notes from the various versions of the book over the years. I realized that a big chunk of something important in the book deals with memories and how much we can remember from a young age. Basically I have to decide how old my MC is when a certain thing happens so I can use the memories. For years I've had him at 4 but now I wonder if that is too young? He is 16 then 17 in the book. I want him to remember some things over time but not a lot. And I don't want him to have the conversational capability that an older child would have.
So the question is - how far back can you remember? How old or how young are your memories?
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I see a lot of posts going around about trips down memory land. I don't have the time for a long post about it today so I thought I'd point to a couple of older posts on my other blog, Write on, Right Now, that dealt with memories. Toys and food are always right there when I think back to childhood. Read more and see some pictures here. And for some more fun and games, an old meme on play and childhood memories can be found here.
Also thought this might be a good time to mention/remind folks that since July of 2005, Write on, Right Now has become a blog of writing and picture prompts to use on your own, with a group or for teachers to use in a classroom. It's also syndicated here on Live Journal and ready for friending at:![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
writeonrightnow
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Things to Do
Quotes
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults." Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock." Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
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