I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb

the home cats, H&P

101. What’s your dream car?  I initially misread this as "what's your dream cat," which I like a lot better. Lately I've been dreaming about the home cats.

102. What do you fear about the future?  dying alone. Or, more accurately—living alone for a long time before I die.

103. What about you scares you the most?  my stupid, foolish hope in the face of mountainous evidence to the contrary

104. What’s the worst dream you’ve ever had?  not going there

105. What do you get overly emotional about?  I do not think that I do. I am sensitive, and my emotions are close to the surface, but that does not make them unreasonable or extreme.

106. What’s the quickest way to make you angry?  insensitivity to something that saddens me. I respond like a wounded animal.

107. What event made you mature as a person the most?  divorce

108. What’s on your bucket list?  travel, publishing something I've written and something I've created, and retiring

109. What’s the hardest truth you’ve come to grips with?  love is not enough

110. What would you want your funeral to be like?  I don't think about it—I won't be there

111. What makes you the happiest?  spending time with my friends and my family, writing, and reading

112. What would your very own personal hell be like?  the singles table at an endless wedding reception with shitty food, unbearable HVAC, overloud music, hordes of happy couples being happy (and swing-dancing at near professional levels), wearing Spanx under a dress that's as unattractive as it is ill-fitting. And blisters on both feet.

113. How soft are you?  like a French fry: crispy on the outside, and squishy in the middle

114. What mundane task have you mastered?  I think I've finally gotten a handle on the HDMI cable connection issue on my motherfucking living room TV

115. What creepy or cringey thing do you do on a regular basis?  one of the best temporary solutions for my migraines is to squeeze the sides of my skull, just behind my temples, really hard. If that doesn't work, squeezing my nose just above the bridge will sometimes do it. No, I don't know why. No, I don't remember when or how I figured it out. And I've been doing it for so long that I sometimes don't realize that someone else is present when I'm doing it—which does tend to be pretty creepy the first time you see it.

116. What quirks does your body have?  

When my blood sugar gets dangerously low, I sneeze. 

The ring-nerves in my toes are not wired correctly, so it takes a great deal more (or far less) anesthesia than most people need to numb my toes. 

And I have scars inside my lips from biting through them when I got punched as a kid.

117. What brutally honest truth about yourself can you share?  I'm vacillating between being really angry and really sad.

118. How much of the bad stuff that happens to you is your fault?  unanswerable question. Some? A lot? Depends? I bring a lot of it on myself. Some of it is shitty people being shitty. The rest is just circumstances.

120. When did you really try hard, really whole-assed it, and it still wasn’t enough?  I've done some interviews that I'd have sworn went better than anything I'd experienced before. Maybe it really is no knock on me, and the other candidate was over the top fantastic...every time. The confluence of circumstances has me wondering what else is wrong with me that I just haven't been told about yet.

[cut from here; the title quotation is by Sherman Alexie, from Flight]