I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey

1. Knowing what you know now, if you had to start high school again, what would you do differently? 

    study. Go out for stuff that's the slightest bit interesting. Take more pictures, both of others and myself. Ignore the guy on the bike. Pick up a few extra hours at the after-school job. Buy the dress. Open up to possibilities while also tempering the flights of idiotic fancy. Spend more time with the friends who act like friends and less on those who wanted me to carry the satchel.  

 

2. Where would you absolutely refuse to go alone? 

     I've thought about this for a long time, and I haven't come up with anything. I have to be able to do stuff by myself, in order to proceed with life at all. 

 

3. What's the hardest physical work you've ever done? 

    none of my jobs has involved hard physical work. Each of them had outlying moments that were more difficult than most (operating a large rotary oven or deep fat dryer, hauling kegs of root beer up incredibly narrow stone steps, shifting library shelves, shuttling dozens or hundreds of bank files through ice & snow—and on and on) but those were not the point or majority of the work. 

    For truly hard work involved, moving house is my high (or low) point. I'm a great packer and organizer, and I'm reasonably good at buddy-carries. But I'm not overly strong and reach my limit pretty quickly. When I think of the most exhausted I've been, and the most physically wrung-out, it's my moves that were the cause.

 

4. Like February 29th, what other days do you wish only came around every four years instead of every year? 

    • the day I pay my law license renewal (mid-December)

    • November 14

    • dental cleaning

    • Valentine's Day

    • the day I pay my townhome association insurance assessment (late January)

 

5. What have you done today that makes you feel proud? 

    I just baked peanut butter cookies. I've been testing every recipe that I can find, trying to hit on precisely the right texture and flavor. I can already tell that this version is not It; the cookies crumbled a bit as they came off the pan. Still, it's one more try, and another couple dozen cookies regardless.

 

6. When did you first feel like a grown-up and what were you doing? 

    there was no one obvious moment, no watershed experience that shocked me to the core. It was probably the first time I needed to pay a medical bill, or even when I was sick and there was no one present to take care of me. Being a grown-up means handling the hard parts.

 

7. In a game of Trivial Pursuit, what category is your strongest? 

    Sports. Shocked? Thought I would claim History? Despite two degrees in that concentration, I never did receive The Download Of All Historical Information that some people seem to think each History graduate receives. My studies were, with the exception of some lower-level classes that I promptly purged from my brain, focused almost entirely on a few specific subjects in a specific theater in a specific war. There are worlds of history outside what I know.

    Sports, though, are pretty easy.  

 

[from 3000 Unique Questions about Me; the title quotation is by Nick Hornby, from The Polysyllabic Spree]