Walking the Wall

The number seven has all sorts of connotations from religious (7 deadly sins, 7 virtues, 7 sacraments, the number of perfection etc.), to mythological (the number of islands in Atlantis, Thomas the Rhymer spent 7 years in faery, the Queen of the Fairies paid a tithe every 7 years in Tam Lin, 7 lucky gods in Japanese mythology, etc.), and let’s not forget Tolkien who used the number 7 in his books a lot (according to wikipedia):

Tall ships and tall kings/Three times three/What brought they from the foundered land/Over the flowing sea?/Seven stars and seven stones/And one white tree.

Thankfully I don’t have to rival any of those seven’s and only need to come up with seven random things about me for Nate over at the Precious Metal blog:

1. From 5th grade until I was married I never had a television and I think it was one of the best things my parents ever did. I love television and I love movies–but I wonder if my intense love of reading would have been so solidified had I had access to the television. One of my regrets as a parent is not doing the same thing–although, luckily, both of my children love reading, my daughter almost as much as me.
2. I remember when “the web” first came into being–we, me and the other people on a Bulletin Board System (a DOS based connection to inter-bbs mail, newsgroups, and telnet) and the MUSHs (multi-user shared hallucination) I frequented, thought it was ridiculous. The first pages were garish and blinking and eyesores after the clean lines of DOS text. We’ve come a long way!
3. I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian–meaning I eat cage free organic eggs and milk products. I’ve been one for 2 years 3 months and the only thing that really tempts me is bacon. Although I’ve found in times of great stress I want to go and buy a Wendy’s cheeseburger. They are just fleeting temptations that are usually followed by “gross”. At work, girls have asked after me as the “meat juice” lady because I won’t pick off pepperoni on a pizza. I find the idea meat juice even more gross than the meat itself–they find that hilarious.
4. My dad had the entire set (or very near) of the Star Trek books when I was growing up. Always looking for something to read, I read them all even though I’d seen very few of the shows themselves (see #1). I remember sitting in the bathroom and crying while reading the part when Doctor Spock died in the radiation behind the glass.
5. I moved next door to my husband when we were fourteen years old. He saw me sitting outside reading and it was love at first sight. He threw a piece of paper folded up into a triangle and taped up–it took me forever to get it opened and it said: “You are a babe.” I still have it, along with two huge binders full of notes.
6. I knew all the words to all the songs of the Wicked soundtrack and the Rent soundtrack before I ever saw the movie version of Rent. I haven’t seen the Wicked musical yet (I read the book before I knew there was one), maybe they’ll make that into a movie as well. To be honest, I don’t think I’d like to see it on stage without the original cast as their voices simply “are” those characters for me. I had a dream last night that something traumatic had happened to me and I couldn’t speak or do anything other than sing songs from Rent. The entire cast came to the hospital and sang through all the songs with me one after another–it was very odd, but very moving.
7. I was in Amsterdam in 1987 when Fred Astaire died and I cried.
   

That’s what came to mind randomly and in that order, a nice brain break from writing a final paper for school.