This week’s Sunday Stealing continues to purloin queries from 200 Questions, so I dubbed it 200.06. It includes email.
1. What do you hope your last words will be?
It will probably be some intentional malaprop such as refrigagator instead of refrigerator or ipitical allasion for optical illusion. People will wonder what I was trying when I merely found them fun to say.
2. What do you spend the most time thinking about?
The never-ending To-Do List.
3. What is something you can never seem to finish?
It is getting rid of my emails. I have, seriously, over 10,000 emails. Some I want to use for a blog or for a project. But a good chunk of them could easily—well, not easily, because I haven’t done it—be systematically purged, and I need to do that because my Gmail is over half full.
4. What mistake do you keep making again and again?
Taking on more than I can handle. I thought that would become easier when I retired, but that proved to be a total lie. I feel like I’ve I’m failing retirement.
5. What’s the best thing you got from your parents?
From my father, it was a love of music, a love of listening to and singing it. From my mother, it was kindness and patience, though I’m not always sure the patience has stuck in my case.
6. What’s the best and worst thing about getting older?
The best thing about getting older is that I have a wide swath of knowledge about many things. The worst thing about getting older is that there’s all this new stuff I can’t keep up with.
Myth
7. What do you wish your brain was better at doing?
I’m convinced that the notion of multitasking is a fiction. In any case, my brain can’t do it.
8. If your childhood had a smell, what would it be?
Lilac, specifically the lilac tree or lilac bush, more correctly. It sat right next to our house when I was growing up in Binghamton, NY.
9. What have you created that you are most proud of?
At some level, it may be this blog because I’ve been doing it every day for almost 19 1/2 years. There are very few things that I’ve done as long continuously. This gives me a chance to plug things I want to plug, like the Underground Railroad Educational Center’s Interpretive Center or church concerts or library events. Maybe I brag about my daughter or my nieces. It has helped me remember stuff that I would have otherwise forgotten.
10. What were some of the turning points in your life?
There are too many to count, but certainly, I have had relationships, romantic and otherwise, that didn’t work, or relationships I didn’t have that could have happened. This is very vague and intentionally so.
No guilty pleasures
11. What song or artist do you like but rarely admit to liking?
This is not an issue. If I like it, I say I like it. If you just don’t think I should like it, I don’t care. I’ve said more than once that I’m very fond of Could It Be Magic by Barry Manilow because I love the Chopin upon which it’s built.
I was thinking a lot about a guy named Dustbury, given the name Charles Hill, who died five years ago last month. We would talk online about music a lot. I remember telling him that every time I’m feeding the cats, I start singing the song “Cat Food” by the band King Crimson. He thought that was very funny.
12. What small impact from a stranger made a big impact on you?
I don’t know if there’s a specific stranger. When I’m riding on the train or a Greyhound/Trailways bus and I have conversations with people, I find that there’s always some interesting and odd piece of information or understanding that I take from that.
Disinformation
13. As you get older, what are you becoming more and more afraid of?
Global warming. Clearly the ferocity of some of the hurricanes that have hit in the US Southeast this year are result of it. The other thing is the constant… misrepresentation of what’s been happening in the world. The administration is doing nothing to help the people suffering and/or they created the hurricanes.
14. What are some of the events in your life that made you who you are?
Substantially, it was moving to Schenectady in December 1977. I subsequently moved to nearby Albany, where I’ve lived for 45 years. It’s not too big or small and has decent mass transit. But I think there are multitudes of events that would qualify.
15. What could you do with $2 million to impact the most amount of people?
I don’t know. I’ve been fond of nonprofit groups such as R.I.P. Medical Debt, which have relieved Americans of billions in hospital bills. They pay a fraction of the money due, which has a real multiplier effect. However, a study found that it did not improve their mental health or their credit score. It is a puzzlement.