Nobody around here appreciates the subtleties.
2006-08-16, 2:18 p.m.

I�ve been tagged (thanks man!), and thank ye gods for that, because this helps me write something without having to dredge the murky bottom of the lake that lives in my head�never mind. Metaphor going nowhere! Move along! Nothing to see!

Anyway, I think I have answered much of this one before, and some of the questions are really pretty straightforward, and others make me spend a lot of time explaining why I cannot answer them. The ones I am able to answer in a straightforward way are yawn-inducing, and the rambly-answer ones will make you scratch your head in puzzlement. Hmm?

Shall we get started?

Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. Whataburger cashier
2. Ice cream dipper at Sticky Chins Ice Cream in College Station, TX
3. CAD draftsperson (we used VersaCad! Oooh! This was my job between college and graduate school. I was paid $5 an hour, and to this date, it remains my very favorite job ever in my entire life)
4. Benetton salesgirl (this job fucking sucked)

Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Shrek
2. Shrek 2
3. Napoleon Dynamite
4. Clueless

Four places I have lived:
1. San Antonio
2. College Station
3. Dallas
4. Temple, TX

Four TV shows I love to watch:
1. Flip This (or That) House (the one on A&E)
2. What Not To Wear
3. The Office
4. Intervention (I get sucked into this one every Sunday night) (I think I could be a good interventionist) (I�d be kind of a zero-tolerance, zero-bullshit interventionist) (I wonder if that would work out)

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. North Carolina
2. Mexico
3. Maine
4. Las Vegas

Four of my favorite foods:
I cannot pick favorites because that would be unfair to the foods I don�t pick. I love most anything. Sometimes it�s something specific, like �grilled corn on the cob with chili salt and lime butter� and other times, it more like �meat�.

Four songs that remind me of summer:
This is difficult for me. I don�t think I�ve ever been struck by a song reminding me of summer. However, the sound of the drum line (at first I wrote �drunk line�, and in the case of my high school, that might have been just as appropriate) practicing early in the morning and late in the evening reminds me that summer is over and school is starting. We have a drum line member in our neighborhood, and I like to sit out on the front porch with an adult beverage, watch the sun go down, and listen to the drummer practice. Does anybody in my family appreciate this kind of moment with me? FUCK NO. Nobody around here appreciates the subtleties.

Four places I would rather be right now:
Again, this one is difficult for me. I am a very in-the-box thinker, and on those rare occasions when I do get a bright idea, giant vats of balloons, streamers and confetti should dump down on my head, for it is definitely a cause for celebration. So where else would I be? It�s work time. 2:00 in the afternoon. If I were somewhere else, I�d be truant.

I�ll tell you some places where I am glad I am NOT: in traffic on IH-35, grocery shopping, having a fine needle aspiration biopsy being done on my throat, or in the bowels of hell. Or in Beaumont, Texas.

I would kind of like to be reading my book right now. Remember The Dante Club? Finally � FINALLY a plot has happened. I�d like to not have cramps right now, too, although they are bearable. Bearable yet bothersome.

I guess it�s not really a place I�d rather be, it�s more the time and the setting. I�d like it to be early evening, the fight through traffic is done, the grocery shopping is mission-accomplished, dinner�s over, the kitchen is clean because DW has cleaned it, and we�re heading off through the �hood on our bikes for our nightly family bike ride. And then we come home and I celebrate health and fitness by pouring a small glass of wine, and I sit on the front porch, keeping a wary eye out for bizarre and dangerous spiders, watch the sun go down, and listen to the drum line practice.