Five things you probably didn’t know about CC

I’m picking up this blog meme from Miss Kitty’s

1. I really wish Diane Keaton were my mom.
You know that Mom character Diane Keaton plays, the slightly neurotic and interfering, but endlessly well-meaning one? I’ve seen it in several movies and her next movie that comes out Friday seems like yet another example of the archetype. I have friends who have this sort of mother, one friend’s mom interferes to the point that she actually told the CSO “I can’t make people make the right decisions, but I can make the right decisions a lot more convenient.”
I get that this is sort of creepy, and I wouldn’t want the motherliness taken to un-Diane-Keaton-like extremes. Even Keaton herself goes too far sometimes. For example, I really think she is unduly mean to Sarah Jessica Parker in “the Family Stone” when she flips out because Parker says that she wouldn’t want to have a gay son because his life would be so much harder. But she behaves that way because she loves her gay son so darn much.

My own Mother has dedicated her life to working to help poor people and taking care of the more pathological people in my immediate family. It’s admirable and great.

But I kind of wish she’d just once have set me up on a blind date with someone really inappropriate because she was worried I’d be an old maid.

2. Biscuit cans terrify me.
I have a weird little phobia of those Pillsbury biscuit cans that keep the dough under pressure. Rationally, I understand that they will not burst into flame in my hands, but I still hate them and am most comfortable holding them with tongs. At the same time, I think this is a stupid thing to be afraid of and have opened many biscuit cans in an attempt to rid myself of this fear.

I told a psychologist I know about this fear one time, hoping she could suggest a cure.

“Ugh!” she said, “Doesn’t everybody hate those things?”

3. I’m really good at a bunch of useless things. I can compose limericks in about five minutes and can write in verse or Iambic pentameter quickly, I speak Pig Latin as fast as I speak English and I frequently break the record on “Whack-a-mole” machines.


4. I taught myself to read when I was three and a half. My first books were Nancy Drew. My mom read me one chapter a night and Nancy Drew chapters always ended with a cliffhanger. It would drive me crazy to have to wait for the end.

So I taught myself to read. But I wouldn’t admit that I could read until I was seven because I believed my parents would stop reading to me if they knew. After Nancy Drew we started on Treasure Island and then all the classics my parents had read as kids, and then classics they’d always wanted to read. My mom read to me at night until I was 14 (it was mostly poetry by then), and after she stopped I didn’t sleep well for about a decade, though my sleeping has improved a lot in the last few years.

5. I can recite Yeats’ The Fiddler of Dooney from memory. It's my favorite poem.


CC