Friday 5: Touched by your presents, dear

From here.

My sleep is so messed up this week I can’t tell if at 3:42 a.m. Friday I’m up late or up early. I should be in bed either way but I don’t want my whole evening-morning to have been a waste so here’s something useful (ha!) instead.

1. For what ability do you seem to have a natural gift?
   You should just see how easily I let food in my fridge go to waste. It’s amazing! I stick some broccoli crowns or green beans in, and *pow* despite being home all the time, and despite loving my greens, in just a few days I’m throwing them all out with all my unrealized good intentions! I had a funny, snarky answer here about repelling the sort of women whose company I most enjoy (middle-aged divorced teachers or librarians!) but despite my status as a professional writer I couldn’t make it not also sound pitiful and pathetic, which was not the vibe with which I want to begin my Friday morning. Or end my late Thursday evening.
2. What’s pretty good about the present moment?
   I didn’t have dinner, and I’m sorta looking forward to either a couple of small sandwiches when I finish typing this (I’ve two rolls left of half a dozen I bought Sunday night) or the leftover Indian food I brought home from lunch with some coworkers. If you live on Oahu and dig Indian food, check out Spice Up on King St. between Piikoi and Keeaumoku. It’s where Choi’s Family Restaurant used to be. Delicious.
3. What nearby, everyday object would be a good symbolic bequest to someone in your life?
   It would be funny to leave my Kindle Paperwhite to R to represent the love we never rekindled, but she’s married so I doubt she’d receive it in the intended spirit, if she made note of my death at all. So I’m bequeathing this large bottle of naproxen sodium to all the girls I’ve loved before who wandered in and out my door, to remind them of all the pain we caused each other and to accept this gift as a token of our mutual healing. Why I’m thinking about relationships at this late (early) hour is a bit of a mystery, since I’ve been feeling pretty great in my self-sufficience these days. Although now that I’m emerging from this long lockdown, I suppose I’m craving the company of the fairer sex.
4. What recognitions, large or small, have been bestowed upon you?
   My senior year of high school, the newspaper staff named me Most Likely to be a Televangelist (this in the years of the Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggert scandals) but I think the newspaper advisor made them think of something else (It was a small, moderately conservative Christian school) so I was renamed Most Likely to be a Used Car Salesman.
5. What was your most recent charitable donation?
   Spelling names correctly is of severe importance. I was freakishly devoted to it when I taught high-schoolers, and I’m nearly as devoted now that I work in a nonprofit. So I have this rule. Anything I’ve written or edited, if it gets published with a misspelled name, I anonymously donate $20 to the associated fund at the university, if there is one. If the misspelled name is in an article about an engineering scholarship, for example, I donate money to that scholarship. If there’s no immediately related fund, I find something close. Someone else misspelled a coworker’s name in our staff newsletter, and for some reason I didn’t check spelling on the names when I edited (which I always do, even the names I absolutely know the spelling of), and it went out with the mispelling. I made the donation to the staff social/party fund, a little side account not budgeted by the foundation but by bake sales and bottle recycling.

Happy long weekend and happy Independence Day. I don’t have plans beyond Friday night but I hope to do some catching up on personal writing. I have so many unreviewed books, films, and TV series. And I’m doing July’s Camp NaNo, so there’ll be a bit of noveling all month.