Three Things

With a sour look on my face, I just scrawled myself a post-it and stuck it right in the middle of my current project where I will have to see it tomorrow before I can forget and accidentally have any fun. It reads: MAKE APPOINTMENT FOR TAXES. Ick. I believe in paying them, I do. I'm no libertarian and would never want to live in a libertarian's world (though I wouldn't mind watching through a porthole as they tried to actually live in the pyscho world they want to build!) but ugh, I am filled with dread as only the self-employed can be at this time of year. Scratch that. As only the fiscally irresponsible self-employed can be. It will be fine. I just have a tremendous capacity for avoiding unpleasant tasks.

I've been tagged by Claudia and Shannon, and am finally getting around to it. The problem with getting to a tag late is that you've already read everyone else's profound, whimsical, and quirky answers. But I'll do my best.

Three things you wish for (just for you):
1. Health & long life (for me and everyone I know)
2. A writing room. (I can't complain. We have a great studio in our house, but to write I need solitude so I do it at the kitchen table, and I dream of a cozy room with a lime-green velvet settee and big polka-dots painted at random on the walls.)
3. Longer legs

Three things you would do if there was no one to judge you or if you had the guts:
You know, I can't think of anything! Moon the president? Flip him off? Shake him like a snow globe? Shave his head. Kick him in the shins. Send him to go to his room without any supper!!

Three bad habits you have:
1. Editing my writing compulsively instead of moving forward with it (getting better at this!)
2. Leaving my clothes on the floor like a college boy.
3. Not balancing my checkbook.

Three insecurities you feel
1. Self-examinations like this make me feel boring. I want to invent personality quirks. I'm very un-complex.
2. Anxious about speaking in public, esp a non-scripted situation -- I'd never call in to a radio show even if I felt passionately about the topic; I may have to do a phone interview soon and I'm so anxious!
3. A niggling and hard-to-explain feeling of being a phony? Of being, somehow, inauthentic? Discovering I have no emotional depth and nothing to say. Er, I don't know. Weird.

Three talents/skills you wish you had
1. Wish I could dance! Wish I felt lively in my skin, rhythmic & kinetic, instead of slouchy & self-conscious.
2. Wish I spoke fluent Italian.
3. Wish I was more natural around kids. I feel stiff around them and watch them like I'm an alien taking notes. Especially unsettled by middle-schoolers.

Three things you would do if you had more time:
1. Hike! Get my body out of the house and make it move up and down hills, in fresh air. I think that I remember that's what hiking is.
2. Quilt. Wish I'd learned from my grandma.
3. See more indie and foreign films. Go to film festivals.

Three things you would do if you had the money:
1. Buy a fabulous villa on the Amalfi Coast, complete with guesthouses for friend, family, and visiting artists
2. Buy original art, thus putting bread in artists' bellies.
3. See India, Ethiopia, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, Thailand, and other distant and exotic lands.

Three things that bring you peace & relaxation:
1. Reading a great book (If I can forget that I ought to be writing one instead)
2. Traveling -- being outside the boundaries of my life I can give myself some peace from my constant inner-nagging that I should be writing or painting or otherwise creating something. Traveling, I can let myself just look, see, smell, eat, smile, walk...
3. Getting in bed at the end of a long day (I LOVE going to bed!) and slinging one leg across Jim's.

Three things that spark your creativity:
1. travel -- trains, magic carpets, gypsy wagons.
2. bookstores!!!
3. mythology & folktales. Stories about vampires, witches, faeries, and other beasties.

I can't think of who hasn't been tagged already, so I tag everyone who's inclined to respond!