Hello. I'm Renata. I wrote all this stuff. I'm a student at Grinnell College. If you would really like to know more about me, you should visit my blog, The Boron Narratives. On Livejournal, I'm bessiemaemucho or renata_kedavra (for fannish things).

You can find things I have written elsewhere on the Internet at: I really like Tori Amos, educational software, and cheese, among other things. I also like people who read my stuff, especially if they email me feedback ^_^

Meanwhile, because I like lists, and because I wanna be just like when I grow up, here are 100 things about me. (I wrote these a couple years ago- as of 02/10/2k+6 I went back and edited ones that simply weren't true anymore but I was too lazy to write an entirely new set of 100. So some of these might not most accurately reflect my personality anymore, but, hey.)
  1. My name is Renata Kay. Renata was chosen more or less randomly from the baby book because my parents liked the sound of it. Also, it had to start with an "R", because... see, my dad has a lot of tools. (He used to run his own welding shop.) And all these tools have his initials on them. His first name is Robert. So, his only criteria for naming kids was that, if it was a boy, his name had to start with an "R" also, so that he could inherit these tools. My mom, ever the feminist, insisted that if it was a girl, her name had to start with an "R" too, just in case she had an interest in tools. (I don't, but I appreciate the thought.)
  2. I have one younger sibling. His name is Reid. He's pretty cool. (He will, in fact, inherit the aforementioned tools.)
  3. I'm straight but I've been told I come off as a lesbian by several people, including my mom.
  4. In high school I was the only actively-participating girl on our scholastic bowl team.
  5. I really like Disney Channel Original movies.
  6. My favorite pair of socks are brown/gold/black striped knee socks. I bought them in London.
  7. I spent a semester in London and loved it, mostly; but I learned that I really don't like big crowds of people.
  8. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't touch my neck. It creeps me out and I flail a lot.
  9. Hablo espanol bastante bien.
  10. When I was small I loved Carmen Sandiego. (I still do.)
  11. I like puns and wordplay. A lot. (Which probably explains the last bit.)
  12. Most of my favorite authors are male. I have no reasonable explanation for this.
  13. I am a liberal feminist-type-person and civil rights are very important to me. However, I think political correctness is stupid and I love offensive jokes.
  14. But if I think that you actually mean the offensive joke, then it actually becomes offensive to me.
  15. I don't really have any nicknames, although certain people have individual pet names for me. You should probably just call me Renata.
  16. I really like the musical Rent.
  17. The Rent movie is unintentionally hilarious to me.
  18. Yes, I realize that my name is just like Rent but with "A"s. Really, you're not the first person to tell me that.
  19. I love to read prose but I very, very rarely enjoy reading poetry.
  20. And I never like writing poetry. (Serious Poetry, that is. I view writing funny haikus/sonnets/limericks/whatever as being more of a wordplay game than I do poetry.)
  21. I have a pretty laidback personality.
  22. My website about Neil Gaiman's book American Gods was recently published by Hill House Publishers.
  23. When I was in 7th/8th grade (I'm hazy on the details) I used to run a mailing list called, embarassingly enough, Renata's Miscellaneous List. I still keep in touch with some of the kids from it, and have met most of them in person. They're fabulous.
  24. My senior year of high school I won the Nietzche Critical Thinking scholarship, which I was intensely proud of because when the speaker read my nomination, I knew it had been written by my AP US history teacher, who was (is) my favorite teacher ever ever ever. It's less impressive if I'm forced to admit that I'm not actually 100% sure how to pronounce "Nietzche."
  25. I'm intensely creeped out by members of the cephalopod, particularly the giant squid. Grosssss.
  26. I had braces for three years in high school. Man, my teeth were fucked up. (My mouth was too small--I had eight teeth pulled and you can't even tell.)
  27. I learned to read at a very young age, but I apparently kept it a secret for awhile because I was afraid my parents would stop reading me stories if they knew I could read on my own. (This was, fortunately, false.)
  28. However, it took me a long time to figure out how to tell time. It still kinda confuses me, honestly. Time zones drive me crazy crazy.
  29. My birthday's June 21st, 1985. That makes me currently 21.
  30. The protagonist of Carrie Fisher's Surrender the Pink had the same nervous habit as I do-- she picked and peeled at her hangnails until they bled. (And then picked at the Band-Aids.) The book itself didn't make that big of an impression on me-- I don't even remember the character's name-- but I had never heard of anyone else who did that.
  31. I try not to be hyper-sensitive about it, but if I feel like you're patronizing me without good cause, I'm probably thinking evil thoughts about you.
  32. i don't really like capital letters but i use them sometimes.
  33. I like lotion and lipgloss a lot, but I don't usually wear any other makeup.
  34. I used to dye my hair purple, and I like the way it looks purple. But it's a lot of work and I'm kind of lazy.
  35. I'm typing this on my Mac iBook. His name is Sam. Before him I only ever had PCs. I'm pleased with the change.
  36. I sleep with a big stuffed yellow triceratops. I have no emotional attachment to it-- I didn't have it as a child. But I tend to sleep in the fetal position and it's good to have something to put my arms around. (No, that's not a pick-up line.)
  37. I've never been formally taught web design, but I like it. (And I've definitely improved over the last... like... 6 years?)
  38. I tend to type the way I talk. That means lots of questions that aren't really questions? And... lots of ellipses, because I tend to... pause randomly... in sentences. Also I *type actions in asterisks* because I tend to talk with my hands a lot. *flails*
  39. I moderate at some Rent message boards. They're fun.
  40. I'm a bit of a sucker for teevee shows with strong female characters. I love The West Wing (Oh, CJ) and The X-Files (Oh, Scully.) But Seasons 8-9 of the latter totally sucked.
  41. I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
  42. I try hard to respect opinions that differ from mine, but I really want to smack girls who think that feminism is stupid. Hard. Men too, really, but somehow it's more bewildering to me that women would find feminism stuupid.
  43. My favorite Powerpuff Girl is Buttercup. (She's the green one.)
  44. I met Tori Amos once. It was at a meet and greet at a Border's in Chicago. She is very small in person.
  45. I tend towards very long sentences when I write. (I realize that the preceeding sentence would have been more entertaining if it had, in fact, been a long sentence; but life isn't perfect.)
  46. My best friend and I have been best friends since 5th grade and neither of us can ever remember fighting about anything. (That's not to say that we agree on everything, of course-- she doesn't like pineapple, and I do.)
  47. I feel guilty labelling her as my "best friend" because I don't want to exclude any of my other friends. But well, so it goes.
  48. My first real concert was Ani DiFranco at the Interstate Center my sophomore year of high school.
  49. I'm pretty shy.
  50. I pretend not to judge people who don't like the Beatles, but secretly I think slightly less of you. Sorry, that's just how it goes.
  51. I tend to get very excited about random historical facts.
  52. I want to be a writer when I grow up but I feel really pretentious saying that. So usually I just tell people that I don't know.
  53. I'm vegetarian.
  54. I frequently find myself using sentences that have no actual meaning whatsoever. Things like, "So anyway... um... yeah."
  55. Most people wouldn't expect me to like comic books, but I, in fact, do.
  56. I really like the phrase "in fact."
  57. My favorite page of writing ever is page 252 (hardback) of Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I just... you should go read it. Even if you've never read the book, hunt down a copy of it and read that page.
  58. I like cheese, and also fake cheese.
  59. My family likes to travel, particularly to Mexico. I've been to most of the 13 Mexican states.
  60. As such, the American Red Cross does not want my blood.
  61. I like Mexican food abstractly; however, I really don't like limes, avacados, or cilantro. This makes finding authentic Mexican food that I like rather difficult.
  62. Boys tend to think I'm funnier than girls do. I'm not sure why.
  63. I really, really like to sleep. Unfortunately, I'm also a very light and very restless sleeper, which means that I rarely get to partake of this activity as much as I would like to.
  64. (I'm Midwestern, and as such have no problem with ending sentences with prepositions.)
  65. I don't really like to drive when there are people in the car with me.
  66. But when I'm alone I like to drive fast and listen to Tom Petty and sing along.
  67. I much prefer cold weather to hot weather.
  68. I wear glasses. I used to wear contacts but then I realized that it was a lot of work to poke myself in the eye every morning, and anyway I like the way I look in glasses.
  69. Fiction makes me cry much more readily than reality.
  70. My preferred writing utensil is a Uni-Ball Vision Fine line pen, in purple or pink, depending on my mood.
  71. I don't consider myself a very visual person. I'm frequently fairly oblivious of my surroundings, and when I read things, no matter how descriptive the writing is, I don't usually have a mental picture of the story. (And I'm okay with watching teevee with my eyes shut. The listening is really the key part for me.)
  72. When I'm feeling sad/stressed/overwhelmed I really would prefer to be left alone. No, I'm not just saying that. No really, back off.
  73. (But thanks for trying.)
  74. When I am feeling sad/stressed/overwhelmed/wrong (which, frankly, doesn't happen too often-- I'm pretty even keel), the thing that makes me feel better is Paul Simon's album Graceland. On repeat. Forever. Graceland is probably the closest thing to religion I have.
  75. Speaking of religion, I was raised atheist and I'm still that. Or maybe now I'm a Paul Simon-ist but that just sounds creepy.
  76. I think potatoes are great, in almost every form.
  77. I don't really have the attention span to watch most movies. Especially when I watch them on video at home... I tend to wander off and never come back. (I don't have this problem in the theatre.)
  78. After four years of high school theatre, I have decided that I very much enjoy watching live theatre, and I enjoy it even more when I'm in no way involved with the production.
  79. Before I figured that out, though, I did a lot of work on props and set crew, and as such am a card-carrying member of the International Thespian Society.
  80. I think British accents are really, really hot.
  81. Neil Gaiman makes me swoon a little.
  82. Even when I know I'm right I tend to preface my statements with "Uh, I'm pretty sure that..." or else I end them with question marks.
  83. Fall is my favorite season.
  84. When I was small I loved school and it confused me a lot to discover that not everyone felt likewise.
  85. My hand-eye coordination skills totally suck, and so I end up walking into doors or otherwise injuring myself in bizarre ways pretty frequently.
  86. I'm actually pretty good at math, but that doesn't mean I like it.
  87. I like to watch video games but I'm absolutely terrible at playing them.
  88. I believe that the secret to being happy is to just be happy. It makes me sad that not everyone works this way.
  89. My memory works in weird, weird ways and so sometimes I remember sentence fragments or numbers and I know that they have some signficance but I've no idea what. And sometimes I can remember old conversations word for word.
  90. I don't drink much. It's not a moral thing-- I don't believe there's anything inherently wrong with drinking (which is why it weirds me out when people assume I'm a hardcore Christian or something because of this.) It's just that I don't really like it. My parents find this to be very, very strange.
  91. My parents have a very laidback parenting style. They're pretty great. (For reasons other than just being laidback.)
  92. I like dark chocolate better than milk.
  93. My family has always had more than one cat. I like cats a lot. Mew!
  94. I like young adult literature, especially historical fiction.
  95. I love mail, both sending and receiving.
  96. I'm double-jointed in my thumbs, but I can't roll my tongue.
  97. When I was very small, around two, I learned that lobsters belonged to the crustacean family. So, whenever we went to the grocery store, I would stand near the lobster tank and inform random passers-by of this fact.
  98. I can't stand to have long nails. Pretty much any longer than the quick and it just freaks me out.
  99. I worked at a Girl Scout camp last summer and will again this summer. My "camp name" is Zelda.
  100. I like pirates a lot! And I (and most of my friends) did before Pirates of the Caribbean came out. Yeah, we're cool.

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