Resabi: TMI (Too Much Info)

. . . edgy (and not in the socially desirable way), but I'll have a go at it.

Things that interest me: Family, friends, reading, writing, exploring the Internet, blogging, Squidoo, Scrabble, grammar and wordplay, gems, book making, handmade paper, miniature books, design (books, jewelry, rooms), children's literature, medical information... and a host of things that catch my attention for some space of time before either fading or becoming permanent interests.

Things that almost never penetrate my consciousness: Housework, cooking, sports (although I do watch poker tournaments on TV and have also watched a Scrabble tournament. I also recently discovered that golf is oddly soothing to watch on TV),

I Enjoy: Reading (mysteries, romance, fantasy, fiction with humor, occasional poetry, nonficton about subjects that interest me), spending time with family and friends, spending time alone, watching tv and movies, designing books, making cards, doing logic puzzles, and learning new things. Last year, I had a wonderful experience collaborating on a virtual Masked Ball with a couple of online friends. Part of that little adventure included collaborating on a serialized story built around our adopted ball personae that reached its denouement during the Masked Ball.

I am a collector -- of beach rocks and gemstones, children's literature, web links, old keys, marbles... I have a penchant for typefaces and miniature chairs and I adore boxes. I like to put little treasures into my little boxes so as to encounter them unexpectedly at some later date. I can crochet, kind of, but that small ability has nothing to do with the skeins and balls of colorful yarn I can't resist buying on occasion. I also can't resist handmade and marbled papers. One of my relatively new interests is the jewelry of designer Barbara Bixby, particularly her keys.

I like to laugh and have a dry sense of humor that some people appreciate and others do not -- and a keen sense of the ridiculous. Not all of my humor is politically correct, but I choose my audience with care. I have a soft spot for kitsch and quirky things(a number of my lenses are centered in those areas) and take pleasure in oddity. A lot of things interest me -- and I never know what next will catch my fancy.

I'm an introvert -- both in terms of shyness and in terms of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (I'm INTP). Often, people to whom I respond don't realize that I'm shy; people to whom I don't respond think I'm a block of wood. I always annoyed my mother by arguing the other side of whatever we were discussing (oops, make that present tense). I'm an "on the other hand..." kind of person.

Squidoo and blogging are both relatively recent areas of interest for me and I'm giving them my usual obsessive attention. As with the introvert thing, I'm very binary about my interests: On or Off. When I'm interested, I tend to immerse myself, at least until I've reached a reasonable level of knowledge. When I'm not interested, it's pretty much white noise.

Among my weaknesses: plummy British speaking voices (Alan Rickman, Michael York), honey-gravel singing voices (David Cook), Alex O'Loughlin, movies that open in Art Deco hotel lobbies, dry British comedies, 1980s American soap dramas. Love Actually is one of my favorite movies. A list of my favorite books cannot be compressed into as few as 100 titles but authors include Christie, Heyer, Barrie, Shaw, Wilde, Austen, Nesbit, Lewis, Tolkien, Gallico, Pullman, Carroll, O. Henry, Batten...

By vocation and by avocation, I'm an editor. If I walk into a house, I mentally rearrange furniture and knock out walls. I look at a piece of jewelry and start sketching modifications.

I'm good at solving problems -- even some of my own... I seem to have a knack for solutions. A friend, who has been trying to figure out a "label" for what I do, calls me a creative consultant. I can almost always see options and possibilities. This often translates to optimism, but I'm also a little too good at foreseeing possible consequences and/or negative outcomes. My daughter finds this aspect annoying, since I'm right more than I'm wrong. So far...

I had a kidney transplant a while back, after 3 years on dialysis, so I've learned a lot of medical information that I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. I find it interests me. Dialysis was an experience I would have been happy enough to avoid, but I learned from it and from the people I encountered. Now I'm relearning to live a life unattached to machines. A happier lesson, but I treasure both.

I also did the infertility dance, at a time when a lot of today's technologies were either unavailable or were in their infancy. Despite that, technology worked in my favor. Once again, lessons learned and an incalculable treasure as an end result.

Both experiences brought their share of humorous (and just plain ridiculous) events. One day, I might share those in a lens.