On Popcorn and Scrabble

Ten Things I Know About Myself

Welcome to my second post of 2025! Perhaps #1 on the list you are about to read should have been, “I buy a lot of journals and then never write in them; I also start a lot of blogs and then…almost never write in them.” 😬 Alas, thank you for accepting my sporadic pop-ins here. And thank you to Aly for inviting me to join this blog hop and giving me the kick in the pants to sit down and write something!

Here are ten (pretty random) things I know about myself:

1. I am an introvert, except when I am on a stage teaching a line dance. Then I am the world’s most gregarious, confident person who wants everyone in the room to have the Best Time Ever.

2. I will never stop emphasizing my Very Important Points by capitalizing the first letter in each word of a phrase, no matter how 2010s-era-blogger it reveals me to be.

3. While I love walking into a movie theater to an olfactory blast of buttered popcorn, I will always opt for nachos with extra fake-but-somehow-delicious nacho cheese sauce.¹

4. Tell me you need me to finish a project “sometime in the next few weeks,” and I will absolutely not start said project until a month later when you ask me how it’s coming along. Then I will drop everything else in life (sometimes including eating and hydrating) to hyperfocus for the next 10-12 hours to complete the project, and it will be as good as (or better than) if I had tried to spread the work out over days or weeks.

5. I may forget my own children’s birthdates on occasion, but I will never not be able to recite my childhood phone number or the license plate number on my parents’ old Ford Aerostar van on command.

6. If I believed in reincarnation, I would be convinced that in a past life, I was Romanian. (I don’t believe in reincarnation, but the way I picked up the language and pronunciation before my first trip to Romania was genuinely baffling to me and every native speaker to whom I said, in perfect Romanian, “I don’t speak Romanian very well.”)

7. I am not a competitive person, except when it comes to any kind of word games. Scrabble, Wordle, Bananagrams, a race to see who can finish a word search at a baby shower — I will DESTROY YOU.

8. I can’t explain why, but I will always opt for hand-writing a recipe rather than printing it out (or, blech, referencing it on my phone screen during prep). I also have the toxic trait of rarely making the same recipe twice, even when the first time turned out Really Dang Good.²

9. I am physically incapable of drinking out of a cup that someone else has put their mouth on before me. I don’t discriminate between husband, child (my own or someone else’s), stranger on a bus who needed a swig of my water because she got a popcorn kernel stuck in her throat, etc. Once another pair of lips has touched my drinkware, it is dead to me until I can wash it thoroughly with hot, soapy water.

10. I spend a lot of time thinking about my idiosyncrasies and wondering how I have any friends at all. But I also think about my favorite people and their idiosyncrasies, and how I love them all the more for their quirks, and I try to remind myself that “my people” are my people for a reason.

And there you have it. Some things I know will (probably) always be true about me! Each of these things (except maybe #2, that’s pretty self explanatory) could be expanded into its own entire post someday.³

What about you? What are some things you know about yourself?

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This post is part of a blog hop with the Creative Speed Dating Cohort led by Laura Rennie and Laura Bass, with participation from the Exhale community. Fun prompts like these are just a taste of the creative samplings offered in the cohort. Click here to view the next post in the “Things I Know About Myself” series.

1. Popcorn kernels inevitably get stuck on the very back of my tongue, and I have enough stress in my life as it is.

2. This is mainly because I forget where I put the handwritten-on-whatever-paper-was-nearby recipe and have yet to come up with one single, organized repository for recipes I’ve actually tried and liked.

3. Also, the picture up top has nothing to do with any of these things; it’s just my littlest kiddo being extra cute with his chalk. 😍