Secrets

• I've forgotten how to flirt. Since I learned to talk, one of my favorite games was flirting with boys. But when I went on my mission, I had to remind myself, "Don't flirt. Don't flirt. Don't flirt." So now I don't flirt.
• My body doesn't work very well, and I am not okay with it. I hate letting people down because I'm sick.
• I am too good for you.
• I'm so vain: I definitely think that song is about me.
• This sister at church said that she read, "Women want to be loved with tenderness and affection, and men want to be loved with admiration and respect." Personally I think drawing a line like that is stupid mostly because I am a woman and I've craved admiration and respect my whole life. I'd take them over tenderness and affection any day of the week. I really dislike people calling me cute for this reason. You don't respect cute. Of course, it's not their fault. Girls like me who are five-foot-nothing usually end up being cute no matter what they do.
• I had a dream that I was President of the United States, but most of it was about my professional-but-feminine wardrobe and hairstyles. Another time I dreamt that I was elected Empress of the World but then my motorcade was taken hostage in a war zone. I looked pretty stylish in that dream too (crowns!) except when I was all covered in blood.
  
• Some of my family were plantation owners who lost everything after the Civil War. Even though it was so long ago and we've all been economic failures since then, the classism runs very deep. We even have a story about how the Yankee soldiers took my ancestresses' silk ballgowns among other household items. When my humbled ancestresses showed up at church on Sunday in their cotton day dresses, they saw the "white trash" (oh yeah, that's what the story calls them) women in the back wearing the same silk gowns. They'd received the dresses from the soldiers in exchange for sexual favors. That story about sums up my family's feelings about wealth: it may have been redistributed, but our dignity and breeding still set us above everyone else. Ashamedly, I still tend to think like this.
  I identify strongly with Margaret Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South: she had roots in the gentry (as did the women in Cranford). Even though her parents and even their parents had never had money, her father graduated from Oxford, her mother's uncle held a title, and her aunt moves in the wealthy gentry circles of London society. When she moves to Milton, she condescends to the mill workers, even though in the book Gaskell makes it clear that some of the mill workers make more than Margaret's family does. However, not only is she far above the mill workers in education and breeding, she was also bred above the new-money mill owners. She fits in nowhere. Of course, she ends up inheriting a ton of money from a family friend who had kept the wealthy part of his upper-classness, marries the most civil and educated mill owner in Milton, and becomes a member of the new world order: the industrialists. That's when I stop identifying with her.
• I am not a big fan of Christmas because my birthday is close to it and also because from when I was seven to when I was thirteen (and a few times after that) I would be so anxious on Christmas Eve because of two months of buildup that I'd start vomiting: What am I going to get? Will my family like the presents I got them? What if I go into the living room and discover that Santa has gotten me the wrong thing again? How will I act happy enough so my parents won't realize their mistake? Which of the relatives will call? What are we having for Christmas dinner? Is anyone going to die at my birthday party this year? Will my brother ever stop playing the nonstop-pop-Christmas-carols station? Why did I eat so many roasted marshmallows?
• I hate a lot of white foods, and coloring these foods does not make me like them: potatoes (except for very thin french fries with lots of ketchup), turnips, parsnips, cauliflower, coconut, mayonnaise, Miracle Whip, Cool Whip, roasted marshmallows, marshmallow crème, meringue anything, every kind of cream pie, most cheesecakes, whipped cream, white chocolate bars, white hot cocoa, cream soda, egg nog (shudder), butter on vegetables, flour tortillas, that nasty whipped frosting supermarket bakeries use, white mountain frosting, royal icing, eggs, white meat from a roasted chicken or turkey, halibut, cod, flounder, Monterey Jack, Muenster, paneer (shudder again), feta, alfredo sauce, and cream soups. I only started eating butter on bread a few years ago, and that was a big step for me. White foods I like include milk, white gluten-free bread (usually toasted or grilled very dark), white rice, scallops, garlic, jícama, cream cheese, yogurt, mozzarella, and Breyer's mint–chocolate-chip ice cream, which is white with black chips.
• Actually, I'm a very picky eater in general. I dislike most of the foods most people like. (See below.)
• I am naturally perverse—my first instinct is to contradict everything anybody says, and my second is to do exactly the opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes I can control this part of my personality better than other times.
• I am a closet romance novelist.
• Often I doubt my emotional capacity to keep a house and raise children.
• I've started daydreaming about the Foreign Service again.
• Twilight was only annoyingly predictable because I've seen too much Buffy.
• I really dislike Edward Cullen as a person. He's a fascinating character, but if I met him in real life I would not be interested once I'd gotten past the "Ooh, he's a vampire" thing. Even though I knew it was outside the scope of the genre, I really wanted Breaking Dawn to be the book in which Bella realizes that Edward is a fantasy. He's too good to be true. He's about as appealing as a cup full of treacle. Alternatively I could say he's about as appealing as the thought of marrying a perennially seventeen-year-old boy. (¡Guácala! I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.) I wanted Bella to decide that she wanted to be normal, that she wanted to go to college and get a job and meet a man (as opposed to a perennially seventeen-year-old boy) and have kids and get fat and fight about money and make up on an anniversary trip to Seattle and grow old and die.
  That's what I would have chosen.