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I have a weird and childlike enthusiasm for random questionnaires (and an insatiable appetite for other peoples’ answers).

Excerpted from Elle

If you could come back as a dress, what would it be?
hmmm … one of Mia Farrow’s little boxy minidresses like the one she married Frank Sinatra in, maybe

What’s your favorite color?
orange

What’s your favorite junk food?
In n Out burger

What are you most shy about?
oh, where to begin – cold sores, muscly legs, post-babies chesticles, paleness of skin

If you could have someone else’s body, whose would it be?
Giselle (duh)

Who are your fantasy dinner-party guests?
Oprah, Obama, F Scott & Zelda, Steve Jobs, Anne Sexton (nice combo of liberals and crazies)

Where is your favorite place to have a drink?
Algonquin Hotel, NYC

Underwear of choice?
Hanky Panky

Last book you read?
The Cobweb – Neil Stephenson (not quite done)

Any pets?
no, and other than large dogs, no interest

What’s for breakfast?
3 small vanilla scones from Starbucks, and my venti latte

At age seven, you wanted to be:
a doctor

Do you have any superstitions?
I like “I love you” to be the last thing I say to my parents before I say goodbye to them

What’s your biggest self-indulgence?
my trainer, Kimberly

Favorite place to shop?
the internet

If you were an inventor, what would you invent?
a time machine

Favorite car?
a Smart car

What was your childhood nickname?
Lindsey Mead, She’s on Speed

When and where are you happiest?
watching my children sleep (is this suspicious?), on cross-country flights

Who is your best friend?
that person knows who they are

Who is your worst enemy?
myself

What piece of art would you most like to own?
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above the Clouds

What’s your favorite vacation spot?
my parents’ back yard in Marion, watching the children run through the sprinkler and drinking white wine on ice.

Who is your favorite fictional character?
hard to pick one – Mamah Cheney, Nancy Botwin, Daisy Buchanan, Eve

What’s your most treasured possession?
my photo albums

Your favorite song/band?
impossible – but certainly something old-school and acoustic from the 70s

What current trend would you like to see disappear?
skinny jeans. Who do they look good on?

Always:
speak your mind. Tell people what you feel.

Never:
take anything or anyone for granted

Which was great even when the skies opened two minutes before the end of her lesson. I do like me a crazy summer thunderstorm. She and I were drenched (luckily I was not wearing only a single layer of white cotton, as she was) when we got to the car. Literally soaked to the skin. Felt pretty great actually. And she has declared tennis her “favorite sport ever.”

These animated children, builders of Lego towers topped with Lego men, devourers of blue frosting … I am trying to let them bring me back from the melancholy that pulls me like a tide. It’s hard.

Am on unsteady ground of late and trying to find my balance. I need to find faith in myself. Rilke, again, gives me solace:

…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. – Ranier Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

This morning I took both children to camp, with my usual pitstop at Starbucks. We got to BB&N and walked to the door where we drop Gracie off. I went in with her and Whit stood outside, uncharacteristically quiet and pensive. When I came out I took his hand and we headed back to the car. He said to me, “Mummy, it looks like it is going to rain.” I was distracted, as usual, and said, “yeah, yeah, Whit.” It was pretty much full sunshine and I wanted to get him to his camp. He yanked my arm, stood stock still, pointed at the clouds, and said, “Mummy! It really looks like rain. Look at those clouds.”
15 minutes later it was raining.
Not only was he accurate, but he reminded me to pay attention to the clouds. My little meteorologist. Like Grace’s devil-may-care gumption, there’s a lot Whit can teach me.