"3's About Me" Author Style

There's a popular game on Facebook called "3's About Me." It's one of those fill-in-the-blank activities that's supposed to help you know your friends even better. It goes something like this:

Three names I go by:
Jeanner Beanner
Just Me (as in "Hi, it's Just Me.)
(And the elementary school favorite) Hygiene

Three places I've been:
Monkey's Eyebrow, Arizona
Fleatown, Ohio
Poop Creek, Oregon
(Yes, people, these are real places!)

Anyhow, you get the idea.

This week, I'd like to play a variation of this game with my blog readers. Here are the rules: Choose one of your favorite authors. Find three quotes from that person that best describe you and then tell why.

I'll start.

Erma Bombeck is one of my favorite authors. (Oh, how I miss her!)

1. Erma said: “I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food.”

The truth about me: My Achilles' heel is ice cream. I'm addicted to it. Last winter when there was a blizzard warning, I rushed to DQ to make sure I got mine. I've been known to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's Coffee, Coffee, Buzz, Buzz, Buzz instead of drinking my morning coffee. My summer nights aren't complete without a dish of Kemp's Under the Stars. And I've tried all of Baskin--Robbins 31 flavors (in one sitting). I finally admitted that I had a problem. I checked myself into ice-cream rehab, and I did well with that until I got a job handing out frozen treat samples at Walmart. Thank goodness for Erma. She put it all in perspective. I am NOT a glutton. I am merely an explorer of food. Amen.

2. Erma said: “The bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going to drop?”

The truth about me: The last ten years have been a wild roller coaster ride. I was downsized out of my job and struggled to get my freelance writing business going. Then my mother died suddenly, and my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. For nine years, I made almost daily visits to the nursing home to join him in craft projects and sing-alongs. Dad died about the same time that my best freelance client went belly up taking with them my health insurance and a consistent paycheck. Through it all, I kept my level-headed sanity. I'm great in a crisis, but now that things are better I have chronic panic attacks. Like Erma said, the bad times I can handle. It's the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going to drop?

And what does that mean, anyway? Not knowing the origin of unusual words and phrases is another thing that drives me crazy. According to the Word Detective web site (Issue of May 23, 2001): Waiting for the other shoe to drop originated as the punchline to a very old joke in which a traveler arrives late at night in a small rooming house and is cautioned not to wake the other guests as he prepares for bed. Very tired, he accidentally allows one of his shoes to fall heavily to the floor, but is more careful with the other and places it quietly on the floor. He is sound asleep a few minutes later when he is awakened by the guest next door pounding on the wall and shouting, "For the love of Pete, drop the other shoe!" No one knows just how old that joke is, but etymological researcher Barry Popik has uncovered what is probably the earliest example yet found, an editorial cartoon in the New York World-Telegram from February 1943.

There, I feel better now.

3. Erma said: “As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative Mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.”

The truth about me: When I was in third grade, I spent many evenings sitting at the kitchen table with Dad as he tried to help me with my math homework. Anything beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division befuddled me. The problem was that Dad didn't understand the "new math" any better than I did. He had his own method of ciphering, and that further complicated things. In middle school, I was horrified to find the word "pi" in a math problem. Until then, I loved that word because it meant something good to eat. Algebra was as mysterious to me as 3.14159265358979323846, which of course is pi, the exact value of which cannot be defined. (See, I was paying attention to my math teachers.) My algebra homework looked like this:


Decades later, I'm still mathematically challenged. I rely on a credit-card size tip table to keep wait staff happy. Without my calculator I can't balance my checkbook or tally my invoices. Like Erma, I honestly do not know how old I am. My birth year ends in a 2. From there, I count on my fingers to 9 to figure it out.

So there you have it, the "3's About Me, Author Style." Now it's your turn. Through Erma's wise words, I have shared with you, my readers, three of my deepest, darkest secrets. What will your favorite author reveal about you?