- I'll respond with something random about you.
- I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
- I'll pick a dessert with which you and I would have a food fight.
- I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me (maybe/maybe not).
- I'll tell you my first memory of you.
- I'll tell you what animal you remind me of (your daemon/Patronus?).
- I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.
- If I do this for you, you must post this on your journal/blog in turn. "Must" is a liberal term in this usage, however, and if you'd really rather not, well, that's cool by me.
- If I don't know you, which is entirely possible given that random people seem to have wandered onto this blog somehow (hello Drew, Sarah Irene, and Mitch!), feel free to leave a message and we'll see if I'm psychic.
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I write this from a hotel room in Warrensburg, Missouri, where I'm speaking tomorrow at a writers' conference at Central Missouri State University. I have been home for three days now, and I have gotten my hair trimmed, bought new jeans and running shoes, made dinner for my family (cranberry chicken, which they duly appreciated), went to see the excellent "Murderball" with my father and sister, walked two miles with my mother, and gone through my grandfather's extensive library with him to select those books I'd someday like to have for myself. I am reading a lovely novel called Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber, which I purchased in Denver because Midnight's Children and Atonement felt too much like assignment reading; it's slow, but the writing is sensuous and gorgeous, and the descriptions of Middle Eastern food -- especially baklava -- have me desperate to get back to Brooklyn and visit Atlantic Avenue. I bought my first-ever song off iTunes today, the Counting Crows' "Accidentally in Love," which always makes me dance around goofily. And I now have silver toenails. All of this matters not a whit, of course, in the face of anything truly important, and I'm still thinking about the events of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. But then I look at my toes, I sing "I'm in love" umpteen times, I lust after baklava -- and the little things count.