Ever_Trying: Behind the Blogger

It occurred to me the other day that not everyone reading our blog knows much about its authors outside of this sometimes neglected space. So here, for your education and entertainment, are 20 unauthorized points of E.T. trivia:

1. To begin, she’s Asian-American. Adopted as an infant from a South Korean orphanage, she was raised the prettiest outlier in Northeastern Oklahoma.

2. And she’s a good enough sport to wear the “South Korea’s Got Seoul” t-shirt I bought for her birthday a few years back.

3. She read books at the dinner table for most of her childhood but is quite the conversationalist these days.

4. Speaking of, she reads faster than anyone you know. Seriously. Most of us digest a picture slower than she does a page of text.

5. Her father is a lovable riot. He recently shipped to her an escape ladder for her second story bedroom window.

6. She can’t handle tequila. At all.

7. Historical evidence would suggest that she only dates national merit scholars.

8. Though I wouldn’t call her a performer, she was in the high school’s marching band...and I’m very tempted to post visual proof. But I won’t. Wouldn’t want to, you know, rain on the whole anonymity thing...or incite yearbook retaliation.

9. She was admitted to and attended a prestigious fine arts summer program for students called Quartz Mountain as a poet. It was there that she discovered her artistic medium, though she's been on hiatus for some time.

10. She has a MAJOR aversion to being touched under the chin.

11. And snakes.

12. While in college, she worked at Victoria's Secret as a sales representative.

13. For years, she had a one-eyed dog named Brownie.

14. She was once a cheerleader and is rumored to fit, still, into half of her uniform.

15. She is the only person I know, my age, that uses the phrase "had a ball" regularly and gets away with it.

16. One of my most thoughtful friends, she keeps better track of my birthdays than I do. Her gifts, too, are always exquisitely personalized. Favorites include the thermos-housed vodka bottle (no, the backstory for that one will not be provided) and the beautiful journal that she christened with an encouraging message just inside the cover.

17. She can catch and throw spiraled footballs.

18. Though she supposedly abhors the telephone, we've logged a handful of six-hour conversations in recent years.

19. I don't think she knows this, but her old Open Diary was the exclusive catalyst for my decision to write online. To write at all, actually.

20. She has, for as long as she can remember, wanted to teach because she believes wholeheartedly in not only the possibility, but the dire urgency, of a brighter tomorrow. And so she does. Simple as that.