but oh how I loved everybody else / when I finally got to talk so much about myself

[pipsqueaky]

So you know that "100 Things About Me" meme that almost all of LJ has already done? Yeah, I've been working on that one for years (trufax!) and have only just now reached 100 Things. Mostly because jarrow has been pestering me to finish the damn thing already. So John, I hope there is at least one thing in here that is news to you. :)

Enough dawdling; on with the obsessive narcissistic self-examination!

1. The very first CD I ever owned was "The Sign" by Ace of Base. I bought it in 1994, three weeks before I actually had a CD player. So I would take it out of the case occasionally, look at the pretty pattern on the top of the disc, leaf through the little booklet, and then put it back in the case and quietly squee over the fact that I owned a CD even though I couldn't play it.
2. I went to my first concert when I was 10. It was New Kids on the Block. I was so excited I could barely breathe. (I was a Jordan girl.)
3. My favorite dessert in the world is tiramisu. Mmmmmmm.
4. My favorite pizza topping is no topping at all. Just good old-fashioned plain pizza - crust and tomato sauce and cheese and that's it. Everyone seems to think that if you're ordering pizza, especially for a group, you have to put some kind of toppings on it. This makes me sad.
5. I am not a fan of red meat. I'll eat it if someone cooks it for me, just to be polite, but I don't like the taste. White meat is better; I like chicken and turkey, but usually only in small doses (like thinly sliced turkey on a sandwich, or popcorn chicken). Fish is FANTASTIC. I could eat fish every day.
6. I live by dry-erase boards. I write everything on them. When I moved to Chicago and spent 3 weeks waiting on my stuff to arrive, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the hardwood floor, one of the only things I bought to help me survive was a dry-erase board. The office where I work actually has dry-erase wallpaper so that you can write on the walls, and it's pretty much the most awesome thing I've ever seen. When I am rich, I will wallpaper an entire wall in my house with dry-erase wallpaper and then write on the walls like Fred Burkle and it will be SWEET.
7. I learned to read when I was 2 years old.
8. There have been very very few times in my life when I haven't owned a cat (or two, or three...). I am totally a cat person. I like dogs well enough, but I don't really wanna bother with all the walking and bathing and grooming and stuff. Cats are much easier. I never had a dog growing up because my dad is deathly afraid of all dogs. (He was bitten once. Very tragic.)
9. I am a huge pottymouth. I curse ALL the time. It gets even worse when I'm drunk. *g*
10. Speaking of drinking, I had never had any alcohol at all (other than a half-glass of champagne at a party once) until I was 27 and joined the company I currently work for. They sent me to India for two months with a bunch of new college grads and I learned how to party hard.
11. My favorite alcoholic drink is Captain Morgan and Diet Coke.
12. Until I started drinking, I absolutely refused to be around people who were. I was terrified of being in the same room as someone who was drunk. (Why? I have no idea.) Once when I was a sophomore in college I came home to find my roommate and some of her friends sitting in our living room casually drinking beers - they were nowhere near drunk - and I flipped out and lost my shit and ran to my room and cried.
13. It took about 4 years, all told, for me to transition from a self-proclaimed conservative Republican heterosexual Christian (when I graduated college) to a self-proclaimed liberal Democratic bisexual atheist. A lot of those 180-degree turns took place within the first six months or so of grad school, but becoming comfortable with specific labels took quite a while longer. And it was all kickstarted by my discovery of fandom.
    
14. I didn't actually become super-religious until high school, when I fell in with a good crowd. :) I was pretty hardcore fundie for the last couple years of high school and all of college.
15. Something I am really not proud of: I ... sorta ... voted for Bush in 2000. OMG PLZ DON'T HATE. I was young and stupid! Trust me, I'd take it back if I could.
16. I was a Rules Girl in college. No lie. Again with the "young and stupid".
17. My parents used to be in a bowling league, and consequently I spent a lot of time in bowling alleys when I was a wee kid. My dad would give me a handful of quarters and tell me to go amuse myself, and I'd buy sweet tarts out of the candy machine and pick out songs on the jukebox and play a LOT of pinball. I got pretty good at pinball.
18. My belly button is ever so slightly off-center.
19. I can roll my tongue. I can't wiggle my ears. I can cross a single eye at a time. I can't raise just one eyebrow.
20. The only bone I've ever broken is my right pinky finger. I was playing dodgeball (EVIL game! EVIL!) in gym class in 5th grade and caught the ball wrong. I didn't go to the doctor for a week, and by that time it had already started to heal, but the bone wasn't set straight. So now my right pinky is very slightly crooked. I can totally make the "live long and prosper" sign with my left hand, but not my right.
21. I've been to an Alaskan rainforest, a Hawaiian volcano, a Jamaican waterfall, a Mediterranean beach, a Welsh countryside, a Roman cathedral, an Austrian garden, a Swiss glacier, a Parisian cafe, and a Mysore temple. I've been amazingly lucky to get to see so much of the world.
22. My favorite place on the planet (okay, other than Chicago) is called Kilchbalm. Here's how you get there: Take a plane to Bern, Switzerland. Take a train from Bern to Interlaken, and then another train from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen. Take a bus from Lauterbrunnen to Stechelberg. From Stechelberg, take a cable car straight up the side of the Schilthorn mountain to a teeny tiny town called Gimmelwald. Ask someone in Gimmelwald which trail will take you to Kilchbalm; find that trail and hike up the mountain for about 2 hours. And then you will arrive here. If I believed in heaven, I'd want it to look like this.
23. Every time I walk up or down stairs, I have to count them in my head. I don't actually bother to remember the number of steps after I've finished, but I cannot stop my brain from going "1, 2, 3..." If I reach a landing, I start over.
24. I adore solving puzzles and riddles, especially the mathematical kind. I can play sudoku for hours on end, and kick ass at it too.
25. Much like Oz, I do well on standardized tests. My SAT score was 1570 (at the time, the highest possible score was 1600). I missed two verbal questions.
26. My first online screen name was "Smyli Face". If you know me at all, you're not surprised. Up until I moved to Chicago, I had a vanity license plate on my car that said "SMYLI".
27. I also collect stuff with smiley faces on it. Candles, clothing, mugs, jewelry, artwork, lamps, toys, pens, whatever.
28. Our family got an AOL subscription when I was a junior in high school (back in the old days when AOL would send out discs with a free trial that included 10 whole hours of dial-up internet access! we were so impressed!), so I spent a lot of time on AOL. The main screen had all these modules on it with AOL content: sports, games, chat, etc. For months, I honestly thought THAT was the internet. Like, the whole thing. Whenever someone would mention the Web in conversation, I'd say "Yeah, I though the internet was really cool at first, but now I've seen almost all of it. I'm kinda bored with it now." And they'd look at me funny and I never knew why. Then one day I happened to notice a button on the AOL splash screen that said "World Wide Web", and I clicked it, and was SHOCKED to my VERY CORE. I think I actually blurted out "...Wait, there's more?!"
29. I completely suck at sports. It takes a lot of talent to be THIS uncoordinated. The only game I will play, on rare occasion, is volleyball. You know, for various values of "play" that include swiping ineffectively at the ball as it sails past me.
30. My favorite sport to watch is American football, but it's really only interesting if one of my favorite teams is playing. Everything else - basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, etc. - is kinda "meh". I probably wouldn't be as enthused about football as I am if I hadn't gone to an ACC school where everyone in at least a 100-mile radius goes to the game on Saturday. It's just what you do.
31. I loved climbing trees when I was a kid. I would go exploring around my house (we lived in the 'burbs) and climb any tree I could find. I am very disappointed that it is considered socially unacceptable for adults to climb trees. And that there are no "tree-climbing parks" in Chicago.
32. I accidentally dropped out of grad school. Yes, you heard me. I only had a couple months left, too.
33. After dropping out, I spent a year and a half being unemployed and depressed and generally hiding in my apartment away from the world. The depression was pretty much entirely due to the accidental dropping out, plus the fact that I was miserable in grad school almost from the start and it was really really not a fun time and I felt very incompetent and pathetic. On the other hand, if I hadn't been so unhappy with grad school, I might never have started looking to other sources for comfort, and I would never have found fandom. So there's that.
34. I've been singing for as long as I can remember. Church choirs, school choirs, a cappella groups, solo performances, anything I could get. I cannot even begin to imagine my life without music. I have to sing for at least a little bit each day, otherwise I get very cranky and out of sorts. I would so, so much rather be blind than deaf; and actually, I would also rather be blind than mute. I don't even want to THINK about not being able to sing.
35. I'm also an actress, or at least I used to be. I did Forensics (no, not the science of dead people; it's a competitive performing arts thing) in middle and high school, and I was involved with a local community theatre that put on 5-6 musicals a year plus one or two non-musical plays. When I was 16 I got to play Juliet, and it was one of the absolute best times of my life.
36. As a side note, I was a straight-A student up until that year. (I also didn't do drugs or have sex or hang out with unsavory characters or do anything my parents didn't want me to do, and I was a relatively happy and well-adjusted child and a total teacher's pet and it was all very very boring. At least in retrospect.) I had so much fun performing on stage, however, that I let my homework slip a little and I got my first B ever. In psychology.
37. I've never been in debt. I've carried credit card balances before, but I always could have paid the whole thing off immediately if I had wanted to. With the way I manage money (which is to say, poorly), this is a very good thing. I am fully aware that I've only managed to avoid debt by being born into a middle-to-upper-middle-class household and getting to take full advantage of the benefits of same, not because I'm a hard worker or some such shit.
38. I am very neurotic about having a fairly large pile of savings stashed away somewhere. If my savings account gets low, I go into full-on panic mode, and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with my own financial security. I have this completely insane and illogical fear that one day one of my loved ones will be kidnapped and held for ransom, and if they are, I had better be able to pay said ransom or else they will suffer Dire Consequences and it will be All My Fault. This is essentially why I get up and go to work every day, and get paychecks and deposit them in the bank: to be able to pay ransom if anyone I love is ever kidnapped. I am TOTALLY SERIOUS.
39. My first job ever was at a waitress at O'Charley's, the summer after freshman year of college. I learned two things: 1) servers do not get paid nearly enough for what they do and you should always tip them well, and 2) I am SO not a people person.
40. I had a temp job once, as a web designer/developer, that was supposed to turn permanent after 90 days. But I had a problem with tardiness (and by "problem", I mean there were 3 times in 2 months when I showed up 15 minutes late to work) and I got fired.
41. The reason I was late the last day, and ergo the reason I lost my job, is that I had just come home from a weekend trip to Chicago and I was so exhausted from the 8-hour drive back that I overslept. The trip was for the explicit purpose of meeting a bunch of fangirls at tzikeh and merryish's house and marathoning some show I'd never seen before called "due South". I have no regrets.
42. Speaking generally, I have very very few actual regrets about my life. Everything I've done, every decision I've made has led me here, and I'm pretty damn happy with here. I don't even regret the fundie Christian days, because I was honestly happy then.
43. I played clarinet in middle school band and high school marching band. I would rather have played the oboe.
44. I tried teaching myself the flute once. I ... can kinda do scales? And that's about it.
45. I took piano lessons as a child, and loved playing but hated practicing. After a couple years I pestered my parents into letting me quit. Of course, I wish now that I had stuck with it.
46. I have one brother who is 7 years younger than me. It's a very strange age gap; we were too far apart to ever really play together, and we were too close for it to be more of a caretaker or mentor type of relationship. So mainly I either teased and belittled him, or ignored him. He drove me crazy (more my fault than his) from the time he was 2 to the time he was 20. He's actually grown up to be an okay guy, though we're not close at all.
47. My dad claims that my brother and I are one-sixteenth Melungeon. (It's a real word. Look it up.) I'm still not sure if he's joking.
48. I had another brother, 4 years younger than me, who was born with birth defects and died when he was 21 months old. I was 5 at the time; I didn't really understand death yet so it didn't affect me much. But it very nearly destroyed my parents. My mom just completely and utterly fell apart, and people in my extended family still talk in hushed whispers about how awful it was for her and how they can't believe she actually survived losing a child.
49. One nickname I had in college was "The Mighty Hummingbird". I can't even remember the genesis of that name now, though I'm sure it was something stupid, but I kinda liked it. I still have a soft spot for hummingbirds.
50. The first year I had my driver's license, I accidentally backed into my parents' garage door and destroyed it. Twice.
51. I loved playing with Barbies as a kid. I had a giant trunk full of Barbies and I took very good care of them; I brushed their hair and kept them clean and and didn't lose any of their clothes (except for those damn tiny plastic high heels, but who doesn't lose those?). My best friend at the time also had lots of Barbies, and we would play together. Except she always wanted to take the Barbies' clothes off and make them have sex with her Ken doll, and I wanted to make the Barbies all be grown-up sisters with exciting careers. This possibly says something about me as a person.
52. When I was 14 I was absolutely obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera. In many ways it was my first fandom, though I didn't recognize it as such. It started with the Lloyd Webber musical but grew to include the original novel as well. My little teenage girl self could SEE into the Phantom's SOUL and UNDERSTAND his PROFOUND PAIN, y'all. It was all very epic.
53. For someone who consciously worked very hard to get rid of her southern accent, I say "y'all" a lot.
54. My second fannish experience, still not explicitly recognized as "fannish" by me at the time, was when my two best friends and I started watching Friends in high school and it completely took over our lives. We even started calling each other Monica and Rachel and Phoebe. I was Phoebe.
55. I really really love living alone. I don't know if I could ever live with someone else again. I am overjoyed by the fact that I can be my natural slovenly self and no one gives a shit.
56. My parents are still married after almost 33 years. They have a fantastic relationship and I'm still kind of in awe at how well they've made it work. (True fact: I did not find out until I was 16 that this is my dad's second marriage. Sometimes my parents ... conveniently forget to tell me things.)
    
57. Despite the fact that I have this great marriage success story to look up to, I'm about 90% sure I don't want to get married. There are lots of factors influencing that: my awareness that people can change dramatically and it's risky to promise "forever"; all the patriarchal traditions surrounding Western weddings and the intense feminist rage they inspire in me (srsly, don't get me started on the whole father-giving-the-bride-away thing); the fact that people of the same gender cannot legally marry in 49 out of 50 states in my country; and my complete inability to give a fuck how my relationship with someone is perceived and/or validated by the outside world.
58. I am 100% sure I don't want kids. Ever. I've known this my whole life. I don't know what to do with babies or small children, and they're not cute or interesting enough to me to make it worthwhile for me to try. Once a child reaches the age where they have developed Earth Logic and can hold a conversation, we're good. But there is not a single mothering bone in my body.
59. I am moderately fond of my first name (Holly). It's not super awesome or anything, but I don't hate it, so that's something.
60. I ADORE my middle name (LeAnn). When I was in elementary school I detested it, because I had just learned in English class that only the first letter of names and proper nouns should be in uppercase and that all other letters are lowercase. And here was this random capital A in the middle of the name and that was wrong and I was so ashamed that my parents had clearly FAILED GRAMMAR.
61. I am a total spelling/grammar/punctuation Nazi.
62. I am inordinately fond of the semicolon. My writing is littered with semicolons; I will find any excuse to throw them into a sentence. (See what I did there?) :)
63. My Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP, with some strong elements of T (I'm almost equally divided between T and F so sometimes I refer to myself as INXP). The descriptions of INFPs fit me pretty well. The only thing that stands out to me as a blatant mismatch is that INFPs are generally very gifted with language, and often write poetry. I've never written any poetry that wasn't for a school assignment, and I don't really understand or like it. And I'm not so hot at the whole stringing words together to make logical sense thing, whether spoken or written. I'm doing it right now, sure, but in this format I have time to think carefully and plan and be a perfectionist about it. Which is often far too much effort for my lazy ass.
64. Despite what I just said about language, I did take 5 years worth of French and mastered it fairly well. I was really good at reading it and fairly good at writing it. I could speak it well if I knew beforehand what I was going to say - for example, if I was reading aloud - but my conversation skills were not so hot; it was hard to think of something and translate it in my head on the fly. I've now forgotten almost all the French I knew.
65. I am a professional procrastinator.
66. I believe in soulmates, because I've actually met mine. Or one of them, anyway; it's silly to think that in a world of six billion people, there's only one person you can be perfectly matched with. His name was Joel. We were best friends during our senior year of college. I had never before, and haven't since, met anyone I felt this intensely connected to. It was like ... we saw the world in the same way, we reacted to things in the same way, we thought about things in the same way, and I have always always felt different from everyone else in that respect, so to meet someone who understood how my brain worked because his was just like it? It felt like finding a long-lost twin.
67. The last time I was in a romantic relationship (before now) was 11 years ago. It's safe to say that in over a decade of being perpetually single, I learned how to be emotionally self-sufficient.
68. For quite a while I had a knee-jerk adverse reaction to the phrase "unconditional love". After my high school boyfriend cheated on me and I got upset about it, like ya do, he said to me "if you can't forgive me for this, then maybe you're just unable to love unconditionally". Which is a very stupid statement that someone with any sort of relationship and/or life experience will respond to with a cackle and a "bitch, PLEASE", while a naive broken-hearted teenage girl facing the end of her first relationship will outwardly deny but secretly believe and internalize it and allow it to fuck her up for a long time afterward.
69. I find many many people of both genders aesthetically appealing, and I will often say "S/he's hot." But there are very, very few people I actually want to have sex with. The pickiness isn't even about emotional commitment or needing an established relationship or anything; it's about pure physical desire, and being turned on enough by someone physically to want to go that far. I can probably count the number of people in my whole life I would honestly have slept with (or wanted to sleep with) on one hand.
70. I love card games. My college friends and I bonded through card playing (many different games, usually spades or hearts but also rummy, nickels, hand and foot, speed solitaire, oh heck, and many others. No poker though). To this day whenever we all get together, the vast majority of our time is spent playing cards. One of my college best friends chose the maid of honor for her wedding by having me and our other best friend draw a card for it. (We both drew aces. So there were two maids of honor.)
71. My mom has 5 brothers and sisters; my dad has 11. I can't name them all. That's how close I am to my extended family.
72. I used to be nearsighted. I got glasses in 4th grade (they were hideous) and upgraded to contacts in 6th grade. After college, my mom got me Lasik as a graduation gift.
73. When I was a child I had these hideous bangs. They were long and straight and started about halfway back on the top of my head and covered my whole forehead and I hated them so much. I finally grew them out when I started high school. I've never had bangs again since, and probably never will.
74. I never wore braces. My teeth aren't perfectly straight, but they were never bad enough to justify the expense of braces. I've had many, many, many cavities though. Pretty much my entire mouth is fillings at this point.
75. I have no tattoos. I'm not morally opposed to them or anything, but I am well aware of how fickle I am and how often my interests and tastes change, and there's nothing I can think of that I know I'd be happy to have displayed on my skin for the rest of my life.
76. My parents and I have a pretty good relationship. (See above re: being the perfect daughter for much of my life.) My dad and I don't talk all that much, but we love each other dearly. My mom is one of my best friends. We are VERY much alike and we bond over a lot of things and we can talk to each other for hours, and I tell her almost everything.
77. I have not, however, told her or Dad that I am a bisexual atheist. I'm not sure when I'll be ready for that. If ever.
78. I like my job; I enjoy computer programming and I'm pretty good at it, and so far it hasn't gotten boring. But I don't come home and write code, and I don't read tech books in my spare time, and I don't hang out on Java forums or anything. My job is just that: it's what I do for a living, to make money. It's not my life. I have far too many other hobbies and interests to want to spend even more time on programming stuff outside of the 8 hours a day I already do.
79. One of my favorite classes in college was quantum physics. It was FUN and fascinating and I still have my quantum physics textbook because I couldn't bear to sell it back at the end of the semester.
80. I adore driving long distances by myself. It's relaxing and I get quality "me" time, and I bring along lots of music and crank it way up and sing as loudly as I want until my voice is gone. I am slightly less enthused about driving with other people in the car, because it's hard for me to pay attention to the road and the current conversation at the same time. I end up doing really stupid things, like running red lights or making illegal U-turns or whatever, when I have passengers because I get distracted. Which means most of my friends and family think I'm an absolutely shitty driver.
81. I have issues with "changing state". When I'm awake, I will stay awake until I absolutely can't hold my eyes open anymore. When I'm asleep, it takes an act of Flying Spaghetti Monster to rouse me. If I've been sitting at home for a while, I have to exert a great deal of effort to get myself out of the house; once I'm out, I want to stay out until I'm forced to go home. And so on and so forth for various situations; the state I'm currently in is the one I want to stay in. I call this "inertia disease".
82. I have very vivid dreams. I inevitably forget them about 5 seconds after I wake up.
83. There are very specific and weird rules regarding which side of the bed I prefer to sleep on. If I am in a room by myself, I sleep on the side closest to the doorway, because it's easier to get to and from the bed or get up in the middle of the night (not that I ever do that, but theoretically I should be able to with a minimum of fuss). If I am sharing a bed with someone, I sleep on the side farthest from the doorway, because I like having a part of the room as my own space. Whoever is sleeping closest to the doorway will generally hang out between the door and the bed. Whoever sleeps on the other side will have to pass through there to get to their side, so between the door and the bed it's shared space, but the person farthest from the doorway pretty much owns any space beyond the bed. It totally makes sense in my head, okay? "Left" or "right" side makes no difference.
84. I am so not a morning person.
85. I cannot cook. At all. I pretty much live on rice-in-a-box and pasta-in-a-box, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Cooking just seems like a waste of time to me when I could be doing something else.
86. Two of my biggest bulletproof kinks (in real life, not fic) are Scottish accents and men playing acoustic guitars. Holy jesus fuck. It's hot when women play acoustic guitars, too, but ... not in quite the same way.
87. My favorite kind of fictional story is one involving an apocalypse. I am a sucker for any book/movie/TV show that explores the end (or near-end) of humanity, and how people deal with that, and what the survivors do when it's all over and they have to rebuild society. Fascinating stuff.
88. I don't consider myself to be very girly, even though many of my fannish friends like to refer to me as a pretty pretty princess. :) Compared to most "mundanes", I'm practically a tomboy. My wardrobe is almost entirely T-shirts and jeans and I hardly ever wear makeup and I don't go get mani/pedis on a regular basis. However, interestingly enough, when I was little (around 4 or 5) I absolutely refused to wear anything but dresses.
89. I would never ever in a million years want to be a man. Not even for one day. Not even if I got paid vast sums of money.
90. My breasts are real, and they're spectacular. (No, seriously, I am really really fond of my rack. It's the perfect size. In my opinion. People are usually insecure about various parts of their body, and women often feel that way about their breasts, but um. Not me.)
91. Driving - or biking, or walking - down Lake Shore Drive and seeing Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline still makes me incredibly happy. Every time. There's just this JOY that comes out of nowhere and I have to take a second to silently squee. I love my city.
92. One of the things I hate and fear most is the feeling of speaking and not being heard. I'm a fairly quiet person by nature, and I keep most of my thoughts to myself just by default. I think carefully about almost everything I say before I say it, so when I do open my mouth to speak? It means that I'm about to say something that's not only important to me, but also something I feel compelled to share with you. If I'm talking and someone interrupts me, or I get the feeling no one cares or is paying attention, it can completely shut me down for the rest of the day. I won't say a word after that.
93. For a long time, I wanted to work for NASA. Then I realized that would mean I'd have a government job.
94. On my 21st birthday, I attempted to dye my hair strawberry blonde. It came out bright orange.
95. I have never been in a relationship on Valentine's Day (a.k.a. "Singles Awareness Day"). I have a tradition of wearing black every February 14th as a form of protest.
96. I am not a fan of holidays. It's not that I don't like celebrating stuff, or giving gifts or whatever, it's that I hate feeling like a slave to the calendar. Like I have to eat a giant dinner with turkey and stuffing today just because it's Thanksgiving; well, what if I'm feeling hungry for pizza instead? What if I want to put up Christmas lights in May? I think you should be able to do what you want, when you want, and fuck the calendar. (This obviously doesn't extend to other people's holidays, like birthdays; I'm not gonna boycott your party or anything. *g*)
97. I've never hit anybody or been hit. I've only raised my voice in anger at two people in my entire life. And one of those was me yelling at a friend "STOP YELLING SO WE CAN TALK CALMLY ABOUT THIS."
98. Somehow I've lived 28 years without ever playing Spin the Bottle.
99. The form of communication I feel most comfortable with is online chat or IM. I prefer it over email, phone, sometimes even face-to-face interaction because it's much less stressful; I don't have to be constantly "on" and monitoring my every reaction, and I don't have to respond to something immediately. I can think through what to say and how to say it, and I can even walk away for a while if I want to. Email has that advantage too, of course, but email feels like writing an essay. I have to form perfect pararaphs and everything. A simple "hee" or "\o/" is perfectly acceptable in IM.
100. Reading back over this list, I have realized that apparently I feel the need to explain everything. :)

Whew. My hands are cramped from typing. Can we rest now, Buffy? Can we rest?