I was just thinking today about how some aspects of my character haven't changed very much throughout my entire lifetime. It's almost like my personality now is founded on who I was as a child and even a baby. I'm sure the examples I thought of are just strange coincidence, a pattern that only appears to exist, like the monkeys typing theory. But still, now that I've thought about it I bet there are some people out there who theorize that we are born as who we will be, that our personalities and character traits are already a part of our soul, that environment and circumstance have nothing to do with our development as a person. It's strange to think about. But anyway, here are the examples I thought of, just as curiosities:

• My first words were when my parents took me for a walk and I saw a bird fly past. According to the story, I pointed and shouted, "Bird! Pretty bird!" For my entire life, I've had a fascination with birds and anything with wings. When I'm bored, I can stare at a backyard birdfeeder for hours on end. I pick up feathers that I find outside and use them as bookmarks. Once when I was 10 I found a flamingo feather in the bird room at the Syracuse zoo and begged the zookeeper to let me have it. I have an inkwell on my desk with quill pens in it as a decoration. I love feather jewelry. And I don't really care that much if any other animal gets run over (yes, I know, that's terrible of me to say) but when a bird gets hit by a car, I'm depressed for the entire day. I saw a sparrow get hit by a semi-truck once on Route 369 on the way to class, and it was so upsetting I burst into tears and even now I sometimes see it replayed like a video clip in my head. It's one of the worst things I think I've ever seen. As ridiculous as that sounds. I think its because birds are supposed to be free from all the lowly things down here -- they're supposed to fly and sing and be careless and detached from everything. When I see an eagle or something soaring high above the earth, I feel weightless and alive, and the world seems right again. When I see a dead bird by the side of the road I feel dirty and corrupt and caged in by my very existence.
• The other interesting thing I noticed about this story -- if it is true -- is that immediately after speaking my first word, I strung together an adjective and a noun. Since then, I've gone through many plans for possible career choices, but I always come back to being an English major. Always. I wonder if it's possible to be born with one's brain wired in a certain way, so that linguistics come especially easy.
  

• My favorite movie as a toddler was Beauty and the Beast. Belle was pretty much my childhood hero. I always wanted to dress up like her in my "belle dress", and I had a bunch of mini plastic "belle dolls" from the disney store that I took with me everywhere I went. I think it's funny that I ended up being a lot like the character of Belle. I had a vivid imagination and was always daydreaming about things being different than they were, and I learned to read really early which is why I hated kindergarten and persuaded my parents to homeschool me. By the time I was 10 I had read the entire childrens' section in the Moore Memorial Library. I always dreamed about having a library like the one in the Beast's castle, with ladders I could swing on. I still want to have my own library when I get a house of my own. And there will be ladders on the shelves, just wait and see.

• My favorite color when I was about 2 years old was red. All of my coloring books were monopolized by red crayon. I wanted to wear red all the time, and I painted one of my belle doll's blue dresses red. I cried and cried when we moved from our red victorian house in Tully to the white one in Greene, and according to my parents, I had a tantrum when I found out we were moving and shouted "I don't want Carly [the daughter of the people who bought the house] to have my red house!!!" I swore I was going to have a red house and a red car when I grew up, and I told my parents when I was old enough to dye my hair I would dye it red. Well, I've never looked particularly good in red because of my skin tone, and truthfully I don't even care for the color that much anymore, at least in terms of clothing and accessories, so I hardly ever wear it. But I think it's really funny that my first car coincidentally ended up being bright red, and the first time I dyed all of my hair instead of just streaking it, it ended up being red (though that was mostly unplanned).