Taking things personally

I was thinking about 'taking things personally'. Partly from reading a comment on my blog. I take too many things personally. I know this but can't seem to do otherwise. This reminds me of some great lines by Meg Ryan's character Kathleen in 'You've Got Mail' (love that movie) when Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) tells her that 'putting her out of business wasn't personal'. And then she goes off on a rant about how it was personal to her. I can totally relate to that. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go watch the movie (my post'll still be here when you get back).

II have a tendency to tune people out sometimes, intentionally and unintentionally. I have a gift(curse?) for remembering conversations verbatim when I do pay attention. People's words remain with me a long time. Sometimes, this gift is great and I use it in conjunction with my other talent for mimicry, mostly to entertain my family. I'm a great storyteller and I've been told that my retelling of actual events/family jokes are even funnier sometimes than when they occurred. I do several impressions of different family members. Actually, all of us do this. I go a little further than most cause I change my voice depending on whom I'm impersonating. It's really funny even if I do say so myself. My family tends to be very sarcastic generally and no one is safe. Usually we wait until the person isn't there before doing an impression of them but not always. Been thinking about what our family motto would be if we had one. Have several ideas. None succinct enough yet. Have you thought about what your family motto would be, if you had one? or do you have one? if you do, do tell.

My sisters and I have been promising (threatening?) for years to write a book(s) about our family. Billed as fiction of course. It'd be very entertaining and would probably sell really well. Some of the stories I have/know, unbelievable but funny. We haven't done much more than talk about doing this. Maybe I'll get us a few cool notebooks so we can start. Our initial idea was to devote chapter(s) to individual family members. Several would probably require more than one chapter. So then we thought about getting notebooks and just jotting down our memories of each person, whether it was based around an event or just a particular saying of that person that we remembered, etc. Then we'd exchange notebooks and add our impressions of those same events b/c everyone's perspective is slightly different.

Reading about NaNoWriMo from other people's blogs has brought this to my mind again. Going to my sis for Christmas so maybe we can actually start doing what we've talked about doing for years.