The Fun

A few fun facts about Hannah…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A common joke among my friends is that I’m not good at “land sports.” As in, I spent nearly 20 years as a swimmer, roughly 12 years as a water polo player, and about 10 years as an equestrian, before giving up the pool, the ring, and the gym and committing to the hot yoga studio once and for all.

2. Despite loving said hot yoga studio, I despise extreme heat or humidity. Outside. When I’m in normal clothes. When I’m not standing on a rubber mat. Five years in Washington, DC was about as far south as I could ever, ever imagine living.

3. I’m the youngest of three women, and, go figure, the tallest at 5′11″. No, not 6′. I spent years saying I was 6′—trying to embrace my height and all—only to have more than one doctor measure me and tell me, no, in fact, I really am 5′11″. Either way, I’m tall.

4. Favorite music at the moment: Vandaveer, Kings of Leon, Leonard Cohen, Griffin House, Gaslight Anthem, Hey Marseilles, Josh Ritter, Ryan Adams, the John Butler Trio.  Go—check them out.

5. If only allowed to take a few books onto a desert island with me, I’d grab Stay Here with Me (Robert Olmstead), East of Eden (John Steinbeck), The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), The Witching Hour (Anne Rice), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard), Sometimes a Great Notion (Ken Kesey), The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway), and Nine Horses (Billy Collins). Hopefully I’d get a bag of some sort to carry these titles with me onto that island…

6. I love all things green.

7. Dirty martinis—vodka, straight up, with extra olives!—make everything better. Champagne can usually do the trick, too.

8. Autumn and October—my favorite season and my favorite month, all wrapped into one.

9. I wrote a story once, about my parents, about their marriage, and love, and family, and heartbreak, and growing up, as I saw it, on the back roads and in the barns and fields, with my sisters, and alone, beneath the bowled sky of rural Pennsylvania. It was my thesis for graduate school. It remains the most haunting and satisfying piece of writing I’ve ever completed. And in the drawer, it sits.

10. I am a practical dreamer, a realistic optimist, a hopeful romantic. Yes, from time to time, being all these things can be quite exhausting. And quite awesome.