I have a love-hate relationship with memes.

I love them because I love anything even remotely resembling a survey. I live to check the boxes next to my top three interests on warranty registration cards.

I hate them because I rarely read other people’s responses - the joy for me is in filling out the form itself, not in reading the responses. I do not want to be known as a meme sharer.

All that said, I recently saw a meme I just couldn’t resist, which is odd because it has zero questions for me to answer yet the results are amusing enough to interest me in reading other responses.

Here’s how it works: Google “[your first name] needs” and share the first 10 results.

Mine:

• Marina needs a facelift
• Marina needs a home of her own
• Marina needs her rest
• Marina needs better slipway
• Marina needs iDockUSA
• Marina needs a large hole excavated
• MarinaNeeds.com (dock repair)
• Marina needs a drink
• Marina needs sports equipment
• Marina needs nine more feet

Damon and I are moving into a new house this week. This continues my life-long trend of never living in the same place for more than nine months, but it marks the first time in my adult life that I am moving within the same state. (In fact, the new house is a whopping 2.5 blocks away from the old one.)

I love moving. Few things make me happier. Being able to sort, purge, and reorganize my things is a wonderful, cleansing experience. A new house is bursting with untapped potential.

Normally, a move is also an emotional “reboot” of sorts for me. It’s a chance to identify some aspects of my personality/life that could use improvement and decide to change them for the better.

Committing to change while in the same environment is far more challenging than starting on the right foot in a new one. I am truly lucky and honored to have an amazing group of friends that have stuck with me through thick and thin for more than a decade now. They know my history, the experiences I’ve had, and the mistakes I’ve made, and can make educated guesses as to how I would react in future situations.

This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I reacted to a situation one way once, it may be assumed I will react to that situation the same way again. Since everyone’s expecting that reaction the second time around, it isn’t always clear that I in fact have free will and can choose to react in a completely different (and ideally better) way.

A silly example to make my point: Say your close friend was in love with a man who died in a sky-diving accident. Out of support for her, and because you care, you would probably alter your future interactions with her in a subtle way. If there is a feature film involving sky-diving, you would not invite her or mention it. You would hesitate to introduce her to your new friend who also happens to be an avid sky-diver. If a sky-diving report came on the news, you would hurriedly change the channel.

Perhaps she would really like that feature film. Perhaps she would fall in love with your sky-diving friend and have a great marriage. Perhaps the news segment following the sky-diving interview would be deeply meaningful to her in some way. Maybe, subtly, unintentionally, you are holding back her personal growth, even though you’re trying to protect her. Maybe what she really needs to do is go sky-diving!

In a new environment that is free of those assumptions, it’s a lot easier to make the better choice. Hence my love of new environments

That said, 2.5 blocks is more of a restart than a reboot. (Pause for laughter at my clever Apache joke.) It has surprised pretty much everyone that knows me that I really haven’t even considered leaving Seattle yet. (See above!) There are a combination of factors at play into this new feeling of settledness, including a number of significant mistakes that I made last year that I very actively never want to make again. However, a key factor not to be overlooked is: I think I rather like the current incarnation of Marina Martin. (Crazy!)

Still, some life-enhancing changes are in order:

• Going back to being vegan. I had quite the year off the vegan wagon, kicked off by a nice hunk of raw horse on a conveyor belt in Tokyo. I always self-identified as one willing to try almost anything once, and never having eaten a hamburger in my life somehow discredited me. I tried anything anyone put in front of me, and for the most part enjoyed the taste. (Exceptions: ostrich and goat.)
   
  I will miss salmon, mozzarella cheese, and Jack in the Box double-bacon cheeseburger ciabatta sandwiches. I will not miss the runny nose I get every time I eat animal products, cholesterol, the sky-high blood sugars that inexplicably followed a can of tuna fish, or the sluggishness that I never felt when I avoided animal products like the plague. (I will continue to make an exception for Guinness, which is filtered using an ingredient from fish bladders, because, well, it’s Guinness!)
• Getting back into exercising. I used to work with a trainer five days a week and do serious cardio seven days a week. Now I get winded going up the driveway. Not cool. This has a four-part action plan: buying a TreadDesk so I can walk all day long while working instead of sitting down; ramping my running back up with the Couch to 5K Running Program; hiring a trainer again; and incorporating some basic sit-ups/push-ups/etc. into my daily routine checklist.
• Natural cleaning products. Always meant to start doing this, never quite got around to it. Now that environmentally-friendly cleaning products are a requirement of our lease, it should be an easy switch.
• Composting. Another thing I always meant to do. The City of Seattle sells composting cones which look simple enough to use. Now let’s see if we actually use them.
• Hiring a cleaning person. I love to clean and have always found it too difficult to justify hiring someone else to do it, especially because it’s hard to live up to my impossible-to-live-up-to standards. However, I have no shortage of work right now, and those extra hours a week are more important than ever, so I’m going to see if I can give up some control in this area in exchange for a greater gain.

I don’t get much traffic at this blog.* Google Analytics tells me that it has been found via search engines exactly once so far:

*I said this on the phone a few days about my collective new blogs. After all, they’ve only been live for a week and I have done next-to-nothing to promote them yet. No sooner had those words left my lips than I saw Guinness Globetrotter had received 10,000 unique visitors from StumbleUpon in its first 24 hours, and a couple hours later the official Twitter blog sent a good chunk of traffic to Oh, Twitter. I remain amused (and appreciative).

I am officially out of my storage unit as of yesterday, and the very last box I loaded into my car brought back some fond memories.

Two years ago, I had a prescription overnighted via USPS from Walgreens. Tracking showed that the package had arrived, but it was nowhere to be seen. I left a very polite note in my mailbox for the postal worker, inquiring as to whether she remembered seeing it. She left a note in return that yes, she had my package, but she wasn’t sure it was for me. I leave another note asking what I can do to prove the package is mine (??). She then leaves another note that says, verbatim, “I’ll get to it when I get to it.” She finally delivers the package a full five days later.

I could have written to her supervisor, but I wanted a more satisfying revenge for her incompetence.

So I went to the post office down the street and mailed myself a box of dictionaries, which the postal worker then had to carry up two flights of stairs to my apartment. Since we had only communicated via notes up to that point, she didn’t put together who I was, and was all friendly to me, making a joke about how heavy the box was and how far she had to climb.

My reply: “It’s a shame they give women these jobs.” Silence.

Every week, I mailed myself that same exact box of dictionaries, with my address clearly listed in both the TO: and FROM: sections. Every week, she had to climb those stairs and bring it to me.

Moral of the story: don’t mess with my package delivery.

Shawn tagged me in a meme and I wasn’t sure where to respond. Now that I have a spot where my more personal stuff won’t impede others’ productivity, here we go…

1. I have a horrible sense of direction. North? East? What are those? (Perhaps to make up for this, I am *really* good at remembering a route I’ve already traveled once, even years later.)
2. I don’t believe in past-life regression, but if I did, I’d be positive I used to be a Hungarian woman. This implausible hunch started when I randomly picked up the DVD of Marta Meszaros’s “Adoption” and felt an uncanny sense of familiarity with the background images. (Why was this Cold-War-era Eastern European flick at the Hollywood Video in downtown Salt Lake City? I’ll never know.) But here’s the kicker: when I spent a week alone in Budapest the following year, I didn’t get lost — not once.
3. I am horrified by the sight of wide-ruled paper, which makes shopping for new journals very uncomfortable.
4. As a pre-teen, I danced in parades dressed as a monkey to promote a local children’s amusement center.
5. I last saw my biological father when I was in high school, and he still doesn’t know that I know who he is.
6. Growing up, I always wanted eight children. (Now that I am a grown-up, I want zero.)
7. I have never lived in just one place for longer than nine months.
8. I love hospitals. I volunteer at hospitals frequently because I enjoy simply spending time in them. I even love the food. I think it’s the combination of cleanliness, technology, and sense of security.

What are eight things I don’t know about you, Christine, Vanessa, Keith, and Jay?