The Basics: Everything I Want You To Know

My name is Romy (pronounced “row-mee”).

It means “little gypsy girl,” and it’s very appropriate, because I dress like a gypsy (lots of cheap jewelry and colorful layers). I also tell fortunes and steal horses. Sometimes I get confused and tell horses’ fortunes.

I’m a 25-year-old web designer living in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, in a little treetop-level apartment surrounded by squirrels and sunlight. My husband Tony is my best friend and the love of my life; we were married in August 2002. We currently have four pets: Falstaff the Shakespearean Rat, Cosette the Poor Little Orphan Kitten (and her brother Oliver the Gas Giant), and Piper Maru the Penguin Cat. Needless to say, our apartment always smells a little funny.

It would be a clichè for me to say what a Complex Person I am, but I daresay I have the quirks to back it up — after all, I’m the only vegetarian, atheist, animal-rights-promoting, bisexual, liberal, intellectual, Scotch-Irish-Russian-Jewish-Norwegian-American ninja/hippie with a passion for poetry, a morbid fascination with disasters (particularly maritime), and a weakness for rodents and dirigibles that I’ve ever met. I’m pretty sure I’m one of a kind, and I’m also pretty sure that it’s a good thing.

Other than web design and sarcasm, my hobbies include reading, writing, knitting, sketching, cat-flattening, genealogy, studying, divination, nitpicking, and being tall (I’m really not; it’s just a hobby). I probably know less than you do about things like calculus or tire rotation, but I’m pretty sure I know more about gerbils and Tudor England. (This means I’m very interesting at dinner parties, but not particularly useful on road trips.)

In the future, I will have two children: a girl named Josephine Rose and a boy name William Anthony. Any other children will be sold to the nearest circus. I will write three novels and publish one; of the other two, one will be kept for my children after I’m dead, and the other will be burnt, because it’s written in a code I’ve long since forgotten how to decipher. When I am old, I will retire to the Channel Islands and open a pub called the Duck and Cover. After my unfortunate demise — my bad eyesight will lead me to mistake a pit bull for a boot-scraper — my corpse will be embalmed and worshipped by a pagan Scottish cult, until it is stolen by a South American dictator who will prop me up at his table to keep him company during dinner. At least, this is what the psychics all tell me.

Quick facts: When I was a little kid, I wanted to be Japanese. In various past lives, I was a bad smell in Sherwood Forest, Anne Boleyn’s sixth finger, and a midget on board the Titanic (as the water rose, I was the first to die). If I had just one chance to go back in time, I would go back to the eighteenth century and play ding-dong-ditch on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I don’t have a favorite color, but I do have a favorite word, a few favorite poems (and one that serves as a personal creed), a favorite opera (which, incidentally, does not contain my favorite aria), a favorite polar explorer, and a favorite shipwreck. I can never remember to throw out my leftovers before they go bad, I never step on spiders (no matter how much they startle me), and I always know the punchline to a joke before I hear it (it’s a gift).