idea shamelessly stolen from  bkwyrm.

1. i have dyed my hair semi-regularly since the fifth grade. as a result, i have learned that i look like a twerp as a blonde.
2. i wear soft contact lenses. i used to wear gas permeables. when i switched, the lack of hard plastic support gave me astigmatism. i’m still mad at the optometrist who made me switch as i liked the gas perms perfectly well.
3. i can’t stand wearing glasses because my prescription is so bad that colors are horribly distorted, because of the lack of peripheral vision, and because they slide down your nose in summer and fog up in winter.
4. i love my car and i love to to drive my car, but i can’t stand driving in heavy traffic and will use transit instead to avoid it if i can.
5. i used to swim competitively. my events were the 500 free and 100 fly.
6. i don’t intend to change my last name should i ever get married, because after years and years of hating it, i’m finally kind of fond of it.
7. when i was younger, i always used to insist that i intended to change my first name as soon as i was legally able, because it really annoys me that ‘sabrina’ is so often misspelled, mispronounced, and misremembered. these days i like it and am glad i didn’t change it. i cope with other people’s idiocy chiefly by answering to the other names, which are most commonly sarah, samantha, and stephanie.
8. i never intended to do unix system administration for a living. even after i dropped out of school, i still intended to finish my degree and become a french teacher. to this day i haven’t decided between grammar and high school.
9. i am approximately $53,000 in debt.
10. i have somewhere between 600-700 CDs, and i know them all. i am still not happy and have quite a substantial list of things i consider ‘essential’ that i am lacking.
11. i banned myself from the iTunes Music Store for the month of november 2005. i broke the ban on the 21st by buying three albums. i banned myself again in january, and stuck out the whole month although it was really, really hard.
12. i listen to a very broad spectrum of music and, consequently, i’m absolute crap at applying genre labels. i couldn’t differentiate house and dance if you paid me.
13. my mother’s tone deaf, and used to make me absolutely humiliated and furious by singing aloud, badly, in the supermarket. i was appropriately humiliated and furious when i caught myself singing aloud (but very quietly) to “Africa” by Toto in dominick’s a year or so ago.
14. i think i’m a decent enough singer, but i generally refuse to sing at all when anyone can hear me. i will do karaoke, but i have to have had a lot of alcohol or be in an unusually giddy mood.
15. i occasionally sing in the shower. generally i sing “ripple” by the grateful dead, “hallelujah” by leonard cohen, “diamonds on the soles of her shoes” by paul simon, or sometimes ani difranco or aimee mann, if i can remember the lyrics.
16. i am not particularly close to anyone in my family, and i’m oddly okay with that.
17. i am an only child. when i was in the fifth grade or so, i had an imaginary sister for a couple of weeks.
18. i had one very close friend while i was growing up, but we stopped talking several years after i left college, mostly due to the fact that she was a born-again religious mother of two and i had no interest in any of that, and we found ourselves with nothing whatsoever to talk about.
19. i used to steal nail polish from the corner drugstore when i was a kid.
20. i was suspended twice in the eighth grade, and facing expulsion if i got in any more trouble. my offenses were stealing teacher’s editions of textbooks, and fighting with another kid, respectively.
21. i got kicked out of the local school for the gifted because i would not do my homework. i mean, any of it.
22. i’m still embarassed by a Usenet posting i made about ten years ago in which i mocked someone for misspelling alanis morrissette’s name — in which they had not, and i had. i generally don’t post to Usenet at all anymore because of that, although i still read a number of newsgroups.
23. i still can’t stand alanis morrissette, and the primary reason is that my hateful freshman first-semester dorm mate played jagged little pill over and over and over and over, and i didn’t actually like the album much to begin with.
24. the only piece of electronics in my house that i would be completely unable to give up is my radio.
25. speed is one of my favorite movies.
26. i used to collect comics, but quit about seven years ago. every so often i think about selling my comics to someone, to clear the space, but i haven’t been able to bring myself to actually do it.
27. i cook, sew, make soap, paint, take and manipulate photos, rubber-stamp, arrange flowers, knit, bead, and work on cars. i cannot draw to save my life.
28. i have occasionally thought about taking voice lessons to become a better singer.
29. i haven’t been in a church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral in at least fifteen years.
30. i mentally worked on sendmail configurations to keep from losing it at my grandmother’s funeral.
31. i have gotten three speeding tickets in my life. 45 in a 35, mom’s ’91 ford taurus, peoria il, 1995; 84 in a 65 (actually nailed for 93 but he toned it down so i wouldn’t have to go to court), my ’75 olds cutlass supreme, wood county illinois, 1996; 49 in a 35, steve’s ’95 mitsubishi eclipse, skokie il, 2001. i haven’t ever gotten a ticket in my volkswagen, but i’m still thinking about getting a radar detector because i don’t like driving long-distance at slower average speeds than 80.
32. one of the highest-rated favors anyone can do for me is to introduce me to a new band that i turn out to love. i am right now listening to a new album i saw mentioned in a column in the guardian.
33. i hate my neighbor to the east chiefly because of their subwoofer and bad taste in music. the only time i have ever been less than pissed at being forced to listen to their music was when they woke me up on a beautiful saturday morning with the theme song to “Shaft.” mostly i just hate them and their relentless thump, though.
34. i drove to new hampshire to attend a fan convention for the stephen king book series, the dark tower. I was far too chicken to actually have a conversation with one guest artist whom i particularly admired, though i did have a very pleasant conversation with his wife. i was thrilled to get a christmas card from them.
35. if you ever want to butter me up for something, compliment either my looks or my music. i’m very insecure about the former, and proud of the other.
36. i am very good at spelling, and i jealously guard that skill. i become quite furious with myself if i spell something wrong. there are certain words that i cannot ever remember how to spell, and if i’m not in a venue where i can check a dictionary, i’ll rephrase in order to avoid misspelling the word.
37. a long time ago, i used to mock my ex-boyfriend mike relentlessly because he never would use capital letters while typing. i guess he’s had the last laugh, after all.
38. i’m crap at trivia. utter crap. i’ll answer john glenn to anything simply because i really won’t have any other idea.
39. i like playing chess, and i don’t mind losing because i’m not very good at it. most other things i will become really angry at myself for losing. i shocked the hell out of myself recently by playing an entire night during which i won not one of at least a dozen games of pool, and being in an extraordinarily good mood anyways.
40. i have written my own sendmail rulesets from scratch. i became quite angry when one i wrote had a real sendmail feature written to do the same thing about three months later. (i’m sure they did a better job of it, knowing what they were doing and all, but dammit, i worked hard on that damned thing.)
41. i have complete crap gaydar. everyone always has to tell me. this leads to frustration when people ask me about other people, expecting me to know, and i have to confess ignorance.
42. i like disco, and i won’t apologize for it.
43. i hate going to see movies alone. i won’t go if i have no one to go with.
44. i have mild chronic pain in my right wrist after breaking it badly on 20 november 2004. i have an implant in it holding the bones together, which i find very amusing. i describe the scar as “my creepy frankenstein scar,” but secretly, i really like my scar.
45. i prefer black tea to coffee, but i usually drink coffee because it’s easier to get. at home, i don’t even have an electric coffeemaker, only a french press that i use about three times a year.
46. my favorite candy ever is cadbury’s creme eggs. i find the london underground very dangerous for that reason.
47. my fondest goal for my life, at present, is move to the uk, just to see what it’s like living someplace else.
48. while anticipating my apartment search, i had nightmares of living in a high-rise and having one of my cats fall out of a window. these nightmares were capable of inducing a panic attack. most other nightmares don’t bother me much; i roll over and go back to sleep.
49. i used to have a lot of stuff. when i moved into a small apartment, i divested myself of a lot of it. i find that i don’t miss very much of it at all.
50. i don’t usually play computer or console video games. they don’t interest me much. i used to love pole position as a kid, though, and would spend my last quarter for the chance to play it whenever i was near a console. i’d play it right now if there wasn’t a white sox baseball game on, and my atari wasn’t packed up to move.