A Vanity Fair moment with Ayun - the Proust Questionnaire!

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A whole afternoon in a Japanese bathhouse, followed by food.

2. What is your greatest fear?
That one of my children will predecease me.

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
What, just one? An inclanation to keep badgering even after my point has registered.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of compassion

5. Which living person do you most admire?
erm......

6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Living in New York City

7. What is your current state of mind?
Relieved

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Conforming in the hope of fitting in.

9. On what occasion do you lie?
When encouraging a beginning artist or supporting a friend is more important than airing my snide opinion of the creative endeavor in which they're involved.

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
The sagging, wrinkled skin on aging, sun damaged face

11. Which living person do you most despise?
Better not say.

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?
Tolerance

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Tolerance

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Awesome, mos def, Proustian Rush, and "big as a hubcap"

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
I'm averse to pulling individual threats out of that great big tapestry, but obviously my little nuclear family tops the chart, even if we drive each other bananas through over-exposure

16. When and where were you happiest?
I have lots of moments, but Greg would pinpoint it at about five weeks after Inky had been born, when I was one of the flag bearers at the top of Bread and Puppet's Domestic Resurrection Circus in West Glover, Vermont, running around the big, outdoor circus ring, dressed in white, waving a flag that said Sister Frying Pan while a rag tag band blatted out the opening number. Greg said he'd never seen me look so happy. Or he might have said crazy. I can't remember. It was one of those exhilarating moments.

17. Which talent would you most like to have?
Playing the accordian

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I'd wake up on Easy Street.

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Getting published

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Something unlikely to be eaten and quite likely to be content with being what it is, where it is. A stone, maybe? Maybe a nice looking, oval stone that winds up in somebody's yoga studio next to an incense burner and a Tibetan singing bowl.

21. Where would you most like to live?
A whole damn building with a back yard and a roof deck on 7th st between Avenues C and D.

22. What is your most treasured possession?
I haven't mastered Buddhist unattachment so I've got lots. Can we count all the photo albums and journals and childrens artwork and anything anyone's ever taken the time to make for me as a single lot?

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
The Siege of Sarajevo. The death camps of WWII. Losing your entire family to a tsunami. Seeing your children hacked to death by a machete-wielding neighbor. Starving with little hope of foreign aid. But I know that people go through hell in this country too. I think any time a child dies, a depth of misery gets plumbed.

24. What is your favorite occupation?
Reading.

25. What is your most marked characteristic?
A sort of shambling, improvisational humorousness

26. What do you most value in your friends?
Thoughtfulness and attendance

27. Who are your favorite writers?
Spalding Gray, Lynda Barry, Jonathan Ames, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, Los Bros Hernandez, Peter Bagge, Lewis Trondheim as illustrated byJoann Sfar.

28. Who is your hero of fiction?
Ma Joad

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
I'd be flattering myself and/ or lying if I picked one. Though Sacagawea is totally awesome because she was breastfeeding a baby the whole time she was leading Lewis and Clark.

30. Who are your heroes in real life?
Fred Rogers. Dwight Conquergood, who was a professor of cultural anthropology at Northwestern University. Anyone who jumps the shark of inconvenience and apathy to help children and families in a position of economic, or educational disadvantage. Public school teachers!

31. What are your favorite names?
India, Milo, and Mehitabel

32. What is it that you most dislike?
The mean reds and the black dog

33. What is your greatest regret?
My timid, conventional youth

34. How would you like to die?
Painlessly, on high thread count sheets, surrounded by grieving but accepting friends and family, and not for a very long time yet.

35. What is your motto?
Dare to be Heinie!