What are your answers?

I found this Proust Questionnaire on Gorgeous Thing's blog, and she challenged us to answer the questions. I took her up on it.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being totally in the moment wherever I am, with whoever I am.

What is your greatest fear?
I've dealt with the worst and lived to tell about it. So, they're all small now.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Jane Austen, acknowledging that her observations are a thousand times more humane, clever, and insightful than mine.

Which living person do you most admire?
My mother. She's lived through enormous and devastating trauma, yet she is wise and serene, and attracts people like a moth to a flame.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My unthinking mouth.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Deception, and withholding information to gain power.

What is your greatest extravagance?
Travel.

What is your favorite journey?
This life.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Physical beauty. It's so transient, is it not? And it does not guarantee happiness. Ask Liz Taylor, or Brittney, who seems so sad and lost.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?
Dare I say it? My little toes. They like to go in their own direction, ignoring their brethren.

Which living person do you most despise?
Add an "s." I despise those who would enslave women and children. Slavery is the ugly, hidden secret in today's world. Millions are enslaved (especially in the Sudan), and we are turning a blind eye to this injustice.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Actually.

What is your greatest regret?
Not following my instinct, actually. It is actually quite good, but I mistrusted it in my younger years.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
My family, bar none.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Singing/dancing. Dancing/singing.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
I'd make us more serious. We laugh entirely too much. Actually, we're perfect.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My creativity and ability to help others. I'm a great mentor.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? The sky, and envelop the earth.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being enslaved by another, losing my free will, and seeing no hope for the future.

What is your most marked characteristic?
My vitality. People say they can tell the moment I enter a room because of the change in energy.

What do you most value in your friends?
Acceptance of who I am. I accept my friends without question, and I believe in them.

Who are your favorite writers?
Jane Austen and Shakespeare in all their permutations, and for relaxation, my irreverent friend Brad

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Ullysses. He never lost sight of his goal: To return to Penelope.

What are your favorite names?
Mother (having one, and being one, even though it is a surrogate monicker)

What is it that you most dislike?
Manipulation

How would you like to die?
While I am laughing and looking at the sky.

What is your motto?
It's on my blog. "Women who want to be equal to men have no ambition." If that's too serious, then there's this observation, "When everything is said and done, a lot more will be said than done."