ANOTHER meme
Jan. 26th, 2003 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyTurnabout is fair play. I've been reading other people's, so I feel obliged to offer my own. That sounds grudging, but I actually rather enjoyed the process. Hope y'all enjoy the results.
1. I'm INTJ.
2. I have a virulently overdeveloped sense of privacy and personal space.
3. Which means that there's a lot of things about me that are not going into this meme. Suck it up and deal.
4. I was also extravagantly unpopular as a child.
5. I am still filled with wonder for hours on end that people I like and think are cool seem to like me in return.
6. I worry that someday the people around me will wake up and realize that I'm actually quite boring and tiresome to be around and that they want nothing more to do with me.
7. I REALLY don't like crowds.
8. Did I mention I'm a control freak?
9. My favorite Bronte is Emily.
10. Both my ears are triple pierced.
11. I got the first set of holes when I was thirteen, under my mother's aegis.
12. However, when I floated the idea of getting a second set, when I was sixteen, she reacted as if this were the first step down the slippery slope toward heroin-addiction, prostitution, and listening to death metal.
13. I did the second set of holes myself two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, with a safety pin, in my dorm-room.
14. In retrospect, this was not a very good idea, and I wouldn't do it again.
15. My mother must have noticed my second set of holes, but she never said a word.
16. Any more than she remarked on it when I got my third set of holes two years later.
17. Dangers of DIY: the second set are slightly crooked, which is visible when I'm wearing hoops, which is most of the time. I've decided I really don't care.
18. I've been thinking about getting my cartilage pierced for a couple years now, but so far haven't done anything about it.
19. I'm contemplating getting a tattoo to celebrate the completion of my PhD (when and if). So far, I haven't been able to come up with a design, although I know I'd want it at the small of my back.
20. Despite the advanced degrees and the hardcore geekiness, I'm not really cut out for academia.
21. I hate teaching, and I suck at it. This is how you can tell me apart from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck.
22. In fact, the only thing in the world about which I seem to be self-motivating is writing. So I guess I'm a writer, although saying so makes me feel like I'm being nauseatingly pompous and self-aggrandizing.
23. I started writing when I was twelve, but only in the past two years have I figured out how to write short stories. I am still insanely proud of myself for finally getting that nailed.
24. Counting by how I identified them rather than actual length, I have at this point written nine novels. All but the last three are total and complete crap.
25. I have no impartiality when it comes to my own writing ability. Some days I think I'm brilliant; some days I think I should just degauss my hard drive and save everyone the bother.
26. I started keeping a dream-journal in high school; I still write down the interesting ones.
27. My dreams are often narrative-heavy, and I do a good deal of lucid dreaming. Sometimes this helps with stories I'm writing, sometimes really not.
28. I learned to read when I was three.
29. I seriously don't know what would have happened to me growing up if I hadn't had books.
30. I read with both concentration and speed. In elementary school, I once missed my bus because I was reading Sylvie and Bruno and didn't notice the bus pulling up.
31. I'm better about that now, but I still revert to a sullen three-year-old when dragged away from a book I'm reading for the first time.
32. As a child, I read omnivorously, including a bunch of stuff I bet my parents didn't know I was reading and wouldn't have wanted me to.
33. I've become much more selective now, due to greater control over the books available to me. My day to day reading is mostly mysteries (generally Golden Age, no cozies); I also read a lot of sf/f/h and have spurts of reading nonfiction.
34. I have a good deal of trouble with insomnia.
35. My ocular albinism is the reason that I identify strongly with moles.
36. I love poetry, but I cannot cannot cannot write it. I was in grad school before I finally admitted this.
37. I dress like teenage boys did when I was in high school: jeans, t-shirts, flannel shirts. No make-up.
38. I double-majored in Classics and Literature (the bastard offspring of the English and Comp. Lit. departments at my college, i.e., English lit. with a side of French).
39. I can read French more or less on the fly.
40. I can handle Middle English, although I want good glosses.
41. I can also read (given a dictionary, a grammar, and plenty of time) Latin and Old English.
42. I used to be able to read Ancient Greek, but I suspect that's almost entirely atrophied by now.
43. I am a fiercely competitive over-achiever when roused. I've spent a good deal of the past seven years trying to teach myself to let that particular sleeping dog lie.
44. I grew up in East Tennessee. Whether or not I have an accent depends on (a.) if I'm tired, upset, slightly lit, or in a Mood and (b.) who you ask.
45. I don't get more than slightly lit. Except once. And that's a much funnier story that you will not get to hear.
46. No, nothing happened.
47. My favorite Beatle is George.
48. I took piano for ten years. I still love to play, but almost never get the opportunity.
49. I took chorus from sixth grade through twelfth, descending from first soprano to alto as I went.
50. I sight-read not quite as well as I read English, about as well as I read French.
51. I'm an adequate technical pianist (or was), but I have neither creativity nor verve. I have no ability to improvise.
52. I sing harmony quite well once I've been taught it.
53. I have good relative pitch. But I also have a terrible tendency to go flat when singing, which makes me very self-conscious about singing in front of or with other people.
54. Yes, I sing in the shower.
55. I've been married for four and a half years.
56. If I'd known I could grow up to be such a thing, I might have become a forensic anthropologist.
57. I have to watch myself very carefully in bookstores. Especially used bookstores.
58. We have nine bookcases in our one-bedroom apartment. Mostly it's my books.
59. Self-consciousness is my besetting sin.
60. The unhappiest year of my life thus far was when I started developing breasts at the age of 12.
61. I was really really bad at being a teenage girl.
62. I think I do okay with being a woman.
63. Favorite poets (aside from the metaphysicals): Plath, Doty, Dickinson, Dunn, Kirby.
64. I'm doing my part to revive "they/them" as the gender-neutral third person singular it was before the eighteenth century grammarians got their nasty patriarchal hands on it.
65. I am, in fact, addicted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
66. I want the government to concern itself with public ethics rather than private morality.
67. I hate ice-breaker games, charades, and all other forms of "fun" that revolve around looking like an idiot or otherwise being conspicuous in public.
68. I make my own bread. All by hand. It's my only culinary talent, and I'm absurdly proud of it.
69. Otherwise, I stay the fuck out of the kitchen.
70. I am seriously lazy. I'm still trying to figure out ways to make myself exercise regularly.
71. I wear shoes as little as possible.
72. One of the things I hate most about living in the Upper Midwest is that I have to wear socks and slippers all winter.
73. I have a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard, which I love with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
74. Don't like kids. Don't want 'em.
75. I have been to Canada, France, Germany (twice), Austria (twice), Italy, and Greece. Also an assortment of states in the continental U.S.
76. I dislike traveling.
77. I thought when I was in junior high that I wanted to be an actress. Happily, this came to naught.
78. I went cold turkey off caffeine when I was a sophomore in college.
79. I nit-pick. Unmercifully. At everything.
80. My aspiration is to be able to write like a cross between Gene Wolfe and Ellen Kushner.
81. I took typing three summers in a row, first with a manual typewriter, then with an electric, then with a computer. The experience taught me to appreciate my word processor.
82. I have always wanted to learn ASL. But I'm too self-conscious about my lack of coordination to try.
83. I loathe Hemingway.
84. The only jewelry I have that never comes off is my wedding ring.
85. Otherwise, I use jewelry like armor. You can track my state of nerves by the amount of metal I'm wearing.
86. I prefer Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin.
87. I have never taken a college-level creative writing class, although I've taught it twice.
88. I love genre fiction and will passionately defend its right to be considered "literature."
89. One of my earliest memories is of my father nagging me to pronounce "lamp" with one syllable instead of two.
90. I love reading in the bath.
91. I try very hard to be truthful, but don't always succeed.
92. Birthdays were an excuse for public humiliation in the schools I attended. Thus I don't tell people mine.
93. I didn't discover rock'n'roll until I was fifteen.
94. The first album I ever bought was Don Henley, The End of the Innocence.
95. I still feel pretty good about that.
96. Less so about the fact that the second album I ever bought was Richard Marx, Repeat Offender.
97. I love the feel of silk, hate the feel of velvet.
98. I like getting books signed. It helps me remember that they were written by human beings.
99. Above all else, I hate feeling like an idiot.
100. Baseball is my spectator sport of choice; I was born and bred a Braves fan.
1. I'm INTJ.
2. I have a virulently overdeveloped sense of privacy and personal space.
3. Which means that there's a lot of things about me that are not going into this meme. Suck it up and deal.
4. I was also extravagantly unpopular as a child.
5. I am still filled with wonder for hours on end that people I like and think are cool seem to like me in return.
6. I worry that someday the people around me will wake up and realize that I'm actually quite boring and tiresome to be around and that they want nothing more to do with me.
7. I REALLY don't like crowds.
8. Did I mention I'm a control freak?
9. My favorite Bronte is Emily.
10. Both my ears are triple pierced.
11. I got the first set of holes when I was thirteen, under my mother's aegis.
12. However, when I floated the idea of getting a second set, when I was sixteen, she reacted as if this were the first step down the slippery slope toward heroin-addiction, prostitution, and listening to death metal.
13. I did the second set of holes myself two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, with a safety pin, in my dorm-room.
14. In retrospect, this was not a very good idea, and I wouldn't do it again.
15. My mother must have noticed my second set of holes, but she never said a word.
16. Any more than she remarked on it when I got my third set of holes two years later.
17. Dangers of DIY: the second set are slightly crooked, which is visible when I'm wearing hoops, which is most of the time. I've decided I really don't care.
18. I've been thinking about getting my cartilage pierced for a couple years now, but so far haven't done anything about it.
19. I'm contemplating getting a tattoo to celebrate the completion of my PhD (when and if). So far, I haven't been able to come up with a design, although I know I'd want it at the small of my back.
20. Despite the advanced degrees and the hardcore geekiness, I'm not really cut out for academia.
21. I hate teaching, and I suck at it. This is how you can tell me apart from
heres_luck.22. In fact, the only thing in the world about which I seem to be self-motivating is writing. So I guess I'm a writer, although saying so makes me feel like I'm being nauseatingly pompous and self-aggrandizing.
23. I started writing when I was twelve, but only in the past two years have I figured out how to write short stories. I am still insanely proud of myself for finally getting that nailed.
24. Counting by how I identified them rather than actual length, I have at this point written nine novels. All but the last three are total and complete crap.
25. I have no impartiality when it comes to my own writing ability. Some days I think I'm brilliant; some days I think I should just degauss my hard drive and save everyone the bother.
26. I started keeping a dream-journal in high school; I still write down the interesting ones.
27. My dreams are often narrative-heavy, and I do a good deal of lucid dreaming. Sometimes this helps with stories I'm writing, sometimes really not.
28. I learned to read when I was three.
29. I seriously don't know what would have happened to me growing up if I hadn't had books.
30. I read with both concentration and speed. In elementary school, I once missed my bus because I was reading Sylvie and Bruno and didn't notice the bus pulling up.
31. I'm better about that now, but I still revert to a sullen three-year-old when dragged away from a book I'm reading for the first time.
32. As a child, I read omnivorously, including a bunch of stuff I bet my parents didn't know I was reading and wouldn't have wanted me to.
33. I've become much more selective now, due to greater control over the books available to me. My day to day reading is mostly mysteries (generally Golden Age, no cozies); I also read a lot of sf/f/h and have spurts of reading nonfiction.
34. I have a good deal of trouble with insomnia.
35. My ocular albinism is the reason that I identify strongly with moles.
36. I love poetry, but I cannot cannot cannot write it. I was in grad school before I finally admitted this.
37. I dress like teenage boys did when I was in high school: jeans, t-shirts, flannel shirts. No make-up.
38. I double-majored in Classics and Literature (the bastard offspring of the English and Comp. Lit. departments at my college, i.e., English lit. with a side of French).
39. I can read French more or less on the fly.
40. I can handle Middle English, although I want good glosses.
41. I can also read (given a dictionary, a grammar, and plenty of time) Latin and Old English.
42. I used to be able to read Ancient Greek, but I suspect that's almost entirely atrophied by now.
43. I am a fiercely competitive over-achiever when roused. I've spent a good deal of the past seven years trying to teach myself to let that particular sleeping dog lie.
44. I grew up in East Tennessee. Whether or not I have an accent depends on (a.) if I'm tired, upset, slightly lit, or in a Mood and (b.) who you ask.
45. I don't get more than slightly lit. Except once. And that's a much funnier story that you will not get to hear.
46. No, nothing happened.
47. My favorite Beatle is George.
48. I took piano for ten years. I still love to play, but almost never get the opportunity.
49. I took chorus from sixth grade through twelfth, descending from first soprano to alto as I went.
50. I sight-read not quite as well as I read English, about as well as I read French.
51. I'm an adequate technical pianist (or was), but I have neither creativity nor verve. I have no ability to improvise.
52. I sing harmony quite well once I've been taught it.
53. I have good relative pitch. But I also have a terrible tendency to go flat when singing, which makes me very self-conscious about singing in front of or with other people.
54. Yes, I sing in the shower.
55. I've been married for four and a half years.
56. If I'd known I could grow up to be such a thing, I might have become a forensic anthropologist.
57. I have to watch myself very carefully in bookstores. Especially used bookstores.
58. We have nine bookcases in our one-bedroom apartment. Mostly it's my books.
59. Self-consciousness is my besetting sin.
60. The unhappiest year of my life thus far was when I started developing breasts at the age of 12.
61. I was really really bad at being a teenage girl.
62. I think I do okay with being a woman.
63. Favorite poets (aside from the metaphysicals): Plath, Doty, Dickinson, Dunn, Kirby.
64. I'm doing my part to revive "they/them" as the gender-neutral third person singular it was before the eighteenth century grammarians got their nasty patriarchal hands on it.
65. I am, in fact, addicted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
66. I want the government to concern itself with public ethics rather than private morality.
67. I hate ice-breaker games, charades, and all other forms of "fun" that revolve around looking like an idiot or otherwise being conspicuous in public.
68. I make my own bread. All by hand. It's my only culinary talent, and I'm absurdly proud of it.
69. Otherwise, I stay the fuck out of the kitchen.
70. I am seriously lazy. I'm still trying to figure out ways to make myself exercise regularly.
71. I wear shoes as little as possible.
72. One of the things I hate most about living in the Upper Midwest is that I have to wear socks and slippers all winter.
73. I have a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard, which I love with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
74. Don't like kids. Don't want 'em.
75. I have been to Canada, France, Germany (twice), Austria (twice), Italy, and Greece. Also an assortment of states in the continental U.S.
76. I dislike traveling.
77. I thought when I was in junior high that I wanted to be an actress. Happily, this came to naught.
78. I went cold turkey off caffeine when I was a sophomore in college.
79. I nit-pick. Unmercifully. At everything.
80. My aspiration is to be able to write like a cross between Gene Wolfe and Ellen Kushner.
81. I took typing three summers in a row, first with a manual typewriter, then with an electric, then with a computer. The experience taught me to appreciate my word processor.
82. I have always wanted to learn ASL. But I'm too self-conscious about my lack of coordination to try.
83. I loathe Hemingway.
84. The only jewelry I have that never comes off is my wedding ring.
85. Otherwise, I use jewelry like armor. You can track my state of nerves by the amount of metal I'm wearing.
86. I prefer Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin.
87. I have never taken a college-level creative writing class, although I've taught it twice.
88. I love genre fiction and will passionately defend its right to be considered "literature."
89. One of my earliest memories is of my father nagging me to pronounce "lamp" with one syllable instead of two.
90. I love reading in the bath.
91. I try very hard to be truthful, but don't always succeed.
92. Birthdays were an excuse for public humiliation in the schools I attended. Thus I don't tell people mine.
93. I didn't discover rock'n'roll until I was fifteen.
94. The first album I ever bought was Don Henley, The End of the Innocence.
95. I still feel pretty good about that.
96. Less so about the fact that the second album I ever bought was Richard Marx, Repeat Offender.
97. I love the feel of silk, hate the feel of velvet.
98. I like getting books signed. It helps me remember that they were written by human beings.
99. Above all else, I hate feeling like an idiot.
100. Baseball is my spectator sport of choice; I was born and bred a Braves fan.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-01-27 05:49 pm (UTC)Well, that and the Latin. Also the French. Also the novel-writing. And the bit about being married. ...okay, I'll stop.
92. Birthdays were an excuse for public humiliation in the schools I attended. Thus I don't tell people mine.
Uh-huh. Unless you can get pastries out of it, in which case all bets are off. *g*
no subject
Date: 2003-01-27 06:10 pm (UTC)And I didn't start exploiting you for birthday pastries until after I knew you could be trusted not to humiliate me in public by singing Happy Birthday or some such similar shit. (And, ooh, check out the alliteration! She's hot tonight, folks!) As a general rule, #92 still stands.
Harrumph.
*g*
no subject
Date: 2003-01-27 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-01-28 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-01-28 05:58 am (UTC)My Emily over Charlotte preference stems not so much from their writing--although Wuthering Heights is twisted and demented and brilliant and if I hadn't turned into a Shakespearean I could probably keep writing papers about it until the heat-death of the universe, turn and turn about with Villette--as from their personalities. No, I don't think I would have liked Emily, but I don't think Emily would have wanted me to. From the evidence that remains, she was one of those completely honest people who are not afraid to tell the world to fuck off if it gets in their way. Charlotte was scheming, managing, hypocritical ... I'm desperately sorry for her, but I don't entirely respect her. Her urge for acceptance and conformity was apparently sufficient excuse, in her mind, for defaming her dead sisters' characters. (Emily didn't know what she was writing, my ass.) And the possibility that Emily wrote another novel, which Charlotte burned because she couldn't spin the PR the way she wanted to, makes me LIVID. LIVID, do you hear me?
Ahem. Sorry. All I actually meant to say was that my favoritism is not based entirely--or even by majority vote--on literary merit.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-28 10:55 pm (UTC)