In the alternate universe, Vin Diesel is wearing culottes.

[squeequeg]

Recently, outsidetheparty posted the "five things" meme (You post a topic, list, category, whatever, in my comments section, then I'll post the answers to all your Top 5 ideas, according to me). He got a really cool request from sanj: what five alternate-universe versions of you are doing right now.

As he pointed out, this is far too cool not to propagate (I'm paraphrasing), and I'm tagging all of you (except outsidetheparty, of course, since he's done it here already).


Some of these are more serious/plausible than others.

1. Drinking a mug of lemon tea and wondering whether she needs to track down that one footnote that's been bugging her. This is the me that decided becoming a medievalist was the best if not most profitable use of her education, and has since gone on to grad school. Her dissertation has eaten most of her brain, but in a good way. She's attempted a translation of Sir Orfeo, but having read Tolkien's is entirely too susceptible to unconsciously using his phrasing. She's happy, if stressed.

2. Catching a much-needed breather after the firefight on the second level of Umbriel's orbital station. This is the me that managed to survive the attack on IASMH, swore vengeance against the creatures that had destroyed her friends, and demanded to be trained by the squad of Neptunian troops that arrived too late to stop the attack. About the most that can be said of her is that she's shown her grandmother's aptitude for sharpshooting and has mostly grown out of her adolescent angst. She isn't well liked among the other troops and will probably not make it past sergeant. However, she does make a good pie crust. (Dude, nobody said the alternate universes had to be realistic.)

3. Changing into pajamas and curling up on the old quilt with a murder mystery she's read twice already. This is the me that became something of a drifter in the summer after her freshman year of college and, after scaring the hell out of her family by disappearing for days on end, ended up staying with her great-aunt in Virginia "so that someone could keep an eye on her." Most days she works in the vineyard. She's only just started writing again, now that she's not coming home exhausted at the end of each day. She has two tattoos, one at the base of her neck and one, much older and cruder, on her left hip. Both are of the same image, which vaguely resembles a barred spiral galaxy.

4. The watusi. You really don't want to know the story behind this one

5. Watching cable TV in her bedroom and dozing off between commercials after having taken a very long bath. This is the me that went to IU on a scholarship, partly because she felt bad about making her parents pay so much for her education. The guilt dissipated by the end of her first semester, by which time she'd gotten through Bio 101 without getting head-explody and realized she really did like it. (Bio 101, not head-explody.) The time spent doing backstage theater scut work ditched any thoughts of going pre-med, not that she minded, and she managed to get a low-level job in a biotech startup. It hasn't folded yet, and she's moved up quite a bit since then, but she doesn't know how long she can stay there without sacrificing other, possibly better, job opportunities.

6. I don't know, what's sigerson doing right now? (And does she have the Evil Goatee or not?)

Incidentally, if anyone wants me to post my top five lists of anything, go ahead and ask. It may take me a while to respond, but I will.

Comments

[minyan.livejournal.com]

Five characters you would like to write a story for?

Alternatively, five favorite lines of dialog?

I like the spiral galaxy tattoo. Especially that it appears twice.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

My guess about the tattoo is that she got it during the few days she was off the map -- and not in any cool mystic way either. I suspect that she emerged from those days with a hangover, the tattoo, and a pressing need to get tested for STDs. Things have calmed down since.

Wow. It's really strange and disconcerting how easily an alternate-universe me becomes just another character to play with.

[minyan.livejournal.com]

I found it more disconcerting to try to write an alternate me who made choices I didn't make, and yet had to accept the consequences as I would. So she couldn't move to NYC after a breakup or wind up married and barefoot in Albuquerque (who knew that city had two q's in it?) even if it felt more natural to the story. If I didn't feel comfortable changing those alternate me's, making characters out of them, I'd start to worry; I like my fictions to be fictions, objective and created and honest :-)