Update? No thanks, I'm full.

[squeequeg]

Long time since my last public post, and I have some news. So of course I'm going to do a meme instead. This is the "eight random facts" meme, for which heatmhub tagged me some time ago.

1. When I was about fourteen, my sister and I went to Japan for a couple of weeks. We stayed with our aunt, who taught English at a Quaker school in Tokyo. I don't know that I was the best tourist -- I remember being very much the sullen teenager at several points -- but I loved the trip, and I'm glad to have those memories. Also, sushi was tasty even then.

2. My dreams often have a strong narrative element; one event follows another, even if the cause isn't entirely clear. I don't know if this is because the dreams are actually like that (unlikely) or because in the space between sleep and waking I impose a narrative framework on the random images spilled from my subconscious. In any case, it makes for dreams that are either very cool or that stick with me long past when they ought to fade, like the series of zombie nightmares I've been having. God, I hate zombie nightmares.

3. The name of a food sometimes makes more more willing to eat it than the taste alone. Frosty Malts, for example, need to be eaten at a baseball game, preferably after chanting "We want Frosty Malts!" It mitigates some of the freezer-burn taste. Or waffles, which I like to eat but like to say more. Waffles. Wwwwaffles. Or there's the demand I made of thomascantor on our last trip to the grocery for "Freezy Pops." Never mind that there isn't anything called a "freezy pop" -- I wanted my damn freezy pop!

Mmm, freezy pops.

4. I've only recently begun to be comfortable when clothes shopping. Part of this has to do with my total lack of fashion sense (everything I know, I gacked from my sisters), but a lot of it is just plain ignorance. Though I know what colors I like, I don't know what colors look good on me, and I don't even quite know what I should be looking for as guides. With a lot of help, though, I'm slowly learning. (For me, retail therapy is an hour in a bookstore.)

5. Something that should have been a tip-off that I would be a total nerd: I loved Holling Clancy Holling's books, most of which had a thin narrative over a lot of either history or biology. Seabird and Paddle-to-the-Sea were stories about artifacts that made great journeys (and incidentally taught a lot about, say, the Great Lakes); The Tree in the Trail was about the Old West and specifically one cottonwood tree. And then there was Pagoo a sort of invertebrate Bildungsroman that told the life story of a hermit crab. I loved them, and I loved the bits in the margins -- the Latin names for octopi and sea hares, sketches of anemones, etc. Reading them now makes me wonder if I was predestined for dorkitude.

I still love Clams Can't Sing, though.

6. When I'm revising a story, I tend to be very harsh. Comments like "LAME" or "NO!" or "WTF?" are commonplace; big red Xs through paragraphs are equally prevalent. (The constructive stuff is usually in cramped handwriting all along the margins, with occasional arrows to the other side of the page.) As a result, when sigerson made the comment "THIS PART SUX" on an unattended work in progress, I didn't think twice upon reaching that page. I just wondered what sucked about it, decided that yeah, it did, and fixed it.

7. I used to eat hot dogs raw. I no longer do so. You can stop gagging now. Strangely enough, I prefer most of my meat well done rather than rare, though I'm not sure hot dogs count as meat.

8. I don't often actively listen to music. Passive listening is another matter entirely; I prefer to have background music when I'm working, and I use my headphones to listen to the radio at work. (This has its pitfalls; "Take It To the Limit" seemed to chase me from station to station one afternoon, and I've never felt quite safe since.) But to sit down and listen to all the layers of music and unravel them is a skill I haven't developed. I'm learning, but it still helps if I can follow the sheet music so that my eyes can help interpret what my ears are hearing.

Technically I'm supposed to tag people for this meme. However, I hate tagging people; I always have the nagging worry that there's something else they'd much rather do than this meme. If you'd like to take this on, though, consider yourself tagged.

Comments

[cybersattva.livejournal.com]

I'm so there!