25 Random Things Meme
Feb. 2nd, 2009 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyAll right, all right! I’ll do the damn meme, Facebook. Yeesh. Pushy bastard.
25 Random Things About Me:
1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as garnet, swelter, and bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.
2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.
3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No, really.
4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)
5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”
6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.
7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.
8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.
9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.
10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)
11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.
12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.
13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.
14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.
15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.
16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
17. I’ve had malaria.
18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.
19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”
20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.
21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.
22. I collect mermaids.
23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.
24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.
25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.
Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!
25 Random Things About Me:
1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as garnet, swelter, and bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.
2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.
3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No, really.
4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)
5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”
6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.
7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.
8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.
9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.
10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)
11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.
12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.
13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.
14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.
15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.
16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
17. I’ve had malaria.
18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.
19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”
20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.
21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.
22. I collect mermaids.
23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.
24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.
25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.
Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:33 am (UTC)There is a guy here who does exactly that (ETA: he is known to everyone as "Jedi Nick", or at least "that Jedi kid" or "that weird dude with the Star Wars braid") - he sometimes even wears his Jedi robes to match (he did so when we went to Rennfaire last year - well, it's close enough to "wizard", I guess?). We're speculating that he'll cut it off when he graduates, though when asked directly he'll refer vaguely to "Jedi trials" or whatever. He's also notable for always wearing the same D&D t-shirt, black vest, khakis, and shoes and carrying around the same Del Sol bag, always. His philosophy is that life should be more like comic books or cartoons, and he's doing his best (in a small way) to make it so.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 04:20 am (UTC)That's actually one of the minor reasons why I started dying my hair unnatural colors.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:40 am (UTC)My friends and I had a similar thing with "Heroes Night". It started out as just getting together to watch Heroes, but it turned into a culinary potluck adventure with different themes each week. By the end, almost no one was watching the show. Unfortunately, that group fell to pieces.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 04:02 am (UTC)And I thought swelter was onomatopoeic for everyone : P
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 04:12 am (UTC)Ohmahgah! Senora made us learn (and sing) that one in high school. Nothing says fun like a mumble-singing class of sophomores, huh? :D I still remember bits and pieces of that one and Cascabells.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:57 am (UTC)Also, was it perchance Cascabel, cascabel, llega Navidad! El trineo viene ya, nos trae felicidad ... I know there are tons of translations of Christmas songs; was yours the same as the one we had to learn? (Granted, none of them was as awesome as the already-in-Spanish Drunken Fish Song, but they were still fun!)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:55 am (UTC)And the verse was: Vorlando por nieve, en un lindo trineo, con my bella Susanita, something something paseo...
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:06 am (UTC)5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”
But... "Yoshi" is the only word they have! In one of the official Mario comics, Mario buys a guide to speaking with Yoshis, and every diagram has the English equivalent on one side, and then a Yoshi saying, "Yoshi!" on the other.
Yeah, I'm a nerd.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:15 am (UTC)I figured that was what it sounded like to outsiders, the way languages we don't know sound like gibberish. Or, I dunno, maybe it's mind-bendingly tonal, like Piraha. They did have each phrase end with a different punctuation mark, after all.
BUT ANYWAY.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-07 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-08 10:42 am (UTC)Granted, he later got to command an entire horde of Yoshis, so that was a trade-off, I suppose. ;)
Wonder where that comic ever got to ... it's probably under my bed next to the Zelda one.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-08 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-10 07:22 am (UTC)I thought it was interesting that he did turn into a wolf in that one, rather than a pink bunny--which is why it seemed so natural to have him become a wolf in Twilight Princess. And the explanation for the crystals the maidens were trapped in was clever--that their minds were so pure that it was the form they wound up in.
I also got a kick out of the awful drawings of Link's feet. It was like the artist would just give up after doing all the other art. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:23 am (UTC)I needed to hear stuff repeatedly to memorize it as a child, but was INCREDIBLY GOOD at mimicking other voice tones and such back then. I'd sing the entire album for "Man of La Mancha" with different voices for all the characters, and was incredibly proud of my Sancho Panza and Aldonza voices.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:00 am (UTC)"George Washington was the first, you see--he once chopped down a cherry tree!"
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 08:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 06:38 am (UTC)Liz
Re: 14
Date: 2009-02-03 11:30 pm (UTC)WATER TEMPERATURE MATTERS PEOPLE OKAY! D:
Re: 14
Date: 2009-02-04 08:01 am (UTC)The worst trial I ever got as a tea snob was when my friend offered to make me a cup of tea along with hers. She got out a couple of mugs that probably held 1/2 cup of water each, jammed in a Lipton tea bag, filled them with water, splashed in some milk, and stuck them both in the microwave for a minute in a half.
Later, she asked me why I wasn't drinking my tea. "... Er, yes. I seem not to be thirsty today for some reason."
Re: 14
Date: 2009-02-04 02:15 pm (UTC)"WE HAVE A KETTLE FOR A REASON!"
(Lipton is to tea what sawdust is to coffee!)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-07 09:31 am (UTC)8. I admire this about you more than you might think. The imaginary audience that watches and judges me is merciless, it never lets me get away with anything, and probably has a lot to answer for my insecurities and repression. After enough time around you I hope I can emulate this. It's also part of what makes you feel... I guess approachable, to me, would be the closest approximation. You let me get away with things my mind audience doesn't.
16. My birthday is the National Day Against Homophobia.
18. In your defense, Beast is 100% brain candy and 100% eye candy for a grand total of 200% candy.
20. From high school to college, I was all Star Wars, no Star Trek. My b/f introduced me to Star Trek about 3 years ago, I realized I didn't know where it'd been all my life, and I've never looked back.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-08 10:50 am (UTC)8. It's been pretty good overall, except sometimes I find out I've offended without meaning to. Perhaps I should take half of yours?
I'm very happy that you think I'm approachable, though. Quite the compliment! I shall try to stay worthy of it.
16. A much more flexible theme, that. You could probably still get away with a cutlass and a parrot, I suppose.
18. He also gets extra bonus points for being fluffy and blue. How can one not love him, I ask you!
20. I think I remain a Star Wars girl most of all, but Trek has its own style. I suppose the only thing they really have in common is their first name and the idea of "Drama! In! Space!", so comparing them is kinda strange anyway. ;)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-08 01:09 pm (UTC)20. When the news series comes out, we've actually decided to check it out, and it's likely we'll stick with it. Although Lucas is supposed to be writing the first season, the subsequent seasons are supposed to have quite a few writers whose work we've already liked a lot elsewhere, and we think they might do something interesting with it.
I guess over time I started seeing the Jedi as Vulcans their writers sometimes take a little too seriously. The emotional repression the Jedi put themselves through is being portrayed as pure and virtuous for its own sake, whereas the emotional repression of the Vulcans is explained as a damage control reaction to their own strength and power that's questioned without being rejected. Star Trek warns about anger but doesn't dismiss it outright as something that can lead to passion for creative problem-solving, which I already saw present in Data before they compared him to Hephaestus in that episode with the paintings.
I don't think that when you get mad at your opponent while you're fighting, that's it, you've joined the Dark Side and you're lost to mortals because you've broken The Rule. I think if you stay calm when you're deciding what you're angry about, who you're fighting and why so that decision isn't exclusively emotional, if you don't release emotion when the time to do something about it, it's just so much wasted fuel.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-10 07:30 am (UTC)I remember how everyone was going on about the "balancing the Force" business in the prequels as though the Jedi represented Good and the Sith were Evil, which meant that it was totally unbalanced if there were thousands of Jedi and two Sith. I had interpreted it as that, before they lost their way, the Jedi were supposed to be the balance itself, the moderate force, and the Sith were extremists. It's my belief that extremism of any form leads to trouble, which is why they and the corrupted Jedi unbalanced the continuum.
Lucas may not have been going for that, but it was what I got out of it.
And he did bring balance to the Force--in the form of Luke!
no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 06:27 pm (UTC)The part I liked about Star Wars the most has to have been its aesthetic, its genetically bizarre aliens, and imagining what it would have been like to train to learn how to use force powers to heal people, fly through the air and communicate with trees and animals. It appealed to a more simple, physically active, dream-oriented aspect of myself that I ended up over-dosing on and trying to snap back from into more realism that way. I was less disappointed with the movies before I'd seen how much more they could have been through the books, and couldn't stop regretting they wouldn't have either gotten some of those people for the movies or made extra short movies or a TV series about the stories they wrote.
I also kind of resent it for having been a contributing factor on it having taken me so long to get into Star Trek, simply because the aliens didn't look as physically interesting. It made me feel superficial and embarrassed about it to have been missing out on what I still think of as the more anthropologically-slanted and socially creative cultures on Star Trek. My ideal movie or show would have to include the best aspects of both.
Even though the 3 prequels aren't among my favorites, I still have to admit that the fight with the 6-armed robot was worth seeing, but maybe that's just because part of me wishes people could see Mano fighting onscreen like that. n_n;