(no subject)
Basics
Name: Emma
Age: 21
Location: Kent, UK (for your reference, basically the bit between France & London)
Grade/Year in School (include major if in college): Finshed Uni, BA Classics, I'm all officially edumacated now, cheesy graduation photos and all. I'm hoping to do a MA in Conservation whenever I get the funds.
Current job (if applicable): Social Assistant, Language School. Basically herding loads of 14 year olds from Spain round the tourist traps of London. Or making them play tennis or charades. They are nice kids. Then I have the horror of looking for real life, long term jobs.
How did you hear of our community?: in passing
Why should we allow you into our community? Because I am so utterly amazingly wonderful that if you don't your life will always be empty and futile afterwards. Or alternatively, I like it here, people have interesting conversations and they can all spell and seem to understand the meaning of the word debate and are probably not secret 13 year olds who just go posting things to be told they are great.
Bitchiness
Please explain why the following people/things suck, and for God's sake, be creative.
Your best friend: She had the audacity to move to Brighton and actually think she can live any kind of life without me, make friends without me vetting them, and undertake social activities without my express approval. Bitch!
Your worst enemy: I either have hosts of secret enemies waiting behind the scenes to utterly destroy me, or I have lived a boring purposeless life if I have failed to make myself so many enemies that I can pick a worst one.
Your boss or teacher: I have not had too many terrible ones of either, so I will tell you about dear Mr Cosslett, in charge of my education in the English language for two formative years of my life. He was wrongly great. He was bald with a ginger beard and wore green tweed suits. If you got a question right he would give you a Fisherman's Friend as a "reward" (Fisherman's Friends are really strong aniseedy/camphory sweets meant to warm up fishermen trawling around the Arctic Circle and cure their colds). He made us write poems about puppies and flowers to send into old lady's magazines to kick start our literary careers, there was a girl named Lyndsey Topless who had had her puppy poem published and she was his hero forever. If he couldn't think of anything to do in the lesson and was steamingly drunk (like often) he would read out the clues to the Telegraph crossword and shout at us if our 11-year-old's answers didn't fit. He had some long-running feud with this other English teacher he came across in a pub, basically it boiled down to Mr Cosslett drunkenly cornering this poor other guy and making him spell difficult words to prove he was a "real" english teacher. (Maybe this is how you gain entry to the secret society of english teachers who save the planet from people mixing up uninterested and disinterested). He kept a teddy bear in his briefcase and would act out that it was staring at people in the class because they weren't working to the bear's satisfaction, he would also on occasion bring in this bouncing rubber novelty alarm clock of John Major and throw it against the wall shouting "You're no Maragret Thatcher!" (John Major was conservative PM until 1997, he was renowned for being boring and grey and having a mockable voice, but was actually having a secret affair that didn't come out til years later. Before he was a politician he made garden gnomes). Mr Cosslett eventually got fired for being so obviously steamingly drunk that no-one could pretend not to notice anymore.
Any celebrity: To be honest I find it hard to get that worked up about these people. Maybe the ones who go in for Scientology, it seems a creepy religion, esp. the whole drafting into the Sea Corp thing.
Any organization(i.e. PETA, the NAACP, The Global Communist Party, etc...Really any collective holding a statement you can strongly contest is eligible for this question, even if they aren't especially well known): I strongly dislike lobby groups that pretend to be campaigning for something on moral grounds, but are actually created and funded by a big business to further its own interests, and it turns out that their scientific studies they were quoting as proof of their arguments were carried out by researchers in the pay of the company and deliberately set up to give a certain desired result rather than being a genuine study.
Yourself: Oh, I am just unbearable and should be removed from being an international menace as soon as possible.
Favorites
I'm afraid I have always been far too indecisive to pick one eternal favourite out of my many favourites, so you will have to suffer through huge lists here
Bands/singers: Sonic Youth, The Smiths, Datblygu, Joy Division, The Knife, Sebadoh, Four Tet, Autechre, Kate Bush, Patrick Wolf, Stereolab, the Pastels, the Monkees, Leonard Cohen, Nancy Sinatra, Echo & The Bunnymen, the Magnetic Fields, Joanna Newsom, the Arcade Fire, Yann Tiersen, Phillip Glass (his non-movie stuff - I don't like listening to his film scores outside the films), My Bloody Valentine, and you will know us by the trail of dead, Ms John Soda, the Notwist, the Fall, Sígur Rós, Múm, Amina, Mogwai, Godspeed, Do Make Say Think, Fly Pan Am, Yo La Tengo, Super Furries, Gorky's, Sleater Kinney, Vashti Bunyan, Pavement, Billy Childish, Felt, Boards of Canada
Books: Fire & Hemlock, The Perfume, The Little Prince, The Waste Land, I Capture the Castle, Agatha Christie, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Charles Dickens (I am from the same town as him, and have had the man stuffed down my throat since a young age, good thing I like him, Great Expectations is set in my hometown), Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Narnia books (minus the last over-christian one, I was brought up a godless heathen and that one always stuck in my throat as a kid, I had a fear of being sneakily converted to a religion without me realising), Kafka, Pushkin, Dr Zhivago, Milan Kundera, Primo Levi, Charlotte Sometimes, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Gerald Durrell, Naomi Klein, Edith Nesbit, Tristam Shandy, Chaucer (Canterbury tales set down my way too)
Movies: Tilsammans (aka Together), Lilja 4-ever, The Saddest Music in the World, Goodbye Lenin, Dr Caligari's Cabinet, M, the Seventh Seal, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Me You and Everyone we Know, Valentin, Papillon, Now Voyager, Metropolis (the german b&w one not the manga), Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service, Shaun of the Dead, But I'm a Cheerleader, Amelie, Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Lost in Translation, In the Mood for Love, the Pianist, Jan Svankmejer's version of Alice in Wonderland, Harold & Maude, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr Zhivago, Mean Girls, Requiem for a Dream, Orlando (the version with Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I & Tilda Swinton), Sonnenallee,
TV Shows: Poirot & detective shows of every kind (I really dislike the new ITV Miss Marples though), Coronation St, Dr Who, the Boosh, Spaced, Big Train, Look Around You, Alan Partridge, Twin Peaks, The Prisoner, Sapphire & Steel, Michael Palin's travels, any kind of history or geography documentary, Black Books, Father Ted, the Adam & Joe show, I Claudius, Up Pompeii, Blackadder
Is there a book you would strongly recommend? Fire & Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, beautiful and funny book based on an old Scottish poem "Tam Lin" and Eliot's "Four Quartets". That makes it sound about 5 times more pretentious than it is, it truly is a fabulous book, not many people seem to have ever read it despite it constantly being in print since 1985, but everyone who does read it seems to adopt it as one of their favourites.
Is there a favorite of yours of which you're highly ashamed? If so, why? I have a secret fondness for bad teenage films. Although to be honest that one isn't particularly secret.
More About You
What name do you wish you'd been born with instead of your own? Mine is pretty ok, I would happily shoot all the other Emmas born a few year later than me at the height of the name's popularity in England though.
If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? Antartica. Otherwise Tierra Del Fuego, St Petersburg, New Zealand or Samarkand. I still have not crossed the equator, I obviously need to get cracking on the non-northern hemisphere travel.
List your best personality traits: I'm generally interested in most things, and like to talk to most people (whether I like them or not is an entirely different matter), and I want to know about the world.
List your worst personality traits: I'm a lazy sod and horrifically moody and neanderthal-like first thing in the morning, and I'm untidy and try to avoid doing the washing up if at all possible. I find it difficult not to be facetious in the face of people who take themselves terribly terribly seriously, which is not always the best thing to do. I have a whole list of things wrong with me I could get off my mother, but she is not known for her connection to reality, so I will find my own faults.
What's your biggest pet peeve? People who buy those charity bracelets, then do nothing else, but then act all smug like they are saving the world, when in fact they are just buying a bracelet to show off "hey, look I'm a good person" and they might as well have given the whole price of the bracelet to the charity and done a bit of free awareness raising on the side.
What is your greatest fear and why? I don't like heights much. In other respects there's all sorts of horrific things I can imagine happening, but I doubt fretting about them and turning myself into a nervous wreck would do any good. Anyway you're better off facing up to things when they happen.
What is something you're better at than anyone else you know? Knowing the difference between a gerund and a gerundive. But that will not get me far in life, and will not cut it if I starting mixing with vast swathes of people who studied Latin . I have the knack of giving cats baths without getting mauled down pretty well though. This is a far more useful skill when your long haired cat has been rolling around in the compost heap.
Do you read into dream symbolism? I have to fight off my new-age obsessed mother armed with a crappy book on the topic often enough to have no desire to particularly want to do it myself. Not that it's not worthwhile, I guess, but I have just been put off it.
Have you been diagnosed with any psychological disorders? Nope.
Cite one life-changing event that has played a pivotal role in the person you are today:Hey, I'm only 21 and I haven't lived an amazingly exciting life, so unless you want to hear yawn-inducing stories of a pretty standard life in the UK, I'll leave this one thanks. I have done interesting things, yes, but I can't think of a single life-changing one.
Use the TITLE of one: song, movie, tv show, OR book to describe yourself. Explain.
Emma. A classic of English literature, and also my name.
World View
Do you have any sort of political affiliation? Yes, I vote Lib Dem, would be old-school Labour if they still existed and hadn't turned into the Tories-Lite So for non-UK people that means left wing ok? And no, that does not mean if I were American, that I would vote Democrat, they are just a less nutjob-extreme-right wing version of the Republicans.
What's one issue that means the most to you right now? I really don't know what to put here. I could write something glossy and glib I suppose, but perhaps that's not what you want. There are plenty of things that bother me. The continued trade from Eastern Europe and SE Asia of sex slaves, which would not exist if there were no market for it. Governments being hijacked by various extreme forms of religions in several countries of the world. Certain newspapers happily stirring up hysteria and ignorance to increase their circulation, without doing the slightest thing to help issues at hand. The fact there are so many people walking around who seem happy to be ignorant of everything outside of what they immediately experience and who are perfectly happy for other people in the world to suffer as long as it doesn't personally affect them. The scary rise of far right parties and organisations in both the UK and countries that are not very far away from me. The fact that the rich-poor divide, that so much was done within the UK in the last century at least to narrow is widening again, and has never been narrowed in other parts of the world, and that so many actions are still taken to deliberately widen it. Plenty more things, but I could fill up this whole page and more.
What do you consider to be the single most important event in known history? Why? Depends where you are in the world. I guess internationally you could say something like the invention of nuclear weapons, the Russian Revolution, the Fall of the Roman Empire, the election of Hitler, the conversion of Constantine or somesuch thing. On the other hand, for instance if say you were from Pakistan, the Partition of India would be pretty damn important to you, if you were Chinese it might be the Cultural Revolution or the first emperor's unification of China, if you were Greek it might be the Fall of Constantinople, etc etc. Difficult question (although technically I guess some of those I listed were ongoing processes that lasted years rather than one discrete event, depends on how you define "event".)
What big change in the world would you like to see happen before you die? Nuclear disarmament would be a nice one, but then the way things look at the moment I can't see any of the major nuclear powers stepping forwards to be the first to disarm, and I doubt that it would happen without one country making an example of itself first by actually going through with it. Sadly my own government is trying its best to get replacements for aging nuclear missiles pushed through, rather than retire the cold war ones. Alternatively for Kim Jong-Il to die of something painful and the rest of his government to be thrown out and replaced with people who wouldn't happily let people starve to death to keep up appearances.
Random:
Share a quote or picture (or both if you want) and explain why you chose it/them. It can be funny/serious/stupid/pointless/etc.
It's an axolotl, a type of salamader from Central America that lives its whole life in the larval stage, and only metamorphoses into a land-based salamander under specific and stressful water conditions. They're very good natured and friendly but have a bad habit of mistakenly chewing their axolotl friends' legs off (don't worry, they grow back fine, that's why they are a biology lab favourite).
Picture(s):
Post 2-4 pictures of yourself. In addition, please include one 100x100 of yourself to be used for the userinfo in the event you're voted in. If you don't have a 100x100, please specify which photo you would like to be used and a mod will resize it for you.
(I'm afraid there aren't many pictures of me, I far, far prefer to take photographs than be in them, and I'm not particularly photogenic)
Me modelling my nan's summer 1986 collection. She's great at the practical aspects of dressmaking, but there should probably be a special law to prevent her from designing any item of clothing.
Here is me looking like an idiot. Stylish hat/oven glove by Ikea
My passport photo that makes me look like I have some kind of skin disease resembling the output of cheap photo printers. This is my standard photo face, both suprised and pissed off. I have no idea how I always end up making it.
Arty one that could be anyone