way more news than is fit to print
Well, shit. I'm pretty much the worst journaler ever. Since I last typed anything meaningful in this space, life and work have both been pretty eventful. My horrible boss was fired and replaced by someone weird but awesome, whom I like very much. I started doing much more complicated work and got a huge promotion. I have a great title! I'm finally in a place where I have power, expertise, and the respect of the colleagues who matter to me. About time, I say! Anyway, working in IT has turned out well for me. I really like having technical knowledge and using it to make things better.
I've traveled to a bunch of new countries: Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Lots of memorable experiences: pressed pomegranates, a wedding ceremony during which the couple wore crowns, becoming frighteningly lost in a blizzard, minarets, emergency surgery for a dear friend under truly adverse circumstances, a museum about a 17th-century warship, major language barriers, the most amazing plum juice, making friends with Europeans who were way too cool for me, special horses, spice markets, a magical evening where Istanbul opened up and revealed itself to me. Traveling is awesome.
Now I'm going to answer a few questions that
pauraque put to me many months ago, when this was going around as a meme. As is usual for my journal entries, I drafted this long ago, then failed to clean it up and post it for months.
1) If you didn't have to work for a living, what would you do with your time?
Oho! First of all, I would do a great deal more traveling. I want very badly to go to Japan and Australia, and I think I'd need three weeks each to do them properly. Then there are lots of other places I haven't been able to visit yet (including but not limited to: Hawaii, Costa Rica, Spain, Morocco, Russia), and plenty of places I'd love to revisit and/or explore more thoroughly (including but not limited to: London, Paris, Iceland, Venice, Turkey).
I would be doing so much writing! This crazy novel I'm working on would be finished way faster. And I'd spend a lot of time cultivating some basic skills I wish I was better at: guitar, piano, drawing, learning certain languages. I suppose I would do some volunteer work of some kind if I could fit it into my busy schedule of self-improvement. And more theatregoing!
With my glamorous work-free lifestyle, I'd be going to bed around 1 or 2am and waking up refreshed 8 hours later. Assuming I was not wealthy enough to hire someone to do my errands for me, I'd do them during the workday when there would be no lines. Similarly, I'd go to yoga classes when they weren't crowded and to the swimming pool at times when I wouldn't have to share a lane. I hate sharing a lane way out of proportion to how annoying it is to share a lane.
And you can bet I'd have at least one large dog! Would s/he be named Sirius? That I can't tell you.
Dangit,
pauraque, now you have me wanting to quit my job so I can live this life. >:[
2) What skill or talent do you wish you had that you don't?
I wish I were great at drawing. I'm...okay at simple, two-dimensional representations of stuff, but man, if I were awesome at drawing things realistically, I'd be endlessly drawing and redrawing pretty much every scene from my favorite novels. So many times would Jane Eyre be rendered lovingly in colored pencil and pastels. And I could illustrate my own stories! It would be amazing.
More than once I've embarked gingerly on a learning-to-draw endeavor, but man, improvement requires so much time and practice, and I have so much other stuff to do, so it always goes on the metaphorical back burner. Yet another indication that I need to become independently wealthy, friends.
3) How did moving to NYC compare to your expectations of what it would be like?
Note for those of you who weren't around at the time: I moved here about 8 years ago from the midwestern US. And...hmm. It's not so much that my expectations did or didn't match reality as that I didn't have many expectations, as far as I can remember. At least, I can think of nothing spectacular: I expected New York to be a place where I could live easily without a car, where I was likely to find a decent job, where I could experience plenty of theatre and music, where there were fewer racist/homophobic/socially conservative people around me. All these things have been true.
Okay, here's something: I think on some level I expected most people here to be interesting and smart and engaged, but in fact there are also plenty of dull people who don't appear to have interests beyond reality TV, who don't seem to be curious or driven or especially worth knowing. Recently I was thinking about my friends and how some of the coolest, most talented, special people I know are still my high school classmates from the Midwest. So there you go--the denizens of New York City can be just as boring and provincial as the rest of us.
Oh, one more thing, sort of: when I first arrived, I was surprised by how few people are blonde and how few swimming pools there are, relative to the population. Of course, I knew that NYC would be far more diverse and have a different standard of beauty, and also that real estate was extremely expensive, but I wasn't always aware of the specific ways in which these facts would play out. When a midwestern friend of mine was visiting, I remember how morally outraged she was at being charged a $3 sitting fee in a restaurant when she didn't order any food. She simply couldn't believe it. By then I'd been living here for a while, and I could sort of see it from both sides.
4) What topic do you wish people understood, so that you wouldn't have to keep explaining or biting your tongue when they get it wrong?
For the most part I enjoy explaining things to people--it must be the bossy know-it-all in me. When I love something or find it interesting, I want to help people understand it so that they can love it/find it interesting, too. But I do get frustrated when people don't get it after I explain. I'd say my #1 wish along these lines would be for my coworkers to gain mastery over basic computer functions: how to attach a file to an email, take a screenshot, that kind of thing. I resent having my srs bsns interrupted so someone can ask me to unjam the printer. Yes, I work in IT, but no, I am not the help desk, and also I hate you because you could figure out how to fix it by googling. Bonus frustration: no, I can't "look up" your password for you. If I could just check out your password whenever I wanted, the system wouldn't be very secure, now, would it?
5) What's your favorite game?
A very hard call...but if I had to pick an overall favorite game, I think it I'd have to say Scrabble. Especially now that you can play against your friends online and have your score tallied automatically and everything. I can get a little Scrabbled-out at times, though.
Honorable mentions: I was fiercely fond of euchre in junior high and early high school, and loved Cranium and Phase 10 in college. In middle school, I got majorly into the King's Quest series, even though I had to look up basically everything in walkthroughs. As a younger child, I loved Crazy Eights, Gin Rummy, and Cat's Cradle. I was pretty obsessed with Echo Bazaar/Fallen London until recently, but I'm burnt out now. The best experience I ever had playing a game was EarthBound for Super Nintendo, which a good friend and I played in her basement over a magical series of weeks. There's a long, interesting story I could tell about that friendship, though possibly it's interesting only to me.
In the spirit of this expired meme, if you would like to give me some number of questions to answer, or if you want me to give you some number of questions to answer, I am up for it.
Mostly, though, I just wanted to say hi and let you know that I am still here, for certain values of here. Hi. Are you still here? And if so, how are you?
Originally posted at http://bowdlerized.dreamwidth.org/50691.html, where there are
comments.
I've traveled to a bunch of new countries: Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Lots of memorable experiences: pressed pomegranates, a wedding ceremony during which the couple wore crowns, becoming frighteningly lost in a blizzard, minarets, emergency surgery for a dear friend under truly adverse circumstances, a museum about a 17th-century warship, major language barriers, the most amazing plum juice, making friends with Europeans who were way too cool for me, special horses, spice markets, a magical evening where Istanbul opened up and revealed itself to me. Traveling is awesome.
Now I'm going to answer a few questions that
pauraque put to me many months ago, when this was going around as a meme. As is usual for my journal entries, I drafted this long ago, then failed to clean it up and post it for months.
1) If you didn't have to work for a living, what would you do with your time?
Oho! First of all, I would do a great deal more traveling. I want very badly to go to Japan and Australia, and I think I'd need three weeks each to do them properly. Then there are lots of other places I haven't been able to visit yet (including but not limited to: Hawaii, Costa Rica, Spain, Morocco, Russia), and plenty of places I'd love to revisit and/or explore more thoroughly (including but not limited to: London, Paris, Iceland, Venice, Turkey).
I would be doing so much writing! This crazy novel I'm working on would be finished way faster. And I'd spend a lot of time cultivating some basic skills I wish I was better at: guitar, piano, drawing, learning certain languages. I suppose I would do some volunteer work of some kind if I could fit it into my busy schedule of self-improvement. And more theatregoing!
With my glamorous work-free lifestyle, I'd be going to bed around 1 or 2am and waking up refreshed 8 hours later. Assuming I was not wealthy enough to hire someone to do my errands for me, I'd do them during the workday when there would be no lines. Similarly, I'd go to yoga classes when they weren't crowded and to the swimming pool at times when I wouldn't have to share a lane. I hate sharing a lane way out of proportion to how annoying it is to share a lane.
And you can bet I'd have at least one large dog! Would s/he be named Sirius? That I can't tell you.
Dangit,
pauraque, now you have me wanting to quit my job so I can live this life. >:[
2) What skill or talent do you wish you had that you don't?
I wish I were great at drawing. I'm...okay at simple, two-dimensional representations of stuff, but man, if I were awesome at drawing things realistically, I'd be endlessly drawing and redrawing pretty much every scene from my favorite novels. So many times would Jane Eyre be rendered lovingly in colored pencil and pastels. And I could illustrate my own stories! It would be amazing.
More than once I've embarked gingerly on a learning-to-draw endeavor, but man, improvement requires so much time and practice, and I have so much other stuff to do, so it always goes on the metaphorical back burner. Yet another indication that I need to become independently wealthy, friends.
3) How did moving to NYC compare to your expectations of what it would be like?
Note for those of you who weren't around at the time: I moved here about 8 years ago from the midwestern US. And...hmm. It's not so much that my expectations did or didn't match reality as that I didn't have many expectations, as far as I can remember. At least, I can think of nothing spectacular: I expected New York to be a place where I could live easily without a car, where I was likely to find a decent job, where I could experience plenty of theatre and music, where there were fewer racist/homophobic/socially conservative people around me. All these things have been true.
Okay, here's something: I think on some level I expected most people here to be interesting and smart and engaged, but in fact there are also plenty of dull people who don't appear to have interests beyond reality TV, who don't seem to be curious or driven or especially worth knowing. Recently I was thinking about my friends and how some of the coolest, most talented, special people I know are still my high school classmates from the Midwest. So there you go--the denizens of New York City can be just as boring and provincial as the rest of us.
Oh, one more thing, sort of: when I first arrived, I was surprised by how few people are blonde and how few swimming pools there are, relative to the population. Of course, I knew that NYC would be far more diverse and have a different standard of beauty, and also that real estate was extremely expensive, but I wasn't always aware of the specific ways in which these facts would play out. When a midwestern friend of mine was visiting, I remember how morally outraged she was at being charged a $3 sitting fee in a restaurant when she didn't order any food. She simply couldn't believe it. By then I'd been living here for a while, and I could sort of see it from both sides.
4) What topic do you wish people understood, so that you wouldn't have to keep explaining or biting your tongue when they get it wrong?
For the most part I enjoy explaining things to people--it must be the bossy know-it-all in me. When I love something or find it interesting, I want to help people understand it so that they can love it/find it interesting, too. But I do get frustrated when people don't get it after I explain. I'd say my #1 wish along these lines would be for my coworkers to gain mastery over basic computer functions: how to attach a file to an email, take a screenshot, that kind of thing. I resent having my srs bsns interrupted so someone can ask me to unjam the printer. Yes, I work in IT, but no, I am not the help desk, and also I hate you because you could figure out how to fix it by googling. Bonus frustration: no, I can't "look up" your password for you. If I could just check out your password whenever I wanted, the system wouldn't be very secure, now, would it?
5) What's your favorite game?
A very hard call...but if I had to pick an overall favorite game, I think it I'd have to say Scrabble. Especially now that you can play against your friends online and have your score tallied automatically and everything. I can get a little Scrabbled-out at times, though.
Honorable mentions: I was fiercely fond of euchre in junior high and early high school, and loved Cranium and Phase 10 in college. In middle school, I got majorly into the King's Quest series, even though I had to look up basically everything in walkthroughs. As a younger child, I loved Crazy Eights, Gin Rummy, and Cat's Cradle. I was pretty obsessed with Echo Bazaar/Fallen London until recently, but I'm burnt out now. The best experience I ever had playing a game was EarthBound for Super Nintendo, which a good friend and I played in her basement over a magical series of weeks. There's a long, interesting story I could tell about that friendship, though possibly it's interesting only to me.
In the spirit of this expired meme, if you would like to give me some number of questions to answer, or if you want me to give you some number of questions to answer, I am up for it.
Mostly, though, I just wanted to say hi and let you know that I am still here, for certain values of here. Hi. Are you still here? And if so, how are you?
Originally posted at http://bowdlerized.dreamwidth.org/50691.html, where there are
comments.