I haven't done one of these in a while
Reply to this meme by yelling “Words!” and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.
soubie's prompts to me are Pre-school education; fandom; swords; Southern food; textual analysis
Pre-school education: I started working daycare when I was 19; I left a retail job on Thursday, applied to a nearby daycare on Friday, started work on Monday and stayed there for almost two years. I applied on a whim, because I was kind of freaking out about not having a job, and I figured, "Hey, I can look after kids, I've done babysitting and my brother is ten years younger than me!"
Naive reasoning, retrospectively, but I was also absolutely correct - I can totally look after kids. Three-to-five-year-olds particularly - I don't do well with the ten+ age bracket unless I've know them a large portion of their lives.
Children tend to make a great deal more sense to me than adults;I've never had any formal Child Education classes, but I seem to kind of instinctively get kids. They're often easier to understand in their motivations, and even when they aren't, the WTFness of them is half the fun. Working with children is never boring, always challenging, and in my experience, always gratifying. They soak up everything and ask a million questions and come up with their own weird ideas about things adults take for granted. They're completely awesome, and I'd probably still be working daycare if it paid enough to keep me alive.
And there are few things more ego-boosting than walking into a room and having 24 little voices shriek,"MISS EL!!" :)
Fandom: Mostly I enjoy fandom as a way to talk about things I like with people who also like them. I was pretty much always the girl - well, kid - who read "those weird books", and I was pretty much the only kid who was srsly into sci-fi fantasy. I did have a friend who was Star Wars crazy with me, and another who quite accidentally introduced me to Mad Max (I think I was 13 or 15 and she was a year younger- she was the first person I knew who had cable!!!), but mostly I was alone in my dorkosity til I was like...er...my mid-20s? and got access to internet and bulletin boards. I lurked on X-Files boards, and then busted out full-on episode dissection with Buffy and Angel. It was pretty damn awesome to be able to completely geek out and be geeked out at and have no-one think it was weird. It still is. *waves to all y'all* :)
Swords: Hee, there's really nothing exciting here except "I like 'em". Never fenced, never so much as used one on stage, as that would require having been on stage. The weight of one on your hip makes you swagger like no-one's business, drawing one gets you some astounded/amazed/admiring looks,even if you don't know how to use it at all, and for some reason, if you have one, people tend to think you're a force to be reckoned with. It's very weird.
Southern Food: Oklahoma Is Not The South. Write it down. /pet peeve
But there are Southern aspects to it, culturally, and I've spent *counts* probably a couple-three years (total)living right smack in the heart of Dixie - Charleston, SC - so I've managed to soak up a good bit of Southerality.
And Southern food is WONDERFUL. Chicken fried steak (none of this "country-fried steak" bullshit, what the hell), biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, grits, cornbread, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, Cajun and all its kick-ass variations - dang, I could live on it forever. Not terribly healthy, some of it (note how often the word "fried" appears), but it's goooooooooooooooooood, dammit. South Carolina food also throws in a good dose of seafood - that's "Low Country cookin'" to y'all - and that just makes it even better.
I don't get down with "Southern Haute Cusine", I want stuff my grandma and your grandma and that dude-over-there's grandma made. It's ultimate comfort food to me. I don't get into bar-b-que, though. Dunno why, other than it's messy.
Textual analysis: If I haven't said it before, lemme say it now: I am not all that gung-ho on analyzing text as a whole. I've done it for classes, and for fun, and I'm capable of doing it if I have to, but I really prefer to come at it by analyzing the characters. Of course the characters are part of the whole, but I like to see how everyone fits together within that construct, how the characters relate to their environment, and then think about the entire thing. If the characters are crap, I will not be interested in the whole - the universe is not appealing to me if the characters are boring. Most of the papers I did for film classes were cleverly [not] disguised character studies, and I don't recall having a single instructor complain, possibly because it was an angle of approach they didn't get all that often. :)
soubie's prompts to me are Pre-school education; fandom; swords; Southern food; textual analysis
Pre-school education: I started working daycare when I was 19; I left a retail job on Thursday, applied to a nearby daycare on Friday, started work on Monday and stayed there for almost two years. I applied on a whim, because I was kind of freaking out about not having a job, and I figured, "Hey, I can look after kids, I've done babysitting and my brother is ten years younger than me!"
Naive reasoning, retrospectively, but I was also absolutely correct - I can totally look after kids. Three-to-five-year-olds particularly - I don't do well with the ten+ age bracket unless I've know them a large portion of their lives.
Children tend to make a great deal more sense to me than adults;I've never had any formal Child Education classes, but I seem to kind of instinctively get kids. They're often easier to understand in their motivations, and even when they aren't, the WTFness of them is half the fun. Working with children is never boring, always challenging, and in my experience, always gratifying. They soak up everything and ask a million questions and come up with their own weird ideas about things adults take for granted. They're completely awesome, and I'd probably still be working daycare if it paid enough to keep me alive.
And there are few things more ego-boosting than walking into a room and having 24 little voices shriek,"MISS EL!!" :)
Fandom: Mostly I enjoy fandom as a way to talk about things I like with people who also like them. I was pretty much always the girl - well, kid - who read "those weird books", and I was pretty much the only kid who was srsly into sci-fi fantasy. I did have a friend who was Star Wars crazy with me, and another who quite accidentally introduced me to Mad Max (I think I was 13 or 15 and she was a year younger- she was the first person I knew who had cable!!!), but mostly I was alone in my dorkosity til I was like...er...my mid-20s? and got access to internet and bulletin boards. I lurked on X-Files boards, and then busted out full-on episode dissection with Buffy and Angel. It was pretty damn awesome to be able to completely geek out and be geeked out at and have no-one think it was weird. It still is. *waves to all y'all* :)
Swords: Hee, there's really nothing exciting here except "I like 'em". Never fenced, never so much as used one on stage, as that would require having been on stage. The weight of one on your hip makes you swagger like no-one's business, drawing one gets you some astounded/amazed/admiring looks,even if you don't know how to use it at all, and for some reason, if you have one, people tend to think you're a force to be reckoned with. It's very weird.
Southern Food: Oklahoma Is Not The South. Write it down. /pet peeve
But there are Southern aspects to it, culturally, and I've spent *counts* probably a couple-three years (total)living right smack in the heart of Dixie - Charleston, SC - so I've managed to soak up a good bit of Southerality.
And Southern food is WONDERFUL. Chicken fried steak (none of this "country-fried steak" bullshit, what the hell), biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, grits, cornbread, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, Cajun and all its kick-ass variations - dang, I could live on it forever. Not terribly healthy, some of it (note how often the word "fried" appears), but it's goooooooooooooooooood, dammit. South Carolina food also throws in a good dose of seafood - that's "Low Country cookin'" to y'all - and that just makes it even better.
I don't get down with "Southern Haute Cusine", I want stuff my grandma and your grandma and that dude-over-there's grandma made. It's ultimate comfort food to me. I don't get into bar-b-que, though. Dunno why, other than it's messy.
Textual analysis: If I haven't said it before, lemme say it now: I am not all that gung-ho on analyzing text as a whole. I've done it for classes, and for fun, and I'm capable of doing it if I have to, but I really prefer to come at it by analyzing the characters. Of course the characters are part of the whole, but I like to see how everyone fits together within that construct, how the characters relate to their environment, and then think about the entire thing. If the characters are crap, I will not be interested in the whole - the universe is not appealing to me if the characters are boring. Most of the papers I did for film classes were cleverly [not] disguised character studies, and I don't recall having a single instructor complain, possibly because it was an angle of approach they didn't get all that often. :)