Interviews Meme
Gacked from misscam:
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
These were misscam's questions:
1. If the US could take on something from just one other country, what would you wish that to be?
Ideally, I'd like it to take Norway's welfare model, which features universal health care, a Social Security system that a) functions and b) ensures a decent standard of living for those on it, and subsidized higher education, except that that would involve infinitely higher taxes for the rich to pass down to the poor.
Alternately, I wish that it would adopt, as federal law, Canada's policy toward same-sex marriage, which makes it no different, legally, than opposite-sex marriage, but which also removes religion from the equation, focusing solely on the civil aspects. That strikes me as a very sensible way of handling an extraordinarily touchy subject.
2. What is the meaning of life?
42!
I don't think that there IS a single meaning of life, because what gives meaning to one person's life isn't the same thing that would necessarily give meaning to another's. So I think that each person has to decide what would give his or her life meaning, and then figure out if they're physically, mentally and/or emotionally able to go after it.
3. What is your favourite animal noise?
A cat's purr, I think. It's quite soothing.
4. How many books should an average person own, in your opinion?
At least a thousand, and I only limit it so that the books can fit in a small apartment. But then, as far as I'm concerned, books are as much a necessity of life as food and shelter are. I'm the kind of persona who will skimp on groceries so that I can afford one book.
5. Who is your favourite fictional female character and why?
Oh, this is tough, because I don't just have one favorite female character. I'll write about five characters that I know had an impact on me, how's that? (And the first character mentioned...well, that bit is reprinted from comments in a fandom opinions post on Dec. 30, 2009.)
1) Lt. Uhura from Star Trek: The Original Series.
I have to say something here about the original Uhura.
I first saw Star Trek when I was about six-going-on-seven and it was in permanent reruns. It was 1969.
I mention the year to give you a hint of the era. Martin Luther King had been assassinated the previous April. I remember his funeral being televised. And I can still recall the rage and rioting that followed in the wake of his murder. Despite a civil rights bill being passed the previous year, blacks were still "the poor" and anonymous, angry protesters on the news to me. The few shows that existed with black stars or co-stars (I Spy, Peyton Place, Julia) weren't the sort of shows my family watched. There were no blacks in my neighborhood; until busing came in a few years later, there were no blacks at my school.
Enter Lieutenant Uhura.
Who was not only part of the crew, but part of the bridge crew. Not just a grunt in the bowels of the ship, but a respected officer...and one, I assumed, in the chain of command. She was smart, tough and quick-thinking. And she was utterly beautiful.
By existing, Uhura sent the message that yes, women and minorities were part of the future--and that their being there was going to be important. We were going to get past the hate and the rage and the injustice, and work together as equals. And that this was not only possible, but necessary.
It was a heady message to send a six-year-old.
2) Pippi Longstocking from Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking series.
I love Pippi Longstocking. I do. I loved her when I was a child, and I love her now.
Looking back, I think that part of the reason I loved her so was that when I was growing up (in the 1960s), many of the books that are now considered standard reading for children and teens hadn't been written yet. To make matters worse, at least until I hit ten or eleven or so, most of the books in the library at school were books that had been written in the 1950s, 1940s, or 1930s. This meant that while many boy characters got to explore and discover and climb and travel to other planets, more girl characters than I care to remember were relegated to staying home, doing chores, helping their mothers, wearing dresses and shiny patent leather shoes even when they were playing outside, playing house with their dolls and overall just being so perfectly nice, even when they were getting in trouble, that I loathed them. There was nothing wrong with being that kind of a girl, but book after book kept telling me that this was the kind of girl I had to be...and even at eight, I knew I'd never be able to manage that.
Enter Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackerelmint Ephraim's Daughter Longstocking.
Pippi was a breath of fresh air. She wasn't conventionally pretty or well-dressed, but she was quite satisfied with her own appearance without spending any time worrying about it. She was exceptionally strong without using it to prove that she was better than anyone else or be a bully. She wasn't educated or even literate, but she was bright and shrewd and had a great deal imagination and common sense. She didn't have the impossibly good manners of so many girl characters back then--no, she could be honest to the point of bluntness, and had a great deal of trouble figuring how adults wanted her to behave in places like school and tea parties. She lived on her own and managed quite nicely, despite the occasional attempts of adults to interfere and make her more conventional and less independent.
Best of all, she had a very real sense of wonder and love of life that I've rarely seen equaled in any character. She could make you believe that anything could be an adventure, if you just looked at it the right way.
So yes, my hat's off to Pippi for being bright, curious, imaginative and filled with wonder...and for never once feeling that she had to be anyone other than herself.
3) The Egyptian princess in the fairy tale The Prince and His Three Fates (sometimes called The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog).
This probably isn't a fairy tale that most of you are familiar with, so let me tell you a little about it. Otherwise, my telling you about the princess won't make much sense.
We start off in Egypt. A prince has just been born, and the pharaoh has begged the gods (fairies in the translation I read, which is blatantly wrong) to tell him his son's future. The gods tell the pharaoh that the prince is destined to die through a snake, a crocodile or a dog, and that he cannot avoid this evil fate. However, when the prince grows up and marries the princess, she saves him three times.
I love her because she isn't helped by a magical being like a fairy godmother or a benevolent ghost like Cinderella's mother; she doesn't have supernatural servants or enchanted artifacts that battle the snake for her; she isn't the favored of the gods; and she has no special destiny, or even any assurance that she can successfully fight fate. She's a perfectly ordinary girl with a strong, healthy body, a knowledgeable mind, and swift common sense. And as anyone who's read fairy tales knows, those aren't the most powerful tools to have on your side.
And she fights fate anyway. She doesn't hesitate for a single second.
She defeats the gigantic snake by fetching milk for it and putting the bowl down right in front of it (which takes nerve in itself. The snake starts drinking the milk--and the princess draws the sword of her sleeping husband and chops its head off. (Which astonished me. She was the first un-revised female fairy tale character that I'd ever seen pick up a sword.)
To defeat the crocodile, which will lose its hold over the prince if a pit is dug in dry sand that will remain full of water (which is as good as saying "impossible"), the princess goes out in the desert alone at dawn to hunt for a rare herb that grows atop a steep rock surrounded by a chasm. This herb will keep water in a pit for a year...if she can find it. Again, she has to trust to her own strength and ingenuity, using a thin rope to bridge the chasm, climbing up brittle rock that crumbles as she puts weight on it, struggling not to be suffocated or blinded by a sandstorm, and identifying the plant she needs solely by touch. And then she has to make her way back from the desert to the banks of the Nile before the sun sets--that's where the prince has had a pit dug, and is waiting with the crocodile.
Well, of course the water remains in the pit and the prince is freed forever from the crocodile. However, as he's standing there rejoicing, he's startled by a wild duck flying past him. While he's still somewhat off-balance, his pet dog chases after the duck--and bumps into the prince's legs, slipping into the river. The prince staggers, falls backward into the Nile himself...and is stuck there, caught by the mud and the bulrushes. Realizing that he's drowning, he cries out to his wife for help. His servants freeze in shock...but the princess, who still has the rope that she used to cross the chasm, races to him and pulls him out of the river herself. As the prince emerges from the river, muddy, gasping, half-drowned and amazed to be alive, he turns to his servants and guards and says one sentence:
"My wife has been stronger than my fate."
So she not only saves the prince three times through her own strength and will and courage, she actually gets credit for doing so in the story.
This girl is made of awesome.
Forget Snow White and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty--this is the fairy tale heroine that I love.
4) Leia Organa (I don't think I have to mention where she's from, do I? Didn't think so.)
I don't know if I can really explain the impact that Princess Leia had on me at not-quite-fifteen... when men were men and women were girls.
TV and films of the time did not lead me to expect much of Leia. Even the women crimefighters on TV were described by reviewers as "a bit of sex and jiggle" and "fantasy eye candy" and were kidnapped, captured and tied up or chained up so often that I wondered how they kept their jobs. The only women who were allowed to be anything but eye candy were plain or homely women in sitcoms or nobly supportive maternal types, and I could see from the poster and the trailers of Star Wars that Leia didn't belong in either category.
Consequently, I expected Leia to be tied up or chained up, to scream fetchingly and cause Luke to come running into danger, and to be the beautiful but useless love interest. At best, I thought she might try to fight the Empire...but to do so with allegedly cute ineffectiveness that was played for laughs.
Instead, I saw a woman who was strong and sarcastic to the enemy (something I'd only ever seen male protagonists do prior to this)., who was fiercely loyal to her side, who lied brazenly and skillfully when the situation called for it, who could fight every bit as well as the heroes could and who could plan a hell of a lot better.
It was AMAZING.
Not the concept. I knew perfectly well that there were young women who had fought bravely and skillfully in war; I was an Air Force brat, after all. But I never, ever expected Hollywood to admit this.
And apparently a lot of women felt the same way. Because letters started flooding to Lucas and other directors saying, "We love Leia, we love women who know what they're doing, and why are there not more women LIKE this in the movies?"
This shocked Hollywood enough that there were actually magazine articles on the subject about the "revolution in women characters" that the public was demanding. It wasn't as if there hadn't been strong women in movies before, God knows. But a large proportion of the audience speaking up and saying what they wanted--that, at least, was seen as new.
5) Tara Maclay from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This will sound terribly shallow, but I liked Tara from the beginning simply for being a normal-sized girl in less than designer clothing and still being gorgeous. All too often, TV and movies give the impression that the only beautiful women are size zeros. Tara gave the lie to that.
Then she turned out to be fantastic in other ways. She was a shy girl. She stammered when she was nervous. But the writers didn't play those qualities for laughs; instead, they took the time to show that Tara had inner strength, intelligence, and compassion. Though she helped fight evil, as all the Scoobies did, by nature she was a healer. While she faced quite a number of horrors and personal fears over the years, she always exuded hope--hope for the future and hope in the goodness of others. Not easy to do in a place like Sunnydale.
Tara also had a quiet courage that was unequaled. She endured years of psychological torment at the hands of her family, who had convinced her that her magic was a symptom of demonic heritage and that therefore she was inherently evil. That she came out of such an environment as strong and as loving as she did is remarkable. And can you imagine facing a hellgod who was threatening you with insanity if you didn't tell her what she wanted to know? Tara did that in Tough Love...and, knowing what she was facing, protected Dawn Summers anyway, not telling Glorificus that Dawn was the Key. Sometimes not so quiet--in Bargaining, Part Two, when Willow was being strangled by a huge demon, Tara picked up an axe and killed him, saying, "Nobody messes with MY girl." But when "her girl" became controlling, messing with Tara's memory and mind to keep Tara from recalling arguments and things about Willow that she might not like, Tara left. It hurt her. She loved Willow deeply. But she had too much integrity to allow herself to be treated like a thing to be controlled.
I've always felt that if Xander was the heart of the Scooby Gang, Tara was its soul. She had faith, she had hope and she had love...in amazing amounts. When she was murdered, BtVS lost something that it never quite regained.
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
These were misscam's questions:
1. If the US could take on something from just one other country, what would you wish that to be?
Ideally, I'd like it to take Norway's welfare model, which features universal health care, a Social Security system that a) functions and b) ensures a decent standard of living for those on it, and subsidized higher education, except that that would involve infinitely higher taxes for the rich to pass down to the poor.
Alternately, I wish that it would adopt, as federal law, Canada's policy toward same-sex marriage, which makes it no different, legally, than opposite-sex marriage, but which also removes religion from the equation, focusing solely on the civil aspects. That strikes me as a very sensible way of handling an extraordinarily touchy subject.
2. What is the meaning of life?
42!
I don't think that there IS a single meaning of life, because what gives meaning to one person's life isn't the same thing that would necessarily give meaning to another's. So I think that each person has to decide what would give his or her life meaning, and then figure out if they're physically, mentally and/or emotionally able to go after it.
3. What is your favourite animal noise?
A cat's purr, I think. It's quite soothing.
4. How many books should an average person own, in your opinion?
At least a thousand, and I only limit it so that the books can fit in a small apartment. But then, as far as I'm concerned, books are as much a necessity of life as food and shelter are. I'm the kind of persona who will skimp on groceries so that I can afford one book.
5. Who is your favourite fictional female character and why?
Oh, this is tough, because I don't just have one favorite female character. I'll write about five characters that I know had an impact on me, how's that? (And the first character mentioned...well, that bit is reprinted from comments in a fandom opinions post on Dec. 30, 2009.)
1) Lt. Uhura from Star Trek: The Original Series.
I have to say something here about the original Uhura.
I first saw Star Trek when I was about six-going-on-seven and it was in permanent reruns. It was 1969.
I mention the year to give you a hint of the era. Martin Luther King had been assassinated the previous April. I remember his funeral being televised. And I can still recall the rage and rioting that followed in the wake of his murder. Despite a civil rights bill being passed the previous year, blacks were still "the poor" and anonymous, angry protesters on the news to me. The few shows that existed with black stars or co-stars (I Spy, Peyton Place, Julia) weren't the sort of shows my family watched. There were no blacks in my neighborhood; until busing came in a few years later, there were no blacks at my school.
Enter Lieutenant Uhura.
Who was not only part of the crew, but part of the bridge crew. Not just a grunt in the bowels of the ship, but a respected officer...and one, I assumed, in the chain of command. She was smart, tough and quick-thinking. And she was utterly beautiful.
By existing, Uhura sent the message that yes, women and minorities were part of the future--and that their being there was going to be important. We were going to get past the hate and the rage and the injustice, and work together as equals. And that this was not only possible, but necessary.
It was a heady message to send a six-year-old.
2) Pippi Longstocking from Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking series.
I love Pippi Longstocking. I do. I loved her when I was a child, and I love her now.
Looking back, I think that part of the reason I loved her so was that when I was growing up (in the 1960s), many of the books that are now considered standard reading for children and teens hadn't been written yet. To make matters worse, at least until I hit ten or eleven or so, most of the books in the library at school were books that had been written in the 1950s, 1940s, or 1930s. This meant that while many boy characters got to explore and discover and climb and travel to other planets, more girl characters than I care to remember were relegated to staying home, doing chores, helping their mothers, wearing dresses and shiny patent leather shoes even when they were playing outside, playing house with their dolls and overall just being so perfectly nice, even when they were getting in trouble, that I loathed them. There was nothing wrong with being that kind of a girl, but book after book kept telling me that this was the kind of girl I had to be...and even at eight, I knew I'd never be able to manage that.
Enter Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackerelmint Ephraim's Daughter Longstocking.
Pippi was a breath of fresh air. She wasn't conventionally pretty or well-dressed, but she was quite satisfied with her own appearance without spending any time worrying about it. She was exceptionally strong without using it to prove that she was better than anyone else or be a bully. She wasn't educated or even literate, but she was bright and shrewd and had a great deal imagination and common sense. She didn't have the impossibly good manners of so many girl characters back then--no, she could be honest to the point of bluntness, and had a great deal of trouble figuring how adults wanted her to behave in places like school and tea parties. She lived on her own and managed quite nicely, despite the occasional attempts of adults to interfere and make her more conventional and less independent.
Best of all, she had a very real sense of wonder and love of life that I've rarely seen equaled in any character. She could make you believe that anything could be an adventure, if you just looked at it the right way.
So yes, my hat's off to Pippi for being bright, curious, imaginative and filled with wonder...and for never once feeling that she had to be anyone other than herself.
3) The Egyptian princess in the fairy tale The Prince and His Three Fates (sometimes called The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog).
This probably isn't a fairy tale that most of you are familiar with, so let me tell you a little about it. Otherwise, my telling you about the princess won't make much sense.
We start off in Egypt. A prince has just been born, and the pharaoh has begged the gods (fairies in the translation I read, which is blatantly wrong) to tell him his son's future. The gods tell the pharaoh that the prince is destined to die through a snake, a crocodile or a dog, and that he cannot avoid this evil fate. However, when the prince grows up and marries the princess, she saves him three times.
I love her because she isn't helped by a magical being like a fairy godmother or a benevolent ghost like Cinderella's mother; she doesn't have supernatural servants or enchanted artifacts that battle the snake for her; she isn't the favored of the gods; and she has no special destiny, or even any assurance that she can successfully fight fate. She's a perfectly ordinary girl with a strong, healthy body, a knowledgeable mind, and swift common sense. And as anyone who's read fairy tales knows, those aren't the most powerful tools to have on your side.
And she fights fate anyway. She doesn't hesitate for a single second.
She defeats the gigantic snake by fetching milk for it and putting the bowl down right in front of it (which takes nerve in itself. The snake starts drinking the milk--and the princess draws the sword of her sleeping husband and chops its head off. (Which astonished me. She was the first un-revised female fairy tale character that I'd ever seen pick up a sword.)
To defeat the crocodile, which will lose its hold over the prince if a pit is dug in dry sand that will remain full of water (which is as good as saying "impossible"), the princess goes out in the desert alone at dawn to hunt for a rare herb that grows atop a steep rock surrounded by a chasm. This herb will keep water in a pit for a year...if she can find it. Again, she has to trust to her own strength and ingenuity, using a thin rope to bridge the chasm, climbing up brittle rock that crumbles as she puts weight on it, struggling not to be suffocated or blinded by a sandstorm, and identifying the plant she needs solely by touch. And then she has to make her way back from the desert to the banks of the Nile before the sun sets--that's where the prince has had a pit dug, and is waiting with the crocodile.
Well, of course the water remains in the pit and the prince is freed forever from the crocodile. However, as he's standing there rejoicing, he's startled by a wild duck flying past him. While he's still somewhat off-balance, his pet dog chases after the duck--and bumps into the prince's legs, slipping into the river. The prince staggers, falls backward into the Nile himself...and is stuck there, caught by the mud and the bulrushes. Realizing that he's drowning, he cries out to his wife for help. His servants freeze in shock...but the princess, who still has the rope that she used to cross the chasm, races to him and pulls him out of the river herself. As the prince emerges from the river, muddy, gasping, half-drowned and amazed to be alive, he turns to his servants and guards and says one sentence:
"My wife has been stronger than my fate."
So she not only saves the prince three times through her own strength and will and courage, she actually gets credit for doing so in the story.
This girl is made of awesome.
Forget Snow White and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty--this is the fairy tale heroine that I love.
4) Leia Organa (I don't think I have to mention where she's from, do I? Didn't think so.)
I don't know if I can really explain the impact that Princess Leia had on me at not-quite-fifteen... when men were men and women were girls.
TV and films of the time did not lead me to expect much of Leia. Even the women crimefighters on TV were described by reviewers as "a bit of sex and jiggle" and "fantasy eye candy" and were kidnapped, captured and tied up or chained up so often that I wondered how they kept their jobs. The only women who were allowed to be anything but eye candy were plain or homely women in sitcoms or nobly supportive maternal types, and I could see from the poster and the trailers of Star Wars that Leia didn't belong in either category.
Consequently, I expected Leia to be tied up or chained up, to scream fetchingly and cause Luke to come running into danger, and to be the beautiful but useless love interest. At best, I thought she might try to fight the Empire...but to do so with allegedly cute ineffectiveness that was played for laughs.
Instead, I saw a woman who was strong and sarcastic to the enemy (something I'd only ever seen male protagonists do prior to this)., who was fiercely loyal to her side, who lied brazenly and skillfully when the situation called for it, who could fight every bit as well as the heroes could and who could plan a hell of a lot better.
It was AMAZING.
Not the concept. I knew perfectly well that there were young women who had fought bravely and skillfully in war; I was an Air Force brat, after all. But I never, ever expected Hollywood to admit this.
And apparently a lot of women felt the same way. Because letters started flooding to Lucas and other directors saying, "We love Leia, we love women who know what they're doing, and why are there not more women LIKE this in the movies?"
This shocked Hollywood enough that there were actually magazine articles on the subject about the "revolution in women characters" that the public was demanding. It wasn't as if there hadn't been strong women in movies before, God knows. But a large proportion of the audience speaking up and saying what they wanted--that, at least, was seen as new.
5) Tara Maclay from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This will sound terribly shallow, but I liked Tara from the beginning simply for being a normal-sized girl in less than designer clothing and still being gorgeous. All too often, TV and movies give the impression that the only beautiful women are size zeros. Tara gave the lie to that.
Then she turned out to be fantastic in other ways. She was a shy girl. She stammered when she was nervous. But the writers didn't play those qualities for laughs; instead, they took the time to show that Tara had inner strength, intelligence, and compassion. Though she helped fight evil, as all the Scoobies did, by nature she was a healer. While she faced quite a number of horrors and personal fears over the years, she always exuded hope--hope for the future and hope in the goodness of others. Not easy to do in a place like Sunnydale.
Tara also had a quiet courage that was unequaled. She endured years of psychological torment at the hands of her family, who had convinced her that her magic was a symptom of demonic heritage and that therefore she was inherently evil. That she came out of such an environment as strong and as loving as she did is remarkable. And can you imagine facing a hellgod who was threatening you with insanity if you didn't tell her what she wanted to know? Tara did that in Tough Love...and, knowing what she was facing, protected Dawn Summers anyway, not telling Glorificus that Dawn was the Key. Sometimes not so quiet--in Bargaining, Part Two, when Willow was being strangled by a huge demon, Tara picked up an axe and killed him, saying, "Nobody messes with MY girl." But when "her girl" became controlling, messing with Tara's memory and mind to keep Tara from recalling arguments and things about Willow that she might not like, Tara left. It hurt her. She loved Willow deeply. But she had too much integrity to allow herself to be treated like a thing to be controlled.
I've always felt that if Xander was the heart of the Scooby Gang, Tara was its soul. She had faith, she had hope and she had love...in amazing amounts. When she was murdered, BtVS lost something that it never quite regained.