(no subject)
You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out. :)
There are probably only one or two people who don't know the answers to all these, but I feel like procrastinating on my hw so I'll post it anyway.
1. First Name
Meaghan. Pronounced like megan . It's the Irish-Gaelic spelling, because my family on my dad's side is Irish. I remember my mom mentioning once that she liked the name because she had recently read The Thornbirds, which has a character named Meggie. I've never read it, but I've heard she's not such an admirable character. I'll have to read it one day and decide for myself, I guess.
2. Age
21. I didn't actually drink before I turned 21 (minus some spiked cider) so my birthday really was a milestone for me. One of my favorite parts about finally being 21 is that I go out to a bar on wednesday nights during school to do country swing. It's tons of fun, and I usually don't even drink because it's a school night. Also, same with mythos, I got my license at this age. Combination of me being lazy and having too many friends who would drive me around in highschool.
3. Location
I grew up in SW Portland, Oregon, and still live there over Christmas and Spring Breaks. I love Portland; it's where I want to live when I get older. The suburbs are nice and relatively safe, the schools are good, the downtown area always has something interesting going on, and you're about an hour away from wither the coast or the mountains. I'm really a very nostalgic person, so while my other highschool classmates were dreaming of moving to Cali or Chicago or somewhere exciting, I really just wanted to stay close to home.
During school I live In Corvallis, OR. It's pretty nice. A LOT smaller, which is annoying, but I don't really have the time to do much during school anyways. It's a very old town with farmland all around (It was actually the state capital for a little while!), and there's a real emphasis on locally grown and prepared food here which is really cool. Because OSU is such a big Engineering school there's also an HP campus here as well as a few other technology and science companies, so it's not all farmers and college kids :D
Last summer I lived and interned at a chemical plant in Kalama, WA, and I'll be returning there this next summer as well. It is seriously small. Population: 1,783. And I'm sure that contains a lot of the surrounding areas as well, the population within the city is even smaller. The town is right on the Columbia river, and formed to house workers from plants and industries built there. The main thing it's known for is its antique stores. There are apparently 10, though I don't think I ever actually saw that many. It also has a couple restaurants (that suck), something that's not quite small enough to be a mini-mart but not big enough to be a grocery store (that charges EXORBITANT prices, I might add), a gas station, and a couple banks. That's about it. On one of the last nights of my internship some of our coworkers took us out "bar hopping". Which means we went from the one bar (a pizza tavern that only sold beer) to the other bar (technically a mexican restaurant). That's how small the place is. It's nice though, and very safe. And my apartment deck had a river view, which was pretty awesome.
4. Occupation
Student. 1st year senior on a five year plan, specifically in Chemical Engineering. I also work retail over Christmas and I intern at a chemical plant over the summer, as I mentioned. I used to have a job working on a website, but I quit because it took to much time away from school and my boss (the company owner) was... well, he really had no idea how to run a business, and I was sick of dealing with him.
My goal is to one day have a research job that incorporates both chemistry and green engineering. A lot of time chemical engineers go into process engineering, which basically entails doing a bunch of calculations to figure out how to make something go faster, or create less waste, or whatnot. That feels so pointless and dead-end to me, and I really hope I don't get stuck doing it. I like research because I feel like I'm doing something new, like I'm contributing something useful to society. I want to feel like my work is helping others, not just myself and my company. Which is also where the green part comes in. If I were to make some cool new green product... I think that'd be awesome. (Also, I'm not going to lie, it'd be really cool to get my name in a paper or something. I'd like my fifteen minutes of fame. Which just doesn't happen in process.)
I've been toying with the idea of freelancing in web design along side of my normal job, just for fun. We'll see if that actually happens or not.
5. Partner?
vashbattousai, for five and a half years now. First (and probably last) boyfriend. We met in high school, and have been dating since the summer after my sophomore year. When I was younger I always used to get teased by my cousins for never having a boyfriend, because they'd both been having them ever since elementary school. I always told them that my first relationship would be way more serious and last way longer than any of theirs were, and I was right :D
We've been together so long that we've already had most of the awkward conversations you can have with a significant other (marriage, kids, what color we should paint our house, etc) so it's nice not having to think about that. But we also argue over silly things like an old married couple sometimes, which can get annoying. We're both really stubborn, so that doesn't help either :) We have a lot of the same friends and hobbies, and spend quite a lot of time together making dinner and whatnot during school. I can't even imagine anything different :)
Since we've been together for so long everyone (especially the girls I work retail with, dear GOD, they are gossipy) always asks when the hell we're getting married, and the answer is sometime after college, which means at least a year and a half. Our relationship hasn't really had many big changes (for good or for bad) so taking that step will be very exciting.
6. Kids
None yet, thank God. I do not want to manage kids and school and work. No thank you. But I definitely do want kids in the long run. I've always said 2-3, vashbattousai wants 1-2, so I guess that means we'll likely have 2 :D I love kids, and I think it'd be amazing to be able to introduce someone to the world from the very beginning. I have a lot plans on how I'd like to raise my kids and what I'd like to do with them. I know everyone always does and half the time it never works out like you want to, but it's fun to think about.
7. Brothers/Sisters
None. Everyone always complained about their brothers and sisters when they were little, but I always wanted one. I was bored a lot as a child: My dad didn't really play with me very much after a certain age and a lot of time my mom was too sick or too tired to. There's really only so long you can entertain yourself. But this did mean I was on the internet early as a child, which sparked my future interest in technology and video games :) We learned in my sociology of the family class that the longest lasting relationship you will have in your life is with your siblings. I do feel a little cheated out of that experience, but I do have two cousins close to my age who I am pretty close to, so they kinda make up for it.
8. Pets
Technically right now I have none, though my parents do. The last pet who was really mine was our cat Marissa, who died last year. At my dad's we now have Suzy, a little brat of a teenage cat, and my mom has Noodles, a fat, demanding cat who's about 6 or so. I've always been a cat person, but I don't hate dogs or anything. My mom and I used to foster feral (wild) kittens before they went out for adoption. The most we ever had at once (in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, I might add) was 8 kittens and a full grown cat. I really miss fostering and plan on doing it when I retire. We've also had mice, rats, fish, crabs and one dog, when I was really little, who was my first pet.
9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life
1. School. Unfortunately. I'm really not feeling it anymore, but the show must go on.
2. My mom. I'll explain more in the next section, but she's really not doing well and it worries me.
3. Waiting. I'm so close to being done with school that a lot of the time I feel like I'm just waiting for the next chapter of my life to start. My life has been rather static, no huge ups or downs, so I get bored with it easily.
10. Parents
My parents divorced when I was 5. My dad is kind of a control freak and my mom just didn't want to deal with it anymore so she left. I was very lucky in that there was no custody battle: I switched off between houses weekly except that every Tuesday I always stayed at my dads and every Wednesday I always stayed at my mom's. The divorce didn't ruin my life or make me need therapy or anything like that. It's just how things turned out and it really doesn't bug me at all. Because of my mom's health problems it got to the point during high school where I no longer lived with her, but I still saw her often. When I'm home now I live with my dad and visit my mom as often as I can.
My dad graduated from the university of Oregon and works as the director of credit for a NW plumbing supply company. He's been with the company for at least 20 years, more I think. Our relationship has always been sort of rocky. He has always had very high expectations of me and I get in trouble when I don't meet them. This lead to a lot of yelling when I was younger, at it really got to me emotionally. Going to college has helped our relationship immensely, I think we really need the time apart.
When I was a senior in high school my dad remarried to Marilyn, who is awesome and totally the opposite of the evil stepmothers you always hear about. We get along really well. She has been the best thing for my relationship with my father, as she mellows him out when he's angry and helps us get through discussions without them ending in yelling matches. My dad tries to look good in front of her so if I have to say anything I know he won't like I make sure she's around as a buffer :) I never knew my dad to crack a joke or ever seem truly happy before Marilyn came around, so she really has changed our family dynamic immensely.
My mom and I are really close. We're actually more like friends than mother and daughter. I have always appreciated the fact that she treats me like an equal and not like someone she's in charge of. She's really creative, and has kinda inspired that in me, though I will never be as awesome as she is in that respect. I think my mom took a few college courses but never graduated. She used to work as an accountant before she got sick.
I can't remember a time when my mom wasn't sick. Being sick has really been the defining experience of her life, which is really sad. She hasn't worked since I was in pre-school, and she lives on welfare and some support from my grandparents, none of which is really enough. She has uncontrollable diabetes, pancreatitis, osteoporosis, numerous heart problems, thyroid problems, anemia, likely some form of cancer, and much more. She used to be an alcoholic (sober for 20+ years), smokes, has had at least two strokes, was once in a coma for 4 days (during which she actually had the light at the end of the tunnel experience but felt her self being pulled back by something), has been in the hospital at least a million times. She has chronic depression and general low self-esteem. She has outlived every doctor's life length prediction and should have died at least 4 times. She seriously does have 9 lives; we joke that the feline race made her an honorary member for all she's done for their kittens over the years :) But she just keeps going. It's amazing. I know she's contemplated suicide multiple times (If she didn't have me and her cat Noodles there is no doubt in my mind that she would have) and she hates the fact that she can't do anything with her life but for some reason God has kept her around. If anything has made me truly believe in miracles it's her.
Recently my mom hasn't been doing so well. Not that that's anything new, but for some reason she feels like she's winding down; that her 9 lives are running out. I try not to think about it. But I'm so busy that I don't talk to her or see her as often as I should, and it scares me to death that she might die during one of the periods when I haven't talked to her in a while. She recently asked me to help her get a will together, which, at my age, is like the saddest thing a kid can be asked by a parent :/
11. Who are some of your closest friends?
mythos and another friend named Annie. I've known both since high school; I consider both my best friends, though our relationships are very different. I don't see either of them nearly as much as I'd like, but somehow we manage to stick together, which is amazing :D
12. What are some of the things you like most?
Food. Seriously. I love to eat and I love to cook. I never grew out of my sweet tooth so I still love chocolate and candy as well. For fun (When I actually have time, which is never) I like to play video games and try to find web design-y things to do. When I was younger I practically devoured books in my free time, but I don't really anymore, which makes me sad. I watch a bit of anime/television, usually just while eating lunch or cooking. Recently I've become obsessed with customizing my desktop. I love being with friends, so I'd almost always rather do something with others than something alone. I didn't have many friends when I was younger so I think I'm trying to make up the time now :)
Apparently I also enjoy writing about myself. Good god. I apologize.
Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out. :)
There are probably only one or two people who don't know the answers to all these, but I feel like procrastinating on my hw so I'll post it anyway.
1. First Name
Meaghan. Pronounced like megan . It's the Irish-Gaelic spelling, because my family on my dad's side is Irish. I remember my mom mentioning once that she liked the name because she had recently read The Thornbirds, which has a character named Meggie. I've never read it, but I've heard she's not such an admirable character. I'll have to read it one day and decide for myself, I guess.
2. Age
21. I didn't actually drink before I turned 21 (minus some spiked cider) so my birthday really was a milestone for me. One of my favorite parts about finally being 21 is that I go out to a bar on wednesday nights during school to do country swing. It's tons of fun, and I usually don't even drink because it's a school night. Also, same with mythos, I got my license at this age. Combination of me being lazy and having too many friends who would drive me around in highschool.
3. Location
I grew up in SW Portland, Oregon, and still live there over Christmas and Spring Breaks. I love Portland; it's where I want to live when I get older. The suburbs are nice and relatively safe, the schools are good, the downtown area always has something interesting going on, and you're about an hour away from wither the coast or the mountains. I'm really a very nostalgic person, so while my other highschool classmates were dreaming of moving to Cali or Chicago or somewhere exciting, I really just wanted to stay close to home.
During school I live In Corvallis, OR. It's pretty nice. A LOT smaller, which is annoying, but I don't really have the time to do much during school anyways. It's a very old town with farmland all around (It was actually the state capital for a little while!), and there's a real emphasis on locally grown and prepared food here which is really cool. Because OSU is such a big Engineering school there's also an HP campus here as well as a few other technology and science companies, so it's not all farmers and college kids :D
Last summer I lived and interned at a chemical plant in Kalama, WA, and I'll be returning there this next summer as well. It is seriously small. Population: 1,783. And I'm sure that contains a lot of the surrounding areas as well, the population within the city is even smaller. The town is right on the Columbia river, and formed to house workers from plants and industries built there. The main thing it's known for is its antique stores. There are apparently 10, though I don't think I ever actually saw that many. It also has a couple restaurants (that suck), something that's not quite small enough to be a mini-mart but not big enough to be a grocery store (that charges EXORBITANT prices, I might add), a gas station, and a couple banks. That's about it. On one of the last nights of my internship some of our coworkers took us out "bar hopping". Which means we went from the one bar (a pizza tavern that only sold beer) to the other bar (technically a mexican restaurant). That's how small the place is. It's nice though, and very safe. And my apartment deck had a river view, which was pretty awesome.
4. Occupation
Student. 1st year senior on a five year plan, specifically in Chemical Engineering. I also work retail over Christmas and I intern at a chemical plant over the summer, as I mentioned. I used to have a job working on a website, but I quit because it took to much time away from school and my boss (the company owner) was... well, he really had no idea how to run a business, and I was sick of dealing with him.
My goal is to one day have a research job that incorporates both chemistry and green engineering. A lot of time chemical engineers go into process engineering, which basically entails doing a bunch of calculations to figure out how to make something go faster, or create less waste, or whatnot. That feels so pointless and dead-end to me, and I really hope I don't get stuck doing it. I like research because I feel like I'm doing something new, like I'm contributing something useful to society. I want to feel like my work is helping others, not just myself and my company. Which is also where the green part comes in. If I were to make some cool new green product... I think that'd be awesome. (Also, I'm not going to lie, it'd be really cool to get my name in a paper or something. I'd like my fifteen minutes of fame. Which just doesn't happen in process.)
I've been toying with the idea of freelancing in web design along side of my normal job, just for fun. We'll see if that actually happens or not.
5. Partner?
vashbattousai, for five and a half years now. First (and probably last) boyfriend. We met in high school, and have been dating since the summer after my sophomore year. When I was younger I always used to get teased by my cousins for never having a boyfriend, because they'd both been having them ever since elementary school. I always told them that my first relationship would be way more serious and last way longer than any of theirs were, and I was right :D
We've been together so long that we've already had most of the awkward conversations you can have with a significant other (marriage, kids, what color we should paint our house, etc) so it's nice not having to think about that. But we also argue over silly things like an old married couple sometimes, which can get annoying. We're both really stubborn, so that doesn't help either :) We have a lot of the same friends and hobbies, and spend quite a lot of time together making dinner and whatnot during school. I can't even imagine anything different :)
Since we've been together for so long everyone (especially the girls I work retail with, dear GOD, they are gossipy) always asks when the hell we're getting married, and the answer is sometime after college, which means at least a year and a half. Our relationship hasn't really had many big changes (for good or for bad) so taking that step will be very exciting.
6. Kids
None yet, thank God. I do not want to manage kids and school and work. No thank you. But I definitely do want kids in the long run. I've always said 2-3, vashbattousai wants 1-2, so I guess that means we'll likely have 2 :D I love kids, and I think it'd be amazing to be able to introduce someone to the world from the very beginning. I have a lot plans on how I'd like to raise my kids and what I'd like to do with them. I know everyone always does and half the time it never works out like you want to, but it's fun to think about.
7. Brothers/Sisters
None. Everyone always complained about their brothers and sisters when they were little, but I always wanted one. I was bored a lot as a child: My dad didn't really play with me very much after a certain age and a lot of time my mom was too sick or too tired to. There's really only so long you can entertain yourself. But this did mean I was on the internet early as a child, which sparked my future interest in technology and video games :) We learned in my sociology of the family class that the longest lasting relationship you will have in your life is with your siblings. I do feel a little cheated out of that experience, but I do have two cousins close to my age who I am pretty close to, so they kinda make up for it.
8. Pets
Technically right now I have none, though my parents do. The last pet who was really mine was our cat Marissa, who died last year. At my dad's we now have Suzy, a little brat of a teenage cat, and my mom has Noodles, a fat, demanding cat who's about 6 or so. I've always been a cat person, but I don't hate dogs or anything. My mom and I used to foster feral (wild) kittens before they went out for adoption. The most we ever had at once (in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, I might add) was 8 kittens and a full grown cat. I really miss fostering and plan on doing it when I retire. We've also had mice, rats, fish, crabs and one dog, when I was really little, who was my first pet.
9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life
1. School. Unfortunately. I'm really not feeling it anymore, but the show must go on.
2. My mom. I'll explain more in the next section, but she's really not doing well and it worries me.
3. Waiting. I'm so close to being done with school that a lot of the time I feel like I'm just waiting for the next chapter of my life to start. My life has been rather static, no huge ups or downs, so I get bored with it easily.
10. Parents
My parents divorced when I was 5. My dad is kind of a control freak and my mom just didn't want to deal with it anymore so she left. I was very lucky in that there was no custody battle: I switched off between houses weekly except that every Tuesday I always stayed at my dads and every Wednesday I always stayed at my mom's. The divorce didn't ruin my life or make me need therapy or anything like that. It's just how things turned out and it really doesn't bug me at all. Because of my mom's health problems it got to the point during high school where I no longer lived with her, but I still saw her often. When I'm home now I live with my dad and visit my mom as often as I can.
My dad graduated from the university of Oregon and works as the director of credit for a NW plumbing supply company. He's been with the company for at least 20 years, more I think. Our relationship has always been sort of rocky. He has always had very high expectations of me and I get in trouble when I don't meet them. This lead to a lot of yelling when I was younger, at it really got to me emotionally. Going to college has helped our relationship immensely, I think we really need the time apart.
When I was a senior in high school my dad remarried to Marilyn, who is awesome and totally the opposite of the evil stepmothers you always hear about. We get along really well. She has been the best thing for my relationship with my father, as she mellows him out when he's angry and helps us get through discussions without them ending in yelling matches. My dad tries to look good in front of her so if I have to say anything I know he won't like I make sure she's around as a buffer :) I never knew my dad to crack a joke or ever seem truly happy before Marilyn came around, so she really has changed our family dynamic immensely.
My mom and I are really close. We're actually more like friends than mother and daughter. I have always appreciated the fact that she treats me like an equal and not like someone she's in charge of. She's really creative, and has kinda inspired that in me, though I will never be as awesome as she is in that respect. I think my mom took a few college courses but never graduated. She used to work as an accountant before she got sick.
I can't remember a time when my mom wasn't sick. Being sick has really been the defining experience of her life, which is really sad. She hasn't worked since I was in pre-school, and she lives on welfare and some support from my grandparents, none of which is really enough. She has uncontrollable diabetes, pancreatitis, osteoporosis, numerous heart problems, thyroid problems, anemia, likely some form of cancer, and much more. She used to be an alcoholic (sober for 20+ years), smokes, has had at least two strokes, was once in a coma for 4 days (during which she actually had the light at the end of the tunnel experience but felt her self being pulled back by something), has been in the hospital at least a million times. She has chronic depression and general low self-esteem. She has outlived every doctor's life length prediction and should have died at least 4 times. She seriously does have 9 lives; we joke that the feline race made her an honorary member for all she's done for their kittens over the years :) But she just keeps going. It's amazing. I know she's contemplated suicide multiple times (If she didn't have me and her cat Noodles there is no doubt in my mind that she would have) and she hates the fact that she can't do anything with her life but for some reason God has kept her around. If anything has made me truly believe in miracles it's her.
Recently my mom hasn't been doing so well. Not that that's anything new, but for some reason she feels like she's winding down; that her 9 lives are running out. I try not to think about it. But I'm so busy that I don't talk to her or see her as often as I should, and it scares me to death that she might die during one of the periods when I haven't talked to her in a while. She recently asked me to help her get a will together, which, at my age, is like the saddest thing a kid can be asked by a parent :/
11. Who are some of your closest friends?
mythos and another friend named Annie. I've known both since high school; I consider both my best friends, though our relationships are very different. I don't see either of them nearly as much as I'd like, but somehow we manage to stick together, which is amazing :D
12. What are some of the things you like most?
Food. Seriously. I love to eat and I love to cook. I never grew out of my sweet tooth so I still love chocolate and candy as well. For fun (When I actually have time, which is never) I like to play video games and try to find web design-y things to do. When I was younger I practically devoured books in my free time, but I don't really anymore, which makes me sad. I watch a bit of anime/television, usually just while eating lunch or cooking. Recently I've become obsessed with customizing my desktop. I love being with friends, so I'd almost always rather do something with others than something alone. I didn't have many friends when I was younger so I think I'm trying to make up the time now :)
Apparently I also enjoy writing about myself. Good god. I apologize.