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This is a meme!
THE RULES:
1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.
I blame
kimonkey7 particularly for my response to number 4. Probably for other stuff too. Like this whole post. Leave a comment if you'd like some Qs.
1) How long have you been a vegetarian? What made you decide to become one?
I’ve been a vegetarian for - OMFG - 15 years. I converted to vegetarianism to punish my father. This was unfortunate, because my father is a good man and he already had his hands full playing single dad at the time. The last thing he needed was melodrama AND anaemia. These days I am a vegetarian because it bugs me that you can just walk into the supermarket and pick that shit up. I’d feel okay about eating meat if I had to walk through the abattoir to get to the lamb chops. I’ve never discounted the possibility that I will eat a fish or a chicken or a cow again, but I’m gonna have to kill it myself. Currently? Seems like a lot of work and angst for one lousy steak that’s gonna be haunting my colon for the next fifty years. I loiter at BBQ grills though, sucking up the stench. I miss meat.
Someone at a party the other night said to me: I find vegetarianism intriguing because the closer you get to your idealized notion of it, the more full of hypocrisy you become. I wanted to say: Fuck, DUDE. Get OVER yourself. Instead I said to them: If I’ve made my peace with my inconsistencies? I don’t think they should be keeping you up at night. This appeared to be just as inflammatory for some reason. I ended up backing away slowly, my hands raised in a soothing fashion.
2) At what point in your life did you realize you had a skill for, or even a desire/need for writing? In what manner did the realization come?
Just now, when you pointed it out. Via this question. Honestly? I can’t remember. My mother has boxes and boxes of all this shit I wrote when I was like, five years old. I keep telling her to burn that crap. My mother would have you believe I came out of the womb with a feather in one hand and an inkpot in the other. She’s horrendously biased, riddled with mental illness and cannot be relied upon to regularly take her meds.
I was a very shy kid and I grew up in a family of razor wits. It was kill or be killed at the dinner table in my house. I was always the one sliding the cutting remark across the table on a piece of A4 paper. Then my brother would roll it up real thin and stab me with it till I screamed. Dad would smack him one and say 'Are you happy now you made your little sister cry?' And yeah, he always was.
Kurt Vonnegut Jnr and Joseph Heller have to shoulder some of the blame. Inside my head, writing feels like brushing horse hair. Like I’m trying to straighten something out. It always has.
3) What's the one stereotypical, over-the-top annoying portrayal of Australians you wish American's would forget about? It's that Crocodile Dundee guy, right?
Oh bejeezus, you guys still remember Mick Dundee? *puts gun in mouth* There was a Simpsons Down Under episode a few years back that drove us Aussies completely fucking INSANE with frustration. I can’t remember why now. I think they screwed up the accents and went bunta with the convict settlement references. As a nation, we’re a bit sensitive about that. We don’t seem to mind that we massacre, persecute and subjugate our indigenous population. But we mind about the ball and chain cracks. *pulls trigger*
4) What's the best fannish sentence you've written this week? Ever?
This week? I dunno if he blew up that photo shoot but the entire west australian seaboard just EXPLODED taking my pants with it.
Ever? Dear Barry Pitman, even though I am only eight I still think you are the best weatherman in the whole of Australia and I watch Channel Seven news every night.
And yes, this freakish display of affection towards the WEATHERMAN was not only sanctioned but also financed by my parents, who put the stamp on the envelope. Disturbingly, LA Story is still one of my all-time favourite films, so go figure.
5) Tell me about candles.
They are still sitting on the bookcase as you come into my house ten years, five states, thirteen houses later. He gave them to me for my twenty-first birthday, right before San Francisco. I didn’t want to learn to live without him. He fell through a hole in my pocket like a touchstone. If you tossed him in a sea of pebbles I could still spot him from miles away. At the airport he looked like a movie star. He was epoxy. They were sculpted by hand. I never could get a match anywhere near them.