In the words of Emmett, 1, 2, 3, 4--
I have a readership of approximately three, so this may turn out to nothing, but we'll see, won't we?
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.
1.what do you want to do after high school? after college?
My immediate goal is to not go insane waiting for college acceptance letters, so I can know what I’m doing after June. But what do I want to do? I want to build my own life, with a lot of little pieces pulled together from this life, but one that’s mine. I want to see what it’s like to not be wary of doing anything that doesn’t conform to the image I’ve got people seeing when they think of me. I want to meet some more people who I connect with over more than the fact that they sit next to me in second period. It’d be nice if I could do like my parents and meet someone in the dorms who I could spend the rest of my life with.
After college? I want kids, and a garden. I want someone to cook for. I want to be a vet (veterinarian, not veteran). And I’d like to live somewhere with just enough undeveloped/ruralish bits that I can catch frogs in spring and pick blackberries in summer.
2. why did you play that computer game so much? what did you like about it? (you know which one i mean)
Dad brought home EverQuest one day because a friend at work had told him a little about it, and he thought we could play together. I was careening through every fantasy novel in the junior high school library, and the game box had a big red dragon and an elvish woman on the front, so I figured I’d probably like it.
There’s a good reason gamers call it EverCrack-it wasn’t long before I became so totally wrapped up in the game I’d spend hours each afternoon in front of the computer. Weekends I’d wake up early to play. I forgot to eat, some days.
A lot of factors conspired together to make the game so enjoyable, so ensnaring. I had spent years sitting on the family room floor, enviously watching Mark and Dad navigate the mazes on their console games, which I was never any good at. I was good at EQ, and not because anyone was playing easy for me or letting me win. There was no winning. There was always the next quest for treasures or glory, the next area to explore, the next bad guy to smack. And that was a part of what took so much time-it never ended. Just when you thought you’d gotten as far as you could, seen everything to be seen, gotten the best armor and the coolest weapon, a new expansion would come out and a new continent would be waiting for you to conquer.
I made a lot of friends in Norrath, the EQ world. I never knew their real names, and not much about their lives, but I spent hours playing with them, collaborating to defeat our opponents or scampering over icebergs, collecting snowballs to make rootbeer floats. And the people in-game kept me coming back, because it adds some responsibility-they can’t do as well on their own as with you there, so you feel obligated to come. And we had a lot of fun, so I came.
Another big factor in my huge hours of playing was the fact that it was something Dad and I did together. And it wasn’t so much a father-daughter thing as much as two friends playing a game. He wasn’t always the adult leader-especially when traveling, because I could read maps and he always seemed to get us lost-and when his friends played with us I wasn’t treated like a little kid either. In fact, most of my in-game friends didn’t guess I was a teenager for a long time. But Dad and I had a lot of fun playing together, more fun than we’d had doing anything else.
The biggest pull though, for me, at least, was the attachment to my character and the fantasies she let me play out. I mean, dude, I was a seven-foot tall barbarian warrior with a long red braid, jeweled armor, and a gigantic sword. It was the ultimate I-can-do-anything-the-boys-can-do rush, to be the “tank,” the “meatshield” that stood in front of the giant and took the hits so the weakling magic users could hide in my shadow and cast their sparkly spells. I’ve always taken pride in being tough, although in real life that usually translates into cold tolerance and a little bit of satisfaction from bruises and scars. And I have always been frustrated by people who assume I can’t do something because I’m a girl. And I got enormously attached to that girl; I cried when she died, I had bad dreams one time when I lost her corpse up a steep cliff and couldn’t get it back for a week. She’s where I get the nickname I use for myself-sandicurls-and she’s in my email, my AIM screename. I took a good picture of her kneeling on a bed in my-her-hometown, a snowy little village called Halas, and it’s on the cover of my binder, and I remember the best parts of the game whenever I take out my homework.
3. do you dream? (day and/or night)
Do I ever. I used to dream about Everquest. When I started playing Ultimate Frisbee I saw flying discs all night and most of the day, which was distracting. I spent the better part of second semester freshman, sophomore and junior years daydreaming about Emandal and days under shady trees and climbing hot rocks. Sometimes I have odd dreams about things going wrongly at school. When I was about 6 I used to daydream that my cousin Beverly would come out of the sky during recess, all dressed in floaty purply-pink skirts and shiny wings, and she’d carry me away somewhere. I never even knew her very well; she was a much older cousin from my aunt’s second marriage, which only lasted a couple years, so she wasn’t in my life very long. I don’t remember anything about her except her name and the daydreams.
4. tell me a story about winter.
School is the reason I haven’t been on skis in 14 years. My gradfather loved to ski, and Dad loved to go with him. But neither one liked crowded weekends on the slopes, so they went during the week. And, as long as I was a four-year-old in preschool, I could go with them.
I’m sure I was really cute, all bundled up in my poofy jacket and three layers of sweats and fuzzy mittens. I can’t see myself in this particular story though; most of the time I can see scenes as if from third-person, but not that day. I can remember the hot chocolate at the lodge, with lots of marshmallows, and the floor of the ski-rental place slippery with muddy bits of snow. Everything else was above my eye-level.
What I remember best about the last ski trip I took, though, is this one hill, that I now realize was barely an incline, down from the top of the ski lift. I was ok on level ground, but going down so quickly, and out of control-I still have no idea how one on skis slows down-stripped away any confidence I might have had in my four-year-old head. So, I stood between Dad’s legs and he held a ski pole horizontally at my chest level, a foot or so in front. I wrapped my mittens around the pole and down we went-and again, and again, and I decided that maybe skiing was fun after all, despite the falling down and the wet snow in my boots and the layers and layers my mother had insisted I wear.
But then I started going to school, and going skiing on a Tuesday afternoon was no longer an option.
5. describe someone important to you.
My English teacher reminds me of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. She’s short and roundish and has wispy gray hair that she wears, every day, in a bun on top of her head. She told a story once about getting stuck at a metal detector station at an airport because she had too many hairpins in her bun, and the guards wanted her to undo it all.
She is the kind of teacher who, should you turn in BSed work, or fail to make an effort in any way, she wouldn’t say anything, but you’d feel guilty anyway. She gives out a ton of work, but she makes every minute in class count. This makes it hard for even the most cynical students to dislike her.
She reads every essay we write, twice, and makes lots of helpful comments. This might be the norm in a school like Urban, but I bet that entire school would fit in my senior class. Some kids get ticked off when we don’t get papers back for a week, two weeks, but it’s because she puts so much effort into really helping us improve as writers and as critical readers of literature. She’s changed the way I read so much that I wonder if I really understood anything I read 2 years ago. The best analytical writing I’ve done I wrote for her class. Her questions really make me think, and surprise me when I come up with intelligent answers.
She has a fascinating way of lecturing, walking up and down the center aisle as we all follow along in our annotated texts and scribble down her words in the margins. If you look up from your notes, it’s a pretty good bet that she’ll be looking right at you, talking to you. But everyone has noticed it, so she appears to be able to spread the effect over whole blocks of desks, which is almost supernatural. And she’s so dramatic, it’s obvious there’s nothing she’d rather be doing.
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.
1.what do you want to do after high school? after college?
My immediate goal is to not go insane waiting for college acceptance letters, so I can know what I’m doing after June. But what do I want to do? I want to build my own life, with a lot of little pieces pulled together from this life, but one that’s mine. I want to see what it’s like to not be wary of doing anything that doesn’t conform to the image I’ve got people seeing when they think of me. I want to meet some more people who I connect with over more than the fact that they sit next to me in second period. It’d be nice if I could do like my parents and meet someone in the dorms who I could spend the rest of my life with.
After college? I want kids, and a garden. I want someone to cook for. I want to be a vet (veterinarian, not veteran). And I’d like to live somewhere with just enough undeveloped/ruralish bits that I can catch frogs in spring and pick blackberries in summer.
2. why did you play that computer game so much? what did you like about it? (you know which one i mean)
Dad brought home EverQuest one day because a friend at work had told him a little about it, and he thought we could play together. I was careening through every fantasy novel in the junior high school library, and the game box had a big red dragon and an elvish woman on the front, so I figured I’d probably like it.
There’s a good reason gamers call it EverCrack-it wasn’t long before I became so totally wrapped up in the game I’d spend hours each afternoon in front of the computer. Weekends I’d wake up early to play. I forgot to eat, some days.
A lot of factors conspired together to make the game so enjoyable, so ensnaring. I had spent years sitting on the family room floor, enviously watching Mark and Dad navigate the mazes on their console games, which I was never any good at. I was good at EQ, and not because anyone was playing easy for me or letting me win. There was no winning. There was always the next quest for treasures or glory, the next area to explore, the next bad guy to smack. And that was a part of what took so much time-it never ended. Just when you thought you’d gotten as far as you could, seen everything to be seen, gotten the best armor and the coolest weapon, a new expansion would come out and a new continent would be waiting for you to conquer.
I made a lot of friends in Norrath, the EQ world. I never knew their real names, and not much about their lives, but I spent hours playing with them, collaborating to defeat our opponents or scampering over icebergs, collecting snowballs to make rootbeer floats. And the people in-game kept me coming back, because it adds some responsibility-they can’t do as well on their own as with you there, so you feel obligated to come. And we had a lot of fun, so I came.
Another big factor in my huge hours of playing was the fact that it was something Dad and I did together. And it wasn’t so much a father-daughter thing as much as two friends playing a game. He wasn’t always the adult leader-especially when traveling, because I could read maps and he always seemed to get us lost-and when his friends played with us I wasn’t treated like a little kid either. In fact, most of my in-game friends didn’t guess I was a teenager for a long time. But Dad and I had a lot of fun playing together, more fun than we’d had doing anything else.
The biggest pull though, for me, at least, was the attachment to my character and the fantasies she let me play out. I mean, dude, I was a seven-foot tall barbarian warrior with a long red braid, jeweled armor, and a gigantic sword. It was the ultimate I-can-do-anything-the-boys-can-do rush, to be the “tank,” the “meatshield” that stood in front of the giant and took the hits so the weakling magic users could hide in my shadow and cast their sparkly spells. I’ve always taken pride in being tough, although in real life that usually translates into cold tolerance and a little bit of satisfaction from bruises and scars. And I have always been frustrated by people who assume I can’t do something because I’m a girl. And I got enormously attached to that girl; I cried when she died, I had bad dreams one time when I lost her corpse up a steep cliff and couldn’t get it back for a week. She’s where I get the nickname I use for myself-sandicurls-and she’s in my email, my AIM screename. I took a good picture of her kneeling on a bed in my-her-hometown, a snowy little village called Halas, and it’s on the cover of my binder, and I remember the best parts of the game whenever I take out my homework.
3. do you dream? (day and/or night)
Do I ever. I used to dream about Everquest. When I started playing Ultimate Frisbee I saw flying discs all night and most of the day, which was distracting. I spent the better part of second semester freshman, sophomore and junior years daydreaming about Emandal and days under shady trees and climbing hot rocks. Sometimes I have odd dreams about things going wrongly at school. When I was about 6 I used to daydream that my cousin Beverly would come out of the sky during recess, all dressed in floaty purply-pink skirts and shiny wings, and she’d carry me away somewhere. I never even knew her very well; she was a much older cousin from my aunt’s second marriage, which only lasted a couple years, so she wasn’t in my life very long. I don’t remember anything about her except her name and the daydreams.
4. tell me a story about winter.
School is the reason I haven’t been on skis in 14 years. My gradfather loved to ski, and Dad loved to go with him. But neither one liked crowded weekends on the slopes, so they went during the week. And, as long as I was a four-year-old in preschool, I could go with them.
I’m sure I was really cute, all bundled up in my poofy jacket and three layers of sweats and fuzzy mittens. I can’t see myself in this particular story though; most of the time I can see scenes as if from third-person, but not that day. I can remember the hot chocolate at the lodge, with lots of marshmallows, and the floor of the ski-rental place slippery with muddy bits of snow. Everything else was above my eye-level.
What I remember best about the last ski trip I took, though, is this one hill, that I now realize was barely an incline, down from the top of the ski lift. I was ok on level ground, but going down so quickly, and out of control-I still have no idea how one on skis slows down-stripped away any confidence I might have had in my four-year-old head. So, I stood between Dad’s legs and he held a ski pole horizontally at my chest level, a foot or so in front. I wrapped my mittens around the pole and down we went-and again, and again, and I decided that maybe skiing was fun after all, despite the falling down and the wet snow in my boots and the layers and layers my mother had insisted I wear.
But then I started going to school, and going skiing on a Tuesday afternoon was no longer an option.
5. describe someone important to you.
My English teacher reminds me of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. She’s short and roundish and has wispy gray hair that she wears, every day, in a bun on top of her head. She told a story once about getting stuck at a metal detector station at an airport because she had too many hairpins in her bun, and the guards wanted her to undo it all.
She is the kind of teacher who, should you turn in BSed work, or fail to make an effort in any way, she wouldn’t say anything, but you’d feel guilty anyway. She gives out a ton of work, but she makes every minute in class count. This makes it hard for even the most cynical students to dislike her.
She reads every essay we write, twice, and makes lots of helpful comments. This might be the norm in a school like Urban, but I bet that entire school would fit in my senior class. Some kids get ticked off when we don’t get papers back for a week, two weeks, but it’s because she puts so much effort into really helping us improve as writers and as critical readers of literature. She’s changed the way I read so much that I wonder if I really understood anything I read 2 years ago. The best analytical writing I’ve done I wrote for her class. Her questions really make me think, and surprise me when I come up with intelligent answers.
She has a fascinating way of lecturing, walking up and down the center aisle as we all follow along in our annotated texts and scribble down her words in the margins. If you look up from your notes, it’s a pretty good bet that she’ll be looking right at you, talking to you. But everyone has noticed it, so she appears to be able to spread the effect over whole blocks of desks, which is almost supernatural. And she’s so dramatic, it’s obvious there’s nothing she’d rather be doing.