Ten Things to Hate About Me
Thank you so much to everyone who's replied to/pimped/glanced at the Why We Slash questions. I'm getting tons of great responses and I really appreciate it. I ought to be working on collating those responses, but I just got back from the World's Most Frustrating Library (what's the point of having all those books if you can't check them out or even, in some cases, read them?), so I feel like screwing around for a while. Also, as there seems to be a lot of new interest in this journal (yay! ...and also, hi!) and the Ten Things meme is everywhere, I thought I'd contribute my own version. So here's the basic rundown on moi, or:
Ten Things to Hate About Me
1. I'm 21; I've been in fandom for 7 years. This means that I've been in fandom for a third of my life. (And that's just internet fandom--if we were talking general fannish tendencies, I'm sure they would date back to shortly after birth, or possibly to the womb.) Yes, this is scary. Yes, this means that fandom is sort of intrinsically tangled up in who I am. And yes, it does mean that I often wonder how my life would be different if I never got into The X-Files--if my aunt never ran into her old friend David Duchovny at a health food restaurant in Brentwood and introduced me, actually, because that's the ass-backwards way I got into The X-Files. If someone had said, "Fuck it, let's go for a pizza," I might not be here right now.
2. I write. Compulsively. When I'm not writing, I feel anxious and depressed. I'm a fast writer when I get going, but I have a hard time getting going. I favor character over plot; I love snarky dialogue; I rely too heavily on pop culture references. If I ever get published, in ten years' time, my work will probably require extensive footnotes in order to be understood. I have written two novels, and neither of them is very good, but the characters are still eating my brain. The first story I ever remember writing was about a Tyrannosaurus Rex who ate all his friends, then was very sad and lonely, and so vomited them back up and everyone lived happily ever after, whee! It was illustrated. I think my writing's improved since then; my drawing hasn't.
3. I was born in Los Angeles, I lived in Vermont for 11 years, I moved back to L.A. when I was 16, and I'm currently studying abroad in Dublin. I mention all this because place is very important to me. I love L.A. unironically: the city is in my blood--kind of like a reverse-infection, as I get itchy and irritable following prolonged lack of exposure. I have recently come to terms with the fact that I'm going to end up there pretty much no matter what. Yet Vermont is where I spent the bulk of my childhood, and it still haunts me. I have a hard time conducting an entire conversation without bringing it up; the joke among my RL friends is that Vermont is my band camp: all my stories start out, "This one time, in Vermont..."
4. I'm kinda Jewish, kinda Protestant, mostly an Atheist. We celebrated all the important holidays growing up, but in a manner that was all about food and family and shiny things, so I've never felt any real need for religion. People are wonderful and awful and complicated enough all on their own, and as far as I'm concerned, the world is beautiful and wonderous without requiring any outside interference. That said, I'm fully tolerant of other people's religious beliefs as long as they're not hateful, and you don't try to inflict them on me. Unless by "inflict" you mean "share your fabulous food/pretty songs/cultural-religious whatever"--'cause that? That's totally cool. ;-)
5. I was recently described as being "in academia," which I find greatly amusing, as I'm not so much "in academia" as "enduring academia." Only 7 months left, whee! ...Of course, then I have to get a real job, and since that "watch TV/check LJ/read/write" post has yet to appear, I'm probably going to end up working at the Hollywood Reporter (summer '03) or at Barnes & Noble (summer '05) again. Um, yay?
6. I can't cook, but I make truly fabulous chocolate chip cookies.
7. I love receiving feedback on stories--really, really love it. But, as I've recently discovered, I'm crap at responding to it. I think this is because compliments, as much as I love them, make me kind of uncomfortable: I'm the type of person who responds to a comment of "That's a nice skirt," with "It was only a dollar!" I kind of wish I could discover the fic feedback equivalent of that--"I wrote it in an hour!" seems rude, though, and also, unlike the dollar-clothing comment, it's (mostly) untrue. Any suggestions? Or alternately, anyone out there who wouldn't mind being told that the nice piece of fanfic they just read and responded to was only a dollar? ;-)
8. As the above anecdote might indicate, I'm extremely cheap. I'm currently wearing a hoodie that was, indeed, only a dollar, and much of the rest of my wardrobe is similarly the product of thrift shops and yard sales. I do have a good eye--my lovely Guess leather jacket was only 10 bucks!--but I also manage to accumulate a lot of crap, based on the lure of it being "only __" or "50% off" or even *rapturous breath* free. I remember spending hours at the Addison County Fair (you know: one time, in Vermont...) not strolling the midway or watching the cow shows (yes: cow shows) but wandering through the corporate exhibition tents where I could get fabulous treasures like water-conservation comic books, tile samples, mini-tape measures, and free pencils with LEEMAN & SONS UPHOLSTERY printed on them. I saved this stuff for years, and only threw it away when we moved.
9. I love, love, love talking with people, and yet I'm intensely anti-social. I'm still not sure what's up with that: why I can be in the middle of an excellent conversation and suddenly want to run away and hide. According to far too many stories that my mother tells far too often, I was an extremely loquacious child...and that just did not go over very well in a rural Vermont elementary school, I guess. In the past I've dealt with this by becoming first really withdrawn and quiet, and then intensely outspoken--the "she'll say anything!" girl. Even now I tend to bounce between the two extremes.
10. But why are you even listening to me? I'm a virgin who can't drive. ;-)
Ten Things to Hate About Me
1. I'm 21; I've been in fandom for 7 years. This means that I've been in fandom for a third of my life. (And that's just internet fandom--if we were talking general fannish tendencies, I'm sure they would date back to shortly after birth, or possibly to the womb.) Yes, this is scary. Yes, this means that fandom is sort of intrinsically tangled up in who I am. And yes, it does mean that I often wonder how my life would be different if I never got into The X-Files--if my aunt never ran into her old friend David Duchovny at a health food restaurant in Brentwood and introduced me, actually, because that's the ass-backwards way I got into The X-Files. If someone had said, "Fuck it, let's go for a pizza," I might not be here right now.
2. I write. Compulsively. When I'm not writing, I feel anxious and depressed. I'm a fast writer when I get going, but I have a hard time getting going. I favor character over plot; I love snarky dialogue; I rely too heavily on pop culture references. If I ever get published, in ten years' time, my work will probably require extensive footnotes in order to be understood. I have written two novels, and neither of them is very good, but the characters are still eating my brain. The first story I ever remember writing was about a Tyrannosaurus Rex who ate all his friends, then was very sad and lonely, and so vomited them back up and everyone lived happily ever after, whee! It was illustrated. I think my writing's improved since then; my drawing hasn't.
3. I was born in Los Angeles, I lived in Vermont for 11 years, I moved back to L.A. when I was 16, and I'm currently studying abroad in Dublin. I mention all this because place is very important to me. I love L.A. unironically: the city is in my blood--kind of like a reverse-infection, as I get itchy and irritable following prolonged lack of exposure. I have recently come to terms with the fact that I'm going to end up there pretty much no matter what. Yet Vermont is where I spent the bulk of my childhood, and it still haunts me. I have a hard time conducting an entire conversation without bringing it up; the joke among my RL friends is that Vermont is my band camp: all my stories start out, "This one time, in Vermont..."
4. I'm kinda Jewish, kinda Protestant, mostly an Atheist. We celebrated all the important holidays growing up, but in a manner that was all about food and family and shiny things, so I've never felt any real need for religion. People are wonderful and awful and complicated enough all on their own, and as far as I'm concerned, the world is beautiful and wonderous without requiring any outside interference. That said, I'm fully tolerant of other people's religious beliefs as long as they're not hateful, and you don't try to inflict them on me. Unless by "inflict" you mean "share your fabulous food/pretty songs/cultural-religious whatever"--'cause that? That's totally cool. ;-)
5. I was recently described as being "in academia," which I find greatly amusing, as I'm not so much "in academia" as "enduring academia." Only 7 months left, whee! ...Of course, then I have to get a real job, and since that "watch TV/check LJ/read/write" post has yet to appear, I'm probably going to end up working at the Hollywood Reporter (summer '03) or at Barnes & Noble (summer '05) again. Um, yay?
6. I can't cook, but I make truly fabulous chocolate chip cookies.
7. I love receiving feedback on stories--really, really love it. But, as I've recently discovered, I'm crap at responding to it. I think this is because compliments, as much as I love them, make me kind of uncomfortable: I'm the type of person who responds to a comment of "That's a nice skirt," with "It was only a dollar!" I kind of wish I could discover the fic feedback equivalent of that--"I wrote it in an hour!" seems rude, though, and also, unlike the dollar-clothing comment, it's (mostly) untrue. Any suggestions? Or alternately, anyone out there who wouldn't mind being told that the nice piece of fanfic they just read and responded to was only a dollar? ;-)
8. As the above anecdote might indicate, I'm extremely cheap. I'm currently wearing a hoodie that was, indeed, only a dollar, and much of the rest of my wardrobe is similarly the product of thrift shops and yard sales. I do have a good eye--my lovely Guess leather jacket was only 10 bucks!--but I also manage to accumulate a lot of crap, based on the lure of it being "only __" or "50% off" or even *rapturous breath* free. I remember spending hours at the Addison County Fair (you know: one time, in Vermont...) not strolling the midway or watching the cow shows (yes: cow shows) but wandering through the corporate exhibition tents where I could get fabulous treasures like water-conservation comic books, tile samples, mini-tape measures, and free pencils with LEEMAN & SONS UPHOLSTERY printed on them. I saved this stuff for years, and only threw it away when we moved.
9. I love, love, love talking with people, and yet I'm intensely anti-social. I'm still not sure what's up with that: why I can be in the middle of an excellent conversation and suddenly want to run away and hide. According to far too many stories that my mother tells far too often, I was an extremely loquacious child...and that just did not go over very well in a rural Vermont elementary school, I guess. In the past I've dealt with this by becoming first really withdrawn and quiet, and then intensely outspoken--the "she'll say anything!" girl. Even now I tend to bounce between the two extremes.
10. But why are you even listening to me? I'm a virgin who can't drive. ;-)