Seven Sins Meme: Day One: Pride
There is a paradox in pride: it makes some men ridiculous,
but prevents others from becoming so.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
1. I am very intelligent. I have an uncannily fast reading speed, go through books like breathing and have a vocabulary beyond my daily means to use. I loved writing five page introduction to twenty-page papers, and an incredibly good writer at times. I have kept a copy of the recommendation letter to my Masters, comparing my writing to Nabokov's (and I seriously try not to shake people who only know this man, this renown international master English prose stylist, by way of Lolita) with his intricate word play and expansive use of the English language.
School, when I liked it, was incredibly easy. And fast. Like completing my whole Masters in eighteen months. I never understood why people not to study the night before, or even during the twenty minutes before a test, since it worked fine for me in every capacity, helping on tests and quizes. I very much like the life around academia, and the world of things that align with it in all places. This is where I feel I am constantly growing and learning. It's why my habits are so very far off of anyone my age and have been since before I was an adult even.
I dislike and find myself not entertained by most popular tv and movies for these reasons. Because most stories are predictable and present comedy is just the bottom line of this for me, because it seems to take the easy way out. And I really don't want to take all pleasure I've gotten from so much learning and go out and club. Ever. I didn't at twenty-one, and likely won't ever. And I try very hard not to be insulted by the people who keep telling me I'm going to "grow into it eventually."
2. I am well traveled.I have been to several countries to travel. I have painted churches in Mexico. I have scuba-dived the Great Barrier Reef. I have walked battlefields in Quebec. I have stayed in Buddhist Temples in Korea. I have touched so many different types of religion and politics. I know how to ride horses from Texas, and ski and ice skate from Christmas up in Michigan through Maine. New Orleans. New England. So many places in each direction.
I am never as happy as when I am traveling to a brand new place. And it is never lost on me the amount of money for trans-continental travel that I lose with in-country travel every year.
3. I am romantic.I am extraordinarily good at displaying my love for people, especially the person I am courting or with. I don't mean that once or twice a year grand gesture. I mean living and breathing it. Adoration. The clearest speech straight from my heart, wrapped in poetry and prose, in any minute it feels compelling. Doing small things, All The Time. All. The. Time.
But I am good at grand displays as well. I gave Phoenix a card and a rose (of a different color each time, without repeating) on every month on the day we first met for two years. I started Billy's painting collection randomly on a Valentine's Day, because he mentioned wanting to experiment, with a full bag of supplies. Last year, I wrote a dozen letters to Hope detailing, my world away from her and how she was already in my heart, in one weekend.
I listen to people very well, which isn't as hard as most people make it out to be. People tell you what they want and what they need in easy, simple words, but each of them speaks in their own language. Loving them isn't about loving them how you would best feel loved, but how they would best see it and hear it and feel it.
4. I am quite, but not meticulously, neat.There is a space for a thing and the thing in its space (with the only caveat being, that 'the center cannot hold' when I fall apart in any other way). I am Virgo-like obsessive with my space, and so Taurus about My Things. All My Things. You only have to look at how organized my work desk is for this. Under my bathroom sink. All the things on my dresser. In my Altar. My magical cabinet and bookcases. Any of my book cases.
I like things in their place. I don't think it is hard to put something away where you got it from, or to have a place where things can go right when you get home. Clutter is bothersome. Large messes are abhorrent at times. Earl and I keep our house in a state where it consistently only every really needs one or two hours of work on it if we're ever annoyed by something. Usually it's only a handful of minutes straightening something.
5. I am honest to a fault.I have and give and demand the kind of sincerity, that as I was told recently, is terrifying. Replace it with 'exhausting' and you get the opinion two relationships back, too. I am up front about pretty much everything in my life, from first blush. My religion. My sexuality. My hobbies. My loves. My confusions. My Inconvenient Truths. My falling apart. If I've been asked for the truth, I won't lie, or evade, or omit even if I think it will hurt someone or paint me in a bad light.
I was offered the chance to get out a ticket last year, if only I could write and sign a statement saying that I hadn't been doing what I was ticketed for. Every single close person in my life at the time pointed out I didn't have the money to say no. But I did, in the end, because I don't have the room in me to lie. Even about something trivial and costly. My morals are worth too much more.
I do not hold people, as a group, in my life to this mark of expectation. Which is probably just as much a fault, as it is something I do so I'm not constantly in the state I am right now in my life.
6. I'm a survivor. God. I don't even know how many ways I can point out this one. My sister's death. My parent's divorce. The abuse of one. The mental collapse of the other. The things my past significant others have done both to our relationship and to me, that fall into several very, very black categories or further and further ick. The kind of which is all over posts both long ago and only months old.
I may whine or cry or howl or ramble forever heartbroken at whatever my problem, but all along the same way I know that there is no way it can burn down my forest. The only person who can give anyone else not the 'right' but the 'ability' to break me is me. And I won't. I found that for myself two years ago, after a near two decade life of thinking I didn't have it.
And I don't plan to ever let that go.
7. I am an accomplished signer. That had a question mark the first time I wrote it. It's really getting harder to pick things as it gets later and the numbers get further. But I spent the first two decades of my life entrenched in music. Seventeen years were spent in being trained to be a high soprano. Which doesn't count the years I continued singing in choirs that still followed after formal education ceased.
The original plan was for me to go to college and major in music. And from there to be trained for Opera . I cannot be without music for very long or I start to go a little stir crazy. I have an ever expanding Itunes/Ipod. You will find me constantly singing both with any source producing music (radio, tv, computer, music device) and all by my lonesome.
I think in music a lot of the time. And just to be contrary -- while I'm about as diva-less, and against soprano-diva-ing, as one can get, I can't manage karaoke bars. I really, really, really can't. It's just asking me to sit there and critique people. Not even on purpose, but because two decades of being taught takes over my head. I will be miserable, and guilt-ridden, the whole time.
Day One: Pride - Seven great things about yourself
Day Two: Envy - Seven things you lack and covet
Day Three: Wrath - Seven things that piss you off
Day Four: Sloth - Seven things you neglect to do
Day Five: Greed - Seven worldly material desires
Day Six: Gluttony - Seven guilty pleasures
Day Seven: Lust - Seven love secrets