too many words
Jul. 23rd, 2009 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanate(words again, composite from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jazzfish & zagzagael)
Five each but with overlap, and feel free to request if you would like me to give you a handful of free-associated words for you to write about. (but don't be surprised if you do request, get some, ignore them, do the meme five times with other people, and then I get cross...)
Fairytales- There are about three different definitions (or perhaps associations would be a better word) for this floating around in my head:
a) the Disney-co-opted (plus a few) ones that everyone knows. B&B, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Three Little Pigs, et cetera. I don’t on the whole like most of these much, because my brain tends to get tired of things after I’ve heard them a certain number of times. I’m also fond of Tam Lin, which I once failed to do a folklore project on because 2 of my interviewees had heard of it, not so much for the story itself, but because I’m extremely fond of some of the modern fiction adaptations. (Fire and Hemlock was my favorite book for years)
b) fairytales/folklore- I may be the only person who can say that I grew up in the storytelling community of the DC area in the 80s/early 90s. My parents were very much involved in organizing the now-dead Voices in the Glen storytelling festival, and I learned early to "listen like an adult" (as in the program flyer saying: "Stories for adults and children who listen like them") as well as taking tickets for workshops and being brought along to countless saturday evening story swaps. So... I've probably forgotten more folktales than the average person meets in a lifetime, not to mention literary stories of a tellable length, and have inherited something of my parents' distain for "personal experience" stories. (which is not to say that there aren't good personal experience stories, but they are often far less interesting than the teller thinks, and life infrequently hands one a nice beginning-middle-ending.)
c) and literary fairy tales, or adaptations of older ones, which is a genre I'm quite fond of. Although if Robin McKinley feels the need to write Beauty & the Beast one more time (*cough*Chalice*cough*) I may have to send her a whiny fan letter. But, yeah. My personal mythology is made up of enchanted forests, talking animals, harps of bone, things that come in threes or sevens, and various other folkloric tropes, and I'm a sucker for fiction that takes this sort of tool set and expands on it well.
(2)Dolls- I'm told that when I was little I disappointed my mother by mainly wanting to play with girl-stereotyped toys, instead of the early legos and various building sets. (and when I did get into lego sets later on, I'd build the castles and Robin Hood's treehouses, and then leave them set up and add more foliage to the forest, shoebox houses, various accessories, and make lego girls with yarn hair and fabric skirts tied on...) At any rate, I've always loved both toy dolls and mannequins. My mother collects ethnic dolls from around the world-- she has literally several thousand of them, made of all sorts of things, in all sizes & regional costumes; I have a small collection of these as well, but they're all in boxes until I have dust-limiting display cases to put them in.
... and I just looked it up, and realized I was rewriting what I said last time (item #4). To add, I'd say I started collecting and customizing (ooh, drawing on a doll!) barbies after college, under the influence ofsaladmonkeylamb and astormorray, and an odd bit of dream I had that brought Psychokiller Barbie into existence. And resins (and Avaren's hands, which kittymaru was working on when I first started reading her journal...) were just too sculptural not to love. Although I have decided that my cut-off is seven of them (things in threes and sevens? yeah...) unless I start making my own.
(2)Hair- see Item 2 here, with the addition that my aunt just cut off her hair at shoulder length. And I'd have to do a little research, but I think this means that I have the longest hair of anyone I personally know, which I find a little bit sad, actually. More people (including me!) should have hair that comes down to the backs of their knees.
Archaeology- Um, ditto on the see previous. Is this cheating? I don't know if I have anything further to say, though...
Introvert-- One who likes books better than people, or has a definite upper limit to social activities before starting to hate everything. People occasionally point me towards various longwinded psychological definitions of this, but I'd say that in my case the main symptoms are that while people in specific are good and worthy and important, a disturbingly large percentage of my friends' friends are not actually people I'm interested in interacting with, and strangers range anywhere from difficult to talk to, to hatred-inducing, depending on my initial impression and my mood. And it doesn't help that I probably learned most of my behavior analysis from written descriptions rather than observing actual people, which means I miss a lot of cues.
----
Newlyweds- Um. We spent a great deal of time on the honeymoon telling each other "we're totally married" and "we're officially grown-ups now" and giggling. And when the receptionist at the doctor's office asked me for my last name the other day I tried to give her my maiden name (I'm fine if you ask for the whole name, it's just breaking it up that's still confusing...) Other than that... well,grauwulf has been excessively busy, so whatever the normal experience is, we're probably having less of it than we otherwise would (though of course the notion of either of us being normal is laughable) but in general this married thing is good for both of us, as it gives us someone else we hold ourselves accountable to to do be more responsible than we otherwise would.
Crafts- I make things. I happen to like things, and I have a habit of having amazing ideas turn up in my head, and no one else is going to do them for me (or do them as well, depending...). My family definitely headed me in the right direction-- my mother, as well as being basically mechanically competent, does many of the traditional home-maker sorts of crafts and insisted that all competent adults should learn to use a sewing machine, and my father does all sorts of woodworking and casts brass, among other things. I tend to be the sort of person who finds it easy to pick up a new handicraft and get a decent result on the first or second try, which makes it sadly easy for me to be fickle with my artforms, so I do a little bit of all kinds of things.
Books- yes, please? From left to right & top to bottom:
paperbacks I haven't read yet, songbooks, misc reference/paperback fiction, combined (mine/his/kiddie/adult, etc)/ 3 boxes of harvard classics & other things inherited from my grandparents
DVDs, Georgette Hayer, Pratchett & Sword & Sorceress anthologies, classical (ancient) authors, ancient history, misc nonfiction
BPotter-drama-misc lit, folklore & short stores, religion & poetry, nursery rhymes & poetry, Complete Works-english language-more literature
hardbacks I haven't read/ combined hardback fiction shelf 1 (with a couple yearbooks at the bottom corner)
combined hardback fiction 2, about to outgrow itself
violin music-misc-binders of school notes, old lit magazines & old journals, reference
craft-sewing-embroidery-etc
Plus two shelving units that aregrauwulf's except for a shelf of cookbooks that are mostly mine, five boxes of picture books in the storage building (mostly children's, but with the first half of Sandman and a couple other aberrations) and the box that inexplicably went missing, but contains my copies of The Merlin Conspiracy and HP#4, among other things I've forgotten. And I've re-started adding to my amazon wishlist as a way of keeping track of the things I want to track down and read.
My mother was a children's librarian before she had me, and so when it came around to my first birthday/christmas, she had so many books that she decided to give me one for every day of christmas instead of presenting them all at once. This tradition endured up through high school at least, and I have an awful lot of things inscribed "Merry x Day of Christmas, [year]" I definitely want to do this for my children as well.
jazzfish & zagzagael)Five each but with overlap, and feel free to request if you would like me to give you a handful of free-associated words for you to write about. (but don't be surprised if you do request, get some, ignore them, do the meme five times with other people, and then I get cross...)
Fairytales- There are about three different definitions (or perhaps associations would be a better word) for this floating around in my head:
a) the Disney-co-opted (plus a few) ones that everyone knows. B&B, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Three Little Pigs, et cetera. I don’t on the whole like most of these much, because my brain tends to get tired of things after I’ve heard them a certain number of times. I’m also fond of Tam Lin, which I once failed to do a folklore project on because 2 of my interviewees had heard of it, not so much for the story itself, but because I’m extremely fond of some of the modern fiction adaptations. (Fire and Hemlock was my favorite book for years)
b) fairytales/folklore- I may be the only person who can say that I grew up in the storytelling community of the DC area in the 80s/early 90s. My parents were very much involved in organizing the now-dead Voices in the Glen storytelling festival, and I learned early to "listen like an adult" (as in the program flyer saying: "Stories for adults and children who listen like them") as well as taking tickets for workshops and being brought along to countless saturday evening story swaps. So... I've probably forgotten more folktales than the average person meets in a lifetime, not to mention literary stories of a tellable length, and have inherited something of my parents' distain for "personal experience" stories. (which is not to say that there aren't good personal experience stories, but they are often far less interesting than the teller thinks, and life infrequently hands one a nice beginning-middle-ending.)
c) and literary fairy tales, or adaptations of older ones, which is a genre I'm quite fond of. Although if Robin McKinley feels the need to write Beauty & the Beast one more time (*cough*Chalice*cough*) I may have to send her a whiny fan letter. But, yeah. My personal mythology is made up of enchanted forests, talking animals, harps of bone, things that come in threes or sevens, and various other folkloric tropes, and I'm a sucker for fiction that takes this sort of tool set and expands on it well.
(2)Dolls- I'm told that when I was little I disappointed my mother by mainly wanting to play with girl-stereotyped toys, instead of the early legos and various building sets. (and when I did get into lego sets later on, I'd build the castles and Robin Hood's treehouses, and then leave them set up and add more foliage to the forest, shoebox houses, various accessories, and make lego girls with yarn hair and fabric skirts tied on...) At any rate, I've always loved both toy dolls and mannequins. My mother collects ethnic dolls from around the world-- she has literally several thousand of them, made of all sorts of things, in all sizes & regional costumes; I have a small collection of these as well, but they're all in boxes until I have dust-limiting display cases to put them in.
... and I just looked it up, and realized I was rewriting what I said last time (item #4). To add, I'd say I started collecting and customizing (ooh, drawing on a doll!) barbies after college, under the influence of
saladmonkeylamb and astormorray, and an odd bit of dream I had that brought Psychokiller Barbie into existence. And resins (and Avaren's hands, which kittymaru was working on when I first started reading her journal...) were just too sculptural not to love. Although I have decided that my cut-off is seven of them (things in threes and sevens? yeah...) unless I start making my own. (2)Hair- see Item 2 here, with the addition that my aunt just cut off her hair at shoulder length. And I'd have to do a little research, but I think this means that I have the longest hair of anyone I personally know, which I find a little bit sad, actually. More people (including me!) should have hair that comes down to the backs of their knees.
Archaeology- Um, ditto on the see previous. Is this cheating? I don't know if I have anything further to say, though...
Introvert-- One who likes books better than people, or has a definite upper limit to social activities before starting to hate everything. People occasionally point me towards various longwinded psychological definitions of this, but I'd say that in my case the main symptoms are that while people in specific are good and worthy and important, a disturbingly large percentage of my friends' friends are not actually people I'm interested in interacting with, and strangers range anywhere from difficult to talk to, to hatred-inducing, depending on my initial impression and my mood. And it doesn't help that I probably learned most of my behavior analysis from written descriptions rather than observing actual people, which means I miss a lot of cues.
----
Newlyweds- Um. We spent a great deal of time on the honeymoon telling each other "we're totally married" and "we're officially grown-ups now" and giggling. And when the receptionist at the doctor's office asked me for my last name the other day I tried to give her my maiden name (I'm fine if you ask for the whole name, it's just breaking it up that's still confusing...) Other than that... well,
grauwulf has been excessively busy, so whatever the normal experience is, we're probably having less of it than we otherwise would (though of course the notion of either of us being normal is laughable) but in general this married thing is good for both of us, as it gives us someone else we hold ourselves accountable to to do be more responsible than we otherwise would. Crafts- I make things. I happen to like things, and I have a habit of having amazing ideas turn up in my head, and no one else is going to do them for me (or do them as well, depending...). My family definitely headed me in the right direction-- my mother, as well as being basically mechanically competent, does many of the traditional home-maker sorts of crafts and insisted that all competent adults should learn to use a sewing machine, and my father does all sorts of woodworking and casts brass, among other things. I tend to be the sort of person who finds it easy to pick up a new handicraft and get a decent result on the first or second try, which makes it sadly easy for me to be fickle with my artforms, so I do a little bit of all kinds of things.
Books- yes, please? From left to right & top to bottom:
paperbacks I haven't read yet, songbooks, misc reference/paperback fiction, combined (mine/his/kiddie/adult, etc)/ 3 boxes of harvard classics & other things inherited from my grandparents
DVDs, Georgette Hayer, Pratchett & Sword & Sorceress anthologies, classical (ancient) authors, ancient history, misc nonfiction
BPotter-drama-misc lit, folklore & short stores, religion & poetry, nursery rhymes & poetry, Complete Works-english language-more literature
hardbacks I haven't read/ combined hardback fiction shelf 1 (with a couple yearbooks at the bottom corner)
combined hardback fiction 2, about to outgrow itself
violin music-misc-binders of school notes, old lit magazines & old journals, reference
craft-sewing-embroidery-etc
Plus two shelving units that are
grauwulf's except for a shelf of cookbooks that are mostly mine, five boxes of picture books in the storage building (mostly children's, but with the first half of Sandman and a couple other aberrations) and the box that inexplicably went missing, but contains my copies of The Merlin Conspiracy and HP#4, among other things I've forgotten. And I've re-started adding to my amazon wishlist as a way of keeping track of the things I want to track down and read. My mother was a children's librarian before she had me, and so when it came around to my first birthday/christmas, she had so many books that she decided to give me one for every day of christmas instead of presenting them all at once. This tradition endured up through high school at least, and I have an awful lot of things inscribed "Merry x Day of Christmas, [year]" I definitely want to do this for my children as well.