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dolorosa_12) wrote2023-09-30 02:05 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2023-09-30 02:05 pm
Alphabet meme
I spotted this on blackcatofmisery's journal, and it looked like a lot of fun, so I thought to answer it myself!
A is for Argument: Who is the last person you argued with and what was it about? I'm a very conflict-averse person, so apart from some minor bickering with Matthias, probably my last 'argument' was done mentally, rebutting whatever nonsense or disinformation I'd encountered online.
B is for Breakfast: Do you eat breakfast? What do you usually have? I definitely need to eat breakfast in order to function. Unfortunately, I come from a British-influenced culinary culture when it comes to breakfast foods, and I dislike almost all of them — cereal, toast, etc. I like pastries, and I like the sort of Mediterranean/Eastern European/North-Western-Central European-styles of breakfast spreads with a variety of cheeses, vegetables, eggs, fruit, bread etc, and I've enjoyed various kinds of East, South and Southeast Asian breakfasts whenever I've had them, but none of these things is really feasible in the time I have available to eat breakfast during the week. So on weekdays I eat homemade muesli with plain Greek yoghurt and stewed fruit, and on weekends, when I have more time, I eat pastries from the bakery or crepes that I've prepared.
C is for Car: Do you have one? What kind? If not, how do you usually travel? I've never owned a car, I don't know how to drive, and I've arranged my entire adult life so that I will never have to. (Matthias does have a license, but has only driven in Germany, and there not for at least fifteen years, and isn't keen to start doing so again.) For the most part, I travel using my own two feet — I've always walked everywhere, and anything that takes an hour or less seems reasonable to me. For longer journeys, I use public transport — trains if they're available, buses if not.
D is for Dinner: What's on the menu tonight? We're going out to dinner tonight at a Turkish restaurant, so ... Turkish food for sure.
E is for Excellence: Name one thing you think you're really good at. Making and completing to-do lists. Breaking down large tasks into smaller, manageable chunks. Committing to do something and then completing it within whatever timeframe to which I initially committed. I guess all of that could be summarised under the heading of 'organisation'. I'm also really good at figuring out what authority figures want of me, and providing it — I have been all my life — but realising this about myself from an early age made me extremely wary of granting my trust and respect to authority figures, so I've always been very careful and selective in this regard.
F is for Friends: Tell us something you like about the last friend you spoke to. Last night I was in London for the birthday party of E, a friend I know from my time as a medievalist academic, so (other than Matthias) he was the last friend I spoke to. I like E's intellectual curiosity, his calm manner, and the respectful way he communicates with everyone.
G is for Games: What's the last game you played (computer or board game)? I don't really enjoy board games, and I've never played a single computer game in my life, so probably the last time I did such a thing was when I played Scrabble a few times when my mum was here. She and Matthias have been playing online Scrabble since 2012, and we always play a few rounds of the physical version whenever we're in the one place.
H is for Home: Where do you consider to be your "hometown"? Is it where you live now? My hometown is Canberra, which is not where I was born, but it's where I lived since I was three years old and the site of most of my formative childhood memories. Canberrans have a very specific sensibility (such that, if I meet a Gen Y or younger Gen X Canberran, I feel a strong sense of recognition and common ground — and not just because we can usually find one or two degrees of separation within five minutes) and I feel it has shaped my outlook in a lot of ways. I left Canberra more than twenty years ago when my mother wanted to move back to her hometown of Sydney — which coincided with my undergrad years — spent the next four years feeling out of place and dreaming of what my life would have been like if I'd stayed, then returned to Canberra after I completed my degree and realised that home was an age, not a place, that the space I'd occupied had closed up behind me, and that I could never really go back. I left again after a year and have never returned. Now I live in (what to me feels like) a small country town in England. My house here is home, certain bodies of water in Australia are home, as are certain journeys, but no city or country feels like home for me any more — home is other people.
I is for Internet: What websites do you look at every day? Other than things like Outlook, Teams, and specialist platforms for work, I generally go on Dreamwidth every day unless I am travelling or extremely busy. I've got the Instagram and Facebook apps installed on my phone and idly glance at them several times a day.
J is for Job: What did you want to be when you grew up? Are you doing that now? I'm lucky, in that my parents were journalists, and spent a lot of time when my sister and I were young children 'interviewing' us, so I have good records of all of this! There is a written 'interview' with me when I was three years old where I claim that I want to be 'a fairy, an angel, or an animal when I grow up.' A few years later, my mum interviewed me, my sister, and a couple of family friends on video and I apparently had decided at that point I wanted to be a hairdresser by day and ballerina by night. Then I went through a phase of wanting to be a diplomat or a travel writer (I think I told my mum I wanted to travel for work and she informed me that these were jobs that would facilitate that), and by the time I was in secondary school I wanted to be a newspaper journalist and book-reviewer. I did indeed end up doing this for a while — freelance book-reviewing from the ages of 16-28ish, which I loved, and newspaper subediting for a year after undergrad, which I loathed and made me realise I did not want to be a journalist. There is absolutely no way that child!me would ever have imagined her adult self would have ended up working as a teaching and research support librarian.
K is for Kitchen: Are you a good cook? What's your go-to dish? I love cooking and am pretty good at it. My sister and I were involved in the kitchen from a very early age (both our parents are talented and enthusiastic cooks, and cooking and eating have always been at the centre of my broader family's way of showing love and hospitality), and I picked up a good repertoire of basic meals (pasta with various sauces, curries, stir-fries, vegetarian stews, roast vegetables etc) that I built on over the years since I've been responsible for all the meals I ate. I don't really have a go-to dish (it would depend on whom I'm feeding), but there is a particular pasta dish with garlic, tuna, parsley and tomato sauce that I've been eating almost since I was first fed solid foods, and which I always cook as the first meal in any new house, or whenever I feel a strong need for comfort and familiarity.
L is for Learning: Are you studying or learning anything new right now? Not really, apart from things I pick up day-to-day as part of my work (new software, new approaches to teaching or advanced database searching or whatever). I've been vaguely wanting to learn a new language (either Arabic or Ukrainian) for a while now, but my problem is that I'm not great at learning languages — the only time it's really stuck was when I learnt in an immersion context for a whole year — and daily Duolingo, or even weekly formal classes, isn't really going to cut it.
M is for Movies: What's the last one you watched and did you like it? Rye Lane, a great romantic comedy with a fantastic sense of place (east London). I liked it a lot. I don't watch films all that often — this one was many months ago.
N is for Nightmares: Do you have bad dreams? Any recurring themes? I haven't had any recent nightmares, but I do have a lot of recurring themes in dreams: arranging to meet my sister somewhere and everything falling apart (like, the place we agree to meet turning out to be some menacing post-apocalyptic wasteland), travelling internationally with my mum and missing flights/buses/trains because she's flippant about how long it will take to get to the airport/station/etc, being required to drive a car in some life-or-death situation while (see answer to the C section of this meme) not knowing how to drive. When I was a teenager, my sister and I both used to have recurring nightmares about our house being burgled while we were in it and the other people in the dream didn't react while we were screaming the alarm (our house was burgled twice when I was 14 and these real-world occurrences obviously had an immediate and profound effect on our sense of personal safety, which crept through in our dreams).
O is for Orders: What's the last thing you bought online? I bought, in quick succession: Ava Reid's latest novel A Study In Drowning, a copy (with bookplate) of a Kickstarted Ukrainian speculative fiction anthology (as my backer reward for contributing to this campaign), and ... a fraction of an air defence missile for the Ukrainian armed forces (as in, I contributed to a military equipment fundraiser that was specifically focusing on air/missile defence, so my donation bought some sliver of a piece of this kind of military equipment). I would say those three purchases are a pretty representative sample.
P is for Pop Culture: Do you follow the world of celebrity and know what the hottest new music, movies and trends are? Ahahahaha definitely not!
Q is for Quiet: If you're home alone, do you like silence or background noise like music or the TV? I like to play music when I'm cooking, cleaning, or doing repetive work (like systematic database searching) for my job. Otherwise, I dislike having background noise and prefer to sit in silence. My stepmother once said that she could tell at once that my sister and I had not been raised in a house with background noise, because every time we walked into a room where the TV was playing (but no one was watching), we'd immediately switch it off.
R is for Reading: What's your go-to genre? I don't think I have a broad go-to genre (although probably I read more fantasy fiction than anything else), but I do have go-to subgenres (1980/90s Australian dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA, historical mysteries in which the mysteries tie in to broader real-world historical events and people, female character-centric retellings of myths and fairytales in which the villain is misogyny and violent honour culture, humans in relationships with immortal supernatural beings who do not want to become immortal themselves and never do, etc etc).
S is for Sweets: What's your favourite dessert or sweet treat? Really good quality gelato. I also really enjoy things with salted caramel, sour cherries, plums, and pistachios — if a dessert has some or all of these things, I'm likely to love it. I am an utterly incompetent baker so only enjoy this kind of stuff when it's been made by other people.
T is for Travel: Where did you last take a trip? Well, I was in Cambridge today running errands, and in London yesterday for the aforementioned friend's birthday party, but I go to both cities so habitually that I wouldn't really describe being there as 'taking a trip.' In late August-early September Matthias and I went on holiday to Ljubljana, breaking the (train) journey with an overnight stay in Brussels and a weekend with friends in Vienna. Generally (apart from during the Covid lockdown years) I go on trips to Europe at least twice a year.
U is for Useless: Name something you're just really bad at. I already mentioned baking. I'm also terrible at sports involving teams, and equipment that I have to throw/kick/hit/manoeuvre, and games where you have to strategise, keep track of other people's potential strategies, and have some understanding of what might happen ten moves ahead. I'm also incapable of telling a lie without it being immediately visible on my face.
V is for Vision: Do you wear glasses or contact lenses? Neither, but I expect I will need glasses at some point in the next ten years, since that's roughly the age my mum and aunts all got glasses.
W is for Weather: What's your perfect day, weather-wise? Autumnal, with morning mists that clear around midday for bright skies. Temperatures in the mid-teens to low twenties, and a gentle breeze that stirs the leaves on the trees. I also love rain and storms when I'm inside, particularly in a house with a tin roof, and I like sunny days in the high twenties if I'm going to be spending my time moving through a body of water, but only in those very specific circumstances. I can't think or move in hot weather.
X is for X-Men: If you could have a superpower, what would it be? I'm really struggling with this one. As a teenager I would have answered immediately that I wanted telepathy, but now the idea of knowing other people's inner thoughts is horrifying to me. As an immigrant who hates flying, teleportation would be useful!
Y is for Yesteryear: What period of history is most interesting to you? Not a single period of history, but rather hinge-points and times of intense transition that we only recognise as being such with hindsight. I'm always drawn to these moments of transformation, and am infinitely curious about how profoundly disorienting they must have been to people who were just trying to live their lives, while things were collapsing and transforming and shattering and rebuilding around them.
Z is for Zero: What popular activity do you have zero interest in doing? Video/computer games. No judgement on anyone who enjoys these, and on an intellectual level I can understand why they're fun to play and a form of art to create, but I have never felt the slightest interest in playing them, on any platform or in any genre.
blackcatofmisery's journal, and it looked like a lot of fun, so I thought to answer it myself!
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Fascinating replies.
Your R subgenres are so specific I imagine you could name the majority that have been published.
(Are Australian books routinely available in the UK, or are rights separated like in US-UK "system")
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You're certainly right about some of those R subgenres, although female character-centric retellings of myths are really popular now and they seem to be churned out at a prodigious rate. I like these very specific subgenres, but I'm also extremely picky about them.
Generally English-language rights to books are sold for the US and/or UK and Commonwealth, so technically Australian books are available in the UK, although in my experience I don't see a lot of them on the shelves of major booksellers — this may be a publisher/marketing decision or a decision by the booksellers themselves. When I was growing up Australia had a pretty thriving local publishing industry, but I don't know if that's the case any more.
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Love how much thought and depth you put into these answers! This was really interesting.
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Love how much thought and depth you put into these answers! This was really interesting.
Thank you! I'm glad to hear it!
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My house here is home, certain bodies of water in Australia are home, as are certain journeys, but no city or country feels like home for me any more — home is other people.
I relate to this a lot (minus the bodies of water in Australia lol)
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I'm glad you enjoyed it! And yes, I think if you've moved home, city, state, and/or country enough times, your sense of home changes into something like this that reflects your experience of impermanence.
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I thought about 'telepathy' as a power but yeah, I think knowing everyone's thoughts at all time would just stress me out. Teleportation would be far more useful.
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My thoughts exactly re: telepathy. Too stressful, and I don't really want to hear the dark corners of other people's minds, especially if they're just strangers I'm passing in the streets.