zenithblue (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zenithblue) wrote2007-08-26 09:25 am
zenithblue) wrote2007-08-26 09:25 am
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the five questions meme...
...is making the rounds again! decemberthirty was kind enough to throw the interview questions my way this time.
And here we go!
All right: the meme propagates, as ever, when anyone who is interested asks me to ask you five questions. I'll do so, and you post the answers (and the same offer I just made) in your own blog. Cheers!
decemberthirty was kind enough to throw the interview questions my way this time. And here we go!
1. If you could choose to live in any city in America, which one would be your last choice?
Probably Greenville, South Carolina, or some analogous Bible-belt locale. I dearly love to be contrary and freakish but I think living somewhere like that would just make me terribly lonely. Plus the nastier parts of my extended family live in Greenville, and to be faced with people who can justify the Confederate Flag's continued use by inciting "history"...well, I'd either be locked away or possibly stoned as a witch.
I know Greenville might not count as a "city," but cut me some slack, I grew up in Anchorage.
2. When did you and Hodge meet? How did you guys get together?
Aha. Well...see, I was trying to hook him up with someone else. My nearest and dearestdrawgirl, in fact. This was at the tail end of my senior year at Reed, and I was recovering from a very, very bad breakup (well, mostly recovered by this point). And I was like, Hodge is a great guy! Someone I know should be dating him! And she was just sort of marginally interested (they both like comic books and Hodge is pretty non-threatening, so she agreed to give it a go), but they didn't really hit it off. All during this fiasco drawgirl kept saying, "You know, it sounds like you really like Hodge. Why don't you go out with him?" I responded with the absolutely bizarre "But it's your turn! Your turn to go out with someone!" (Like I said...I was just out of a really bad breakup...). Anyway, after it became clear that Hodge and drawgirl weren't that terribly interested in one another, I started flirting.
The second part of the story is that Hodge was doing his senior psychology thesis on attachment styles. Basically there are four attachment styles (which describes how you relate to other people). Normal (just what it sounds like), anxious-ambivalent (clingy and frantic), avoidant (aloof and detached) and the worst of all world, fearful (where you alternate erratically and painfully between anxious-ambivalent and avoidant). Well, I was the first one to take his study's survey, and because he was interested in me he (with temporarily dubious ethics) checked my test scores. Guess who's a freak? Guess who's fearful? Yuppers, c'est moi. So he then got to decide how deterred he was by my spastic attachment style...which, luckily, wasn't very deterred at all.
I like to remind him of this every now and then when I'm being a pain in his ass via some strange behavior or another. "You knew what you were getting into! You were warned!"
3. Is there any character that you've created toward whom you feel a special affection, beyond what you feel for the others? One that you want to be friends with, or one you feel protective towards, something like that...
My favorite character so far is a party-obsessed, frat-boy sort of freshman living as a roommate to an introverted and somewhat damaged college kid. What I ended up loving so much about him was that it was a chance to try to humanize a kind of person I usually have a knee-jerk dislike for. I liked the idea of this really unlikely (and probably temporary) friendship between two kids out of their element for the first time. I also liked that the frat kid had this intense loyalty that made him sort of blithely continue to invite his shy roommate to keggers, in spite of continued resistance. I don't know, I tend to like surprises; people who can offer something you wouldn't have expected from them. It might be a little naive of me.
4. If you were going to throw a themed party, what would the theme be and how would it manifest itself? Just for fun, assume that money's no object.
Come as your favorite dead literary figure! Ophelia with blue-green skin! Madame Bovary with...well, probably also blue-green skin! Anna Karenina would be a challenge. A bloated fly-covered Kurtz...Hektor with a spear through his nipple and a bunch of road burn from being dragged behind the damn chariot all day. We could have Poe's raven over the door and Queequeg's coffin could be the snacks table (or else Addie Bundren's). We'd have prizes according to theme: best suicide, best murder, etc. It's just like me: both nerdy, and tasteless.
5. What's the last really phenomenal book you've read?
This year so far, my favorite two books have been Richard Powers' The Echo Maker and Haruki Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I read them back to back without knowing they'd be in some ways very similar, and it was kind of a cool experience, exploring the brain and the nature of reality through two quite different lenses.
Probably Greenville, South Carolina, or some analogous Bible-belt locale. I dearly love to be contrary and freakish but I think living somewhere like that would just make me terribly lonely. Plus the nastier parts of my extended family live in Greenville, and to be faced with people who can justify the Confederate Flag's continued use by inciting "history"...well, I'd either be locked away or possibly stoned as a witch.
I know Greenville might not count as a "city," but cut me some slack, I grew up in Anchorage.
2. When did you and Hodge meet? How did you guys get together?
Aha. Well...see, I was trying to hook him up with someone else. My nearest and dearest
drawgirl, in fact. This was at the tail end of my senior year at Reed, and I was recovering from a very, very bad breakup (well, mostly recovered by this point). And I was like, Hodge is a great guy! Someone I know should be dating him! And she was just sort of marginally interested (they both like comic books and Hodge is pretty non-threatening, so she agreed to give it a go), but they didn't really hit it off. All during this fiasco drawgirl kept saying, "You know, it sounds like you really like Hodge. Why don't you go out with him?" I responded with the absolutely bizarre "But it's your turn! Your turn to go out with someone!" (Like I said...I was just out of a really bad breakup...). Anyway, after it became clear that Hodge and drawgirl weren't that terribly interested in one another, I started flirting. The second part of the story is that Hodge was doing his senior psychology thesis on attachment styles. Basically there are four attachment styles (which describes how you relate to other people). Normal (just what it sounds like), anxious-ambivalent (clingy and frantic), avoidant (aloof and detached) and the worst of all world, fearful (where you alternate erratically and painfully between anxious-ambivalent and avoidant). Well, I was the first one to take his study's survey, and because he was interested in me he (with temporarily dubious ethics) checked my test scores. Guess who's a freak? Guess who's fearful? Yuppers, c'est moi. So he then got to decide how deterred he was by my spastic attachment style...which, luckily, wasn't very deterred at all.
I like to remind him of this every now and then when I'm being a pain in his ass via some strange behavior or another. "You knew what you were getting into! You were warned!"
3. Is there any character that you've created toward whom you feel a special affection, beyond what you feel for the others? One that you want to be friends with, or one you feel protective towards, something like that...
My favorite character so far is a party-obsessed, frat-boy sort of freshman living as a roommate to an introverted and somewhat damaged college kid. What I ended up loving so much about him was that it was a chance to try to humanize a kind of person I usually have a knee-jerk dislike for. I liked the idea of this really unlikely (and probably temporary) friendship between two kids out of their element for the first time. I also liked that the frat kid had this intense loyalty that made him sort of blithely continue to invite his shy roommate to keggers, in spite of continued resistance. I don't know, I tend to like surprises; people who can offer something you wouldn't have expected from them. It might be a little naive of me.
4. If you were going to throw a themed party, what would the theme be and how would it manifest itself? Just for fun, assume that money's no object.
Come as your favorite dead literary figure! Ophelia with blue-green skin! Madame Bovary with...well, probably also blue-green skin! Anna Karenina would be a challenge. A bloated fly-covered Kurtz...Hektor with a spear through his nipple and a bunch of road burn from being dragged behind the damn chariot all day. We could have Poe's raven over the door and Queequeg's coffin could be the snacks table (or else Addie Bundren's). We'd have prizes according to theme: best suicide, best murder, etc. It's just like me: both nerdy, and tasteless.
5. What's the last really phenomenal book you've read?
This year so far, my favorite two books have been Richard Powers' The Echo Maker and Haruki Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I read them back to back without knowing they'd be in some ways very similar, and it was kind of a cool experience, exploring the brain and the nature of reality through two quite different lenses.
All right: the meme propagates, as ever, when anyone who is interested asks me to ask you five questions. I'll do so, and you post the answers (and the same offer I just made) in your own blog. Cheers!