it's a long meme
Jan. 11th, 2011 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdDay Two: Nine things about me.
I'll leave aside things in my profile and which are otherwise obvious.
1: I taste cilantro not so much as soap as some sort of battery-acid like substance, with a soapy undertone. It's absolutely hideous and it clings to my fingers if I have to cut it. I'm highly sensitive to tannins, too. It's intensely bitter, and is why I really dislike nuts. But I love sour, as long as it's tempered just a little with a sweet highlight - grapefruit, lemons, sour gummies, super-sour Japanese candies, yum yum yum. Sometimes I wonder whether all these are related.
2: Music was the only thing keeping me sane in 2008 and 2009. In 2010 it hasn't helped as much, partly because of a set of venues changing managers from one who likes my playing to a new manager who loathes musicians in general and me in particular. So a lot of those fun days turned into run-the-gauntlet afternoons of stress, and that really sucked. It's one of the reasons I've been working so hard to move to stage venues.
3: I miss Japan in general and Yokohama in particular, a lot, but I'm a little afraid to go back, because I worry that it can't live up to the past. Japan is the only place I've ever been that felt like home, and it's done it more than once. Sure, foreigners - even ones Japanese people seem to think have partial Japanese ancestry - are in an outside class, but even being fully aware of that? It was better.
4: I'm much better at fake internet scrabble than I am at real scrabble. I'm okay at real scrabble, but at fake internet scrabble, I'm actually pretty good.
5: I used to be a huge computer person - genuinely hardcore - but I'm done with that now. I can bodge together a decent website, I write perl scripts or other little code projects if I have a reason (c.f. the studio ON AIR website, which actually has a fair bit of perl in it) but I'll never be the cause of another IBM Urgent Service Bulletin, or even release anything else commercially.
6: I like gardening, but only in a very limited temperature range. Fortunately, we have that temperature range a lot around here! I really, really, really want a greenhouse, and I'd like to terrace our hillside so I can do some Things, if we ever have money again. But for a lot of it I want to pay people - I like planting, not clearing; I like designing, and enjoy maintenance, but I hate blackberry and horsetail wars; and I've built enough retaining walls. It's somebody else's turn for that shit. I want to pay someone else to weed. ^_^
7: Despite being in the US, my Canuck/Brit spellings are not an affectation; I come by it honest, I just don't know how. I don't know who my birth parents were, and I don't really remember being a child, so it might be through early childhood. What I do have: the oldest writings I have by me are the same. Some of them are school and didn't have points deducted. The oldest textbook I still have - an introductory science text - was printed in the UK and has the spellings I use. A lot of the oldest teachers I can remember were Scots, English, or Welsh. It's confusing and complicated; for me, I've just always spelt this way, the same way I've always known how to read, write, type, write code, and so on. They're all received skills.
(I have been working to try to improve at least my consistency, so I use a spelling dictionary all the time now.)
8: I think a lot about emigrating, but I don't know whether I'll ever actually do it. I want to, but I obviously haven't yet wanted to quite enough to make it happen. The US has gone more than its fair share of crazy, most of the shit I spent decades trying to prevent either has happened (torture normalisation, surveillance state, absolutist presidency) or is in progress, and bluntly, I don't want to pay for all the crap I worked so hard failing to prevent. (I've already paid quite a bit, thanks.) And as a cherry on top, I'm sick to death of being an endless political target. I'm just done, and I want to leave all of it. But that's scary, too.
9: I've always had some white hair. I have quite a bit more now than I did in high school (which is when my memory starts), a lot of which happened after I got hit by a car. I watched a new crop grow in after that, getting longer all the time; I also have a scar near my mouth from the accident. I was hoping the white would turn back to copper or brown, and some of it did - I had hairs that started white, then got brown or copper closer to the scalp, and a couple were striped for a bit, alternating! That was awesome - but not much of it. I think about colouring all the white into copper or red or green or something, but the maintenance puts me off it. Think I should?
I'll leave aside things in my profile and which are otherwise obvious.
1: I taste cilantro not so much as soap as some sort of battery-acid like substance, with a soapy undertone. It's absolutely hideous and it clings to my fingers if I have to cut it. I'm highly sensitive to tannins, too. It's intensely bitter, and is why I really dislike nuts. But I love sour, as long as it's tempered just a little with a sweet highlight - grapefruit, lemons, sour gummies, super-sour Japanese candies, yum yum yum. Sometimes I wonder whether all these are related.
2: Music was the only thing keeping me sane in 2008 and 2009. In 2010 it hasn't helped as much, partly because of a set of venues changing managers from one who likes my playing to a new manager who loathes musicians in general and me in particular. So a lot of those fun days turned into run-the-gauntlet afternoons of stress, and that really sucked. It's one of the reasons I've been working so hard to move to stage venues.
3: I miss Japan in general and Yokohama in particular, a lot, but I'm a little afraid to go back, because I worry that it can't live up to the past. Japan is the only place I've ever been that felt like home, and it's done it more than once. Sure, foreigners - even ones Japanese people seem to think have partial Japanese ancestry - are in an outside class, but even being fully aware of that? It was better.
4: I'm much better at fake internet scrabble than I am at real scrabble. I'm okay at real scrabble, but at fake internet scrabble, I'm actually pretty good.
5: I used to be a huge computer person - genuinely hardcore - but I'm done with that now. I can bodge together a decent website, I write perl scripts or other little code projects if I have a reason (c.f. the studio ON AIR website, which actually has a fair bit of perl in it) but I'll never be the cause of another IBM Urgent Service Bulletin, or even release anything else commercially.
6: I like gardening, but only in a very limited temperature range. Fortunately, we have that temperature range a lot around here! I really, really, really want a greenhouse, and I'd like to terrace our hillside so I can do some Things, if we ever have money again. But for a lot of it I want to pay people - I like planting, not clearing; I like designing, and enjoy maintenance, but I hate blackberry and horsetail wars; and I've built enough retaining walls. It's somebody else's turn for that shit. I want to pay someone else to weed. ^_^
7: Despite being in the US, my Canuck/Brit spellings are not an affectation; I come by it honest, I just don't know how. I don't know who my birth parents were, and I don't really remember being a child, so it might be through early childhood. What I do have: the oldest writings I have by me are the same. Some of them are school and didn't have points deducted. The oldest textbook I still have - an introductory science text - was printed in the UK and has the spellings I use. A lot of the oldest teachers I can remember were Scots, English, or Welsh. It's confusing and complicated; for me, I've just always spelt this way, the same way I've always known how to read, write, type, write code, and so on. They're all received skills.
(I have been working to try to improve at least my consistency, so I use a spelling dictionary all the time now.)
8: I think a lot about emigrating, but I don't know whether I'll ever actually do it. I want to, but I obviously haven't yet wanted to quite enough to make it happen. The US has gone more than its fair share of crazy, most of the shit I spent decades trying to prevent either has happened (torture normalisation, surveillance state, absolutist presidency) or is in progress, and bluntly, I don't want to pay for all the crap I worked so hard failing to prevent. (I've already paid quite a bit, thanks.) And as a cherry on top, I'm sick to death of being an endless political target. I'm just done, and I want to leave all of it. But that's scary, too.
9: I've always had some white hair. I have quite a bit more now than I did in high school (which is when my memory starts), a lot of which happened after I got hit by a car. I watched a new crop grow in after that, getting longer all the time; I also have a scar near my mouth from the accident. I was hoping the white would turn back to copper or brown, and some of it did - I had hairs that started white, then got brown or copper closer to the scalp, and a couple were striped for a bit, alternating! That was awesome - but not much of it. I think about colouring all the white into copper or red or green or something, but the maintenance puts me off it. Think I should?
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 01:17 pm (UTC)1) is probably genetic; have read about this somewhere somewhen, but it's not coming up to the top of the stack this morning. My ex, who is Ashkenazi out of eastern Poland, also loathed cilantro. Question comes to mind: how does the sensitivity to tannins impact your experience of black tea?
9) it's worth it for the experiment, once anyway. With a temporary colouring you aren't stuck with it permanently. Red would be the best fit with your brown, in my opinion.
G'luck, eh?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 01:55 pm (UTC)i have maybe six or so, i'm not sure it would....and you have a lot of hair too.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-11 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 01:46 am (UTC)9) NEON BLUE OR PURPLE OMG
no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 02:45 am (UTC)Can I get back to you on that, in 3-5 years? If all goes not-too-horribly, I expect to be moving to Seattle around then.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 07:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 11:11 am (UTC)Thanks for sharing these things. <3
no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-12 04:42 pm (UTC)(Thanks for reading these things. ^_^ )
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:27 am (UTC)Not sure when, or whether I will do it as part of Utena cosplay for Nan Desu Kan or just for the hell of it, but I will.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:30 am (UTC)Cilantro lime rice = mmmmm tasty.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:32 am (UTC)For me there is nothing light about it. It's overwhelming - extremely strong taste. Plus, you know, tastes like corroded batteries smell. Only with a little soap.