8 point agenda
Pinocchio! So, this is where I find you! How do you ever expect to be a real boy? Look at yourself. Smoking! Playing pool!
Wildly Parenthetical tagged me for the 8 random things meme. Like roughtheory, I’ve been blogging for a long time (er, since 2000) but I don’t think I’ve ever actually been meme-tagged. This reflects something of my lackadaisical relationship to blogging as an ongoing, and especially social, activity. I disappear for months at a time, I don’t keep up a coherent [life] narrative, I don’t keep up reciprocal linking duties, and I’m quite bad at giving shout-outs to other bloggers I admire or read. In fact, you’re lucky if I even respond to your comments. Plus I have the attention span of a gnat, so when I do post it’s likely to be absolutely random, with no follow-up.
I guess I could see this meme as a duty, and subtly overlook it — keeping on with the net equivalent of smoking and playing pool. But WP is too nice to have her gesture thrown in her face. In fact, insofar as the improving dimension of being social deflects the rather messy politics of self-revelation, maybe this is my chance to make good! If I do this meme, finally I will be a real blogger too.
So, eight random ‘facts’ about me:
- When I was five, my friend T. and I decided that when we grew up, we would both become psychologists and share a practice. (And maybe a house, as well. Or a flat. I think it was a flat.) To be a psychologist seemed wildly sophisticated then: couches, large rooms, listening poses, secret knowledge. I think her mother was a shrink. It strikes me as odd that five year olds would be planning their lives as adults in such a detailed manner. We haven’t been in contact since I was about 9, but as far as I know, neither of us are in the ‘helping’ professions now.
- I went to four primary schools and two high schools, counting home-schooling or Correspondence School in Years Seven and Eight. The best school by far was on an ashram in Virginia, where we did yoga every day before lunch. I can still do a mean cobra pose. Lunch wasn’t so great, though; it was invariably mashed raw tofu with tamari. Euch.
- At age 12 another friend T. and I started writing a science fiction novel together. We thought up a protagonist together — she was a space explorer — and wrote alternating chapters. Earth was, of course, destroyed in the first paragraph of Chapter One. Our heroine’s task was to find out who blew up her home. A couple of years ago, I found the collaborative chapters in a box of old papers. They were quite revealing. T’s sections were all about the heroine’s love of her alien pet (T. was a big fan of Gerald Durrell and had all his books). The sections I wrote was, typically, racy: her ship docking at a big space station, the heroine falls into bed with three different men over three days, etc. The plot may have been influenced by Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of A Spacewoman, and definitely Joanna Russ’ Adventures of Alyx.
- I couldn’t tell right from left, strike a match, whistle or tell the time by clockface until I was 10. I’m left-handed; it created confusion. I finally worked out how to distinguish left from right by the presence of a freckle on my left thumb. Fire scared me. Whistling was one of those things my body couldn’t come at. And clock faces — all the hands looked the same! I had what people call a ‘vivid imagination’, and I spent most of my childhood immersed in it. Anything corporeal felt a bit strange.
- I studied classical music for two years after leaving school, and for a while it looked like I might become a professional violinist.
- I learnt how to use chat software before I learnt how to send email.
- Like Nate, I really like watching TV shows downloaded from the Internet. In fact, we watch DVDs so rarely nowadays that it feels like a novelty. My current favourite is Big Love, and I’m really looking forward to 2008, for Bionic Woman and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Having just watched the pilot episodes of both, courtesy of A., I think it’s safe to say we can look forward to some awesome viewing next summer. (Aside, of course, from the new season of Battlestar. Which will be greater than awesome.)
- I have lived in this house longer than every other house I’ve ever lived in, except one. And for five out of nine years at the farm, I was only ever there on weekends and holidays. That’s kind of weird.
Now I’d better tag some other people. Don’t be alarmed, people, and don’t feel obligated. At least I haven’t sent you a chain letter asking for a one dollar note to be sent to the name and address tenth from the bottom. Take it away, The Fagulous Gaylourdes (who has been ill so is especially deserving of nettention); Sorensen and Bean at Baybeasts; Mattilda at Nobody Passes; Oso Raro at Slaves of Academe; Ika at Now and Rome; Lila Futuransky at Queer Geek Theory; Emily at Sexual Ambiguities; and Jack at Angry Brown Butch.
Ee! Tagged! Now I can start my blog going again.
Comment by Ika — August 7, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
Ah, just look at you now, Az! Smoking, playing pool *and* all real! :-)
Re: #3, I seem to recall a friend and I mimicking a trashy, trashy book I read which was entirely made up of letters written from one character to another and back again. I have no clue about how I came across this book, but it was, I think, a regency fantasy of some kind; our letters back and forth echoed it in some ways, though I had a tendency to ‘race it up’ a bit. I seem to recall my friend being a little taken aback by my sassy heroine and her sexy rendezvous(es?) with men in caves. It was much silly fun, writing letters on proper writing paper, putting them in envelopes with her character’s name written big and curly on the front, and sticking them in her locker. Certainly made high school more entertaining!
And #1 made me grin a lot.
Comment by WildlyParenthtical — August 7, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
Heh, regency fantasies. Collaborative teen novels are awesome. I have this dim memory of reading every single Jean Plaidy book ever written at about 10-12. There was not much else around: parents’ bookshelf (full of scifi and Classic Novels) or the library, which because we lived in a remote area, was a big bus that stocked mostly romance novels.
Comment by Az — August 7, 2007 @ 3:10 pm
oh, childhood novels! a friend and i once wrote a HUGE (to people in grade three) epic about a girl who rode horses and fought pixie-goblin-aliens and lived in a house with secret passageways. like a weird enid blyton, tolkien, scifi cocktail. and i still have folders full of those stories where you fold one line over and the next person has to write without knowing all the backstory (mostly done in tedious highschool music classes). i think the grade three story was probably better than those ones, though the latter ones had far more kinky sex and bestiality in them.
Comment by nix — August 8, 2007 @ 3:45 am
hah! your chain letter threat makes me want to start up a grandma chain letter, where you have to send five bucks in a card to the person at the bottom of the list, while pretending to be their grandma. rightio… i’m off to write 8 random things
Comment by gaylourdes — August 8, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
I totally used to get $5 in a card on my birthday from my grandma! That idea sounds great, and reminds me of this awesome zine called Mavis McKenzie, a Northcote grandma who wrote letters to lots of people like Ray Martin, and Ernie Sigley, and published the results… She was invented by some indie boy who lives in fitzroy, he was very sweet. I miss Mavis. She even died and came back from the dead.
Comment by Az — August 8, 2007 @ 1:53 pm
Thanks for #4. It helps me a lot, as my son with the very vivid imagination is going through a bit of a rough patch just now — unfortunately, mostly because of his great imagination and lack of interest in quotidian, real-world things. But things aren’t so bad — look how you turned out!
Comment by Eric — August 8, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
you know, i reckon we would have got along just as well as kids as we do now…
eight random things, huh. ok. i’ll see what i can do. can the demands of new parenthood mean that bean and i can just do four each?
Comment by sorenson — August 8, 2007 @ 9:24 pm
Eric, I still have a problem with quotidian, real-world affairs… just ask the tax man! Being habitually disconnected from reality probably didn’t do me many favours — I would read on the walk to school, doing housework (try reading a book while lighting a wood fire or doing the dishes) and if I wasn’t reading, I was writing novels in my head. Hence, I had to repeat a lot of chores. Maybe some kids come to terms with their physical being later than others? Who knows :)
And sorenson, four from each of you and we’ll split the difference in me getting to hold the baby!
Comment by Az — August 9, 2007 @ 12:28 pm
Nobody tags me for memes, either. I think for the same reasons as you.
When i was a small child, a my friend and i wrote a letter to the queen (she was the most, or possible only, famous person we knew of). We glued a picture of her from a magazine onto the letter and wrote “you look very radiant in this picture”, haha. We received a letter back, i believe my friend kept it.
Comment by jay — August 13, 2007 @ 12:33 am