Ack, there’s no Friday Five this week. What am I going to do with myself?!

Update, 10:29am Hooray for mariann! She made up a substitute Friday Five, and a good one. The questions seem a little long, but I like what she’s trying to find out.

1. What do you like to read? What genres do you read the most? Why?
I read magazines a lot more than I read books, actually. My girlfriend’s mother subscribes to Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, The New Yorker, and a few others, so I routinely get those from her. I also have my own subscription to The Week, which saves me from having to read all the other news magazines I don’t get from A’s mom. I finally got my subscription to the Washingtonian worked out, and for some reason I continue to get On Our Backs even though the free subscription was only supposed to be for one year. I almost can’t stand to be without a magazine, I’ll pick up something if I’ve finished reading everything else I’ve got. (This week it was Jane and New York.) On Thursdays I read the City Paper and on Fridays I read the Blade. As for books, I tend to read things that are about being queer or deaf, and I also enjoy biographies.
(more…)

This is probably the only time I will ever post the Wednesday Whimsy, and it’s because I found it from mariann. I am not going to link to the page itself because I do not like the webmaster’s attitude. When I arrived on the page, this is what appeared in a pop-up notice:

You are viewing this site using Netscape - a habit I suggest you break as soon as possible. This being only a personal site, I don’t bother designing for Netscape, since it’s the slowest, most crash-prone, worst code-interpreting browser I have ever dealt with. However, I do try to go back and make the site Netscape compliant as I have time. Sooo… You can either continue using Netscape to view my site and see improvements as I get to them, or you could come to your senses and uninstall Netscape from your system.

Plus the colors were totally awful, it was black on eggplant or something. So he or she can stick it where the sun don’t shine. Nothing against the webmaster personally, just eir attitude. But I did like today’s prompts, so I’ll do them.



1. If you could speak any known human language in the world, what would it be, and what would you do with that ability?

I’d like to be able to speak Spanish just because it’s used so much in the United States. I’m glad I learned French in school, and I’m glad I know a bit of Russian and stuff, but I’d really like to speak Spanish because I could use it. Arabic would be another good one to know because I could probably get a good government job that way. Other than those I’d just like to have a native-like fluency in ASL.



2. How about any known animal language? Why would you want to be able to speak with that particular animal?

I think we could have interesting conversations with dolphins, because they’re so intelligent. They do have a formal language of their own, we just don’t understand it. Either that or I’d like to be able to know what goes on in my cats’ heads.



3. Have you ever had your own made up language, either by yourself or with someone else?

Not that I remember. I learned a little bit of Esperanto once upon a time.



4. Describe a recent dream.

Er, okay, this is a totally unrelated question. But I happen to have a recent dream that I remember enough to describe, so I will. This was a weird one. My girlfriend and I were at our local Six Flags and for some reason the park had been emptied and we were among the first people let back in. I wanted to go on the Typhoon SeaCoaster and my girlfriend didn’t, so she waited on the ground. (For some reason I didn’t find out until I was on the ride that it apparently had a break in the tracks, and the cars were just supposed to jump the break and make it to the other side.) I looked in the gift shop when the ride was over, and wanted to buy a wetsuit to use while kayaking but didn’t. My girlfriend had struck up a conversation with a woman who seemed perfectly nice, but then this woman followed us around until she ended up chasing us and we couldn’t get away from her. We finally made it into an elevator in the park’s corporate area, and the guy in there pushed the button so we could go talk to park management about this woman. When the doors of the elevator opened, we were in a bizarre religious area that was frequented by Muslims, where a Whack-A-Mole game turned into Whack-Saint-Peter. We sat in the only snack bar that appeared to be run by women, and my girlfriend said she didn’t really like it there. I mentioned I’d seen a Jewish park area when we were in the elevator, and that’s when I woke up.

If anybody’s interested, here are the daily question-based writing prompts I’ve found so far.
Monday Monday Mission - Participation Positives - Monday Memories
Tuesday Tuesday Too
Wednesday HumpDay Hump - Wednesday Whine - Wednesday Whimsy
Thursday Thursday Threesome
Friday Friday Five
Saturday Saturday Scruples - Eight from the 80s
Sunday Sunday Samaritan - Sunday Op-Ed
…there’s also the Topics Blog, which provides individual topics on a pretty regular basis. Unfortunately they call them “things to blog about” which is inaccurate. A weblog is a personal surfing diary, while what most people write (myself included) is an online journal. The description for the Weblogs cat of the ODP has a good clarification of the distinction. Ah well.

The questions for the Monday Mission seem a bit odd, they’re not thematically linked like most daily question prompts. Ah well.

1. What caused your last case of pseudo-road rage?
Pseudo road rage? I’m not sure what that is, but I’ve never experienced road rage to my knowledge.
(more…)

Here’s my first shot at the Tuesday Too.

If you’re not too paranoid go post your photo on Andy’s Sunny Pose.

I’m not too paranoid - my website features full-frontal nudity of myself (including recognizable face) from a porn mag, among other pictures, so I’m not too paranoid - I just don’t have a picture like that. I used to play with a webcam, and if I still had it operational I might put a Sunny Pose together just for this! but it’s in the other room hooked up to the other computer which isn’t on etc. So I’m not too paranoid, I’m too lazy.
(more…)

Hooray for the Friday Five.

1. If you could eat dinner with and “get to know” one famous person (living or dead), who would you choose?
I’m tempted to give an easy answer like k.d. lang or Ian McKellen, but I want to be more profound than that - there’s all of history to consider. Unfortunately I can’t really come up with anything else, so perhaps I’ll leave it at that. It certainly would be wonderful to meet one of those two, get to know them, and then be able to continue the friendship over time. (Minor pet peeve note: that should be “whom would you choose.”)

2. Has the death of a famous person ever had an effect on you? Who was it and how did you feel?
When I was about thirteen or fifteen years old, I sat down to watch the Melissa Gilbert version of The Diary of Anne Frank. I had watched it at least a dozen times before and knew it by heart, but for some reason I began crying during the final scene, when the residents of the Annexe sit listening as members of the Gestapo break in. My mother chided me for crying, pointing out that I had seen it so many times before and it hadn’t made me cry in all the previous viewings. I realized that I was finally identifying with Anne Frank: I am also Jewish, but although some of my ancestors may have been saved by Oskar Schindler, as far as we know none of them died during the Holocaust. At that moment, watching the movie, it struck me that she was my connection to that tragedy - having no one else to mourn, I cried for her.

3. If you could BE a famous person for 24 hours, who would you choose?
Actually, I’d want to be myself. I’d rather experience what my own life would be like if I were a celebrity than try wearing someone else’s mask. (Who/whom again. Grr.)

4. Do people ever tell you that you look like someone famous? Who?
I pretty much always get Audrey Hepburn, though somebody once said Winona Ryder. I managed a rather cute version of Holly Golightly for Halloween a couple of years back, but now I’ve gained a bit of weight so I probably couldn’t pull that off again. I would still agree that I look like Audrey Hepburn, I’m just not the stick-thin waif she was. (Incidentally, she never had an eating disorder. Her permanent reed-like figure was because her metabolism was permanently affected as a result of not having enough to eat during World War II; clicking her name above will take you to my writeup about her, which has more details on her experiences during the war.) (And a third time, even. Bah. It’s not that hard to remember…use whom when you would use him. Whom did you see? I saw him. You wouldn’t say “I saw he,” now would you?)

5. Have you ever met anyone famous?
Not to speak with intimately, but I have attended gatherings to see Sue Grafton, LeVar Burton (both at book signings), John de Lancie, and George Takei (both at Star Trek conventions, of course). I got to ask John de Lancie a question during his Q&A bit, so I asked about being naked on an episode of TNG…I was twelve at the time; when he came through the autograph line signing pictures on his way to his room, I stepped on his foot. Sue Grafton is really great about chatting with her fans in the forum on her website, and I got to say hello to her in person when she came to town promoting P is for Peril. I’m pretty sure that’s it though…can’t remember having met anybody else.

majorweather is doing a survey about journaling, and I’ve submitted my answers.


(more…)

Time for the Friday Five again.

1. What is your favorite time of year?
Late spring and early summer.

2. What is it about your favorite season that, well, makes it your favorite season?
I much prefer warmth and balmy air. Summer can get awfully hot, but I still prefer that over cold, blustery weather. Summer rains are lovely.

3. What is your least favorite time of year? Why?
I can’t stand winter because I don’t like to be cold. I have to get up earlier so I can put on more clothes, scrape the ice off the car (or trudge through the snow and fall on the ice), etc.

4. Do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons?
Not the seasons, but I picked up the habit of saying “rabbit rabbit” aloud on the first day of every month. I think it’s supposed to be for good luck, but I forget where it’s from.

5. What’s your favorite thing to do outside?
I’m currently big on kayaking, and I’m really looking forward to the season starting up soon.

take free enneagram test

In fifteen minutes I get to meet my friend _R_ for lunch, we’re not sure yet where we’ll go but we’re planning to be voice off the entire time. If we end up at Subway we’ll have to speak to order, so I’m kind of hoping we’ll go somewhere with a salad bar - but Subway is cheaper.