Five Questions Meme
Oct. 15th, 2018 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phoenixfalls With thanks to enemyofperfect , who posed these questions to me:
1. What is your favorite Lois McMaster Bujold book?
GAH. Probably Memory? Except it's the one book in the whole Vorkosigan saga that you really can't read as a stand-alone, because it's where everything that Miles has been doing for years catches up to him and all his spinning plates come crashing down. It's so deeply satisfying, even though I adored watching Miles keep all those plates in motion for so long. And I love the Barrayar-set based books best overall anyway -- everything matters more, in those, than in the galactic adventure novels.
But almost everyone says Memory is their favorite, so to give a slightly less-common favorite, I also really love Komarr. I adore Ekaterin's perspective, and I wish we got so much more of her in the later books. Her perspective is so much the opposite of Miles's, inward-focused, very domestic, and she grounds that book so beautifully.
Once upon a time, A Civil Campaign was my hands-down favorite; but since I read the Harriet Vane arc of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels that Bujold was clearly emulating, it's gone down quite a bit in my estimation. Bujold essentially skipped from Strong Poison to Gaudy Night when she went from Komarr to A Civil Campaign, and I think the romance really needs that middle book of Have His Carcase to work.
2. Do you have any pets, or would you like to?
I do not currently have any pets. I had a veritable menagerie a year ago, several snakes, lizards, fish, and a bird; but they were more my ex's than mine, so when we broke up he took them all, and I moved into an apartment that doesn't allow pets. I have some herbs on my balcony?
Part of me really wants a dog and/or cat, when I next move. But another part of me is extremely morbid and can't help but think that if something happened to me, there's no one who would think of or be able to come to the rescue of my poor pet, so it would probably die miserably trapped in my apartment. (Because at the moment I have neither friends nor family anywhere closer than a thousand miles from me, so if I were to die suddenly it would take time for anyone to notice.)
This answer got really depressing. I'm sorry?
3. If you had to give up written works or television and film, which one would you keep?
Written word, no question. I enjoy those newfangled moving pictures, but words are my go-to. They're how my brain processes stories, and stories are definitely vital to my continued well-being. I read pretty much constantly, even while I'm watching television. :)
4. What's a language you would like to learn?
I'd like to go back to learning ASL (American Sign Language). I took a couple quarters of it in college, before I transferred to a school that didn't offer it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it really rewarding to learn something of the Deaf community through my classes, and the language itself. . . I don't think of myself as being particularly good with spatial relationships, because I never scored particularly well on those parts of my standardized tests in school, but as I've tried teaching random things to other people (and as I've had to pack things into small-ish cars) I think I've underestimated my facility with that kind of thinking? Concepts have shapes in my head, in a way that they don't seem to for other people that I've interacted with. And so I found ASL surprisingly intuitive, when I was learning it -- I picked up vocabulary much more quickly than I did when I was learning Latin and Spanish.
So anyway, yeah. ASL. Which I'm actually very well positioned to learn, because I work just a few miles from a university that my old ASL professor said was basically the center of the Deaf academic community on the west coast? And yet. . . I just don't have TIME. Stupid work.
5. Are there any personality sorting systems -- like astrology, Enneagram, Hogwarts houses, etc. -- that you find interesting or meaningful?
I find all of them interesting. i love taking personality quizzes! Even utterly absurd ones! I've never figured out my Hogwarts house because I've never actually read (or watched) Harry Potter, but I've taken probably thousands of various other personality quizzes in my life. I have little interest in astrology, in part because I have a family member who makes his living doing it, and in part because I'm a Gemini and I fit very, very few of the common Gemini traits. But beyond that, I like categories, and I like figuring out which categories fit me, and I like arguing with the survey when I get categories that *don't* seem to fit me. But I don't take any of them particularly seriously, enough to say that I find them "meaningful."
(This is why my family member who is an astrologer means that I can't get into astrology -- I find personality quizzes predominantly fun, and my family member is deadly Serious about astrology, so it's not fun for me.)
Anyone else who wants five questions to answer, let me know in the comments!
enemyofperfect , who posed these questions to me:1. What is your favorite Lois McMaster Bujold book?
GAH. Probably Memory? Except it's the one book in the whole Vorkosigan saga that you really can't read as a stand-alone, because it's where everything that Miles has been doing for years catches up to him and all his spinning plates come crashing down. It's so deeply satisfying, even though I adored watching Miles keep all those plates in motion for so long. And I love the Barrayar-set based books best overall anyway -- everything matters more, in those, than in the galactic adventure novels.
But almost everyone says Memory is their favorite, so to give a slightly less-common favorite, I also really love Komarr. I adore Ekaterin's perspective, and I wish we got so much more of her in the later books. Her perspective is so much the opposite of Miles's, inward-focused, very domestic, and she grounds that book so beautifully.
Once upon a time, A Civil Campaign was my hands-down favorite; but since I read the Harriet Vane arc of Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels that Bujold was clearly emulating, it's gone down quite a bit in my estimation. Bujold essentially skipped from Strong Poison to Gaudy Night when she went from Komarr to A Civil Campaign, and I think the romance really needs that middle book of Have His Carcase to work.
2. Do you have any pets, or would you like to?
I do not currently have any pets. I had a veritable menagerie a year ago, several snakes, lizards, fish, and a bird; but they were more my ex's than mine, so when we broke up he took them all, and I moved into an apartment that doesn't allow pets. I have some herbs on my balcony?
Part of me really wants a dog and/or cat, when I next move. But another part of me is extremely morbid and can't help but think that if something happened to me, there's no one who would think of or be able to come to the rescue of my poor pet, so it would probably die miserably trapped in my apartment. (Because at the moment I have neither friends nor family anywhere closer than a thousand miles from me, so if I were to die suddenly it would take time for anyone to notice.)
This answer got really depressing. I'm sorry?
3. If you had to give up written works or television and film, which one would you keep?
Written word, no question. I enjoy those newfangled moving pictures, but words are my go-to. They're how my brain processes stories, and stories are definitely vital to my continued well-being. I read pretty much constantly, even while I'm watching television. :)
4. What's a language you would like to learn?
I'd like to go back to learning ASL (American Sign Language). I took a couple quarters of it in college, before I transferred to a school that didn't offer it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it really rewarding to learn something of the Deaf community through my classes, and the language itself. . . I don't think of myself as being particularly good with spatial relationships, because I never scored particularly well on those parts of my standardized tests in school, but as I've tried teaching random things to other people (and as I've had to pack things into small-ish cars) I think I've underestimated my facility with that kind of thinking? Concepts have shapes in my head, in a way that they don't seem to for other people that I've interacted with. And so I found ASL surprisingly intuitive, when I was learning it -- I picked up vocabulary much more quickly than I did when I was learning Latin and Spanish.
So anyway, yeah. ASL. Which I'm actually very well positioned to learn, because I work just a few miles from a university that my old ASL professor said was basically the center of the Deaf academic community on the west coast? And yet. . . I just don't have TIME. Stupid work.
5. Are there any personality sorting systems -- like astrology, Enneagram, Hogwarts houses, etc. -- that you find interesting or meaningful?
I find all of them interesting. i love taking personality quizzes! Even utterly absurd ones! I've never figured out my Hogwarts house because I've never actually read (or watched) Harry Potter, but I've taken probably thousands of various other personality quizzes in my life. I have little interest in astrology, in part because I have a family member who makes his living doing it, and in part because I'm a Gemini and I fit very, very few of the common Gemini traits. But beyond that, I like categories, and I like figuring out which categories fit me, and I like arguing with the survey when I get categories that *don't* seem to fit me. But I don't take any of them particularly seriously, enough to say that I find them "meaningful."
(This is why my family member who is an astrologer means that I can't get into astrology -- I find personality quizzes predominantly fun, and my family member is deadly Serious about astrology, so it's not fun for me.)
Anyone else who wants five questions to answer, let me know in the comments!
