Meme post meme post
Jun. 2nd, 2023 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve6623. How often do you talk on the phone?
Me, I talk on the phone a fair amount. Probably a couple of times a day at least. Not usually long, interesting conversations -- these days, those are usually texts, FB messages, or email. Writing is my most comfortable groove. But I am probably LESS against the phone than most people I know. I used to love long phone calls, back in the misty 1980s, for instance, when long, late-night phone calls were somehow very important, with friends or my then boyfriend. We had three phone outlets -- all those sort of long, oblong-shaped plastic phones where the earpiece is the same size as the cradle. One was on the wall in the kitchen (thus, no late-night phone calls there); one was on a side table in the living room (a more likely spot, though I suspect most of these remembered calls took place when my parents, or by then, my mother wasn't home), and one on my mom's bedside table. When she WASN'T home sometimes during my high school years, I remember a lot of long, involved conversations on that phone. A phone conversation, without any visual, late, in the dark, can be very intimate.
24. What is something that is challenging you right now?
I'm somewhat anxious about how the summer will be -- much as I gripe about teaching, it orders my life during the school year. Now, especially with Ruby and Rosie MOVING (my nieces -- Ruby to LA, Rosie to Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, in August, to start at Sonoma State University)... agh. Agh, I say.
25. What did you collect as a child?
I probably have tendencies towards hoarding, too, but they are countervailed by not liking clutter. As a kid, I collected
1) Coins (my great-uncle Bill, otherwise a bullying Prussian bastard, started me off with a ton of change and even paper notes literally from the European countries he hefted stretchers through in WWI; and my father brought me coins from his Fourth International meetings in France and Belgium, and my grandmother brought me coins from all over the world, wherever she traveled with my great-aunt Betty -- England, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Peru...) And then I started liking old American coins -- I kept every wheat penny I ever found -- bought a couple of 1943 steel pennies, but cheap ones, had a Morgan silver dollar also from Uncle Bill, I think -- he was a kid when it was minted, which is so weird. And so on.
2) Stamps, but this was really pushed hard by my dad, and apart from introducing me to a friend, comrade, and sometime-middle-school-and-high-school crush, who was the child of one of my dad's fellow Northwestern University Library staff, I really did not give much of a fuck about stamps for more than a year or so.
3) Dolls, mostly from my grandmother, as mentioned before.
4) Rocks, for a while -- we had a rock tumbler, very 1970s, I don't remember why. I think it was one of my dad's brief and strange passions. He would get really into something (classical CDs for a while in the 1980s, though that lasted; gardening perennials and annuals, which has also lasted)
5) Books, always and forever. It's funny that I made the transition so easily to ebooks. I still have most of the books that I loved, growing up, and from grad school, on a wall of shelves (oh, I always wanted a wall of shelves and now I have one)... but I almost always read electronically now. Even old books, which I read electronically via the Internet Archive. I tremble at the thought that copywriter bastards may succeed in bringing that glorious collection down.
6) I guess, Xmas ornaments? I mean, I don't have tons of house decorations (barely any) so it is not out of hand... and I haven't really gotten any new ones recently... I don't think. But I have one plastic storage box, probably 1 and 1/2 feet by 2 and 1/2 feet that has my tree stand and all the Xmas tree stuff. I used to take Ruby and Rosie to Cost Plus/World Market at the beginning of every December and get a couple of new ones. And I have half of the ones my sister and I grew up with -- we divided them scrupulously. I also tend to look to buy a new Xmas album, or a few songs, anyway, every year.
So I collected and still collect a lot of stuff, I guess... but it doesn't spread out of bounds. My house doesn't look cluttered, which I couldn't bear. I mean, it also doesn't look Nordic or anything. Er, a happy medium?
26. When was the last time you went to a museum?
Ages ago. A couple of years. I do troll the internet, though, the way we were all encouraged to do when lock down started in 2020.
I incorporate art into my teaching as much as possible, and it's much harder to give kids art projects to do via virtual, so I went harder this year on doing mini-art-history lessons to start each Zoom class, beginning about in... February, I see by looking at my photos.
I pretty randomly decided on some of the most well-known artists to begin with (I started with Van Gogh, in fact, and then Renoir and Matisse) and I would have one of their works as the background on my laptop, and share screen in Zoom after we did check-in, and talk about the artist, his or her life, their context, and the piece. I am NOT an art historian, at all, in any way, so this was all kind of improvised on the spot with the help of Wikipedia and any reviews of art exhibits etc I could find online. I learned a lot myself, about art and artists I like. I would usually spend three Zoom days per artist, something like that.
Artists I recall at this point: Renoir, Kandinsky, Klee, Hilma af Klint, Gustav Klimt, Jacob Lawrence, Picasso, Archibald Motley, Sr., Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, a side-swerve into a lot of those lock-down projects where people at home recreated famous paintings using themselves and took a selfie (I loved those), Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and the final one will be Banksy. We have three more days of Zoom, next week. The last three before Banksy worked really well, because they all knew each other and overlapped.
27. Do you put anything besides cheese on grilled cheese sandwiches?
Jesus, no.
28. When it comes to books, what do you think is the “perfect” amount of pages?
"I disagree with this question's premise. If I like the writing, I don't want the book to end. If the writing or the character(s) is/are awful, it's too long at 10 pages." What Microbie said.
That stated, I have to admit I do like a long-assed book (if it's good, obvs.) Long-assed books I have liked: the oeuvre of James Clavell; of Jean Auel, of Colleen McCullough, of Neal Stephenson, of Kim Stanley Robinson, and of Gillian Bradshaw, who I wish would write MORE, damnit. I really enjoy her very detailed historical novels.
Me, I talk on the phone a fair amount. Probably a couple of times a day at least. Not usually long, interesting conversations -- these days, those are usually texts, FB messages, or email. Writing is my most comfortable groove. But I am probably LESS against the phone than most people I know. I used to love long phone calls, back in the misty 1980s, for instance, when long, late-night phone calls were somehow very important, with friends or my then boyfriend. We had three phone outlets -- all those sort of long, oblong-shaped plastic phones where the earpiece is the same size as the cradle. One was on the wall in the kitchen (thus, no late-night phone calls there); one was on a side table in the living room (a more likely spot, though I suspect most of these remembered calls took place when my parents, or by then, my mother wasn't home), and one on my mom's bedside table. When she WASN'T home sometimes during my high school years, I remember a lot of long, involved conversations on that phone. A phone conversation, without any visual, late, in the dark, can be very intimate.
24. What is something that is challenging you right now?
I'm somewhat anxious about how the summer will be -- much as I gripe about teaching, it orders my life during the school year. Now, especially with Ruby and Rosie MOVING (my nieces -- Ruby to LA, Rosie to Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, in August, to start at Sonoma State University)... agh. Agh, I say.
25. What did you collect as a child?
I probably have tendencies towards hoarding, too, but they are countervailed by not liking clutter. As a kid, I collected
1) Coins (my great-uncle Bill, otherwise a bullying Prussian bastard, started me off with a ton of change and even paper notes literally from the European countries he hefted stretchers through in WWI; and my father brought me coins from his Fourth International meetings in France and Belgium, and my grandmother brought me coins from all over the world, wherever she traveled with my great-aunt Betty -- England, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Peru...) And then I started liking old American coins -- I kept every wheat penny I ever found -- bought a couple of 1943 steel pennies, but cheap ones, had a Morgan silver dollar also from Uncle Bill, I think -- he was a kid when it was minted, which is so weird. And so on.
2) Stamps, but this was really pushed hard by my dad, and apart from introducing me to a friend, comrade, and sometime-middle-school-and-high-school crush, who was the child of one of my dad's fellow Northwestern University Library staff, I really did not give much of a fuck about stamps for more than a year or so.
3) Dolls, mostly from my grandmother, as mentioned before.
4) Rocks, for a while -- we had a rock tumbler, very 1970s, I don't remember why. I think it was one of my dad's brief and strange passions. He would get really into something (classical CDs for a while in the 1980s, though that lasted; gardening perennials and annuals, which has also lasted)
5) Books, always and forever. It's funny that I made the transition so easily to ebooks. I still have most of the books that I loved, growing up, and from grad school, on a wall of shelves (oh, I always wanted a wall of shelves and now I have one)... but I almost always read electronically now. Even old books, which I read electronically via the Internet Archive. I tremble at the thought that copywriter bastards may succeed in bringing that glorious collection down.
6) I guess, Xmas ornaments? I mean, I don't have tons of house decorations (barely any) so it is not out of hand... and I haven't really gotten any new ones recently... I don't think. But I have one plastic storage box, probably 1 and 1/2 feet by 2 and 1/2 feet that has my tree stand and all the Xmas tree stuff. I used to take Ruby and Rosie to Cost Plus/World Market at the beginning of every December and get a couple of new ones. And I have half of the ones my sister and I grew up with -- we divided them scrupulously. I also tend to look to buy a new Xmas album, or a few songs, anyway, every year.
So I collected and still collect a lot of stuff, I guess... but it doesn't spread out of bounds. My house doesn't look cluttered, which I couldn't bear. I mean, it also doesn't look Nordic or anything. Er, a happy medium?
26. When was the last time you went to a museum?
Ages ago. A couple of years. I do troll the internet, though, the way we were all encouraged to do when lock down started in 2020.
I incorporate art into my teaching as much as possible, and it's much harder to give kids art projects to do via virtual, so I went harder this year on doing mini-art-history lessons to start each Zoom class, beginning about in... February, I see by looking at my photos.
I pretty randomly decided on some of the most well-known artists to begin with (I started with Van Gogh, in fact, and then Renoir and Matisse) and I would have one of their works as the background on my laptop, and share screen in Zoom after we did check-in, and talk about the artist, his or her life, their context, and the piece. I am NOT an art historian, at all, in any way, so this was all kind of improvised on the spot with the help of Wikipedia and any reviews of art exhibits etc I could find online. I learned a lot myself, about art and artists I like. I would usually spend three Zoom days per artist, something like that.
Artists I recall at this point: Renoir, Kandinsky, Klee, Hilma af Klint, Gustav Klimt, Jacob Lawrence, Picasso, Archibald Motley, Sr., Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, a side-swerve into a lot of those lock-down projects where people at home recreated famous paintings using themselves and took a selfie (I loved those), Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and the final one will be Banksy. We have three more days of Zoom, next week. The last three before Banksy worked really well, because they all knew each other and overlapped.
27. Do you put anything besides cheese on grilled cheese sandwiches?
Jesus, no.
28. When it comes to books, what do you think is the “perfect” amount of pages?
"I disagree with this question's premise. If I like the writing, I don't want the book to end. If the writing or the character(s) is/are awful, it's too long at 10 pages." What Microbie said.
That stated, I have to admit I do like a long-assed book (if it's good, obvs.) Long-assed books I have liked: the oeuvre of James Clavell; of Jean Auel, of Colleen McCullough, of Neal Stephenson, of Kim Stanley Robinson, and of Gillian Bradshaw, who I wish would write MORE, damnit. I really enjoy her very detailed historical novels.