The end of June meme-ing
Jun. 30th, 2023 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve6616. What is a lesson you’ve recently learned?
Hmmm. Pantry moths are difficult to eradicate, despite cleaning my pantry shelves and using hormone traps.
17. Did you win any superlatives in school?
If school includes grad school, a lot. Two teaching awards, several informal encomiums (encomia?) about my PhD Written exams (which were crazy fun, because I am crazy like that). (OTOH, a few very puzzled and disappointed looks about my Orals because I panicked and froze in front of my committee... they were all so CONFUSED). If school is high school and younger... uh... I mean, teachers thought I was very smart but also quite lazy.
18. Did you ever own a bean bag chair?
No.
19. What magazines do you read regularly?
I have a sub to Jacobin and the longer I've had it, the more I've read it. It's good. In the past, I have assiduously read Real Simple even though 95% of it is irrelevant in my life... and a magazine I know I would read cover to cover every issue is Archaeology. I wish my father and stepmother would get me THAT magazine for Christmas, instead of stuff like... what was the last one? Oh, yeah, The Smithsonian.
20. Have you ever seen a magic show?
No. But there was a great fictional description in one of my favorite YA historical fiction books, The Great Brain at the Academy, where Tom Fitzgerald goes with his Catholic Academy mates to an 1890-ish stage magic show, which inspires him to figure out the mind reading trick and deploy it to defraud his fellow students, at least the 8th graders who hazed him.
21. What’s better: a surprise or knowing you’re going to get it?
If we're talking about gifts, I prefer a surprise to a prior negotiation. My sister is the exact opposite.
22. What’s the last thing you got in a vending machine?
Wow. No damn idea, though probably a Coke?
23. What are some hobbies you’d like to try and pick up?
I wish, wish, wish I could learn to play guitar but I feel like I cannot.
24. Describe your personality in six words?
That sounds sort of Colbertian, like his Colbert Questionert...
Empathetic, lazy, curious, socialist, addicted-to-reading, writer
25. What are some places that you've been that you'd like to go to again?
Brighton, London, Oxford, Paris, Seville, Lisbon, Amsterdam, New Orleans, Chicago, Evanston, Lake Geneva, Madison.
26. Ever taken pictures in a photo booth?
Yes, a couple of times in high school and at least once in college, though I do not have any of the photos... or maybe there are one or two stuck in old albums.
27. When was the last time you did something for the first time?
Gosh. I am not sure I can remember the last time I tried something for the first time. Once I've done something once (and liked it) I tend to do it again and again.
28. What is the last song you listened to on repeat?
This is not exactly that, but whatever. I have a bazillion VERSIONS of the same songs in my iTunes (or Music, whatever pointless thing Apple has renamed it to, except not Apple music, because I want all my music to belong to me and to be located first on my hard drive) -- for instance, of songs like "The Water is Wide", "Little Musgrave" (a Child ballad, and there are MANY versions that I have, mostly from the Brit New Folk movement) "Blues Run the Game", "Landslide", "Bread and Roses", "Life's a Brook" (actually only two, there, but one is Lucie Blue Tremblay's French version), "Changes" (Tupac and Bruce Hornsby's "The Way it Is" and I think one other iteration I cannot at the moment find)... but the last way I listened to the same song was just minutes ago when I first listened to Rick Astley's Glastonbury cover of "There is a Light" with the Blossoms, and then listened to the Smiths' 1986 version on YouTube.
29. How long did you last drive in the car for?
Also, like Microbie, about fifteen to twenty minutes, home from my sister's house IN MY NEW (to me) CAR -- a purple (well, "blackberry pearl" -- it's purple in the sunlight) 2010 Honda Fit, which has room for me to lift my travelscoot into the back without breaking it down at all.
30. How have you changed in the last year?
It's all a perennial tumble downhill, physically speaking, sigh. Even worse mobility, etc. Bleah. Also, with my sister, facing Empty Nest Syndrome, because both my nieces are moving. Ruby leaves for LA tomorrow. Rosie goes to Sonoma State University in August.
PS: this has nothing to do with this entry (and I should write about writing, this summer, in a separate entry) but... I was reading an online 2020 dissertation from Loyola University, on women's vocational education 1880-1930, which has a large portion of one of its chapters on the Illinois Industrial School for Girls, founded and sited in Evanston, 1879-1908 or so (when it moved to Park Ridge). It's readable, mostly, but it desperately needed editing it did not get, and drove me INSANE in the first chapter with just these word choice issues: "astrology" for what Evanston high schoolers had to study in preparatory classes, instead of "astronomy"; "pentameters" for "parameters"; and "plumping" for "plumbing". That was all in Chapter One.
Hmmm. Pantry moths are difficult to eradicate, despite cleaning my pantry shelves and using hormone traps.
17. Did you win any superlatives in school?
If school includes grad school, a lot. Two teaching awards, several informal encomiums (encomia?) about my PhD Written exams (which were crazy fun, because I am crazy like that). (OTOH, a few very puzzled and disappointed looks about my Orals because I panicked and froze in front of my committee... they were all so CONFUSED). If school is high school and younger... uh... I mean, teachers thought I was very smart but also quite lazy.
18. Did you ever own a bean bag chair?
No.
19. What magazines do you read regularly?
I have a sub to Jacobin and the longer I've had it, the more I've read it. It's good. In the past, I have assiduously read Real Simple even though 95% of it is irrelevant in my life... and a magazine I know I would read cover to cover every issue is Archaeology. I wish my father and stepmother would get me THAT magazine for Christmas, instead of stuff like... what was the last one? Oh, yeah, The Smithsonian.
20. Have you ever seen a magic show?
No. But there was a great fictional description in one of my favorite YA historical fiction books, The Great Brain at the Academy, where Tom Fitzgerald goes with his Catholic Academy mates to an 1890-ish stage magic show, which inspires him to figure out the mind reading trick and deploy it to defraud his fellow students, at least the 8th graders who hazed him.
21. What’s better: a surprise or knowing you’re going to get it?
If we're talking about gifts, I prefer a surprise to a prior negotiation. My sister is the exact opposite.
22. What’s the last thing you got in a vending machine?
Wow. No damn idea, though probably a Coke?
23. What are some hobbies you’d like to try and pick up?
I wish, wish, wish I could learn to play guitar but I feel like I cannot.
24. Describe your personality in six words?
That sounds sort of Colbertian, like his Colbert Questionert...
Empathetic, lazy, curious, socialist, addicted-to-reading, writer
25. What are some places that you've been that you'd like to go to again?
Brighton, London, Oxford, Paris, Seville, Lisbon, Amsterdam, New Orleans, Chicago, Evanston, Lake Geneva, Madison.
26. Ever taken pictures in a photo booth?
Yes, a couple of times in high school and at least once in college, though I do not have any of the photos... or maybe there are one or two stuck in old albums.
27. When was the last time you did something for the first time?
Gosh. I am not sure I can remember the last time I tried something for the first time. Once I've done something once (and liked it) I tend to do it again and again.
28. What is the last song you listened to on repeat?
This is not exactly that, but whatever. I have a bazillion VERSIONS of the same songs in my iTunes (or Music, whatever pointless thing Apple has renamed it to, except not Apple music, because I want all my music to belong to me and to be located first on my hard drive) -- for instance, of songs like "The Water is Wide", "Little Musgrave" (a Child ballad, and there are MANY versions that I have, mostly from the Brit New Folk movement) "Blues Run the Game", "Landslide", "Bread and Roses", "Life's a Brook" (actually only two, there, but one is Lucie Blue Tremblay's French version), "Changes" (Tupac and Bruce Hornsby's "The Way it Is" and I think one other iteration I cannot at the moment find)... but the last way I listened to the same song was just minutes ago when I first listened to Rick Astley's Glastonbury cover of "There is a Light" with the Blossoms, and then listened to the Smiths' 1986 version on YouTube.
29. How long did you last drive in the car for?
Also, like Microbie, about fifteen to twenty minutes, home from my sister's house IN MY NEW (to me) CAR -- a purple (well, "blackberry pearl" -- it's purple in the sunlight) 2010 Honda Fit, which has room for me to lift my travelscoot into the back without breaking it down at all.
30. How have you changed in the last year?
It's all a perennial tumble downhill, physically speaking, sigh. Even worse mobility, etc. Bleah. Also, with my sister, facing Empty Nest Syndrome, because both my nieces are moving. Ruby leaves for LA tomorrow. Rosie goes to Sonoma State University in August.
PS: this has nothing to do with this entry (and I should write about writing, this summer, in a separate entry) but... I was reading an online 2020 dissertation from Loyola University, on women's vocational education 1880-1930, which has a large portion of one of its chapters on the Illinois Industrial School for Girls, founded and sited in Evanston, 1879-1908 or so (when it moved to Park Ridge). It's readable, mostly, but it desperately needed editing it did not get, and drove me INSANE in the first chapter with just these word choice issues: "astrology" for what Evanston high schoolers had to study in preparatory classes, instead of "astronomy"; "pentameters" for "parameters"; and "plumping" for "plumbing". That was all in Chapter One.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-01 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-01 09:37 pm (UTC)YES THOSE ASSHOLES
My friend was going to buy parasitic wasps to deal with them. That to me is nightmare fuel and I just couldn't.