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February 22, 2006
Self-Portrait in Brief
As promised yesterday, here are some of the things I have said about myself in my Friendster profile.
I actually have several affiliations, but at this moment I feel pretty damn unaffiliated. If I lived in a different time and place, I'd grab my begging bowl and hit the road.
As an insomniac, I find sleep pretty interesting, and many of my hobbies involve efforts to help me fall and stay asleep: yoga, acupuncture, lying prone in a dark room and thinking about my toes.
When I'm awake and want to stay that way, my hobbies and interests include dancing, paisley, calligraphy, learning to knit sweaters that fit me after they've been washed, radical Mormon feminism (yes, there is such a thing), men in mascara (saves me the trouble of wearing it), proper dental hygiene, good beer, writing, and those spaces on maps where cartographers used to write "here be dragons."
I love the simple, transient pleasure of cleanliness, as in crisp, freshly laundered sheets; hair washed so recently it's still damp; the minty freshness of just-brushed teeth. I especially love going to sleep in a clean bed with just-washed hair and well-maintained teeth.
I keep detailed records of my dreams, but rarely take them literally: for instance, when I dreamed my mother told me she was an alien from a galaxy populated by giant, electric-blue dancing elephants, I didn't believe it meant that my mother really was an alien--or that a galaxy populated by giant, electric-blue dancing elephants existed anywhere in the universe. (Note: since I started blogging, I've stopped doing this. I used to get up, sit down at my computer, and write down my dreams; now I get up, sit down at my computer, and post a blog entry.)
An ideal job for me would be continuity person for a long-running television show, because I have a very precise memory and like keeping track of details. The job I really have is nothing like that.
I love to dance and I'm pretty good at it--years of hula and belly dancing lessons mean that I can do some fairly phenomenal things with my hips--but these days I can't find anyone who shares my enthusiasm for dancing, so my best option is to put something fast on the stereo (I favor 80s new wave), turn the volume up, and dance around my living room.
I studied French for a long time but never got all that good at it, and Mandarin for not so long but became fluent because of the strange circumstances under which I learned it (read: mission to Taiwan). In grad school I took two semesters of German (under duress) so I could learn to do rudimentary translations, which left me with a horror of the German system of article declension and the ability to say "was ist mit Madonna?" with reasonable conviction.
I love chocolate and ice cream and garlic and coffee and dark beer, but not all at the same time. I like eating grilled cheese sandwiches made with extra sharp white cheddar for breakfast. More favorite breakfast foods: a whole array of chocolate desserts I make from time to time, just because I can.
My favorite color is green.
My favorite deity is Shiva, Lord of the Dance and inventor of yoga.
I am old enough that I know exactly where I was when Kennedy was shot: in the womb.
I tend to call a spade a "fucking shovel." I prefer to pay the fiddler before I dance all night.
I often think and write about things other people find unseemly, i.e., God, religious despair, really gross medical procedures, broken bones, diarrhea, menstruation, the exceptional weird nasty meanness of one particular ex-boyfriend. Trust me, though: these things might be unseemly, but they're still really interesting.
OK, I know I wrote all that about myself, but the fact remains, I read these bits of description and I can't help thinking that the person being described sound downright fascinating. If I didn't already know her, I'd really want to learn more.
Posted by holly at February 22, 2006 9:09 AM
Cave, hic dragones!
Of course, "beware" is not the same as "forbidden, don't go there." I agree that this person sounds fascinating. I think the unseemly is the most interesting thing to read about -- along with the abject and the repressed. And I like to smear my grilled cheese sandwiches with Branston pickle (though I don't know if that counts as unseemly, abject, or repressed). I speak Spanish well enough to think that I can speak Italian after six beers -- dark is okay but my general preference is for cask-conditioned bitter. I like to dance poorly. It requires me to lose my self-consciousness. And there are days when I am so mad that I think the piper should pay me.
Ugh: Did I just produce one of those half-worked out friendster profiles that used to annoy you?
Spike--that's a marvelous profile: it actually tells me something. No, the ones I objected to said something like
Interests: sports, movies
favorite movies: action movies
favorite music: rock
favorite books: The DaVinci Code
About me:
And from that, I'm supposed to intuit that so-and-so is a great guy? I don't think so.