Health food my ass

TOO MUCH SALAD.

Owowowowowowowow. How does salad actually HURT?

Oh, and my grandmother has an aneurysm. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I like to think that I'm following in the footsteps laid out by her and her son by not really giving a shit out loud, but secretly being not really much more concerned about it.

That interview meme

Questions asked by kenwestervelt.

1. What makes you change the channel on the radio?
I listen to a lot of music - pretty consistently, I've got a cd or the iTunes or something playing, and I have a wide variety of music that I listen to. In fact, there's not really any one genre that I would say that I don't listen to and never would, unless you don't consider polyphonic Renaissance arrangements, the works of Henry VIII, and early-medieval recreation recording to not fall into the category of classical. And admittedly, a lot of commercially-successful hiphop, rap and R&B make me gag, but that doesn't exclude them from what I listen to - it's just not the commercial stuff. Music is a major factor in my life, and has been since I was seven. Having said all that, I only listen to commercial radio in the car. So I don't have to be particularly tolerant, since there are ten other stations within inches of my fingers, and it's not like I have to actually get up and change the channel or find the remote or something.

Wait, I just implied there are circumstances when I'm tolerant. Har.

Commercials. Horribly annoying Geico and jewelry commercials in particular. Songs I can't sing along to are another winner in that sweepstakes. Artists I really don't like, like Queen. Led Zepplin is sudden death.

Morning radio shows can really make me change the channel. I dislike that typical format of two guys and a girl and the guys basically try to be as stupid as humanly possible so the girl can point out how stupid they're being. Also, they tend, at least here, to be staffed completely by yuppie wannabes, so you get a lot of opinions about things that make me want to retch. One of the ones I last heard on the Andy Savage show (the ONLY good thing about KRock going off the air is that they're currently unemployed) was this bit about how no one on the staff wanted to have a daughter because they didn't want to have to worry that she was running around having sex. On the other hand, these are people who think that their dogs are perfectly well entertained with no interaction from their owners (ie, don't understand why the dogs are chewing on things), so you can guess why their daughters might be running about having sex rather than having the interaction with family that might cut down on sexual shenanigans. Interestingly, none of them refused to have a son on the principle that they didn't want to worry that he was running around having sex, so I guess the real issue was whether they wanted to deal responsibly with sex-education (no) and whether they wanted to deal with consequences like pregnancy for failing to educate their daughters about sex (no). So probably best that they don't reproduce altogether.

Every time I think I'm not an elitist, I listen to morning radio shows. If I had a longer commute, I'd spend a lot of it on the phone bitchslapping radio stations.

DJs who sound like Pauly Shore (and act like him too) are an instant winner in the channel-changing sweepstakes.

Boredom combined with optimism can make me change it. I can be three quarters of the way through a song I really like and wonder what else is playing on the radio, because you never know if there's a song I like better playing somewhere else.

I listen to radio to be entertained. That means music I can sing along to and DJs I can listen to without retching, and a minimum of commercials. Otherwise, it's not entertainment, it's a task, and I have enough of those, thanks, without making my own time into one.

2. What do you think of the local alternative lifestyle subculture there?
I don't know what it is anymore, really. I suppose it's some sort of bastardised emo-goth-whore-cutter thing now, if what I hear about is accurate (and a lot of the music I listen to is technically marketed to a younger generation than mine) but I'm 28 years old, and I never have been a scenester in a major way. Sometimes my fashion choices (and I include music and books as fashions) intersect with the things that are being pushed by their respective industries, but I'm not one thing or the other. So I can't really vouch for the current omg-bleeding-edge-hip alternative lifestyle here. Or anywhere, for that matter.

Having said that, I'm going to broaden the definition of alternative lifestyle and answer this one a bit differently. I think that my lifestyle is alternative, if not in a musical sense or in an actual red-state-beware sense because of who it includes and what I like to do. I like coffee shops. I like small, horribly tacky bars and waitresses that I can talk about someday getting the courage to hit on. I like independent cinema, and bookstores, and indie bookstores, and I like a diversity of music and lifestyle, in my friends if not myself.

I like horribly intellectual people and people who have strength of character and who have the ability to tell people to fuck off when they want to, and I have all those things here in Seattle. I suspect that unless I moved to Bumfuck Arkansas, I'd have those things, but they are here and so am I. I like that I'm not constrained by anyone I know at all to get a real job in insurance underwriting, lose some weight, and get married and have a bunch of kids and a mortgage. No one I know is pressuring me to do that. Whether that means that I live outside the norm or not, I can't say, though it feels like it, from the ways the media filters society. Or rather, by the way that media is division by zero of common experience.

Also, bear in mind that I know precisely one straight person in Seattle. I know a lot of gays and several lesbians, and I'm bi myself, so it's not like I'm getting the het vibes delivered straight to my brain via inborn hetdar and GPS. So in that sense as well, my lifestyle is alternative, possibly more literally than in the sense of the two previous paragraphs, where I turned into the Last Romantic At The Parisian Street Cafe, Smoking Cloves And Waiting For Love In The Rain While Being Secretly Pretentious.

I think I'd wrap this question by saying that my lifestyle, at least as I idealise it, is that of a bricoleur, where I take things from one person and from one place and from another person and from that scent and that sight and that thing that I've always liked and bodge them together into something that functions. I believe - because I will have to kill myself if I don't believe it - that that is an alternative lifestyle, if not in the musical sense that, you know, we had this sort of unified grunge movement ten and more years ago and that was easy to define, but in the sense that I don't care what Martha Stewart and Jessica McClintock and J.Lo are doing - unless it's interesting, in which case I will steal it and incorporate it into my own lifestyle.

I went to a friend's house the other week - he lives across the street from me - and I was standing in his horribly impressive living room, looking at his brushed-steel refrigerator and tastefully-placed accent lighting and the couch he bought new and the prints on the walls, and I thought to myself "My god I've fucked my life up if I don't have the money to afford this, this is gorgeous." And then I came to my senses and said "But I don't want any of this, I didn't want it until I saw it here, and it doesn't matter to me other than this stab of reflexive consumer-envy."

I'd like to sum that up neatly with some sort of statement on how I made it home safely and he was hit by a bus, but it'd be bullshit. But I feel sure that he's living some sort of yuplet dream and I'm living my dream and society would look down on me if we were featured in House and Garden magazine because omg poverty!chic. So that must make me alternative. And if not, I've got this really bleeding-edge-hip CD by this band that no one's ever heard.

3. Have you ever lived outside the Pacific Northwest? Would you want to (again)?
The only places I've lived outside the Pacific Northwest have been Alaska and England. I'd say yes to both, for very different reasons.

In Alaska, if you pick the company you work for right, you can make a fuck of a lot of money quite quickly. There's nothing to spend it on, either, so you can save almost all of it. I worked in tourism both times I lived there (for a summer each time) and the first place I worked at had this ridiculously good pay and benefits package. They paid a dollar over minimum wage and gave overtime for more than eight hours a day AND forty hours a week - and I was, by the end of the summer, working twelve and fourteen hour days. Drinks cost a buck for employees at that lodge, and you ate pretty much what you could gank or get because it was expiring.

This in the middle of some gorgeous scenery. But I'm not an outdoors person (gosh, who'da'thunk it?) so it was the money that made me happy. Alaska has this total Irish thing going on, too, where everyone who meets another Alaskan immediately does the "Oh, you're from ___? Do you know Mr/Miss/Mrs ___, who lives in ____ and runs the ____?" And the response is usually "Oh, yeah, he/she's my second cousin!" And then they're family. That sort of understanding of the importance of people is enjoyable to me, but then again, if it really was, I'd introduce myself to my neighbours.

I do still hope to go back to England to live at some point, but frankly that day gets further and further away because I really, really, really like my job here in Seattle and I don't think I could find a company there that would be that sort of mix of completely crazy geniuses and niceness that I have at Wizards. But if I were to get fired tomorrow, I'd definitely be looking at jobs in England. Hopefully now that I've nearly got a year in a profession I like, I'd qualify for more jobs than I did when I was fresh out of school, trying to get into journalism/media/publishing with an Anthropology degree.

I loved England in part because it made sense to me. It really did. It's a small country and it feels small. You don't drive twenty miles to work, as I experienced it there, because that's unreasonable. I mean, I know there are people who do, or who live well outside London and commute, but it didn't feel like that was the expected standard. There are definitely things that are...worrying, about it, mainly things like the fact that the Bill of Rights (which, okay, granted, that's been raped by Bush, but still) doesn't apply to you, but that can be worked around. The main thing I'd think about would be freedom of speech, anyway. There were other parts of it that made sense, but it was mainly that it was my home for so long and one that I didn't have help from family in getting used to, so everything that I managed to do (from paying council tax my last summer to actually finding and buying correct ingredient equivalents for an American recipe) I did. Which makes me sound like a) I had no friends and b) I want that gold star for tying my shoes before I showed up at summer camp, but I'm not like that. It's just that I have four siblings, two parents, five nieces and nephews, two brothers-in-law, a sister-in-law, and one greatniece, so it's hard to actually do something that your family hasn't done or figured out or does with you.

The other - and more pressing - reason I loved England was that because I was five thousand miles from family and they weren't going to drop in unexpectedly, I could be myself in a way I've never really felt here in the US, even when I was going to college sixty miles away (and don't get me started on when I lived in Alaska, because my dad did come there on his vacation, with my nephew). I could go out and get completely pissed and stay out till five am and get chips on the way home and sleep till ten and no one would know or care unless I told them. I could do anything I wanted, and I did quite a lot of them. It was where I recreated myself very deliberately, into the charmingly bitchy intellectual you see today. Granted, that wasn't much of a stretch, but it was like taking the brakes off my personality and letting it happen full throttle.

Even more than the fact that I like the country and I love my friends there, I'd go back to England simply to be me again in that full on way, because ever since I got back two years ago, I've been damping back down in response to changed circumstances. It's helped that my job doesn't require conformity, and it's helped that one of the things I learned in England was that I finally had the maturity and perspective to say that I didn't give a fuck what someone else thought of me and mean it under all circumstances (rather than the not-meaning of it in high school and the partial meaning of it in college) and it's helped that I could play with concepts of what it meant to be me. I'll never, ever go back to that level of not-me that I used to occupy, but I'm definitely leaving the heights I achieved in England, and I feel like a fucking wuss for that.

4. What's the best "cheap/free date" you've been on?
That depends on your definition of date. I really don't date other people - like, seriously, the last time I went on an actual date, Braveheart and Toy Story were in theatres. Often, I get the sympathy vote - my mother still pays for me to go out to dinner with her and my dad and to go to movies when I'm truly pathetically broke, but that's because she enjoys my company and because she can afford it. Everyone I hang out with is pretty broke too, so it's like even if someone else buys the tickets, I'll pay gas and parking and drive and someone else will buy the drinks.

But thinking more about the question, the answer that my Amazing Psychic Powers tells me is right is rather different. And I can't narrow this down to a specific time that I've done this - because again, I don't date (nor do I do relationships, poor little me) so I can't count back to a specific person I was with. But my ideal cheap date is simply to pick an area and walk through it. Generally, because I am TEH URBANZ, that area is a shopping district, like West Seattle, Lower Queen Anne, Cowley Road, Cornmarket, Capital Hill, that sort of place. Just to wander in and out of the shops (the list must include: used music stores, used book stores, and thrift stores/age concerns) and browse and talk and get lunch somewhere cheap (I do like to eat street when possible, though it's not nearly as possible here as it is in New York) is ideal to me. It's a good way, I think, to get to know someone, or to interact with someone you do know, because you're not focusing on meaningful eye contact over the pasta, nor are you both staring at a movie screen, but you're talking. At the same time, you're doing something else as well. And then you can see what they pick out to look at closer and decide what you think it means to them. And then you can ask them about it. So, more conversation.

Hey, I'm Italian and Irish. Food is second to conversation.

5. Do you regret spending money on any of your books?
No. Ironically enough. I've read some real stinkers (Of Saints And Shadows sticks out, as does R.A. Salvatore) but those have been books that someone else has purchased and loaned me, or that I've gotten for free. The charity shop around the corner from my first house in England was very good about having books for free outside, and so there was this element of potluck, but at least I never paid money for Salvatore.

I've never read a book I paid for and thought that I had to throw it against the wall immediately or I would not live. I don't tend to take chances with new books, though, simply because of the cost, especially for hardbacks. So I tend to buy authors I know (or books I've read in the past and lost one way or another) when I buy new fiction, and when I buy new non-fiction, I have a subject in mind, or else I've been interested by a specific book enough to buy it. I'm a real comparison shopper and educated just enough to be a headache for most people, so I flip through books I'm considering, and if they say things that seem blatantly stupid or that I know to be wrong, I won't buy those.

On the other hand, I regret spending money on my books simply from the standpoint that if I didn't buy another book for the rest of the year (and kept up my normal work schedule but spent as much of my free time as possible reading) I don't think I'd get through the backlog of books. Let's face it, that book on the physics of dreaming minds that I bought at a garage sale, while interesting, isn't exactly the thing that calls to you at midnight when you just want to go to sleep.

I suppose a better way to ask that question would be "You're a heroin addict. Do you regret purchasing your next hit?" To which my reply would be "No. But then again, yes." I love books a whole bunch. Fortunately, I've never had to pay for a bad one. A few of the books that I get through work I would classify as bad, but the worst I've ever read weren't books I'd spent even any work time on, thank god.


Well. That was quite long.

And now, the actual meme itself.

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.