meme

[rm]

The problem with Livejournal is that we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. Hence, I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ (if you want to) and find out what people don’t know about you.

Okay, I loathe the wording the meme, but I'm at work (waaaah), and people have been asking questions lately that I've now lost track of where they were to answer (someone asked about perfume a few days ago, that sticks in my mind). So if you're so inclined, have at.

Comments

[bare-bear.livejournal.com]

I'd hate to ask a question because I know I won't post this onto my own lj (I doubt anyone actually reads it so I'd feel rather dumb posting it :D), but I do have a question so I'll ask it anyways. You could always ask one in return if you'd like! :D

Anywho, have you always lived in New York? I think I know that you grew up there, but have you ever moved anywhere else for a spell?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I went to university in Washington DC and then stayed for about 6 months or so after graduation, so I lived there (and proper-like -- I had an apartment and didn't go home in the summers because my family and I were not getting along then). Also, technically, we lived in Spring Lake and then East Hampton when I was a baby, but I don't remember any of that.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

You've said you want to be famous. At what?

(You've mentioned acting but it wasn't clear if that's the planned career or a past one.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh, anything. No, that's not true. I worked in PR long enough to know that all publicity is not good publicity.

The problem really is that I do a ton of stuff, which makes it very hard. Monomania is so useful in these cases. I suppose a Stephen Frye-like career is the most obvious thing at this point, because I write! I act! I comment!

You don't look like me and actually fantasize about being an A-lister, which is good, because that shit is oppressive. But the rest of it looks good.

[fuyukodachi.livejournal.com]

Isn't the wording atrocious?

When did you realize you weren't straight?

Ridiculously, I was sixteen. That's four years after I found and looked avidly at my parent's stash of porn. I managed to have No Idea that other people didn't like the same pictures I did, and when my friend wanted to look at something else, I thought they were the weird one.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

Have you ever had to go without money?

[saomigray.livejournal.com]

The perfume question was me. I'm glad you thought it was interesting. I'd forgotten about asking it, though I am still quite curios.

Having read a bit about how you use clothing as costume on a daily basis, I wondered what part scent plays in creating the illusion.

Do you wear different perfumes and colognes depending on the style of your dress and the persona you're creating, or do you stick to the same scent all the time?

[saomigray.livejournal.com]

ug.

I'm curious. Although an argument could be made for my being a curio if you're going by the Mirriam-Webster definition.

curio: something (as a decorative object) considered novel, rare, or bizarre : curiosity ; also : an unusual or bizarre person

[neifile7.livejournal.com]

Ever had writer envy? As in, boy-I-wish-I-had-written-that?

[verasteine.livejournal.com]

It's gonna sound really silly, and I apologise in advance, but what drink is it you're holding in that icon?

?

[keith418.livejournal.com]

Is LJ dying off? Has Facebook started to replace it people's lives and affections? As an "early adapter" of LJ, do you see it in decline?

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

What color undies are you wearing?

Just kidding!


How did you and kalichan meet/come to collaborate and write things together?

[rm.livejournal.com]

You know, I was much more aware of being different than I was of being not-straight, and that wasn't a thing I ever realized. It just was. I didn't know it, but people reacted to me funny, like I smelled wrong. I think a lot of that was gender perception related, but I don't really know. I remember even telling people in my twenties, "I feel like I have a secret, and I don't even know what it is."

There was never an ahah moment. I just hung out with gay people as soon as I was allowed to hang out anywhere on my own, and fretted that all these men thought I was some sort of faghag (some did, some got my deal before I did). Obviously there were inklings of it in high school, awkward UST with friends, etc., but I never said it aloud or dated a woman until college. But it wasn't like "oh god, confession time!" You know, I just went off to college, got a job in a gay bookstore, and that was that.

Everything else about my identity was so much more preoccupying.

But I do remember looking at the playboys my much older cousin had stashed in his bedroom when I was seven and we went to visit family in Atlantic City.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yeah. I mean, in general, I think people think I have or grew up with more money than I do/did, and I've certainly had the luxury of mostly being comfortable.

But I've certainly been at points past unemployed, months behind on rent, methodically eating 500 calories a day because that's what I could afford, or stayed in a relationship because I knew I'd get fed, yeah.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm actually barred from telling most of this story now, as we're working on it for part of the IHNIIHBT DVD commentary, but Kali is the childhood best friend of one of my best friends, so we had met in person in passing a few times over the last decade or so.

We really started hanging out around the time I went to Australia, and when I came back we were hanging around and I asked her to write with me in the Harry Potter fandom. I remember it like that money shot of the sad sad Frodo eyes in Lord of the Rings after Gandalf falls. There was just this pause.

And then we've been writing together ever since. We're both mystical in the same way about writing -- this idea of where do ideas come from, and how things that aren't both real and true can inhabit a person and take them up. And it's that, largely, I think, that makes it work.

(and pink, but they are boy shorts at least).

[podle.livejournal.com]

I have admired your writing for quite some time now. I am particularly impressed by the quality of vulnerability and openess without cynicism. I would love to know what writers you are influenced by and enjoy (giant question, I know) and when you began writing about your life.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's a cosmo. Which to me is a shameful Sex in the City girly drink. But the Gally hotel had really good ones and a drink special.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not a particularly high maintenance person in general, so it's very surprising if I wear any scent everyday for a week, say. In general, I tend to gravitate towards more masculine perfumes, regardless of what I'm wearing, as I never use anything with alcohol in it (oils only) or too many florals as it makes my nose itch.

My favorites perfumes are from BPAL. I wear Whitechapel a lot, which I confess I associated with Lucius Malfoy. And I wear King of Clubs a _lot_ which is shockingly masculine I think (when I first got it I was like "even I can't wear this" but now I wear it all the time), which I associated with another character in my HP fics. But I'll wear these things dressed like a girl too.

I do have a few sugar sweet perfumes, that I wear not when I'm feeling feminine, but when I am feeling girlish.

My more neutral scents tend to be food related -- I have things that smell like almonds or honey or one that is a mix of apple and pine.

Mostly, with scents, they are not about gender, but about character. I'm always looking for the random thing that smells like people who only exist in books or on the screen or in my heart. And sometimes I'll spend years looking, but I always know it when I find it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The stories I want to tell are so specific, that this doesn't happen too often, but there are a few things I can think of off-hand:

dsudis's "get loved...."
sushi's "marching off to war" universe for HP
the first 70% of that insane Obama/Emmanuel slash someone did for Yuletide.
Kali's crazy Harry/Draco frenemy story.

I don't really get like that about original fic, although I do think that William Gibson's New Rose Hotel is the most perfectly constructed short story ever written, and I envy its mere existence.

Re: ?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I don't think LJ is dying off, so much as I think blogs are going out of fashion in favor of things like Facebook and also Twitter. Although Twitter, like LJ, has problems with monetizing and so ongoing existence is in question.

I think LJ is in less danger than it was a year ago. Things like Dreamwidth just confirm that people really do want this sort of platform to exist. Of course, if personal journaling sites do fade out, I think something like Dreamwdith may outlive LJ because the expectations are lower. LJ has a lot of baggage because it really only ever makes people money when it gets sold, and eventually there aren't going to be any more suckers to sell it to.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I never really had a choice about beginning my writing life. I had two hour essay examinations in every school subject but mathematics by the time I was ten. I was required to take Latin, studied speeches by Cicero, so for as fucked up as my educational environment was, I learned to be very persuasive from a very young age -- which is sort of twisted in its own right. Who wants a ten-year-old who can argue like that?

I think the first short story I wrote down was in third grade, for a class. I don't really remember it, although there was a unicorn in it. In high school I wrote a novel (by hand!) about a boy I had a crush on.

Mostly though, I only did academic writing until I got on the Internet, and then I would talk about my life on this BBS I was on. And people hated me for it -- I was boring, I was pretentious, HOW FUCKING DARE I? and god, I'd cringe at huge swathes of that stuff (lost to the ether) now I'm sure, but that's how I learned to tell my story. I'm always writing with the idea of speech-making in mind. It's all written for the ear.

My mom read a lot of biographies when I was a kid, and read them aloud to me sometimes, so that's a lot of how I learned about this idea of just telling the stories of a life.

Oscar Wilde was a huge influence on me growing up. Not Dorian Grey so much, but the plays, that reflected something of the weird social status I grew up in, and also his essays and letters.

Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat was really important to me as a writer, because it was the first time anything had ever said to me that it was all right that the world felt so grand to me. I was allowed to say it. So that gave me a lot of freedom.

Robert Olen Butler, whose work I can barely look at now, has a wonderful sorrowful cadence to his work, that really helped me hone a natural tendency in my own stuff.

Steve Erickson really helped validate my impulse to write in a circular way and to focus on serendipity. His density of language, his sorrow, and his unrepentant mixing of fact/fiction and true/real has also been huge for me -- he has conversations with Sally Hemmings in his non-fiction political work; he is a character in several of his own novels. He also went to a school for stutterers growing up, and no one believed he wrote the papers he wrote because of it as a child. No one believed in my skills as a kid either both because of the speech therapy and because people don't expect much of anything from "ugly girls".

I love the brutality in C. J. Cherryh's fiction. Elizabeth Hand's interest in ritual is huge to me.

Robert Fripp's essays mean a lot to me both as a person (I used to do Guitar Craft) and as a writer.

The poetry of Lucie-Brock Broido has really given me a framework for talking about things like the formality of distance and of bowing before things.

I think that's the best I can do off the top of my head.

Oh, ETA: Annie Ernaux, why is quite clear if you read Simple Passion.

[earthgoat.livejournal.com]

How are you able to share so much with others on your lj? You have these amazing but incredibly personal stories that few would tell to their closest confidants yet you are able to share them in a very public arena!

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think it's a defect. ;)

Um, seriously, I don't know.

I guess, there's a few things:

1. I grew up in a very emotional household. My father's family is Sicilian. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of melodrama, passive aggression and just all sorts of stuff. Everything was loud. Yawns were loud.

2. Talking about stuff relieves the pressure for me.

3. I'm not always sure I always get that other people are really there and absorbing what I say. It's an only child thing.

4. Secrets are really, really fucking dangerous. Yes, there's stuff that I wouldn't necessarily want certain people in my life to find out, but I never want someone to have a gotcha over me. There are things I'm ashamed of in my life: letting people walk all over me, treating people badly, not having the courage to deal with situations instead of avoiding them. But I won't be ashamed of the fact that I've had an abortion, or been involved in sex work, or am really insecure or whatever. I just can't. It's my life, I've made my choices, I've lived with their consequences -- good and bad. There's no reason to have shame too.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

I only very recently stumbled across your LJ, so I hope that you'll forgive a question from me. But perhaps: I gather that you are a writer. Where can I find your work? You also mentioned your job; what do you do?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Day job is media analysis.

A lot of the stuff I write is BORING web journalism stuff like product reviews and disease articles and stuff. Ah, journalism degree.

I also have a book of Harry Potter trivia out (The Book of Harry Potter Trifles, Trivias and Particularities), and a short story in an anthology called Between The Sheets: The Best of Cthulhu Sex (Cthulhu Sex being a magazine I've had a few stories published in). I also have something from my prior journal coming out in a Modern Library anthology next year. I've had poetry published in Anthem and a bunch of other small press literary mags and have a couple of non-fiction anthology things I've been asked to do recently, but I'm still in the process of writing those. I'm also doing a couple of things on spec for some academic journals right now.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

What was the first book you remember reading where you felt, "I know this world. I know these people?"

not that i prefer one look over the other...

[alumiere.livejournal.com]

but you've posted pictures of yourself at various events in both masculine and feminine clothing, etc

how do you decide what you're going to look like today/tonight?

is it mood driven, or specific to the event or activity, or something that's influenced by who you'll be with/someone else's request, or is there some other thought/emotion behind your choices? or all of the above perhaps?

dress/style for me pretty well screams who i am in a lot of ways, and while my casual wear and my ensembles for going out are different, the underlying themes are the same - and i'm not sure how i'd cope with multiple styles (in general, i've refused to accept jobs that want me to not look like myself - i tone it down a bit for work, but i'm still dressed in a black skirt, jewel toned top, black or houndstooth jacket; and i always have purple hair and visible piercings)

Re: not that i prefer one look over the other...

[rm.livejournal.com]

A lot of it is mood.

Some of it is weather related. Men's clothing is very warm. My current suit (and the one on the way) are both light-weight wool. So that's a huge factor.

I only dress femininely around my parents for everyone's mental health.

Sometimes, I'm more prone to wear a dress if I'm going somewhere with Patty because we are, at the end of the day, in a lesbian relationship.

If I'm feeling sorrowful, which is just sort of this thing in my character, I usually dress femininely, because I make that very stately.

If I'm doing something that's truly old world (as opposed to a recreation there of), for lack of a better term, I'll usually dress femininely if I don't think I can absolutely, positively pass, because trousers on women are less formal, and I respect formality.

A lot of what I wear and when has a lot to do with avoiding questions or a feeling that people want me to reassure them. I definitely bow to peer pressure in that way, and am still learning that it's okay for me to shop in the men's section or wear men's clothes in a context that is entirely costume-free.

We're going to the theater tonight, and I am wearing a dress, but a good chunk of that is the fact that my suit's at the cleaners! But it is Richard III and since I do Lady Anne as one of my monologues, I do respond to it from a feminine place.

Anything retro, I wear men's clothes for about 80% of the time. So swing dancing, 1920s stuff, Regency dance, etc.

[frodo-esque.livejournal.com]

Do you read the LJ pages of those who post on your LJ?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yes. I don't read with a filter. If you're on my friends list I see your entries. Sometimes, obviously, I skim, and often times I don't comment because I think "oh, I don't really know this person and my advice/commentary is probably more direct than they are interested in from a total stranger" -- plus I do that boy thing where I try to solve people's shit and I know that's annoying.

But I do pretty much know what's up with people and follow along, although occassionally I get confused people of people with similar user names or icons.

Re: not that i prefer one look over the other...

[alumiere.livejournal.com]

thanks!

and i can totally understand the feminine place vs one less-so (although since i hate pants i pretty well fail at truly masculine - boy in a skirt is one of my favorite looks though)

[frodo-esque.livejournal.com]

That's understandable. I will say on my behalf that I absolutely appreciate input from anyone on my friends list. In fact, without it, it can make it harder to get to know the other person better. =)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Okay, cool. I'm just sensitive that I have this reputation of being aggressive/elitist/etc and I feel like it can add unintended tone to my best intentions (which of course, sometimes need a good smacking, but sometimes not).

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool. I like reading your collaborative fic, very much. And solo things too, but I find it interesting to learn about the ways in which people work together to create things.

I would have guessed... black undies. :) I was wrong!

I wear not when I'm feeling feminine, but when I am feeling girlish.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I think I get this, but I'm not sure.
Could you explain a little, if you wouldn't mind?

Who wants a ten-year-old who can argue like that?

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

The ten year old!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I think your refusal to be ashamed is very powerful. None of those things can be used as a weapon against you, although fools will of course try it. Let them eat baby-cakes!

I think "oh, I don't really know this person and my advice/commentary is probably more direct ETC.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Please feel free to not think that where I am concerned. Your input would be valued!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

You aren't elitist. You are elite. Different! ;)

[paraselenic.livejournal.com]

what is your first running away story? did your parents have the audacity to help out?

(my one did. she gave me peanut butter sandwiches for the trip-- I was 6 or so and had nothing to drink, so had to go home due to insatiable peanut butter thirst. CRAFTY.)