big life; small space

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In the first 15 minutes of the first time our class went to ice-skating, I was scared. I mean, slipping about on ice with knives on your feet is scary. I'd never even seen ice-skating in person before. I didn't know it would be cold, so I crept around the edges of the rink, holding on so I wouldn't fall.

You told me, in those first fifteen minutes that I was too scared to learn, pulled me off the ice and called my parents and told them I could no longer attend this activity. You weren't even the ice-skating teacher, just my homeroom teacher.

Too scared to learn, you told me. I was five. I still can't ice skate, and I don't really care, but I believed I was too scared to do anything (despite fighting against it) for twenty years.

I'm pretty amazing, but what, I wonder, would I have been without you? Maybe even more.

Believe it or not, I think of you every time I hear a couple of lines from Fairytale of New York:

I could have been someone.
Well, so could anyone.

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ETA: See the question that box asks now? That's not what it used to say. The original question asked which Harry Potter character would you submit to a pat down and why if you were TSA for Hogwarts.

What LJ was thinking: two hot topics get exponentially hotter together.

What LJ actually did: trivialized a significant political and individual rights issue in the US and effectively asked people what fictional characters they'd like to sexually assault.

Sexual assualt: not hot or funny.

The erosion of personal freedom and the application of a whole lot of -isms in the name of security theater: also not hot or funny.

*sigh*

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Okay, I'm not actually even going to answer this. I just want to say... hello, Internet, you are funny. Or really not funny. Or something. Or... er, yeah. Anyway.

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I once convinced someone that New York City is infested with packs of feral chihuahuas that spread disease and die in the walls like rats.

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I'm much goofier in person, although when I am severe, I'm sort of even more so than I am here. The big convoluted sentences though? Just that in RL. I really do function in paragraphs.

Also, apparently I'm taller on the Internet.

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But the possibility of failure gives it the frisson.

And if I can't fail, then it's not a mere attempt then, is it?

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Because of the glorious power of the compound-complex sentence, I could easily and appallingly stretch this to a paragraph, but I'm so made of awesome, fiction, and ridiculousness (lists and parenthetical statements are also quite handy for this sort of exercise), I don't even have to.

As ever, LJ, thanks for playing!

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Latin.

To be fair, Latin has perhaps not made me a better writer, but it's certainly made me a more interesting one. Because when you study Latin for more than a couple of years you wind up studying speeches, and studying speeches means studying cadence and all manner of rhetorical tricks. Alliteration may often be over-used, but it's also almost always undervalued. If you can write with cadence, you make your material a pleasure to read. And being able to vary cadence means you have the tools to iluminate worlds that may have different habits and graces than our own, as surely as you have the tools to pen a call to arms. It is those two things are what form stories over and over again. What is this place like? and I challenge you to be here! Characters examine and change their worlds as surely as the author, and it all trickles down through the layers of the story the wirter means to tell and the stories then accidentally revealed within.