Greetings, lovelies! Be you a stranger or a friend, a gentleman caller or a lunching lady, an angel or a demon, I am overjoyed that you have paused upon my small and meager blog-thing.
While this blog will mostly be devoted to the pursuit of literary excellency, transmigratory phantasmagoria, and bookish wanderings, I thought I would make my first post a sort of introduction. Many of you will know me well, and others will not. In an effort to remedy the latter, I thought I would compile a list of various and sundry facts pertaining to my person. Peruse it as you will! I hope it will lend you insight into my character and whet your appetite for future ramblings.
1. I have two older siblings and two younger siblings. I am the middle child.
2. I believe in ghosts.
3. I had a short story published when I was thirteen in a magazine called Stone Soup. If you Google my name online you can find it, actually. It’s pretty hilarious, reading it now. Unfortunately, this is the only time I have been published (although I hope to change this soon)….
4. When I was a very young child I had an extreme, morbid fascination with death. I would make my parents wander around in graveyards with me reading all the headstones and telling me when the people died and how old they were. While the fascination is no longer extreme, many of my writings still tend towards the brooding and grim.
5. I’ve never seen Jurassic Park. Any of them.
6. I have watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever. I could not be more proud of this fact.
7. I suffer from hypnagogic illusions or hallucinations. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night and in that state between waking and sleeping I experience intense and realistic hallucinations of shapes and things around me. It tends to be highly disturbing.
8. I also lucid dream with a decent amount of regularity. In almost all of my lucid dreams, I wind up flying, although there’s a point in the sky that I can never fly past.
9. My family sometimes reminds me of the Addams family, which makes me Wednesday, I guess. Although I’ve always seen myself as more of a Morticia type.
10. I read voraciously. I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite author, although F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Mitchell, Lloyd Alexander, Neil Gaiman, and Tamora Pierce are among my favorite/most influential authors.
11. I lived in Ireland for a year with my family when I was eleven. We lived in a lonely, isolated farm-house out in the middle of nowhere, and I used to go wander around for hours on the moors with only myself, my vivid imagination, and those feral ponies on the hill to keep me company.
12. I think that we all use highly arbitrary markers with which to compare ourselves to other people.
13. I play the piano (poorly). I like memorizing new pieces, because my brain creates strange relationships and patterns between the notes. Learning music is a sort of hyper-Gestaltist synesthetic exercise for me, with notes engaging in actions dependent on other notes in the context of the greater pattern…it’s really hard to explain.
14. When I was 9, I wanted to be a jockey. Like, the horse-riding kind. My mother claims that I also wanted to be a scientist, but I think she’s making that up.
15. I believe that my perceived vanity is really just a grim satisfaction with the fact that I find myself fairly unattractive.
16. I was born in water. I think that it would be fascinating and highly appropriate if I were to die by drowning.
17. I hate math, but I find prime numbers bizarrely attractive.
18. The week of my 18th birthday, I played Aunt Abby in my high school’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace.
19. I am very sentimental about certain things. I keep keepsakes.
20. I briefly considered going to Art School. My high school art teacher Mr. O. killed that for me, though.
21. I also briefly considered changing my major to Astronomy in college. Instead, I graduated with Political Science, which in retrospect was no more applicable to my life goals than Astronomy!
22. I am fascinated by Tielhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point. Also, he has some pretty neat quotes: “We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. ”
23. I really like learning languages. While I am unfortunately only fluent in English, I know bits and pieces of French, German, Spanish, Arabic and even Irish (and no, it’s not called Gaelic. Gaelic is what they speak in Scotland).
24. I would really like to disappear for a few years at some point in my 20’s. Just…go away, who knows where.
25. I used to have an entire pantheon of imaginary friends. Snorkler was the main one, but he had a brother Aldooit and a girlfriend named Elliot and a nemesis whose name I don’t remember. I think it was something like Gossendump, but for the life of me I cannot remember the significance of that. I was a strange child.
Check back for updates soon, my lovelies!
I quite enjoy prime numbers as well. Specifically the number 3. Maybe that’s the Celt in me.