AMA, or "I have no About Me post, sorry"

[mousme]

Since the new friending meme, I've seen people linking to "about me" posts, that go into incredible detail about their lives, their family, their personality, their beliefs, their values, their hobbies, and a host of other things.

I had something like that in my LJ profile for a while, but then it became so horribly outdated that I deleted it, and never bothered to write a new one. I'd promise to do that, but it would very likely be a lie, or it will take me another five years to get around to it.

In terms of content, I tend to write about my everyday existence, interspersed with existential angst, and the occasional whining about health or work. I do tag all of my posts. I like tags, they are super useful. If you find one of my posts upsetting or triggering, there is an option in LJ to blacklist that tag. I also will almost always use an LJ-cut for long or picture-heavy posts, and definitely always use a cut for potentially triggering stuff. I will use specific words to warn for triggering material: mental health, eating disorders, suicide, abuse, etc. If you find these generic words triggering, then my LJ is probably not a safe space for you. No judgment on my part, just a caution so that you can keep yourself safe. I have seen people request in other LJs that only the word "trigger" be used, but in my case I find it insufficient: I am not easily triggered, and can generally read most content, but having an idea of what's behind the cut lets me make an informed decision about whether I want to read what's there, and so I try to afford the same courtesy to my readers.

That being said, I rarely talk about triggering stuff.   ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, anyway, now is your chance to ask me about stuff! Want to know about my religion? How I feel about body issues? My taste in music? My extremely important opinions about frogs? Go for it! I will answer to the best of my abilities in the comments, and then if I'm on the ball I will link back to my answers in the body of this post. Kind of like a comment-fic meme, only without the fic. ;)

Comments

Challenge: accepted

[sirena73]

Tell me about being Quaker. Why it works for you, what it's all about, anything goes! I know very little about it from an actual Quaker, just from reading about it.

Tell me about your job (within reason and of course without crossing any lines) and how you got into it. I know what you do, just not how you got there, how you like it, and things you've learned from it.

And yes, taste in music. Tell me that, too.

Also, special bonus round: tell me about a good book you've read, a bad book you've read, and tell me a book that should absolutely be on the shelves of a small indie bookstore and why I should tell my customer-friends about it and make them buy it. :)

Re: Challenge: accepted

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Ooh, okay! Lots of questions!

The Quaker thing is both simple and complex. I was baptized Catholic, and raised halfway between Catholicism and atheism. Neither of my parents practice, and my father is an outright atheist. Nonetheless, I went to Catholic school, went through all the rites, and grew up believing in all the Mysteries.

Then I came out of the closet, and the church I'd grown up in kept its official stance that I was, in essence, an abomination. A walking embodiment of sin, no matter that I tried hard to be a good person, to be honest and kind and hardworking and compassionate. I wasn't the kind of self-loathing queer to keep going to church and self-flagellating by abstaining from loving whomever I wanted to love.

I figured I would just... not be religious. I poked at paganism and Wicca, and the more I did the less I felt like it fit. I still believed in all the stuff I'd believed in before, I just didn't have a spiritual home for it anymore. I also looked at the Unitarians, but they were a bit too "anything goes" for my tastes. So I gave up on ever being a practicing Christian, because there didn't seem to be a Christian community that would allow for these two very disparate parts of me to coexist.

That's until I found the Quakers. I think I found them during a fit of desperate googling. I attended a Meeting for Worship in Montreal, and found that I liked it. I kept attending for about a year, until work got in the way (I started working most Sundays), and I had to stop.

I attend what's called an unprogrammed meeting. One of the founders of Quakerism, George Fox, was dissatisfied with the teachings of organized religion, and felt that it was possible to have a personal experience of Christ without the intervention of ordained clergy. So what we do is "wait in quiet expectation of God." Meeting is conducted mostly in worshipful silence, with the occasional vocal ministry by any member, if we feel moved to speak.

Communal silent worship is a really interesting and unsettling experience, the first few times. It's not like meditation, which encourages you to center on yourself, and let your thoughts flow away like water. Instead, I personally find that the energy in the room changes, and that my thoughts become more uplifted (on good days; on other days, I sometimes end up thinking about my bills or my grocery list--it's an imperfect world we live in), and I feel that much closer to the God I learned about as a child.

On a more prosaic note, I love the Quaker community. The ones I know are all left-wing, crunchy granola tree hugging activist types. The ones who like kale way too much and who take their bicycles even in the midst of winter, who chain themselves together to protest projects that are bad for the environment, and write sternly-worded letters to the government about our arms deals with Saudi Arabia. They are good, well-intentioned people, and while they are far from perfect (they tend toward the white, middle-class, and over 50), they are accustomed to self-reflection, and as a result are more open to changing their thinking in the name of the greater good. They consider themselves not only a community, but a family, and you couldn't ask for kinder, warmer people.

I hope that adequately answers your first question. :)

Re: Challenge: accepted

[eyes-of-venom.livejournal.com]

Quakerism sounds just like something I would probably have gotten into if my family had decided to stay in the US/on that side of the world, tbh; having been in a very similar situation, and knowing how betrayed one can feel by their own religion, I'm glad you found it :)

The relationship I had with my own religion (born and raised a Roman Catholic) had been, hm, pretty bumpy. After nine years of Catholic school (read: emotional and physical abuse; being treated differently depending on how much money your parents had; being so miserable I felt physically sick every morning before going to school) I was about ready to give up on religion altogether. Then there was Bible studies and our teacher's "gay/queer people are sick and we should pity and support them", which sealed the deal for me. It took me *years* to just go: "You know what? Fuck that!", and decide I wasn't the one who had to leave, they were the ones who had to deal with my presence.

Thankfully, Catholicism is so ingrained in Italian society, most of us have deviated from the norm, one way or another, and "I'll pray for you so you don't go to hell for being queer :)" people are definitely looked at like they're the weird ones.

I still have to find a decent priest, though. The Imam of my town has spoiled me immensely, he's way a better person than my neighborhood priest xD

Re: Challenge: accepted

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Job!

My job is one I find interesting and challenging and, alas, I can only talk about it in very general terms. I no longer dispatch for the RCMP (and I do miss that part of my job a lot). Instead, I moved to the National Capital, and while I still work for the RCMP, my job involves Classified Transmissions. In short, all the communications that happen between the RCMP and other levels of government that aren't necessarily meant for the eyes of the public. At least, not right away.

It's my job to ensure that information goes to the right people in a timely fashion, all while enforcing communications security (or COMSEC). There are other things, too, but I can't even talk about those in even general terms.

Ta-da!

Re: Challenge: accepted

[mousme.livejournal.com]

I was mostly joking about the music thing. /o\

My tastes, like most people's, I would imagine, vary a lot. I think my taste can be classified under "mostly Occidental music." I grew up listening to classical music, but also love musicals and opera, classic rock and pop rock, and country western, much to my parents' dismay. I am less keen on R&B and rap, but even that's not a hard "no."

My first musical love when I got old enough to listen to stuff other than kids' songs was The Beatles, and that has informed pretty much all of my musical choices from there on out.

Re: Challenge: accepted

[eyes-of-venom.livejournal.com]

I got into music by listening to The Beatles too! :D My dad used to listen to their songs constantly when I was little, I still remember going to bed while he was in his office humming along to 'Strawberry Fields Forever' :)

[elanya.livejournal.com]

I hope you didn't make a post like that and assume no one would ask you about your very important opinions about frogs.

Tell me your very important opinions about frogs!

Also, hmmm... tell me about your favourite character you have ever created, whether for a game, a story, whatever.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

I just really like frogs! Frogs are awesome. They come in all shapes and colours, and they jump really, really high (sometimes 20 times their own height!). Did you know that when frogs hibernate, they form a new layer of bone? So you can tell how old a frog was (after it's dead) by counting the rings on its bones just like a tree?

In summary: FROGS.

As for my favourite character? Oh, man, that's a hard one. I don't even think of my original characters and my RPG characters as belonging to the same category.

My favourite RPG character would have to be Vicky, or Victoria Anne James. You probably remember her from Beyond the Pale, when I was re-imagining the Deadlands campaign in story form. I played her the longest, and as such I know her the best of all my characters, and as such she has a very special place in my heart.

I think the most interesting character I created, though I never finished writing that story, was Vanya from Conflation. He had a bunch of really neat personality traits that made him unpredictable and unreliable, and as a result made him super fun to write about. The most memorable thing I had decided about him was that he enjoyed both making people feel off-balance, and being off-balance himself, and as a result I never allowed him to stand or sit completely still. I always had him perching or balancing on furniture, or standing on his toes, so that his stance was never stable. Vanya was by nature impossible to pin down.

[elanya.livejournal.com]

I think it is telling that I remember both those characters with just what you said here about them, even though it has been years since I've looked at those stories - they were both very memorable :)

Also I didn't know that about frogs - neat! Now I wonder if we could print a frog skull at work, hmmm..

[call-me-katya.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Let me see. I think something I often find difficult when 'meeting' new people on LJ is when they start talking about people in a really casual fashion, with absolutely no explanation of who this person is. Like 'Oh! And I met Stephen finally after The Big Conversation [you remember that, right?' and although we didn't discuss it in detail, we both knew what the other was thinking. We mainly discussed the Paris trip.' and I'm lost. Who is Stephen? What was the conversation?! What Paris trip??!

So I guess my question is... who are you likely to mention? Do you share a house with someone? If not, why? Do you have close family members, a partner, a best friend? Just a headsup really so I recognise names and situations when you talk about them!

Also, is there any sort of huge situation that you talk about a lot that new readers would need to know about?

Oooh, and as a bonus, do you do any creative things?

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Hm. I tend to err on the side of Too Much Exposition in my LJ posts, especially since I picked up a bunch of new readers. My life has changed so much since I was last posting regularly that I think I'll have to re-explain everything to readers anyway as I go.

I can't think of anyone I'd be mentioning in my LJ without it being clear. There are my parents, but I refer to them as my mother and father or as the Parental Units. I don't have any siblings, and I live by myself with a house full of pets. Why don't I live with someone? It's a bit complicated, but the short version is that my last relationship ended badly, and left me emotionally battered and financially in pretty bad shape.

I don't have many friends where I live now, because I moved to a new city for my current job. So I am kind of a sad sack who doesn't see many people outside of work. ;) I try not to dwell on negative things as much as possible. It depresses me, and is super boring for other people to read.

I will try to provide as much context as possible about the past for new people, and feel free to ask if anything is unclear.

As for creative things, that's a bit of a loaded question. I used to write, and I used to write a lot. And then stuff happened, both personally and creatively, and my writing brain sort of shut down, and I haven't gotten it back. I also used to knit a little bit, but nothing terribly exciting. Right now my main creative outlet is the occasional roleplaying game.

[call-me-katya.livejournal.com]

Hey, I love Too Much Exposition! I think I do the same thing even when it's not needed, although even when I explain things in a way I think is super clear, there's always someone has a question that makes me realise I could have explained more. I guess I'm just used to a lot of LJ people not giving context, and it frustrates me to the point where I simply give up asking.

I'm sorry that difficult things have happened, but I'm happy to meet you and delighted to be 'starting over' with you.

[call-me-katya.livejournal.com]

Also, yeah, I'm similar with giving warnings. If I give a trigger warning [which is quite new for me] I will give the topic of the warning in the warning. In that, if I'm warning about suicide mention, I will say that. I recently posted a video in which I mention suicide and because it was a video I didn't cut it. I figured if someone wanted to avoid the mention, they didn't have to press play. I also am not easily triggered [although it can be done] and I like to know the topic of the cut so I can decide whether to read. I don't use blanket trigger warnings [just the word 'trigger'] for this same reason.

[diggerlicious.livejournal.com]

I'd like to know your favourite movies and t.v. shows!

[mousme.livejournal.com]

EGADS. So many I couldn't list them all!

Uh, I've already written a whole post about Critical Role, so I won't bore you with that.

I was a huge Supernatural fan for many years (don't really like where they went with it after that), and lately I've been rewatching a few shows I really liked: Covert Affairs, Sense8, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (set in 1920s Australia!). I might make a post about the ridiculous amount of TV I watch these days. ;)

As for movies, I don't get out much. I've enjoyed all the Marvel movies, and last year's stand-out movie for me was the new Mad Max. Otherwise, I don't think I've seen many movies in the past, oh, ten years or so. I have been remiss.

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

What is this friending meme that you've been mentioning? I seem to have missed it (so far).

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Oh! Here, have a link! http://belenen.livejournal.com/656628.html

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

Alas, I stopped posting regularly on account of no longer having any still-active friends who I could expect to read my posts (and if my posts aren't being read be anyone, I'd rather just keep my writing offline, where the Internet Surveillance Machine can't use it against me). Had this meme come about 9 months earlier, I might still have a posting frequency, and common topics to include :P

That said, I'm tempted to start an entirely different blog, but probably not on LJ; just something that explores the theme of "optimize for conviviality" (in the Illich sense of "conviviality" rather than the OED sense--unless OED has incorporated the Illich sense into its definitions).

[pkwench.livejournal.com]

No real questions since I know you. Just reading, smiling, and waving. Miss talking to you!

[mousme.livejournal.com]

*waves*

Me too! I have to get back into the habit of texting you more regularly. I've been reading your posts with diligence, though. <3