interactive

[threeplusfire]

It doesn't even feel as if I had a weekend now. I'm back in the same pool of doom. It's frustrating to no end not to have enough work to fill my hours with, not to mention the quiet climate of fear that is slowly growing thanks to not so smart comments by management. It reminds me of my PcO days, and I hate it.

So I do my work slowly, excruciatingly slow and think about grad school instead. Download the multitude of forms needed for name changes and try to figure out exactly how many forms of ID I need to show. I truly don't want to go to the Social Security office, but neither do I want to mail them my passport, birth certificate and drivers license. Oddly enough, the passport is the easiest thing to fix and doesn't cost me anything. This is such a pain. I want to do it though.

My livejournal shirt came in the mail today. It is cool. I am also working on a humorous short story about my D&D character Meier.

In the interest of taking advantage of this oh-so-interactive medium, and to help alleviate my incredible boredom, I call upon those people reading right now. Comment, and ask me a question, request I write about something in paticular, etc. Like the interview meme but with less regulation. What do you really want to hear from me today? I'm usually very selfish with my journal and what I write about, so this is your opportunity. Request away.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

1. What one question do you want to ask what one celebrity right now?

2. What should I have for dinner?

3. If you had to vote for one of the current presidential candidates, who would you choose? If you could vote for anyone, who would you choose?

4. Have you seen that asthma ad with the pug?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

1. "Peter Jackson, will you direct my movie?"

2. Quesadilla. Or sushi. Take your pick.

3. In all seriousness, I don't know enough about any of them. If I had to vote right this minute, I would vote for Clark based on his career and his desire to both revive the space program and build a time machine.

4. I have! I think about the pug goblin every time.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Clark wants to build a time machine?!?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I read it in an interview, swear to God. He's all about science and invention. Bring on the sci-fi future!

[rm.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's pretty cool. I'm convinced he and Dean need to be on the same ticket (either order) -- I think it's the only chance the Dems have.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

It would definitely pull a lot of popular support.
I really need to read more about the runners. I've been slacking.

light interpretation

[jonqui.livejournal.com]

What do you really want to hear from me today?

So, what do I want from you, you ask. I request the use of you brilliant intuitive powers. Analyze:
This past weekend, I had a dream where I was trapped in a house with all of my friends and family. People were outside(i think it was dark and there was snow on the ground) massing for a war i started somehow. Then the masses started attacking the house and I just walked around feeling helpless because there was nothing I could do.

You don't have to be serious. I'm just trying to give you something to amuse yourself with. Any interpretation aside from 'you feel kinship with Bush' will make me happy.

Re: light interpretation

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Okay. I have two interpretations for you.

The Serious Interpretation

You're feeling at war with the world. It's a cold, harsh place, and you feel as if you've made some bad decisions. The negative results of those choices are affecting your loved ones, and you feel responsible but powerless to change your life.

The Whimisical Interpretation

You didn't turn the heat up enough before bed, and you desire to eat strawberries romanoff.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

1) What movie you've seen disappointed you more than any other, and why?

2) What are the three things most fundamentally wrong with American journalism?

3) What single challenge would you most want to embrace in life, and why?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

1. I'm going to have to say The Order. It had such potential for so many interesting and creepy plot arcs, a reasonably talented and attractive cast, an excellent setting... and it clearly died on the cutting room floor. So much wasn't explained or was glossed over. It was clearly something that could have been cool, but ended up "eh." I hate to see that.

2. The unwillingness or laziness on the part of writers and editors to write challenging stories, horrid shoddy writing that my high school teacher would have failed without a thought, and the trend towards 'info-tainment' instead of actual news.

3. I would like to accept the challenge of working hard. So often, I don't. I coast, I find ways out of it. I want to challenge myself to work under deadlines and pressure, to do the best and push the limits of my abilities. I want to learn.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Bonus question: is your character Meier named after Andrew Meier?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Good question. I wish I could he was, but I actually took his name from the vampire in the second Vampire Hunter D movie. His face and something of his character I borrowed from Gerald Tarrant from a fantasy novel Black Sun Rises.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Black Sun Rising actually. Whoops.

[alainn-sorcha.livejournal.com]

If you had the opportunity to be anyone, alive or dead, for one day, would you do it? Why or why not? Who would you choose? Why? What would you do that day, and how much would your potential to affect the course of history affect your decisions?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Anything that involves messing with the space/time continuim is usually a Very Bad Idea. This I have learned from countless sci-fi novels and movies. But the appeal of living another life for a day? Of experiencing something completely and utterly foreign to me? That is something I would give a great deal to experience.

I would choose to be Peter the Great. I've always wondered what it would be like to have a man's body, what it would be like to rule one of the largest empires on the face of the earth. I'd attend to a bit of business, give the slave laborers a day off and then declare a national holiday. (Because I've really always wanted to go to a royal ball.) I'd find out if he kept a secret memoir, and make certain it survived the ravages of history so one day someone could write their thesis about it.

And I would try really hard not make the universe collapse in on itself in the process.

[alainn-sorcha.livejournal.com]

I think that is a very, very good answer. Seems hard to imagine anything terribly irreversible could happen by giving the slaves the day off. Unless, you know, they got all uppity and started thinking they actually deserved it. ;)

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

While I thik Petersburg is lovely, it is a bit creepy to know what brought it up out of the swamp. I'm not sure I could watch that. And hey, everyone loves a holiday.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Anything that involves messing with the space/time continuim is usually a Very Bad Idea. This I have learned from countless sci-fi novels and movies

Do you think that this is a covert propaganda move to prepare people for the reality of messing with it? Specifically - suppose for a moment it already exists , and current tinkering with it accounts for some anomolies that happen. Due to this, consider the possibility of a conspiracy between sci fi writers, hollywood and etc to educate the public so that they understand and don't try to tinker with it too much when it finally leaks out that we can tinker / have been tinkering.

Your thoughts ?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I can see that backfiring in a big way. When everyone finds out we've already been messing with the space time continuim, then everyone will freak out and assume the end of the world is at hand. ;)

[quietexpression.livejournal.com]

Hi. I want an LJ tshirt. Hehe. I'll probably buy one eventually but I have bigger fish to fry right now. :>

I haven't talked to you in forever. Congrats on getting married! Last I read in your journal you weren't even dating! That's wonderful.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

The tshirts are most excellent, and I'm all about supporting Livejournal.

Thank you muchly. It has been a very crazy year. :)

[quietexpression.livejournal.com]

I understand. 2003 completely flipped my life over in the best way. I'm much happier these days. I'm glad to see that this goes for you as well.

[puella.livejournal.com]

I was wondering before about something that you bring up in this entry- why did you change your name? What were you thoughts about changing VS keeping and why did you decide to change?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Changing my last name was a difficult decision. Not just because of the paperwork hassle, but because I'm the oldest child of a man who didn't have a son.

I thought about keeping it. Because I'm used to correcting people on the pronunciation and the spelling, because all my ID has that name, because it was the name my father and family gave to me. There's a huge feminist issue there that I won't even go into, because my feelings are unsettled about that subject.

But here was this chance to start a new life, and with a new name. It's even a Slavic last name, which was something I've always secretly envied. I knew it was something Alan cared about, though he never asked me to make this decision. He is his father's only son. There's also the consideration of hospitals and doctors and social situations and if we ever had children whose last name would they have?

I thought about the hyphen but decided it was awkward and more of a hassle.

In the end, I decided that since it would mean something to Alan and because the name was lovely, I would change my own.

[evilgeniuskatie.livejournal.com]

I rather like my last name, and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. It's fun because (and I look in phone books) I've never met anyone else with my name that isn't in my family.

And I'm an only child, so I'm sort of like a standard bearer for this branch of our Polish tree. My mom has a different last name now too, because she's on her second husband.

And here's another interesting conundrum: being gay I'm really not sure how the last name thing is supposed to go when I get married. ~KMK

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I would think that if you found a lovely girl and decided to marry her, the two of you could sit down and decide if you wanted to change names and which name you would like to have. You could go for the hyphen, or there's even a trend starting where couples make up a new last name out of the old ones.

[evilgeniuskatie.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of making a new one, that's kind of neat.

Hyphenated names piss me off though. ~KMK

[delchi.livejournal.com]

You two still owe me an email :)

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

You know, I think we've finally decided on Mahogany. :) That only took weeks!

[delchi.livejournal.com]

For a day, you are me. Name three things you would do within the 24 hours alotted, specifically ...

1. To improve internal moralle

2. To improve an interpersonal realtionship

3. To assure future happiness AND success ( in balance )

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

1. Hair cut, even if it just needs a trim. New shoes. Perhaps hair dye. Nothing improves morale like hair products and shoes. Trust me.

2. I'd sit down with the person in question, and lay it out on the table. "Look, this is the situation. I'm not happy, I don't think you're happy, and I'd like to make this better. What can we do here?" After talking, I'd take the person out for a drink.

3. I'd work out a budget I could live on, and try to sock away whatever cash I could. In the meantime, to cut down on entertainment expenses and improve my brain, I would study at home and do a lot of reading. I'd check out career paths open to me, school options, etc. When it all gets too stressful, I'd put on the headphones and bop around to NIN until I was too tired to move.

[evilgeniuskatie.livejournal.com]

I'd like to hear (er...read) about the place you lived in Texas in when you were little. In that way you write sometimes. ~KMK

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I was born in the Potter County hospital in Amarillo, a featureless white building sticking up in the plain. Potter County has the highest mortality rate in the state, which really just comes down to being poor. My parents lived in a little house with a dusty yard on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, the part of town reserved for "people of color" and other poor folk a few decades ago. My father told me once there were weekly shootings and blue-red police lights almost every weekend. He saved scraps of sod and grass from his job to make a real yard.

We didn't move very far the first time, just across the hard flat panhandle to Lubbock. Our windows were up against the ceiling, because of the tornados and dust storms. My dad was lost in a dust storm once, and the world turned brown and gritty for an afternoon. We had tulips in a patch near the front of the house, and evergreen trees planted in a row down the driveway like a castle wall. They were perhaps as tall as five year old girl.

The house in Lubbock is where my earliest memories come from, looking up at a black silent dog. The dogs kept watch over me, a wayward pup without fur. The yard felt enormous, running from one end to the other, climbing up on the fence in the back where the honeysuckles vines grew. I spent hours in the sand box in the early evening gloom, afternoons of bright sunlight watering the vegetable garden and creating rivers between the corn and the zuchinni plants in my bathing suit. I remember snow once, white and grey and cold, and trying to tunnel through it. A crab apple tree grew next door, with hard fruit just big enough to fit in my fist. Outside my high bedroom windows, I could just see the feathery leaves of a mimosa tree, not far from the airconditioner unit.

I remember it being very flat, very still. No water running over the ground, and the trees were not so big as the ones I would see later. Mostly I remember it always seemed to be sunny, except for the tornado days. Brilliant, shining sunlight and green grass surrounded by a tall wooden fence, and a sky so far overhead.

[evilgeniuskatie.livejournal.com]

Thanks. ~KMK