This is going to be pretty rambly... and long.
I'm on a lot of drugs. I figure nobody comes here unless they
want to find out more about the author of this website, so here it
is... more.
I was born on Valentine's Day. This is only cool when you're
little if you were not a tomboy and enjoyed pink foofy heart stuff.
I have since then developed a pretty healthy appreciation for pink
foofy heart stuff, but nobody gets me birthday presents any more.
I don't even have birthday parties... people are generally either
bitter or busy on Valentine's Day. Being an "Alice in
Wonderland" enthusiast I try to have unbirthday parties instead.
Yes, that is a Superman shirt. I'm still a big Underoos
fan.
I always wanted to make gloomy/gothy underwear sets and call
them 'Six Feet Underoos'. Right? I was quite a handful when I was little... I hadn't shown any signs
of being ill yet and didn't know I should be saving my energy for
the near future when I would suddenly become old. My health has (obviously) impacted my ability to work over the
years. When I was young I started with logging and moved on to
excavation and construction work, but then the lupus and narcolepsy
kicked in and put paid to that (you can't be in the sun with lupus).
I moved on to banking and graphic design as well as some tech
support gigs, but then the arthritis and even more severe narcolepsy
ended all of those. I was even fired from a few of them (I'm
talking to you, Stream International, you bastards) for suspected
drug abuse, because according to them nobody could reasonably miss
that much work due to undiagnosed health problems even though I had
medical documentation for all of my symptoms and hospital visits.
I became a stripper after that, because amazingly stripping is a
great thing to do if you're unhealthy. The shifts are short,
you spend very little of your time actively dancing (most of the
time you're visiting at the bar or resting in the dressing room) and
if you're tired or sore the customers will just assume you're drunk.
It was easy to cancel shifts if I was suddenly sick and easy to pick
up a shift if I was unexpectedly well. Easy until the breast
cancer, that is. I'm almost afraid to ever look for another
job. I don't really want to go blind or deaf or get "hand
falling off" disease or something. A friend recently
heard my list of jobs and the corresponding illnesses and said...
wow, good thing you were never a hooker. I about died
laughing.
Cranky and sick. This is the second time I got the
chicken
pox. I was hospitalized and quarantined.
I love my family. I have the average
number of parents (that's still two, right?) and amazingly they're
still in love and married to each other, which seems to be rare
these days. They fell in love in high school and dad was a
football player and mom was a cheerleader and it's all like
something off of Gidget Goes to School. I have
one sister and she's nothing like me, which is probably why she was
popular. We didn't always get along but I think that's
normal... we get along great now, which is also probably normal.
I have a lot of extended family that I adore in small doses and a
few aunts and uncles that I don't see as much as I'd like (which is
pretty much all the time). Isn't it the future yet?
Where are my space cars and teleporters?
The fact that those other children are smiling would indicate
to
me that we didn't know each other very well. The fact that my
sister
is smiling indicates that I didn't leave in any pins in my sewing
for once.
When I was little my father was always bringing home animals that he'd
found injured in the woods. At different points he had an owl,
raccoons, and all sorts of otherwise woodland-oriented creatures.
He also kept lionfish and oscars, and I was always trying to rescue
the goldfish and keep them in coffee cups, heh. It's no surprise that I
carried on the tradition and keep a variety of pets myself. It
doesn't have quite the same effect when you live in a one bedroom
attic apartment on the edge of downtown as when you live in a
spacious house on the edge of the wilderness, but I make do with
what I've got. What I've got at the moment happens to be eight
cats (indoor only... they think their life is so rough), one
aquarium (an unheated fifty-five gallon with four ornamental
goldfish), one fennec fox, two birds (an owl finch and a society
finch), and three chinchillas. My father always jokes that I'm going
to be on the news one day as the person whose animals are all being
seized by the
Humane Society because they live with forty goats on a decrepit
bus. At least, I think he's joking. Like I would give up my
car for a decrepit bus. Plus, goats are stinky.
Considering the rate at which I adopt pets, it's probably good
that I don't live in the country any more...
I received my first computer when I was a
child, a Trash-80
from Radio Shack. It was the most awesome thing I had ever seen,
with it's cassette drive and it's four-inch-wide heat-sensitive
printer paper. I eventually moved up to a Macintosh LC,
which kept me busy through high school graduation, and even a few
years after that, although eventually I threw together my
own PC (how could I say no to such a wide variety of software
options and compatibility?). That PC lasted me until about five
years ago, when I had to evolve in order to keep up with
EverQuest, a
part-time obsession of mine.
Yummmmmm... EverQuest... I started out by avoiding any and all
MMORPGs (Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games, or,
alternately, Many Men Online Role Playing Girls... sorry, I couldn't
resist) I came across, fearing that I would be forced to interact
online with the kind of people that live in their parents' basement
wearing plastic vampire teeth and using scented oils as an
alternative to modern hygiene. The fates were against me, however,
and they provided me with an unopened
Ultima Online
box at the local Goodwill bins for the low, low price of $1.99. How
could I resist this? It couldn't hurt to just try it out, could it? It wasn't a far jump to go from Ultima Online to
EverQuest, and after that I was lured entirely to the
dark side...
World of
Warcraft. No comment, except that now I play both WoW and
EverQuest II. Coinciding
with some of this online gaming was a pin-up photography website I
published that was intended to combine my enthusiasm for gaming with
my love of lingerie and pin-up art. This netted me a small
amount of notoriety and I made a modest amount of money and went to
a lot of sci-fi/fantasy conventions where I met some great people.
I can't remember most of these people now, since narcolepsy,
menopause, and chemo have melted my tiny brain.
I really miss going to conventions. A lot. Rawr.
Probably the reason I was so easily taken in by crack-pedaling
enterprise known as online gaming is that so much resembles my first
gaming crush,
Dungeons & Dragons. I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by my
uncle when I was just a kid... to this day I don't know whether I
should be offering him gratitude or revenge (I did ponder signing
him up for the EverQuest Macintosh Beta Group, which kind of would
have been both). I was
in the process recently of developing a number of d20 supplements and
campaigns... when Wizards of the Coast made the d20 system
open-content (that means that other people could make products for
their game and publish them), I was so happy that I had to change my pants.
They've since changed their minds about that, and will now go to
hell.
Playing D&D in Seattle with my aunt...
I am really addicted to
comics, animation, and most things Disney (including Disneyland, but
not Disney World, because who has the kind of energy it takes to
walk all over half a million parks?). I do my best to keep going to
the park, even though they do their best to make it unappealing to
me, committing such atrocities as turning the Swiss Family Robinson
Treehouse into Tarzan's Treehouse and making the Pirates of the
Caribbean politically correct. Despite this, I still hope to one day
make millions of dollars and become a member of
Club 33. Right now I would be ecstatically happy just to
visit the park. Once. Even just to use the happiest
restroom on earth.
Disneyland and my friend Mark. I totally lost touch with
Mark,
and his friend who was also super cute and who's name I can't
remember
because drugs melted my brain. Le sigh. Sewing occupies a lot of my free time (hahaha... free time) and once
in a while I actually finish something that I start. I dabble
occasionally in the
Society for Creative Anachronism, and of course I make all of my
own garb (that's what medieval reenactment nerds call clothing) for that. If you've ever been
interested in the middle ages you should check it out.
I love to draw... I draw every day. Well, every day that
I'm awake. Some days I just miss completely. I've always
loved to draw... I can't remember a time I didn't at least scribble.
I doodle in a lot of different styles ranging from ridiculously
cartoonish to something resembling those crazy art nouveau knockoffs
from the seventies. I'm currently working on a comic book.
Who isn't?
Knowing me (and I do) I suspect those are not butterflies but
rather
an amateur depiction of Hitchcock's "The Birds".
I used to go out nightclubbing most of the time, but that's
slacked off almost entirely while I focus on getting back into
something resembling 'shape'. It's a curious thing, but going
out every night is actually less expensive than going out only once
in a while, since everybody loves you and everything is free if you
go out every night. I still go to a local jazz and blues
supper club once in a while (I'm a big fan of risqué blues and
jazz), and on rare occasions I go dancing at one of the local goth
nights. Goth is a musically-based subculture, by the way, not
a religious movement or any other ridiculous think you may have read
in the news. Since I'm old I listen to old gothy music, like
Bauhaus. Once I combined my love of Bauhaus and my love of
Disney and stuck mouse ears on the Bauhaus logo and wrote 'baumaus'
underneath... I wore a t-shirt like this to Disneyland the day
before a Los Angeles Bauhaus concert. I like some new music,
too, but since I'm not stripping any more or going out very often I
don't hear as much new music as I used to.
Woot, Bauhaus. I made that dress. I bet it
wouldn't even
fit my leg now... I try to not be so
much of a hermit, but you know, I really enjoy staying home and
doing quiet things and not making awkward conversation with other
human beings. I do have a few close friends that have figured
out they will have to visit me if they want to see me in person...
I'd rather have a small number of friends that I really enjoy rather
than a large number of friends I barely know. I still hang out
with my best friend from high school on a fairly regular basis
despite the fact that she's got her life way more together than I do
and actually has no problem socializing with other humans
whatsoever.
My best friend Erika, who is brilliant and gorgeous and
hilarious. She
is also a pinball wizard. She hardly ever flaunts this.
As to the rest of my free time, I try to spend it reading books or
watching movies. I have a strange fascination with pre-1970
Harlequin Romance novels... I used to be able to find them all over
Portland but now they are completely scarce. As far as books that I've read that
other people may have possibly read as well, some of favorite sets
of books are the Discworld series by
Terry
Pratchett and the Belgariad (and therefore also the Mallorean)
by David
Eddings (I cried when he died. Really.). I've also
been rereading my old favorites, the Riftwar Saga by
Raymond E. Feist
and the childhood (and again as an adult) classic Watership Down.
When I watch movies I only watch humorous movies with happy endings
(bonus points for quirky romance, anything pre-1960, or anything
featuring
Jackie Chan or Audrey Hepburn).
Well, that's about it for me... I think that's more than enough for
one person to write about themselves unless they're an egomaniac or
phenomenally interesting. In case you skipped to the end,
here's a short recap: crazy cat lady, draws silly pictures, plays
nerdy games, has no social skills, and, um, stuff. |