zephoria's blog

Which cartoon character best represents you? 
Submitted by Know It All.

I don't know if Tank Girl best represents me or if i simply want to be her.  Either way, she's been on my homepage for forever because i lurve her. 

I have to answer the tattoo question since i missed it...

When i complete my PhD, i will get three circles tattooed on my wrist.  When i was in high school, i liked that you put 3 circles at the bottom of a proof before writing QED.  I always thought it meant "the end."  In college, i learned that it means "therefore, because."  This made me giggle because it's what i always told people about why i was in school in the first place.  Therefore because was my response to whatever.  So, i figured that it would be the perfect end to my dissertation: therefore because the end.  Three circles, three concepts, a completion.

<b>What do you usually do on Sunday?</b>

I wish that i could say something funny or unique or eccentric but really, Sundays are like every other day.  I wake up, i check email until i *really* have to got to the bathroom, i try to find food, i follow the cat around the house, i try to do some work until i decide that i smell, i shower and put my PJs back on, i try to do more work but end up surfing the web, i eat dinner, then i really do work.  My life is beyond lame.

Didn't the weekend just end? I spent last weekend chilling on an island in the Archipelagos with no electricity but gorgeous views and a fantastic Finnish sauna. Tomorrow, i get on a plane from Finland to Fiji (4 stops) so i intend to spend next weekend camping in Fiji and scuba diving. Ahhhh.... Now, i just need to deal with the travel!

Growing up, my mother was working constantly to make ends meet.  She picked us up from after school programs and rushed around to help us get our homework together and feed us via something that came out of the freezer and then went to work as a waitress for the night shift.  Our treat was that on Friday nights, she made breakfast - eggs, bacon and toast.  We loved this meal and it's the only thing that i can remember my mother cooking when we were small.  The exception was high holidays.  These always involved mass family gatherings and what you can imagine to be generic American holiday food - turkey, salad (Iceburg lettuce), frozen vegetables, white bread, etc.  I *hated* this food.  All of it.  Part of it came from my resentment about having to eat turkey on my birthday (Thanksgiving day) when all i wanted was pizza. 

Not surprisingly, i grew up hating all things green.  As an adult, i actually crave greens.  Of course, i crave *fresh* greens, not the frozen kind.  My absolute favorite is asparagus - i *lurve* asparagus but i can't imagine having ever been exposed to this as a child.  I can't say there are lots of foods that i grew up with that i hated then and now love - my diet is quite different nowadays and is antithetical to what i grew up with.  As a child, i never had Mexican or Japanese or Thai or anything that wasn't "American." Now, that's my preferred food.  I think that the only thing that i've maintained since childhood is my absolute love of junk food.  <grin>

When my grandfather retired, he decided to do a big family genealogy and traipsed through the histories of both my grandmother and grandfather. He's British; she's Irish (yeah - their marriage was mega-taboo, but she had already been ex-communicated so a few more sins didn't hurt anyone). My family is pretty hyper-religious the whole way back - lots of nuns and bishops, and whatnot. This is quite convenient for the family tree because it keeps it pretty simple - those individuals don't have their own branches... or at least not legitimately.  There are also a lot of hard working folks - people who did skilled labor with their hands.

We can get most of the way back through the 1600s but all of the wars make it difficult to go beyond there.  Churches were where that data was kept and when they were attacked, away went the records.  Floods and fires also make record keeping a mess.  Still, given that i'm the first generation born in the States, it's pretty cool to see back for a while. 

(Btw: i like these questions... way too much fun to answer instead of thinking of what to blog.)

I'm about to go on a mini world tour - Finland, Fiji and New Zealand.  I need some good fun fiction to read while i'm sitting on infinite airplanes.  What should i read?

Sellevision: A Novel

The qualifying books have been pushed aside - no more Imagined Communities and Conquest of Cool... Instead, there's nothing but fun novels - Sellevision and a few Chuck Palahniuk books.