Right. The first question is hard:

1. A fictional character you identify with and why.

Um. I keep thinking it's going to be Madame Bovary or the lead character of the Awakening, but I just don't really feel like I'm the kind of person to passively sleepwalk through a tragic life that I've never tried to change. The problem with trying to choose a character from a book that I relate to is I don't know how my story ends. Am I a comic heroine, a tragic heroine, or a side character in some other story? I'm not sassy enough to be Becky Sharp and not ... Jane Eyre.

Wait. I remember. I identify with Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God. She felt like there was more to life than what she had, and she stuck her neck out to try to make a life that meant something to her, that felt real. She was passionate and impulsive but also suffered and struggled - but despite all this, she could still see how life could be amazing. And at the end, when she was broke and broken, she didn't regret a thing.

( The rest of the questions. )

I'm not up for it, really, just thinking about where I am now is really depressing.

2011. Have had current job for 1 1/2 years. Am senior managerial type. No idea where my life is going. Live in rented flat. Actively seeking to get to a better place headwise.
2001. Have low level manager job in soon to implode dot-com. Not having good luck making friends in Seattle. Heavily involved in volunteering in my local community. Living with man and dog I love (both of them, not just the dog) in house we love with car that always works. Thought I had my life worked out, including retirement location.
1991. Working in Tempe at the "Coffee Plantation" and living in a rented house with 6 other roommates. Dating guy who makes fun of me when I'm not around. Roommates and friends keep drifting away from me. Extremely poor. Decide to learn how to type to see if it helps me get a better job.
1981. Living in trailer park in central Arizona mining community. Not able to fit into local cliques. Spend a lot of time rollerskating in the basketball court and listening to Xanadu when I'm not reading science fiction.
1971. Mom has moved us to Arizona. This is, I think, the first summer I spend at my grandparents house in Kansas, something I will continue to do for decades, and as often as possible until my grandmother dies in 2002.

I about crapped my pants this morning when I ran my sister's flight through the "Where is it now?" feature on United's site and found that her plane landed two hours earlier. This was bad because I as at work. I then called the airline frantically and found out that they'd changed the number for her flight. Whew. ETA: 1:15 PM today. Yay!

Work is quiet still but I keep expecting the storm to hit any second. But since it hasn't:

This is in the run-up to the VP debate tonight.

"As evidenced by Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade.

The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historical your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun."

Off of the top of my head, I very easily came up with Brown vs. the Board of Education, and I should be able to come up with the Miranda that Miranda rights came from. However, I am rather more frequently finding myself thinking of Worcester v. Georgia of late, in which a president of the United States blatantly ignored the Supreme Court's mandate. When I read about this in high school, I was shocked that such a thing had happened, but it seems that this administration may get there yet, a membership in the lowest rungs of the American history books. (Not that I don't think it qualifies pretty well as is. Trials for crimes against humanity, anyone?)

While researching this, I found a good NY Times Magazine article on Harry Blackmun. Read and enjoy.

Today we were somewhat blowing with the wind. During our discussion at rosamicula's last night it came up that I was interested in seeing the Millais exhibit at the Tate Britain; I woke to discover Miss Micula had offered to guest butterbee in to the exhibit. So off we went, at the late, late, post-cleaning-up-the-house hour of 1:45 (but I felt much better for having all of the wrapping paper and presents out of the living room and also for having made little roast beef sandwiches for us to have for lunch).

The exhibit was nice, especially when you consider that all four of us made it in for eleven quid and the price of a round of heavily doctored cups of tea (shadowdaddy is not recovering gracefully from his cold - I imagine it kicking and screaming from its position deep within his sinus cavities). The first two rooms were mostly filled with the paintings of his I've seen a million times before - Ophelia, Mariana, Christ in the House of his Parents, The Order of Release, Autumn Leaves - the really pretty paintings I'm so fond of but .... well, let's be honest, which occasionally have a touch of schmaltz to them. (I still like many of them quite a lot, and enjoyed seeing new works I'd not seen before, such as "Love," pictured, and the studies for many of the paintings I was very familiar with.)

The "schmaltz" factor seemed to more and more take over as the exhibit wore on. I was happy that he found love in Effie Ruskin, but once he had eight kids to feed, I guess he threw artistic purity out of the window in favor of commercial success. Sappy sweet kiddie portraits, random decorative romantic "scenes," society portraits ... the middle three rooms ("The Boyhood of Raleigh," "The Ruling Passion," bleah!) were full of what looked like the kind of crap you need to crank out to keep the bills paid.

That said, the last room was full of lovely Scottish landscapes that he painted when he ran away from London society and went to live "the life of an English gentleman," which apparently involved a lot of hunting and fishing and hiding in little huts for seven hours a day painting water pouring over volcanic rocks. Unfortunately I was a bit too tired by this time to really appreciate this art and just wanted to sit down and have some more tea and recover a bit.

Afterwards, off we went to Liverpool Street Station to meet spikeylady and enjoy a christmas tour through the Dennis Severs house. All of the house was lit by candlelight and in each room it appeared the occupants had just left - leaving behind a half eaten softboiled egg, a whiff of perfume, some overturned crockery, etc. I found it all quite charming but felt like a little bit of it was passing me by! Apparently the whole house was the artistic project of Dennis Severs, who died some years back, but like my last trip to see a Punchdrunk production (in this case Faust), I felt like I was just a little bit behind getting what was holding it all together. But it was neat, anyways.

That said my big fun was having dinner afterwards at the Nazrul Restaurant on Brick Lane. Of course, the whole thing was an experience, with every damned restaurant having a shill outside trying to drag you in and make you a paying customer. I was insistent that we find a place that had an "English menu" with fish and chips on it so butterbee could have something utterly unspicey to eat, and managed to escape from the clutches of many proprietors based on needing to fill that criteria (one offered to bring us some from down the street while we ate, which was really just OTT but had me say, "We may be back!"). But we were convinced at last and settled down for a nice dinner (with fried fish, and with the discount I'd been offered elsewhere carried over to this one - 20% off plus free drinks :-) ). It was YAP YAP YAP for about two hours or so and then we all called it a night and slunk back home after getting some sweets down the street (burfi and that fried honey pretzel thing, yum!) and passing through some of the Ripper haunts we'd visited when we did the tour. It seems like we didn't do much today but we are all now very tired.

65 words

Touch Typing online

And now, cake! ("Cake!")

Tagged by wendolen. No retagging, I can't be bovvered as I've had too much to drink. And since I've already posted about winning ribbons for my cooking when I was in elementary and high school, I'll skip that.

1. I didn't drink until I was about 22. I still don't like beer (won't drink it at all) and dislike gin, scotch, and several other hard liquors.
2. I lived in a trailer park for most of high school.
3. I owned a horse for a year when I was 14.
4. I don't like babies. I don't hate them, I just ... don't care. And I don't understand the whole "I want to have a baby" thing. Now that I'm 40, I think this just isn't going to change. It's hard to resolve this with the importance of "family" to me, but since most of the people that seem like family to me aren't related (and many of the people that are related to me don't act the least bit like we're family), I'm sure I can find a resolution for this somehow.
5. Whem my mom died in 2000, we hadn't talked to each other in two years.
6. I've been doing Pilates since 1997.
7. I believe we get one trip around the block, and you need to do the best you can with what you've got now. In my case, that means building relationships and memories. If you die tomorrow, will the people you love know you love them, and will you have been doing the stuff that makes you happy to be here? They do and I have.

some_fox's birthday was right fun, and I felt happy to spend it surrounded by the people I'd moved here to be with, and to be HERE for it and not on the other side of the pole hearing about it and feeling like I was so close and yet so far. Many happy returns and here's hoping we have wonderful years ahead of us!

After my crappy Monday I'm glad this week is turning out better than it started. I made it to Pilates (advanced, creamed me), then to miss_villanelle, then with her to lovely downtown Seattle. We had a wonderful afternoon: browsing the Wednesday organic farmer's market, buying tea (still no Makaibiri second flush but they promised to call when it came in), eating gelato. We hit the library on the way back so I could get some sheet music for tomorrow night at Sorry Charlies, and then I stopped back at her lovely lower Capitol Hill apartment to pick through her discarded clothes and see if there were any treasures for me.

Then the day took a turn to the left, although it was still going in a good direction: I had three people coming over for dinner and Catan. Dinner (enchiladas) was late, but everybody enjoyed it and 2 of the 3 people were also late so it wasn't a big deal. Then we all played Catan until about 10:30. We played very competetively and the game seemed very evenly divided. My sister in law to be won, and we were all, I think, happy about it as none of us were creamed and it was damn competetive up until the last roll of the dice.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to have lunch at Paseos. I hope I sleep better tonight.

webcowgirl Magic Number 15 Job Sporting Great Personality Multiple Temperament All Bark, No Bite Sexual Just Say No Likely To Win A Place On The Bench (For The Reserves) Me - In A Word Evil Colour Brought to you by MemeJack