6 posts tagged “qotd”
What's your motto?
"Always tell the truth". Life became so much simpler when, in my early twenties or so, I realized that lying is so much more difficult than just telling the truth. It works with coworkers, with customers, and with family. I work hard to avoid situations where I have to lie because the short-term reason for lying never seems to justify the long-term problems it causes. And that's the truth!
Tell us a little something about your first girlfriend/boyfriend.
Beautiful, bookish, seventeen, and immediately discarded in favour of her perky sixteen year old sister. I was a shitbag. It wasn't even that I was a womanizing stud in my youth (or ever!). It was just that her sister was curvier and I had no practice in saying "appreciate what you've got" to my hormones. So sad, so very sad. She took it with grace, from which (with the benefit of distance) I deduce that I was no great catch at age seventeen.
What's the strongest association you have between a scent and a memory?
Right now it's the stream of diarrhea running like a river from the homeless man who was parked on the sidewalk two blocks away from Rael's office. The smell was like nothing I've smelled before, and I've had two small children who like dried fruit. It was a Niagara of effluvia, a smell that travelled with you even as you looked away, gagging, and thought "well, there's nothing I could do" while awkwardly making your middle-class excuses as you strode onward checking to make sure that smell that stuck in your nose, the smell that wouldn't go away even when the man and his predicament were blocks away, the smell that was making your psyche ache, wasn't coming from a drip of homeless shit on your clean new limited-edition Puma sneakers.
I'm a bluegrass fan, and as such after the first five million times you hear "make you squeal" followed by a toneless attempt at the Dueling Banjos intro, you lose the ability to be embarrassed by your music.
I think I prefer Mena's measure: what do you have that your spouse refuses to play in your presence? Or, as she said, "I told him it was shit and he had to play it when he was alone." I'll cop to a fondness for Bryan Adams that makes Jenine do a good impersonation of Mena. "Heaven" cuts me to the heart, whereas for Jenine it cuts the cheese. Vive la difference.
But for "most fucked up thing in my collection that even I'm embarrassed to admit I have", it has to be "Ghouls With Attitude - Disc 2". Lots of cheesy 60s horror TV show themes that I can't even play for kids on Halloween because they all say "that's shit! Play it when you're alone!"
Firefly, duh. I'd have traded the last four seasons of X-Files for four seasons of Firefly, gladly. And man, I was passionate about X-Files. All of it, not just the bits that were Scully. But I'd give the left nuts of Mulder and Scully just to have had more Firefly. Movie was great, but 3 hours compared to a TV season's worth ... no comparison. How you know Hollywood's boned: more great watchable obsession-worthy television happens than film. (Veronica Mars, I'm looking at you)
Family reunions down at the bay just below our house. That's where the first Torkingtons pitched their tent when they came to New Zealand, nearly starving because they didn't know about the shellfish in the harbour. Every year the descendants of those people gather and eat, drink, and be merry for a day.
