| Tuesday, October 31, 2006 |
| visual aid |
In revisiting "Sphygmomanometer" as a radio essay, I was going through the photos I had from Ann's graduation, and I figured I might as well share. Have a look, if you like.
Oh, and don't mind the fish--I have no idea why those are in this set. |
posted by La Malinche @ 7:35 PM   |
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| Friday, October 27, 2006 |
| i want to be standing where people can see me |
What are you wearing?
Well, aren't we forward? The answer to this is disappointingly boring: jeans, boxers, Underdog t-shirt, white button-down, watch.
Your Greatest Weakness
Distraction. Oh god, distraction. Unless you mean in a purely combative sense, in which case...distraction, followed closely by a lack of balance that stems from my right leg being slightly longer than my left.
Who was the last person you lectured?
I tend to avoid people that need constant lecturing. Closest I've come is probably explaining to someone I just met through facebook when he sent me a message about this very blog [hi, if I didn't scare you away!] that I don't really think I grew up under difficult circumstances. But then, everything is relative. Now that is a lecture I've delivered many times, usually to the same person, whom I also nag of late about never being around anymore. Huh. Maybe I lecture more than I thought. Who'da thunk? ^_^
Who was the last person you envied?
Heh. My sin of choice. If we want to go the disarmingly honest route, I envied two people--boyfriends--who started showing up to quizbowl earlier in the year. I envied them and felt vaguely threatened by them, because they were by virtue of being together "more gay" than I, and could potentially usurp my big gay quizbowl throne. In hindsight I rather outgayed them both and had nothing to worry about. They stopped coming to practice, which is sad because I think I would like them, having gotten over myself enough to make room to get to know them.
Who was the last person you vehemently disagreed with?
Some kid in workshop who got squeamish when someone read an essay containing graphic descriptions from his time working in the burn unit at the hospital. He wanted the author to tone down the description. I disagreed. Vehemently.
Who was the last person you told that you loved them?
Uhh. My mother, on the phone last night. I really considered it nothing more than a formality. If we mean non-reflexive "I love yous," then I have no idea.
Who was the last person you sincerely insulted?
I'm pretty sure I strongly implied that someone was a recluse while talking to her on the phone recently. I meant it.
Give a brief outline of your history on the net
My parents got AOL sometime in the 90s, and I started exploring. My first real communities were yahoo groups involving Star Wars and a horrifying in retrospect, but mercifully brief infatuation with professional wrestling. I found the Combine and created Phryss in 2001, and blogging and La Malinche in 2005, the same year someone introduced me to World of Warcraft. Those are pretty much the milestones. There's a little bit of nuance in a previous essay, if you're interested.
Which is more important to you, finding the right mate or the right job?
My instinct is to say mate, because...because. But lately I've been freaking out pretty much 24 hours daily about The Future, so at the moment I want the right job, which might just be Professional Student. We'll see how well that works out.
What religion fascinates you the most?
Anything fundamentalist. It's morbid, but the people who believe something so strongly that they're willing to bet their lives and salvation on it are just...fascinating. And the people who believe their salvation depends on my damnation are just fun to listen to. In teeny tiny doses.
Open your playlist, cut to five random songs and explain why you have each of them.
It will be difficult to find five songs that have a meaning other than "I liked the anime/show/movie this was from," but I'll do my best.
Madonna - Like a Prayer (1989) - 01 - Like a Prayer
Most people were distbured by this video's blasphemous, interracial jesus-fucking. 5-year-old Malinche was disturbed by Madonna stabbing her own hand. And yet, I couldn't get enough of this video. I watched MTV with my sister just hoping it would come on. I just had to leave the room for a few seconds during the stabbing.
Imogen Heap - Speak for Yourself (2005) - 08 - The Walk
I am not too proud to admit that I first discovered Imogen Heap while watching "So You Think You Can Dance." This song in particular I mixed into the first cut of a radio essay I'm still working on, and I can say without hesitation that the best way to cure an infatuation with a song is to spend 4 hours mixing it into a radio essay, go to bed for 6 hours, and go right back to the studio only to be told in workshop "good effort, but the song doesn't work. Do it again."
Sigur Rós - Ágætis Byrjun (1999) - 07 - Viðrar Vel Til Loftárása
I had been a halfway-fan of Sigur Rós--one who enjoys their music, but doesn't go out of his way to acquire it--until I saw the video for this song. Full of clichés, but it makes me very happy nonetheless.
Guster - Goldfly - 10 - Rocketship
There's a lot of hate for Guster, and I don't partake of it. I don't care if my half-range self has to change octaves every three seconds, these songs are infectious and I can't not sing along. I also was introduced to Guster by a Dave Busse, high school friend that I'm sad I'm not in touch with anymore.
Gackt - Mars - 05 - Vanilla (MARS Ver.)
Read and watch.
I adore Gackt.
Would you rather be deaf or mute?
Mute, no question.
Pick two people you think are reading this. Make a pointed comment that nobody, not even they, can tell for certain is directed at them.
1/ I'm sorry that I hurt you, but I will never say that to your face. [emo much? >: /]
2/ You are probably the only person I know who has more issues than I. This makes me sad for you, but more, it makes me interested in getting to know you. I secretly hope you don't get over them.
They say that deep-down, everybody has repressed stereotypes, bias and racism...name two of yours.
Upper-class girls have to do a lot of legwork to get me to like them. I grew up around spoiled girls, and I assume every girl with expensive clothes is spoiled.
Hypermasculinity and male posturing scare me. If you've ever studied straight boys in groups, you notice that they are ceaselessly making a point of how straight and male they are. I always get tense when I pass such a group.
Why do you fill out LJ quizzes?
It's easier to answer interesting questions than to come up with something interesting to say. Any time anyone asks me to tell him/her about me, I tell them to ask me a question. I wonder sometimes if that comes off as reluctance. Maybe it is, but I would rather that someone ask me a question when they're curious than not. Someone who once told me that I inspired her wrote:
For her, she told me, “representing” has been important. It’s been important that her buzzed hair and boyish clothes flag her as queer. It’s important that she’s out, that she’s visible, and that she’s not trying to hide anything.
“I think visibility is the antidote to shame,” she said . “I don’t want anybody to interpret my quietness around queerness to mean that queerness is something that I’m ashamed of.”
“I want to be standing where people can see me,” she’d said, “and see me as queer, and come up and talk to me about queer stuff.”
[stolen from Josh]
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| posted by La Malinche @ 1:08 AM |
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| Wednesday, October 25, 2006 |
| in chronological order |
| Johann Strauss II, Georges Bizet, Pablo Picasso, Richard E. Byrd, Minnie Pearl, John Berryman, Bobby Knight, Dan Gable, Nancy Cartwright, La Malinche, Ciara Harris |
| posted by La Malinche @ 9:58 PM |
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| Tuesday, October 17, 2006 |
| “well, it sounds like this.” |
When someone’s computer is actually broken, this is usually the evidence presented by the hapless owner. They say it makes no noise, or too much noise, or the wrong noise. Then they try to imitate the sound of their broken computer, but they end up making a variety of animal noises instead—the shrieking caw of a crow, a low rumbling growl, or the whiny, plaintive bleating of a goat. Those are usually problems with the actual sound system of the computer, and are easily fixed by an updated driver or a replacement part. But the truly catastrophic, apocalyptic sounds—and trust me, I have personal experience in this matter—are far less biological in nature. An electrical discharge, a real live flash-gordon sound effects zap, means the two-thousand-dollar laptop that you brought to Europe but forgot to flip the voltage switch on has literally fried most or all of its internal components, and has become a very expensive, but also very satisfying and therapeutic bludgeon to use on the person who “told you so.” Hard drive failure, the most tragic of computer injuries, has a fitting accompaniment. The entire system freezes, abruptly halting any sound the computer was making, and from the case, a moment later, emanates a horrifying scrape-click, scrape-click, scrape-click that is the actual sound of a sharp point of metal pushing against, dragging across, and gouging into the delicately-textured discs containing, for instance, the only complete copy of your work as a writer. It is the sound of a child who doesn’t know his own strength drawing on the sidewalk, dragging a piece of chalk along the concrete, until the chalk gives, and snaps, and silence.
Computer parts do just go bad. Charges diminish, moving parts wear out. The disks in a hard drive spin constantly at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute. These things have life spans. Data, however, doesn’t. Long after the moving parts of a hard drive have died, the information stored on it is still there—someone just needs the skill and technology to go in and retrieve it, and that’s where Data Recovery Specialists come in. You give them a broken hard drive and they salvage whatever is intact. Nothing is ever truly lost.
So what is a writer, then, if not his body of work? A writer writes, right? Are you still a writer if you’ve never been published? If you shove all your writing in a locked drawer somewhere and never show it to anyone? If you shred every page of writing you produce? What about when your hard drive goes bad? Are you a writer if you have no writing? Nothing is ever truly lost, but Data Recovery has a price. My broken hard drive was holding my life as a writer hostage for prices starting at one thousand dollars. How much is my writing worth? |
| posted by La Malinche @ 1:11 AM |
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