ganked from sdelmonte

[yakalskovich]

I did it here, and now must pass it on.-

Leave a comment, and I will...
1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a colour, a photo, a word etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favourite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you must post this in your LJ.

Comments

[yakalskovich]

1. You used to be in the Wraeththu chat on Saturdays, long ago; when I got back from the con in Stafford and got my LJ, of course I friended you!
2. Portuguese
3. The way you're into so many different cultures and languages not your own; we Europeans are led to believe that is rare in Americans.
4. You comment of 'Aww! Girlfriend went stabbity' on that post where I was translating bits of Teja's canon; it made me giggle all day.-
5. You're very much a fandom person; why did you not take to RPage?
6. The cat. I always approve of cat content.-

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

5. You know, I always felt bad about that.

The main reason I dropped out of the RP game so quickly, after you went to all that trouble of setting me up, will probably sound so ludicrous as to be...well, a very ludicrous thing. Just as I was getting settled into RPing, I was hit by a norovirus. Seriously. I mentioned it briefly on my lj, but didn't want to go into detail, as having the Norwalk virus is just as disgusting as they say, if not more so. And every time I looked at the page and thought about logging in, I would get a flashback to being that drastically ill and I would think "Erm, not right now." And then I got out of the habit.

Also I was really shy about whether I was doing the "right" kind of character interaction, or whether I was messing other people up too badly with my comments, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it was kind of scary. Even with support, it's hard to break into an established community that already has strong bonds with each other and a history. It's easy to disrupt that, or feel as though you might be disruptive, even if you're not.

[yakalskovich]

Oh, all sorts of disruptive stuff went on in the old Discworld RPG that would never be allowed anywhere else; people were expected to jump right in and mess with the others. In other games, it's called god-moding, and very much a no-no.

I hope I might interest you in Milliways eventually. For some reason, there never was a Wraeththu contingent there. They may be able to sex it up with nobody but another har, but they can interact just fine! Also, one can play a charrie without getting them involved with anyone; I have had Teja in Milliways for three months now, and he's still not started anything with anybody. He is very slowly getting to a point where he may change that, but I take that very slowly, and also, it's plotted and intended that way.

So, how about it? **tempts**

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I'd love to! I assumed it was a closed community, so I never thought much about it. Perhaps I'll lurk and get a feel for the atmosphere there. Thank you.

[yakalskovich]

No, anybody an apply there. Just read it a bit (you might 'threadstalk' Teja, for example, to get a point of reference, keeping an eye on his tagged entries; or indeed any other character, to narrow things down a bit) and then, when apps are open again (from the 1st to 7th every month), you app somebody that you want.

I might tempt you with Myrtia (the 'girlfriend went stabbity', you know), but to be honest, narrative causality is so strong, that between he 19th century canon, and the 21st century values of Milliways, her plot line is completely on rails; she has what one would call insta-plot, and not much freedom in her development, should she come to Milliways. On the other hand, she'd be easy, for a first character; her canon is limited, you know all there is to it, and you couldn't do much wrong with her.-

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

3. I think a lot of that is due to my childhood. I was always very into those "Children From Other Lands" type books when I was a kid, and that was encouraged by my family. We had a vast doll collection that had been built up over the years from my grandparents' globetrotting. We also had a lot of French children's books and children's books about Norway from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My grandmother's father was a professor of French, and also when she was a small child she found a treasure-trove of books in French in an abandoned house somewhere that she "adopted". As an adult, my grandmother loved to read nineteenth century French novelists like Stendahl. My grandfather's mother was from a bilingual English/French family, although he himself was not fluent in French (he could speak it, though). His mother was also friends with a Norwegian-American publisher, so she got a lot of books from him.

Since we lived in San Francisco, it was quite common for us to go into Chinatown and Japantown and Little Italy for dinner or something like that. That lead to buying books and dolls related to those cultures, so I developed an interest in Japanese culture and folklore quite early, long before I got into anime. Also, my grandparents were Vedantists, so they had a lot of books about India and Hindu philosophy, including Indian comics in English retelling stories like the Ramayana. My grandfather was a professor of philosophy and English, so things like Buddhist philosophy and Shakespeare were important parts of my background as well.

As well as that, we travelled a lot. When I was five, we went to London and then drove through France. When I was six, we went to Hawaii (not out of the US, but definitely a different culture). When I was seven, I visited London and Bristol, where I spent a week at an infants' school, then the Netherlands and Switzerland. When I was eight, we went to Italy. So early on, I learned that not everyone in the world speaks English, and that it's helpful if you can speak as much of another person's language as possible, because if you're lost and jetlagged and need a bathroom, accurate information is key.

And in addition to *that*, I got used to the idea of learning at least smatterings of different languages in school at an earlier age than is common in the US, where languages are normally begun in the pre-teens. I went to a private school in first grade (six years old), which focused on teaching ballet with academics sort of as a sideline. You can't study ballet without learning French, so French lessons were mandatory (I was extremely poor at them). We moved the next year, and I went to a public school. Languages weren't officially taught there, but my second grade class (seven years old) had a teacher (what was her official title? Damn, I can't remember) who worked with the "mentally gifted minors" who made up my class. She taught us very basic Spanish. No languages in third grade, but I hit the jackpot in fourth grade, where a wonderful woman who was the mother of one of the students taught us German. This was completely unofficial, and she was not affiliated with the school faculty; she and our teacher simply felt it was a good idea for her to teach us as much as she could while her daughter was still in that class. I learned far more German than I had French or Spanish, and fell in love with the language, an illicit affair which lasted through my first two years of university. I also messed around with Italian and Russian on my own, but never got very far.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Oh, and my grandparents were champion shutterbugs, who never let a moment go undocumented by the camera. When they weren't actually travelling, they had slideshows of everywhere they'd been already. They would talk about their experiences there, what the people were like, what the food was like, funny stories about things that happened. I absolutely adored those nights. And they had been EVERYWHERE, except for Eastern Europe, South America, and Antarctica.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Ah! The "Resource Teacher"! That's what we called the lady who taught Spanish. She did odds and ends of all sorts of things, mostly arts-related.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

And now that I've googled it, I know that a "resource teacher" is a teacher who works with special needs students. That explains the eclectism of her job.

[yakalskovich]

So she taught other stuff as well when there was no special needs student around to specially tutor?

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't know. It's possible. I was seven at the time, I wasn't exactly keeping track. : )

This was back in the halcyon days when California had the best public schools in the US. Before the tax cuts were voted in and the rot started. Yes, I'm bitter about it.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I haven't been out of the US since 1984. 1984! I really miss that, sometimes.

[yakalskovich]

All of it sounds really interesting; and it explains a lot. Is there no way you might travel with the choir, though?

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

ECC, as it happens, may well be traveling to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in the summer of 2009. I don't see how I can afford it, though. I plan to be with Soromundi for their twentieth anniversary, so it should be easier to avoid the temptation.

OMG. Vienna and Budapest. I've wanted to go to those places all my LIFE. And I've been reading so much about Prague, I'm interested in there, too. Argh. Argh. I can't let myself think about it.