Day 2: 20 facts about me
1. I was born in Ithaca, NY to parents who had recently emigrated from England. As a kid I just accepted this as my origin story, but now that I am nominally an adult it completely blows my mind that my mother, 8 months pregnant with her first child, moved 3,000 miles away from all her friends and family support ‘cause my dad got a job at a new university. That is seriously intense.
2. The rest of my family still lives in England, with the exception of a couple of cousins who live in Holland. They’re the only cousins I’m Facebook friends with, but also they only post in Dutch, so it kind of comes out a wash.
3. I have one younger brother, A, who I forced to play “school” a lot as a kid. We fought a lot as teens but now we have a good relationship. He’s a pretty hilarious dude and him and his girlfriend often do matching cosplay at the local cons so clearly we have similar sensibilities.
4. I played the viola for 10 years all through school. Violists are the best part of any orchestra.
5. On more than one occasion I have not noticed that I was dating someone and had to have it pointed out to me. Sometimes in fandom I see this criticized as a beyond unrealistic plot point, but I am here to tell you folks, it IS possible to be that oblivious.
6. Sometimes I think about the afternoon I spent pacing my bedroom debating with myself whether to reply to quettaser’s post offering a free ticket to see Gym Class Heroes at the Liacouras Center and how my life would be different if I hadn’t decided to go for it.
7. Somewhat relatedly, I have a lot of anxiety about being a bother to other people, even people who I know like me or I know require things from me. This makes me really bad at keeping up correspondences with people, even though I also know that being the one to initiate conversations all the time is a drag. Brains! \o/
8. The first time I was an unaccompanied minor on an airplane was before the days of seatback monitors and my main recollection of the trip was that the inflight movie was Shakespeare In Love. In my mind that is the raciest movie of all time because I was so beyond glad that my parents weren’t with me to watch it.
9. mmeguilotn and I go to the same hair salon and after our most recent haircut I think my hairdresser thinks the two of us our dating. Like, she asked me what I was doing for Thanksgiving and I said I was spending it with mmeguilotn’s family, because that is what I am doing, and then she was like “Oh, how long have the two of you been together?” and I thought to myself that that was a weird way to put it but I told her that we’d moved into a house together about 2 years ago. Then I talked about how mmeguilotn and quettaser used to live together by themselves but then they wanted to get a bigger house so I moved in with them as well, so now who knows what she thinks.
10. Every time I go to a hockey game I get a Bud Light Lime, because if I’m going to pay $11 for a beer, I might as well go for broke. I’ve actually developed quite a taste for it.
11. A thing I have been doing lately is subscribing to various subscription boxes where they send you food or makeup or whatever every month. I feel a little silly about it sometimes, but it is fun to get packages in the mail on the regular. What is also a lot of fun is reading the blogs of the hardcore subscription fan people, who subscribe to every box under the sun and post what’s in them every month. Way cheaper for me just to read their posts, plus sometimes there is hilarious subscription box drama.
12. My parents tell me that the other names they were considering for me beside the ones they eventually chose were Hepzibah Angharad and I have never been able to figure out if they’re being serious or not. Also my dad put in a fully coordinated effort to make my first words be “intergalactic coordinates” because he is a hyper nerd.
13. I was the kind of kid who skipped recess in elementary school to help shelve books in the library, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment to my self-image that I’m now a person who goes to the gym three times a week plus takes one or two yoga classes. That’s so much more physical activity than I thought I wanted! And while I can’t say running on the elliptical is my absolute favorite part of my day, I have enjoyed doing Zombies! Run/having an excuse to watch trashy TLC programming.
14. My college boyfriend bought me Flash Gordon because he was worried about how depressed I was and thought having to take care of a cat might help draw me out of it. Didn’t work 100% as he’d hoped, but I got a pretty sweet cat out of the deal.
15. I have a tumblr (I’m josiepye) which I enjoy, but I’ve developed some tics about how I use it. Like, I won’t reblog anything with more than 1,000 notes unless I’ve got something really important to say about it, and I don’t reblog things with fewer than 1,000 notes if I’ve already seen it in my feed three or four times. Wouldn’t want to bother all my friends who have probably already seen it by now! Also I still mostly tumblr through my rss feed instead of the dashboard. Super normal stuff.
16. I also have a spreadsheet in Google docs with all the nailpolishes I own and the date I last used them, so I don’t end up overusing one color and then never getting around to another.
17. A couple of months ago my bedroom ceiling started leaking underneath where the bathtub is upstairs, which was pretty worrying. We eventually determined the leak was behind the tiles on the wall, which is probably going to involve ripping down the whole wall to replace. So as a stopgap measure until he has the time/knowledge to fix it, our landlord has installed a second shower curtain in the tub to protect the tiles from getting water in them. It does lend an air of serial killing to our morning shower routines, I have to say.
18. I got my first grey hair at sixteen, a fact I can blame my father for, since he’s pretty much full grey in all my toddler photos. Right now it’s all concentrated in kind of a salt-and-pepper Rogue streak which I think looks pretty cool.
19. I’m double-jointed in my left thumb.
20. There was a set of wooden stairs in the house I grew up in, and the bottom step had a knot on it that looked to me and my brother like the face of a ghost. As a consequence, we refused to step on that stair in case the ghost got us, and to this day I habitually skip the bottom stair on most staircases.
2. The rest of my family still lives in England, with the exception of a couple of cousins who live in Holland. They’re the only cousins I’m Facebook friends with, but also they only post in Dutch, so it kind of comes out a wash.
3. I have one younger brother, A, who I forced to play “school” a lot as a kid. We fought a lot as teens but now we have a good relationship. He’s a pretty hilarious dude and him and his girlfriend often do matching cosplay at the local cons so clearly we have similar sensibilities.
4. I played the viola for 10 years all through school. Violists are the best part of any orchestra.
5. On more than one occasion I have not noticed that I was dating someone and had to have it pointed out to me. Sometimes in fandom I see this criticized as a beyond unrealistic plot point, but I am here to tell you folks, it IS possible to be that oblivious.
6. Sometimes I think about the afternoon I spent pacing my bedroom debating with myself whether to reply to quettaser’s post offering a free ticket to see Gym Class Heroes at the Liacouras Center and how my life would be different if I hadn’t decided to go for it.
7. Somewhat relatedly, I have a lot of anxiety about being a bother to other people, even people who I know like me or I know require things from me. This makes me really bad at keeping up correspondences with people, even though I also know that being the one to initiate conversations all the time is a drag. Brains! \o/
8. The first time I was an unaccompanied minor on an airplane was before the days of seatback monitors and my main recollection of the trip was that the inflight movie was Shakespeare In Love. In my mind that is the raciest movie of all time because I was so beyond glad that my parents weren’t with me to watch it.
9. mmeguilotn and I go to the same hair salon and after our most recent haircut I think my hairdresser thinks the two of us our dating. Like, she asked me what I was doing for Thanksgiving and I said I was spending it with mmeguilotn’s family, because that is what I am doing, and then she was like “Oh, how long have the two of you been together?” and I thought to myself that that was a weird way to put it but I told her that we’d moved into a house together about 2 years ago. Then I talked about how mmeguilotn and quettaser used to live together by themselves but then they wanted to get a bigger house so I moved in with them as well, so now who knows what she thinks.
10. Every time I go to a hockey game I get a Bud Light Lime, because if I’m going to pay $11 for a beer, I might as well go for broke. I’ve actually developed quite a taste for it.
11. A thing I have been doing lately is subscribing to various subscription boxes where they send you food or makeup or whatever every month. I feel a little silly about it sometimes, but it is fun to get packages in the mail on the regular. What is also a lot of fun is reading the blogs of the hardcore subscription fan people, who subscribe to every box under the sun and post what’s in them every month. Way cheaper for me just to read their posts, plus sometimes there is hilarious subscription box drama.
12. My parents tell me that the other names they were considering for me beside the ones they eventually chose were Hepzibah Angharad and I have never been able to figure out if they’re being serious or not. Also my dad put in a fully coordinated effort to make my first words be “intergalactic coordinates” because he is a hyper nerd.
13. I was the kind of kid who skipped recess in elementary school to help shelve books in the library, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment to my self-image that I’m now a person who goes to the gym three times a week plus takes one or two yoga classes. That’s so much more physical activity than I thought I wanted! And while I can’t say running on the elliptical is my absolute favorite part of my day, I have enjoyed doing Zombies! Run/having an excuse to watch trashy TLC programming.
14. My college boyfriend bought me Flash Gordon because he was worried about how depressed I was and thought having to take care of a cat might help draw me out of it. Didn’t work 100% as he’d hoped, but I got a pretty sweet cat out of the deal.
15. I have a tumblr (I’m josiepye) which I enjoy, but I’ve developed some tics about how I use it. Like, I won’t reblog anything with more than 1,000 notes unless I’ve got something really important to say about it, and I don’t reblog things with fewer than 1,000 notes if I’ve already seen it in my feed three or four times. Wouldn’t want to bother all my friends who have probably already seen it by now! Also I still mostly tumblr through my rss feed instead of the dashboard. Super normal stuff.
16. I also have a spreadsheet in Google docs with all the nailpolishes I own and the date I last used them, so I don’t end up overusing one color and then never getting around to another.
17. A couple of months ago my bedroom ceiling started leaking underneath where the bathtub is upstairs, which was pretty worrying. We eventually determined the leak was behind the tiles on the wall, which is probably going to involve ripping down the whole wall to replace. So as a stopgap measure until he has the time/knowledge to fix it, our landlord has installed a second shower curtain in the tub to protect the tiles from getting water in them. It does lend an air of serial killing to our morning shower routines, I have to say.
18. I got my first grey hair at sixteen, a fact I can blame my father for, since he’s pretty much full grey in all my toddler photos. Right now it’s all concentrated in kind of a salt-and-pepper Rogue streak which I think looks pretty cool.
19. I’m double-jointed in my left thumb.
20. There was a set of wooden stairs in the house I grew up in, and the bottom step had a knot on it that looked to me and my brother like the face of a ghost. As a consequence, we refused to step on that stair in case the ghost got us, and to this day I habitually skip the bottom stair on most staircases.