with this heart, I have the power to blackmail the eyelids
Time for another installment of Kassie's writing meme.
Day 01 (April 3) - Your current relationship, if single discuss how single life is.
Day 02 (April 4) - Where you'd like to be in 10 years.
Day 03 (April 5) - Your views on drugs and alcohol. (in progress)
Day 04 (April 6) - Your views on religion. (complete, awaiting posting)
Day 05 (April 7) - A time you thought about ending your own life. (in progress)
Day 06 (April 8) - Write 30 interesting facts about yourself.
Day 07 - Your zodiac sign and if you think it fits your personality.
Day 08 - A moment you felt the most satisfied with your life.
Day 09 - What you hope your future will be like.
Day 10 - A passage from a book that has touched you.
Day 11 - Put your iPod on shuffle and write 10 songs that pop up.
Day 12 - Bullet your whole day.
Day 13 - Somewhere you'd like to move or visit.
Day 14 - Your earliest memory.
Day 15 - Your favourite photo of yourself and why.
Day 16 - Your views on mainstream music.
Day 17 - Your highs and lows of this past year.
Day 18 - A photo of you in the last item of clothing you bought.
Day 19 - Discuss disrespecting your parents.
Day 20 - How important you think education is.
Day 21 - One of your favourite shows.
Day 22 - How have you changed in the past two years?
Day 23 - Give five pictures of guys/girls who are famous and you find attractive.
Day 24 - Your favourite movie and what it's about.
Day 25 - Someone who fascinates you and why.
Day 26 - What kind of person attracts you.
Day 27 - A problem that you have had.
Day 28 - Something that you miss.
Day 29 - Goals for the next thirty days.
Day 30 - Your highs and lows of this month.
1. At the age of sixteen, I decided that I wanted to dye my hair every color of the rainbow by the time I turned 21. Over the next five years, I went through nineteen different hair colors (silver, pale pink, hot pink, fire-engine red, dark cherry red, orange, platinum blonde, bleach blonde, yellow, green, deep-to-the-point-of-almost-being-black forest green, ice blue, teal blue, true blue, cobalt blue, a weird mix of dark teal blues and greens, medium purple, grape purple, and black) racking up the final two - green and brilliant yellow - a month and a half before my 21st birthday. My favorite/signature hair color is blue, and there are people who still call me Meggy Bluehair.
2. I only have one double-jointed appendage: the big toe on my right foot.
3. I love finding small change on the ground, and I've been collecting it consistently for about four years. I keep it in a blue glass jar that I call my good-luck jar, and when it's full, I'm going to buy myself a wonderful little good-luck talisman (or just keep it, buy a new jar, and keep going)
4. I prefer to bandage finger injuries with electrical tape. My dad and the people he worked with always patched themselves up with it, since tape is more resilent than band-aids in a wet environment, and after I started working, I picked it up pretty damn quickly..
It isn't just practical - it's comforting. I love the fact that I'm from a place where people live in flannel and torn jeans and Xtratufs, where hands are rough and smiles are real and tape is an essential part of any manicure.
5. I'm always the big spoon. Like every rule, this one has exceptions, but it holds for almost every relationship I've ever had.
When it comes to men, I tend to favor two types: small, slender, and pretty (see: Misha Collins) and lithe, oddly beautiful giants (see: Jared Padalecki before he turned into the Hulk). It isn't so strange when I'm spooning someone who's between 5'8" and 5'11", but when it comes to someone like my current boyfriend, who is 6'4", I find myself bursting out into little gigglefits when we're cuddling over how ridiculous we must look.
For the record, the largest height difference in a relationship where I was the big spoon: ten inches. I'm five eight and a half. He was 6'6".
6. I was a musician for nearly a decade - I played clarinet, bass clarinet, and contrabass clarinet. If I'd had any sense, I would have learned how to play guitar and bass guitar from my father, too.
7. When I was eleven, I won first prize (and a hundred dollars) in an Elvis impersonation contest.
7a. (completely unrelated, but I wanted to fit this in somewhere)
I have approximately ten thousand different nicknames, ranging from the somewhat dignified to the utterly ridiculous.
8. I was raised in the remote wilds of Alaska, 40-60 miles from the nearest civilization (a town of 8500 people). My dad has a degree in fish husbandry, and we'd move wherever his job took him. In total, I spent the first seventeen years of my life living at fish hatcheries; we lived remote for six years, then moved to a hatchery on the outskirts of the aforementioned 8500 person town when I was old enough to start going to school
Being brought up in such a unique environment had a huge impact on my personality, likes, and dislikes. Here are some of them that directly resulted from it:
- I'm not a big fan of sunlight
- I love the rain
- I love forests
- I love storms
- I love snow
- I have a serious appreciation for the beauty of nature, and it's hard for me to live in completely urban areas
- I don't like high maintenance people
- my wardrobe is default-set to ripped up jeans, t-shirts, thermals, and tank tops. (even during my goth stint I always had a good supply of worn-in denim and tight, comfy shirts that I wore fairly regularly)
- I really enjoy manual labor, and I have a lot of fun working on projects that involve moving/lifting/fabricating things. See: Chris' and my tire-collecting exploits in the desert, which I've had an absolute blast with. Yesterday, we moved approximately 5400 pounds of rubber. You read that right. Five thousand four hundred pounds. On my good days, even when I'm partially weakened by Lyme disease, I've still got enough strength to lift 100-pound tires from flat-on-the-ground to on their sides and shake water out of them.
- I love going hiking and adventuring around in nature. I grew up climbing mountains, playing in tidepools, and exploring coastlines and islands.
- my previously mentioned fondness for electrical tape
- I'm not a big fan of social politics and bullshit, although I can play the games really well when I need to.
- I consider duct tape to be one of the foundations upon which the stability of the entire Universe rests.
9. I have three tattoos, a large neotribal on my right arm and a geometric snake-dragon surrounded by Polynesian tribals on my left arm.
The one on my right arm incorporates elements of tribal traditions from New Zealand, Africa, India, and the American Southwest. It was designed by Nigel Sade; he sat me down at a beautiful park in Milwaukee nearly six years ago with a tube of henna and asked me what I wanted. I said, "draw what you see". So he did.
Two days later, on June 16, I had it inked into my arm.
The dragon on my left arm was my first tattoo. His name is Muffin - a girl I made out with a few times in my first year of college called him that, and the name stuck. I'd wanted him for a year and a half, and my former roommate's boyfriend offered to design him for free. He was probably a mistake, but without him, I wouldn't have any of my others, so he's just as important to completing me as they are.
The tribal surrounding him contains symbols of protection, family, dreams, wisdom, the ocean and rocks of my home, and prayers for my future. In Polynesian mythology, you take two things with you when you pass from the world; your soul and your tattoos. Thanks to that tattoo, I carry my home with me wherever I go, until the end of time.
10. My father-daughter bonding experiences were amazing when I was growing up. My favorite: we would hang out in the kitchen, trimming fat and sinew off the giant hunks of bear and deer meet he'd either hunted himself or been given by our friends. Black bear meat makes great chorizo sausage.
11. I have a scar in my bellybutton from the surgery that saved my life. It's tied with the chicken pox mark between my eyes for the title of "favorite scar".
12. Adventuring is one of my favorite things in the world. From random road-trips to nowhere in the middle of the night to splashing down granite tubes at Sequoia National Park in my underwear to hunting for tires in the desert to swimming in the ocean at midnight, I'm always on the lookout for new, interesting, absolutely mad ways to spend my free time.
13. I'm a passionate bibliophile; my parents started teaching me how to read a few days after I was born, and within two years, I was reading everything I could get my chubby little hands on. When I close my eyes and picture something, I don't see images - I see words that weave themselves into images. When I finally have a house of my own, it's going to need an entire room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (and a bay window nook where I can curl up in my cozy nest of pillows and read to my heart's content).
14. I'm a high school dropout, and I'm extremely proud of it.
My educational environment was awful for years, between having to deal with the other kids and the boredom that came with being at the top of my class and not having nearly enough interesting things to occupy my brain, but it got really bad in high school, when I started wondering if there was more to life than getting perfect grades, being what my teachers wanted me to be, and following a traditional path to success. I started experimenting with my personal style, making friends with different groups of people, and doing things that made me happy, and everyone but my parents gave me hell for it.
Add that to the fact that my biology teacher didn't believe in evolution, I'd exhausted my school's entire science department by the time I was a junior, and my teachers were treating me like shit because I was getting straight As with 96% instead of 98%, and I was miserable.
A mediocre education at that mediocre school with those mediocre people wasn't enough for me.
I left at the end of my junior year, and I never once looked back.
Everyone but my parents, my English teacher, and my drama teacher told me I was ruining my life. I lost almost all my friends, and became a complete social pariah in my town.
I had a job within three weeks, and a GED within two months, and half a year later I was accepted to a top-tier school where I could tailor-make my own education and get the challenges I craved.
When I graduated with my bachelor's degree, it was one of the happiest, most validating days of my life. I was willing to take a risk in the name of making my life and my world what I wanted them to be, and I've never regretted it for a moment.
15. I have bizarre eating habits. I drink pickle juice and olive juice, I love squid and octopus, I'll eat seaweed by the sheet and drink nonalcoholic bloody mary mix by the bottle, I drink chicken broth straight from the can, I like my leftovers cold, and I'll eat garlic straight.
16. I was a goth for seven years (16-23) - I went through mallgoth, romantic goth, cybergoth, and rivethead phases, eventually settling on the latter. As far as I'm concerned, industrial clubs will always feel like home.
17. Most of my favorite animals are insects.
18. I'm a serious business science nerd. Virology is my favorite discipline, but I'm also in love with molecular biology, genetics, inorganic chemistry, and theoretical physics, and I'll study anything related to biology that I can get my hungry little brain around.
19. Neuroses and flaws, I have them.
One of my favorite quotes comes from mister Augusten Burroughs - "I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
I'm very aware of my negative qualities, quirks, and foibles - I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I've struggled with anxiety, I can be quite paranoid, I'm afraid of flying, I'm materialistic, I'm very territorial when it comes to My Things, and I get really pissy if someone messes with my stuff without asking, I go through periods where I avoid social interaction, and I'm comfortable with them. I'm not one of those people who's constantly seeking out flaws and trying to correct them; if something is unhealthy or compromising my ability to live (like my jealousy), I'll work on it, but otherwise I'm okay just letting myself exist.
20. In my personal vernacular, "challenge" is defined as A Thing That I Must Do, Or Forever Be Branded A Failtarded Wussypants, and when it comes to challenges, I have the self-preservation instincts of a particularly ballsy Chihuahua facing down a Great Dane.
My personality contains a fatal trifecta of perfectionism, stubbornness, and competitiveness, wrapped up in a neat little box made of the desire for praise/prestige/the personal satisfaction of knowing that I can do really difficult things and topped off with a bow made of blatant moronitude and denial of the limitations of reality.
Speaking of which...
21. Last year, I took and beat the Edward Fortyhands challenge.
If you're unfamiliar - take two fortys of the premium malt beverage of your choice and duct tape them to your hands. Drain each bottle at an equal rate. Don't take them off 'til you're done.
I failed at the finishing them both before you have to pee part, but the very impressed men I was hanging out with were so entertained by my drunken antics (which included smoking a cigar by clamping it between the bottles taped to my hands and figuring out how to lock myself in the bathroom without the use of my fingers) that they forgave it.
It was the first (and only) stupid drinking game I'd ever played.
I'd never been that drunk in my life, and if I never get that trashed again, it will be too soon.
In spite of my complete and absolute inebriation, I behaved beautifully - I made it to the bathroom both times after I threw up, I took care of myself for most of the night, with the exception of the two or three lost hours where I blacked out.
I woke up the next morning feeling like my face was on the back of my head, and promptly cleaned the living room because the sight of empty beer bottles made me want to die.
A word to the wise: Steel Reserve is absolutely disgusting. Don't. Just... don't.
22. In my senior year of college, I played Frank-N-Furter in my school's production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I caused two gay men and three straight women to question their sexuality, was mistaken for a male-to-female transsexual or a really convincing drag queen by a few people, and managed to pull off the entire production in a pair of shoes with silver, rhinestone-studded 6" heels without falling on my ass. It was the most fun I've ever had on a stage.
(Pictures available upon request)
23. If I was going to develop an addiction to anything, it would be cigarettes.
Alcohol is a close second, but I don't like having more than a drink or two at a time, and while I enjoy being drunk, it isn't something I like to do more than once every few months, so full-on alcoholism isn't something I could really see happening.
I was a smoker for two days, in my senior year of college. I'd never smoked a cigarette in my life until a beautiful Spring night, when one of my housemates, a fellow insomniac himself, asked me to walk to the local 24-hour convenience store with him at 2 am. We bought cigarettes, Twinkies, and beer, and when he found out that I'd never smoked a cigarette, he offered me one.
I figured it couldn't hurt to try it once, and from my first taste, I loved them.
We ended up sitting on the front stoop of our dorm with beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other (I also had a Twinkie wedged between two of the fingers on my beer-hand), discussing our mutual love of rock 'n roll and Tom Waits until 4.30 am.
I went through three cigarettes that night, and smoked one more two days later. I haven't had one since, and I don't intend on ever smoking one again.
They're too easy to get hooked on, and that's one addiction I can't afford to have.
24. For a year and a half after I became sexually active (from the age of sixteen and a half through the middle of my eighteenth year), I went through a libertine phase. I slept with whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I ended up having a lot of sex with a lot of different people. I had a fantastic time of it - one night stands and multiple night stands and open relationships and threesomes galore - and to this day, I'm absolutely open about it and completely unashamed.
25. I made the decision to lose my virginity by flipping a coin. It could have gone either way, and I decided, "what the Hell - I might as well." Not one of my proudest moments, but I don't regret it at all.
26. My favorite alcohol is Bushmills Black Bush whiskey. I loves me some whiskey.
27. I had nipple piercings for a year and a half in my late teens, and I kick myself all the time for getting rid of them.
28. Music was one of the first ways I learned to relate to the world - when I came home from the hospital, my daddy curled me up in his lap and sang "Hotel California" to me, and I've been hooked ever since.
Rock was my first and truest musical love, evolving into my taste for the harder stuff and keeping me grounded in the glory of electric guitars and seriously excellent vocals all the while. My daddy raised me right, with a good helping of the blues to go with all those badass riffs; I've got a serious love for music that speaks to the soul in any form, which is why Tom Waits and Nick Cave are two of my favorite artists on the damn planet.
Favorite genres - Classic rock, hard rock, blues, metal, industrial metal, electro-industrial/technoindustrial, EBM, mainstream rock, obnoxious pop, and bad 80s music of all kinds
Favorite bands - Rammstein, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, Nine Inch Nails, Muse, A Perfect Circle, Johnny Cash, and Leonard Cohen
My 10 favorite songs right now are:
"Mein Herz Brennt" - Rammstein
"Timekiller" - And One's cover (originally by Project Pitchfork)
"Whistlin' Past the Graveyard" - Tom Waits
"Cannibal's Hymn" - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
"Alice" - Tom Waits
"Since I've Been Loving You" - Led Zeppelin
"Howl" - Florence + the Machine
"Supernaturally" - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
"Accidentally In Love" - Counting Crows
"Carry On My Wayward Son" - Kansas
29. I love monogamy. This comes as a surprise to a lot of people, given my history, but it's a bona fide fact.
With that said, I can definitely see myself being happy in a triad relationship (two women, one man) if I was at the right point in my life, and found the right pair of people to share it with, but by and large, I'm an extremely monogamous creature.
30. I'm not really big on celebrity crushes or celebrity fantasy-fucks, since I'm the sort of person who doesn't just bang someone based on the way they look - I don't care how beautiful you are, if we don't click, and if your brain isn't sexy, too, I won't come anywhere near you. With that said, if had to pick a celebrity, male or female, for a single night of no-strings-attached, no-holds-barred, pelvis-shattering sex, it would be Misha Collins.
Hands down.
Day 01 (April 3) - Your current relationship, if single discuss how single life is.
Day 02 (April 4) - Where you'd like to be in 10 years.
Day 03 (April 5) - Your views on drugs and alcohol. (in progress)
Day 04 (April 6) - Your views on religion. (complete, awaiting posting)
Day 05 (April 7) - A time you thought about ending your own life. (in progress)
Day 06 (April 8) - Write 30 interesting facts about yourself.
Day 07 - Your zodiac sign and if you think it fits your personality.
Day 08 - A moment you felt the most satisfied with your life.
Day 09 - What you hope your future will be like.
Day 10 - A passage from a book that has touched you.
Day 11 - Put your iPod on shuffle and write 10 songs that pop up.
Day 12 - Bullet your whole day.
Day 13 - Somewhere you'd like to move or visit.
Day 14 - Your earliest memory.
Day 15 - Your favourite photo of yourself and why.
Day 16 - Your views on mainstream music.
Day 17 - Your highs and lows of this past year.
Day 18 - A photo of you in the last item of clothing you bought.
Day 19 - Discuss disrespecting your parents.
Day 20 - How important you think education is.
Day 21 - One of your favourite shows.
Day 22 - How have you changed in the past two years?
Day 23 - Give five pictures of guys/girls who are famous and you find attractive.
Day 24 - Your favourite movie and what it's about.
Day 25 - Someone who fascinates you and why.
Day 26 - What kind of person attracts you.
Day 27 - A problem that you have had.
Day 28 - Something that you miss.
Day 29 - Goals for the next thirty days.
Day 30 - Your highs and lows of this month.
1. At the age of sixteen, I decided that I wanted to dye my hair every color of the rainbow by the time I turned 21. Over the next five years, I went through nineteen different hair colors (silver, pale pink, hot pink, fire-engine red, dark cherry red, orange, platinum blonde, bleach blonde, yellow, green, deep-to-the-point-of-almost-being-black forest green, ice blue, teal blue, true blue, cobalt blue, a weird mix of dark teal blues and greens, medium purple, grape purple, and black) racking up the final two - green and brilliant yellow - a month and a half before my 21st birthday. My favorite/signature hair color is blue, and there are people who still call me Meggy Bluehair.
2. I only have one double-jointed appendage: the big toe on my right foot.
3. I love finding small change on the ground, and I've been collecting it consistently for about four years. I keep it in a blue glass jar that I call my good-luck jar, and when it's full, I'm going to buy myself a wonderful little good-luck talisman (or just keep it, buy a new jar, and keep going)
4. I prefer to bandage finger injuries with electrical tape. My dad and the people he worked with always patched themselves up with it, since tape is more resilent than band-aids in a wet environment, and after I started working, I picked it up pretty damn quickly..
It isn't just practical - it's comforting. I love the fact that I'm from a place where people live in flannel and torn jeans and Xtratufs, where hands are rough and smiles are real and tape is an essential part of any manicure.
5. I'm always the big spoon. Like every rule, this one has exceptions, but it holds for almost every relationship I've ever had.
When it comes to men, I tend to favor two types: small, slender, and pretty (see: Misha Collins) and lithe, oddly beautiful giants (see: Jared Padalecki before he turned into the Hulk). It isn't so strange when I'm spooning someone who's between 5'8" and 5'11", but when it comes to someone like my current boyfriend, who is 6'4", I find myself bursting out into little gigglefits when we're cuddling over how ridiculous we must look.
For the record, the largest height difference in a relationship where I was the big spoon: ten inches. I'm five eight and a half. He was 6'6".
6. I was a musician for nearly a decade - I played clarinet, bass clarinet, and contrabass clarinet. If I'd had any sense, I would have learned how to play guitar and bass guitar from my father, too.
7. When I was eleven, I won first prize (and a hundred dollars) in an Elvis impersonation contest.
7a. (completely unrelated, but I wanted to fit this in somewhere)
I have approximately ten thousand different nicknames, ranging from the somewhat dignified to the utterly ridiculous.
8. I was raised in the remote wilds of Alaska, 40-60 miles from the nearest civilization (a town of 8500 people). My dad has a degree in fish husbandry, and we'd move wherever his job took him. In total, I spent the first seventeen years of my life living at fish hatcheries; we lived remote for six years, then moved to a hatchery on the outskirts of the aforementioned 8500 person town when I was old enough to start going to school
Being brought up in such a unique environment had a huge impact on my personality, likes, and dislikes. Here are some of them that directly resulted from it:
- I'm not a big fan of sunlight
- I love the rain
- I love forests
- I love storms
- I love snow
- I have a serious appreciation for the beauty of nature, and it's hard for me to live in completely urban areas
- I don't like high maintenance people
- my wardrobe is default-set to ripped up jeans, t-shirts, thermals, and tank tops. (even during my goth stint I always had a good supply of worn-in denim and tight, comfy shirts that I wore fairly regularly)
- I really enjoy manual labor, and I have a lot of fun working on projects that involve moving/lifting/fabricating things. See: Chris' and my tire-collecting exploits in the desert, which I've had an absolute blast with. Yesterday, we moved approximately 5400 pounds of rubber. You read that right. Five thousand four hundred pounds. On my good days, even when I'm partially weakened by Lyme disease, I've still got enough strength to lift 100-pound tires from flat-on-the-ground to on their sides and shake water out of them.
- I love going hiking and adventuring around in nature. I grew up climbing mountains, playing in tidepools, and exploring coastlines and islands.
- my previously mentioned fondness for electrical tape
- I'm not a big fan of social politics and bullshit, although I can play the games really well when I need to.
- I consider duct tape to be one of the foundations upon which the stability of the entire Universe rests.
9. I have three tattoos, a large neotribal on my right arm and a geometric snake-dragon surrounded by Polynesian tribals on my left arm.
The one on my right arm incorporates elements of tribal traditions from New Zealand, Africa, India, and the American Southwest. It was designed by Nigel Sade; he sat me down at a beautiful park in Milwaukee nearly six years ago with a tube of henna and asked me what I wanted. I said, "draw what you see". So he did.
Two days later, on June 16, I had it inked into my arm.
The dragon on my left arm was my first tattoo. His name is Muffin - a girl I made out with a few times in my first year of college called him that, and the name stuck. I'd wanted him for a year and a half, and my former roommate's boyfriend offered to design him for free. He was probably a mistake, but without him, I wouldn't have any of my others, so he's just as important to completing me as they are.
The tribal surrounding him contains symbols of protection, family, dreams, wisdom, the ocean and rocks of my home, and prayers for my future. In Polynesian mythology, you take two things with you when you pass from the world; your soul and your tattoos. Thanks to that tattoo, I carry my home with me wherever I go, until the end of time.
10. My father-daughter bonding experiences were amazing when I was growing up. My favorite: we would hang out in the kitchen, trimming fat and sinew off the giant hunks of bear and deer meet he'd either hunted himself or been given by our friends. Black bear meat makes great chorizo sausage.
11. I have a scar in my bellybutton from the surgery that saved my life. It's tied with the chicken pox mark between my eyes for the title of "favorite scar".
12. Adventuring is one of my favorite things in the world. From random road-trips to nowhere in the middle of the night to splashing down granite tubes at Sequoia National Park in my underwear to hunting for tires in the desert to swimming in the ocean at midnight, I'm always on the lookout for new, interesting, absolutely mad ways to spend my free time.
13. I'm a passionate bibliophile; my parents started teaching me how to read a few days after I was born, and within two years, I was reading everything I could get my chubby little hands on. When I close my eyes and picture something, I don't see images - I see words that weave themselves into images. When I finally have a house of my own, it's going to need an entire room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (and a bay window nook where I can curl up in my cozy nest of pillows and read to my heart's content).
14. I'm a high school dropout, and I'm extremely proud of it.
My educational environment was awful for years, between having to deal with the other kids and the boredom that came with being at the top of my class and not having nearly enough interesting things to occupy my brain, but it got really bad in high school, when I started wondering if there was more to life than getting perfect grades, being what my teachers wanted me to be, and following a traditional path to success. I started experimenting with my personal style, making friends with different groups of people, and doing things that made me happy, and everyone but my parents gave me hell for it.
Add that to the fact that my biology teacher didn't believe in evolution, I'd exhausted my school's entire science department by the time I was a junior, and my teachers were treating me like shit because I was getting straight As with 96% instead of 98%, and I was miserable.
A mediocre education at that mediocre school with those mediocre people wasn't enough for me.
I left at the end of my junior year, and I never once looked back.
Everyone but my parents, my English teacher, and my drama teacher told me I was ruining my life. I lost almost all my friends, and became a complete social pariah in my town.
I had a job within three weeks, and a GED within two months, and half a year later I was accepted to a top-tier school where I could tailor-make my own education and get the challenges I craved.
When I graduated with my bachelor's degree, it was one of the happiest, most validating days of my life. I was willing to take a risk in the name of making my life and my world what I wanted them to be, and I've never regretted it for a moment.
15. I have bizarre eating habits. I drink pickle juice and olive juice, I love squid and octopus, I'll eat seaweed by the sheet and drink nonalcoholic bloody mary mix by the bottle, I drink chicken broth straight from the can, I like my leftovers cold, and I'll eat garlic straight.
16. I was a goth for seven years (16-23) - I went through mallgoth, romantic goth, cybergoth, and rivethead phases, eventually settling on the latter. As far as I'm concerned, industrial clubs will always feel like home.
17. Most of my favorite animals are insects.
18. I'm a serious business science nerd. Virology is my favorite discipline, but I'm also in love with molecular biology, genetics, inorganic chemistry, and theoretical physics, and I'll study anything related to biology that I can get my hungry little brain around.
19. Neuroses and flaws, I have them.
One of my favorite quotes comes from mister Augusten Burroughs - "I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
I'm very aware of my negative qualities, quirks, and foibles - I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I've struggled with anxiety, I can be quite paranoid, I'm afraid of flying, I'm materialistic, I'm very territorial when it comes to My Things, and I get really pissy if someone messes with my stuff without asking, I go through periods where I avoid social interaction, and I'm comfortable with them. I'm not one of those people who's constantly seeking out flaws and trying to correct them; if something is unhealthy or compromising my ability to live (like my jealousy), I'll work on it, but otherwise I'm okay just letting myself exist.
20. In my personal vernacular, "challenge" is defined as A Thing That I Must Do, Or Forever Be Branded A Failtarded Wussypants, and when it comes to challenges, I have the self-preservation instincts of a particularly ballsy Chihuahua facing down a Great Dane.
My personality contains a fatal trifecta of perfectionism, stubbornness, and competitiveness, wrapped up in a neat little box made of the desire for praise/prestige/the personal satisfaction of knowing that I can do really difficult things and topped off with a bow made of blatant moronitude and denial of the limitations of reality.
Speaking of which...
21. Last year, I took and beat the Edward Fortyhands challenge.
If you're unfamiliar - take two fortys of the premium malt beverage of your choice and duct tape them to your hands. Drain each bottle at an equal rate. Don't take them off 'til you're done.
I failed at the finishing them both before you have to pee part, but the very impressed men I was hanging out with were so entertained by my drunken antics (which included smoking a cigar by clamping it between the bottles taped to my hands and figuring out how to lock myself in the bathroom without the use of my fingers) that they forgave it.
It was the first (and only) stupid drinking game I'd ever played.
I'd never been that drunk in my life, and if I never get that trashed again, it will be too soon.
In spite of my complete and absolute inebriation, I behaved beautifully - I made it to the bathroom both times after I threw up, I took care of myself for most of the night, with the exception of the two or three lost hours where I blacked out.
I woke up the next morning feeling like my face was on the back of my head, and promptly cleaned the living room because the sight of empty beer bottles made me want to die.
A word to the wise: Steel Reserve is absolutely disgusting. Don't. Just... don't.
22. In my senior year of college, I played Frank-N-Furter in my school's production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I caused two gay men and three straight women to question their sexuality, was mistaken for a male-to-female transsexual or a really convincing drag queen by a few people, and managed to pull off the entire production in a pair of shoes with silver, rhinestone-studded 6" heels without falling on my ass. It was the most fun I've ever had on a stage.
(Pictures available upon request)
23. If I was going to develop an addiction to anything, it would be cigarettes.
Alcohol is a close second, but I don't like having more than a drink or two at a time, and while I enjoy being drunk, it isn't something I like to do more than once every few months, so full-on alcoholism isn't something I could really see happening.
I was a smoker for two days, in my senior year of college. I'd never smoked a cigarette in my life until a beautiful Spring night, when one of my housemates, a fellow insomniac himself, asked me to walk to the local 24-hour convenience store with him at 2 am. We bought cigarettes, Twinkies, and beer, and when he found out that I'd never smoked a cigarette, he offered me one.
I figured it couldn't hurt to try it once, and from my first taste, I loved them.
We ended up sitting on the front stoop of our dorm with beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other (I also had a Twinkie wedged between two of the fingers on my beer-hand), discussing our mutual love of rock 'n roll and Tom Waits until 4.30 am.
I went through three cigarettes that night, and smoked one more two days later. I haven't had one since, and I don't intend on ever smoking one again.
They're too easy to get hooked on, and that's one addiction I can't afford to have.
24. For a year and a half after I became sexually active (from the age of sixteen and a half through the middle of my eighteenth year), I went through a libertine phase. I slept with whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I ended up having a lot of sex with a lot of different people. I had a fantastic time of it - one night stands and multiple night stands and open relationships and threesomes galore - and to this day, I'm absolutely open about it and completely unashamed.
25. I made the decision to lose my virginity by flipping a coin. It could have gone either way, and I decided, "what the Hell - I might as well." Not one of my proudest moments, but I don't regret it at all.
26. My favorite alcohol is Bushmills Black Bush whiskey. I loves me some whiskey.
27. I had nipple piercings for a year and a half in my late teens, and I kick myself all the time for getting rid of them.
28. Music was one of the first ways I learned to relate to the world - when I came home from the hospital, my daddy curled me up in his lap and sang "Hotel California" to me, and I've been hooked ever since.
Rock was my first and truest musical love, evolving into my taste for the harder stuff and keeping me grounded in the glory of electric guitars and seriously excellent vocals all the while. My daddy raised me right, with a good helping of the blues to go with all those badass riffs; I've got a serious love for music that speaks to the soul in any form, which is why Tom Waits and Nick Cave are two of my favorite artists on the damn planet.
Favorite genres - Classic rock, hard rock, blues, metal, industrial metal, electro-industrial/technoindustrial, EBM, mainstream rock, obnoxious pop, and bad 80s music of all kinds
Favorite bands - Rammstein, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, Nine Inch Nails, Muse, A Perfect Circle, Johnny Cash, and Leonard Cohen
My 10 favorite songs right now are:
"Mein Herz Brennt" - Rammstein
"Timekiller" - And One's cover (originally by Project Pitchfork)
"Whistlin' Past the Graveyard" - Tom Waits
"Cannibal's Hymn" - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
"Alice" - Tom Waits
"Since I've Been Loving You" - Led Zeppelin
"Howl" - Florence + the Machine
"Supernaturally" - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
"Accidentally In Love" - Counting Crows
"Carry On My Wayward Son" - Kansas
29. I love monogamy. This comes as a surprise to a lot of people, given my history, but it's a bona fide fact.
With that said, I can definitely see myself being happy in a triad relationship (two women, one man) if I was at the right point in my life, and found the right pair of people to share it with, but by and large, I'm an extremely monogamous creature.
30. I'm not really big on celebrity crushes or celebrity fantasy-fucks, since I'm the sort of person who doesn't just bang someone based on the way they look - I don't care how beautiful you are, if we don't click, and if your brain isn't sexy, too, I won't come anywhere near you. With that said, if had to pick a celebrity, male or female, for a single night of no-strings-attached, no-holds-barred, pelvis-shattering sex, it would be Misha Collins.
Hands down.