fpb | First meme in a while, swunked from aphoenix2007

Commented upon. :)

1) Oddly enough, our first encounter was quite a donnybrook. (Then again, when you consider our respective tempers and views, that is not so odd.) I was angry when some of

thepreciouss' so-called friends laid into her over her distaste for homosexuality, and I tried to defend her, and you somehow got in the way. Looking back, that has to have been some sort of misunderstanding. Then I got to know you in Stephanie's blog, and when you said that, though no Catholic, you agreed with condemning people who picked and chose what they wanted to believe, I asked if I could friend you. And I haven't regretted it since.
2) For some reason, I associate you with the forests of North America. So, something woody - Sergeant York, perhaps, since it is about a man of great integrity.
3) On one or two occasions, I posted on something that you had intended to post on, and you then gave up on your own post. I think that is letting yourself be unnecessarily cowed - first, I am neither infallible nor all-covering, and you would certainly be able to say things I had not thought of; and, second, our f-lists do not overlap that much, and you can surely reach people I do not know.
4) You were a curiously different note on Stephanie's blog, where every other poster was female and college-age.
5) Something woody and pleasant... I don't know. Maple syrup is not really a fruit, but... Or beavers, were it not for the nasty pun.
6) Tell me something about your early years and education.
7) They are all nice, but the one with the black and white cow is funny.

I was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1970. My first few years were spent living in a small town called Summerville, closer to the coast. I remember a good deal from those times. Most of the time I was just playing with my sister, my dog Heinrich (a purebred doberman) or my friends at the daycare. When I was five my family moved up to York, South Carolina, where my father was from and where his parents lived. We moved in just a few houses down from them. In York, until 1986, my childhood was pretty normal in a Norman Rockwell sort of way. It was the type of small town America the painter immortalized.

My grandparents and paternal great-grandmother helped raise me. Having been very active and integral to the community for over 50 years at that time, my grandparents had friends who also helped look after me when I was out and about in town, at school or wherever. (I never knew this until I was probably about 30 years old.)

My parents divorced when I was 13. My father married a detestable woman very soon after the ink was dry, and my mother married a few years later. When she married we moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That was a little rough at first, but I fit right in very quickly. I did well in school, and I did exceptionally well in theatre since Oak Ridge had (and still has) a remarkably good community theatre. In 1988, I graduated high school and went on to college.

As far as education goes, I was bright but often unfocused. So I did marvelously well in subjects in which I was interested (literature, language, sciences, history) and poorly in mathematics. I graduated in the top 20% of my class, in a nationally-recognized high school program out of almost 800 students, and I went on to do pretty well in college -- except for those times I clashed with my professors over their interpretations of little things, like the Constitution of the United States, the Scriptures, what constitutes evil, democracy, etc. (Those clashes cost me three classes where the professor told me I was going to fail, and I did, despite my actual grades.) I tried sometimes to "play the game", but I rarely could for long. Lying doesn't come easy to me, especially on important things like principle.

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I returned to the are, to Rock Hill, in January of '89 to go to Winthrop. Toss a few name my way, but honestly, I didn't know many Rock Hill folks before then. I'll be happy to see who we may have in common. I'm always up for The Name Game.

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I knew Chris Wagner. The other names don't ring any bells.

I went to grade school with him, and I went to high school with him, until I moved to Oak Ridge in '86. I saw him several years later at Winthrop. By that time he'd re-adopted his given name, Hans, and was wandering around and about with another friend of ours from school, John Buchanan.

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Two people - very fine people, too - are born in the same year in the same area. They move around the same towns and know at least one person in common. And yet, in order to get to meet each other, they go through my blog. Somehow, I like this a lot. Makes one feel useful.

Yeah, I'd heard he was in the military, but that's all I knew.

*comment*

1) I first noticed you in FA, where you produced a charming three-part story about a younger sister of Hermione's. Then I somehow came across your LJ and found that you read your textbooks where your teacher did not (good) and that your attitude to the election then going on were similar to mine (nearly as good) and asked if I could friend you. At that time, I was a bit of an ogre in fandom, and so I was particularly touched when you friended me back.
2) Obviously, Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera. You pretty much throw it in our faces, lady.
3) I have a charming photo of you in a great hall of maps in Venice, looking a bit jeansy but quite pretty.
4) I wish I could figure out how you and

cette_vie - that is, my share of Chinese-American princesses - manage to put in being hard-working students, amazingly and enchantingly feminine, and having fun, all within 24 hours in a day. This is not a memory, exactly, just the way I perceive you.
5) A lychee - small, tough, but sweet inside.
6) Tell me about your past life.
7) I guess I have no choice - ever since I've known you, you've had Draco being snarky.

Obviously, Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera. You pretty much throw it in our faces, lady.

Haha, I felt it was time for a dramatic layout.

Tell me about your past life.

Well, I do believe I was a person named Flibberbudget... Hmm. I have no idea who I could have been. Marie Antoinette (sp?) maybe, since I'm such a spoiled brat. Heh.

Was disease your wording? heh

Well, no, it wasn't. I just picked it up from

aphoenix2007, who probably picked it up in turn from her source, who....
1)You turned up in my very first LJ riot - about Marauder slash - and played the part of voice of reason, very convincingly. I went back to the battlefield a couple of months later and friended everyone who had acted, in my view, as a decent and open-minded opponent. You were pretty much top of the list.
2) Bruce Springsteen, "No Surrender".
3) You have an extraordinary and interesting mixture of backgrounds, Philipino and Portuguese IIRC.
4) At one point, I published a list of six favourite hymns, and it turned out you liked most of them too.
5) A panda. Looks wonderful, but by all accounts it has a prickly and uncertain temper.
6) I want to see a photo of yours, dammit! I have been asking for this as long as I have known you, and you have only teased me and your other friends.
7) You had a lot. One that sticks in my mind is the white witch whispering to the black one.

5. A panda? That is awesome. Especially after seeing all those cute cuddly cubs in the news a little while ago. I never knew pandas had a temper. But definitely describes me!
6. Okay, here. I'm using that for my facebook profile picture. Originally it had my friend (you can see her hair) but she didn't like her expression. So I cropped her out.) Anticlimactic and disappointing, I know. But you asked and I'm not paranoid of the internets anymore, so. :P

PS You've probably already seen it but have you two months paid time now. I actually meant it to be anonymous and didn't realize until after. (Honestly.) Oops. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy a faster LJ experience for a couple months. I don't think you're much for uploading extra icons, but hey, now you have the choice. I suck at commenting but I wanted to let you know that I enjoy reading your LJ.

Duly commented. :)

1) You have just come on board of your own initiative, saying nice things about my writing. Perhaps you may begin to wonder, after recent events on your LJ, if it was worth the trouble.
2) The guitar version of the Bach suites - obviously.
3) You are an Austrian classical musician - though not by trade - which is not unlike saying, say, a Prussian general, a Parisian chef, a Bolshoy ballet dancer, or an Australian cricketer. Excellence by definition. You also live in my favourite part of the world - the Alps - although on the wrong side.
4) The first thing I found out about your LJ is that you produced fine limericks. I failed miserably to think up one of my own to add.
5) Something to do with the Alps. I do not know whether it is the same on your side of the mountains, but the best apples in Italy are the wonderful yellow, crunchy, super-tasty items from the valleys of Trentino, and I would associate you with that.
6) Why do you call your guitar teacher by an Italian title?
7) I only know the one, and it will do.

Ad 1) Recent events on my LJ have made LiveJournal more interesting than it's been in months. :)
Ad 3) *blushes beetroot-red* Though I fear the excellence is confined more to aspiration than achievement.
Ad 4) Mea maxima culpa -- I see I must correct a wrong impression that I managed to create by failing to provide an attribution except down in the comments. I could wish that limerick were my own work, but it isn't. I learned it from one of my Ancient Greek professors, who wasn't its actual author either, and I don't know who originally wrote it. (I've been known to produce the occasional limerick, and double-dactyls too, but of my own efforts the best that can be said is that, well, I do my best.)
Ad 5) To my knowledge, the best apples in Austria too come from the southern slopes of the Alps; ours are from Styria.
Ad 6) It's intended as Spanish, actually, though I'm aware the form is identical in Italian; La Maestra hails from Argentina. :)

Present! Only you won't have much choice in the userpic realm...

1) You are a very old friend as fandom friends go. I lost my records of our first meetings when *&($#!!!! Microsoft deleted my Hotmail account, but I remember that I was getting to know you just as Hijja and I were talking of a possible collaboration, and for a while it even looked as if it could become three-sided.
2) Anything classical, but for national motives, let us make it the Polonaise Heroique.
3) You and I share a degree subject - Social Anthropology - though you carried on with it and I turned back to my first love, history.
4) I still wish that story with Hijja had worked out. It would have been something, since you two are among the finest writers I know, and I don't suck myself, I think.
5) An owl - in the mythical, not the zoological sense. Wise, thoughtful, and a bit lugubrious.
6) How did you become interested in China, and how much freedom have you got when you work there?
7) Well, I guess my favourite over toad making a speech, toad happy, toad sad, toad cogitating, toad about to jump, is toad.

Ad.1. I think we started to know each other when I unduly praised White Goddess in FAP thread :) The we discussed your story about great magical war of late 19th cent.
Ad. 5. I am not wise, but I'm certainly a night creature :)
Ad 6. How? Incidentally, in fact. I was in my first year uni and I saw a note stuck on the wall: "anybody interested in learnign Chinese please come..." so I decided it's just too surreal; I called my friend, who said he had seen it too, he also believed it was just too weird to pass. We went and we got sucked in. He works in Chinese-foreing law now.
Freedom? Nobody really interfered with my research, I'm sure the authorities knew I was in the village, but they preferred "not to know." Which is typical for China, namely one never knows what will happen and it's often down to luck. Basically, unless you start throwing sensitive questions around or distribute Bibles on the third day from your arrival, nobody usually bothers you or about you.

*comment* :-)

1) I got to know you through the wonderful

kikei. She said you were her best online friend at the time, I think, so, though I knew next to nothing about you, I surmised that if she's good enough for Kiks, she's good enough for me. And you know what? I was right.
2) Something fun and energetic, like Rock around the clock.
3) Although we live within a hundred kilometres of each other, we have not managed to meet yet. My loss.
4) Almost the first thing I found out about you is that you visited Rome and loved the place. That did not dispose me to think badly of you, of course.
5) A small, lively bird with a pretty voice and wonderful plumage. A blue jay, perhaps.
6) What career do you intend to take after graduation?
7) I am not sure you always had this one (tree and blue horizon), but it is the one I remember, and I like it.

:) You always give such lovely responses, made even more so by the fact that they're honest.

Career after graduation... now, as we speak, I'm currently filling out a large pile of application forms for vacation placements at big-shot solicitors firms. This, however, is mainly so that I can go on one of these placements to confirm that it's what I don't want to do. I've realised I'm not the kind of person who can be fired up by commercial law; it just doesn't appeal to me. Although, you never know, one of these placements could really appeal to me. Assuming they don't, the alternatives at the moment are:

- Remain as a solicitor, but for the Government Legal Service. I'd still be a lawyer and still be doing interesting challenging work, but 9-5. I said to my friend the other day that I want a work-life balance, and that would be ideal.

- Become a barrister. The advocacy route seems better suited to me than the solicitor's route, especially in the criminal area. I love public speaking, and for some reason it just seems more... 'human' than selling my soul to a big corporate firm.

- Teaching. A bit out of the blue, perhaps, but it's been my quiet dream for some time. I would love nothing more than to be a History or an English teacher, but I need to find out whether I can apply my Law degree to either of them, albeit with some extra training.

So the short answer is: I don't know :) But I have a list of options.

*Comment!*

1) You turned up out of the blue, leaving a friendly comment on a bitter remark I had made about football thugs in my country. I liked the sound of you and we became friends.
2) Something about courage and dignity. You'll never walk alone, though, for personal reasons, that song makes me cry.
3) Your town, Lierre, has gained an unfortunage kind of literary immortality thanks to G.K. Chesterton's hilarious but hardly flattering account of it.
4) The position you took when we were debating abortion.
5) A German Shepherd dog. Affectionate and brave.
6) Do you play any instruments?
7) I think you always use the one. Or do I remember wrong?

6/ Yes, I play the piano for about 13 years now. Not really fantastic or worth listening to but I learned it just for fun. =)
And about a year or so ago, I bought a guitar. I’m planning to learn it in the near future but until now, I haven’t found the time to study it on my own or to follow lessons.

7/ I’ve had quite a few icons but the piano-one has been my default picture for quite some time now.

I comment too.

1) You turned up one day in

aphoenix2007's LJ, where we were having a pleasantly inconsequential chat on old-fashioned telephones.

aphoenix2007 had said that she had only seen telephones with number wheels, which made me feel my age. You mentioned the noise they made, and you were right, it was pleasant. I had never heard of you before, but I looked at your few LJ entries and decided you were nice - and offered to friend you, subject to the usual warning. ("This LJ ain't called Reflexions of a stormy petrel for nothing, you know!")
2) We used to have an Italian children's song, a child's lullaby to his mother, which I think you might like, but it's in Italian.
3) I still have no idea who the guy in glasses on your icon is.
4) We had a row almost immediately, in private correspondence, on a very serious matter. I think very highly of your tolerance and courage since you did not defriend me immediately.
5) Do you know the old strip Pogo Possum, by Walt Kelly? It was a sublime masterpiece of comics, side-splittingly hilarious, and all its characters were adorable. I sort of see you as a female version of Pogo.
6) What did your original username, Hafguk, stand for? (The UK at the end originally misled me into thinking you were British.)
7) I don't think any that I've seen quite reflect the way I see you.

3. It is Will Ferrell from one of his Saturday Night Live skits that made me laugh, where he is playing some drunk sportscaster.

6. Hafguk was one of my college nicknames; my friends called me halfbreed, and then it grew into half-gook. I changed it because it thought it might be offensive and I thought it had become a little juvenile for me.

Sure.

1) I met you through

lilium_convalli, whom I later managed to offend mortally by means of, of all things, a perfectly well-meant and, I thought, constructive criticism of her prose style.
2) I cannot think of anything that sums up the various sides of your character - your depressions and your faith, your love for China and your talent. Maybe a multi-coloured rose, though it does not fit the parameters of this question.
3) You look Italian, though according to you you don't have one Italian gene in you.
4) You wrote some lovely thoughts on the Catholic religion, which I was too lazy to repring in FPB de fide.
5) See question 2.
6) How did you become a Catholic?
7) There are a lot of good ones, but the China landscape and the lamppost are among my favourites.

As I read about the faith, I had a very violent reaction to Calvinism, which I immediately felt portrays God as a sadistic puppet master. I started investigating which denominations spoke against it... and gosh, Catholicism upholds free will... and they're much better than the Methodists (what I was raised as) in terms of proclaiming correct moral behavior. There were some big obstacles, notably our Lady and the Saints, an all male priesthood, the real presence... but I started investigating, and the more I read the more I saw the truth of it. Then I started hanging out at the Newman Center, met so many awesome people, talked with the priests, and took the plunge and started attending RCIA. And last Easter I was confirmed and I've been a Catholic ever since! :3

Oh, why not? ;-)

1) As in the case of

kikei and

tashmania, wonderful people have wonderful friends. I came across you in a casual post of the great

synaesthete7 and my eyes screeched to a halt in disbelief as the familiar-looking object on your icon turned out to be, of all things, a Giovanni Guareschi angel. And then I saw the username...! Well, a match made in Heaven, you know?
2) The Don Camillo movies, obviously.
3) You and I were in the top two colleges of Oxford University (Merton and St.John's) at roughly the same time, but we never met - Well, Oxford is small, but not that small.
4) Early in our acquaintance we almost had a debate about whether 10,000 books were harder work than three kids. Almost.
5) Something strong and sturdy. A shire horse?
6) How did you get to Oxford at all?
7) Which other but the Guareschi angel!

6) I was a Fulbright scholar (sounds like a movie title...)

First meme in a while, swunked from aphoenix2007

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