rowyn

I have been too embarassed to do one of these since I took questions from ladyperegrine seven years ago and never posted my answers. But my very cool sister-in-law mrw42 did the meme this weekend and I figured there was probably a point at which I should stop living my life based on my regrets about the past. :)

So! Y'all probably know the meme by now: if you'd like me to interview you, ask and I'll give you five questions to answer in your own LJ. Below are my answers to mrw42's questions to me.

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1.) What do you like and/or dislike about living in Kansas City? Do you see yourself living there indefinitely?

Things I like about KC:

* It's in the middle of the US, so a nonstop flight to anywhere else in the continental US is no more than four hours or so. Since I have friends and relatives on both coasts, that's handy.
* It's a very pretty city: lots of parks and fountains and open sky.
* Lut lives here, which is the reason I came here.
* My job is here, and as jobs go it's not bad.
* My house is here and conveniently located within walking distance of my job (by design).

Things I dislike about it:

* I don't have a gaming group here. I don't really miss tabletop RP (I generally like MUCK-based RP better anyway), but I miss boardgaming. I could presumably fix this with a little effort, but in fourteen years I haven't so it's not looking so likely.)
* It's too far away from terrycloth, my long-distance boyfriend.

I can see living here indefinitely, more as a default than by intention. I have a house here, and buying a house was a nightmare. I am sure selling a house is MANY TIMES WORSE. Still, I might move to the Pacific Northwest someday; Lut and I both have family there, and Terrycloth lives there.

2.) If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go? And why?

I do a lot of travel, but all of it is to see people rather than places or things. But if I had an all-expense-paid vacation or teleport coupon, I would use it to do something I could not otherwise. The likely candidates are:

* Some place with downhill skiing. Maybe Switzerland or maybe just Colorado, since Switzerland seems like overkill for someone who's only been skiing a half dozen times two decades ago.
* Botswana. Botswana is a small African country bordering South Arica. English is the dominant language there. While -- like too much of Africa -- it's a poor nation, it actually has a reputation for reasonable, democratic governance. I'm interested in it because, of English-speaking countries, it's one of the ones with a culture most unlike the USA. It'd be interesting to go somewhere very different but where I could still speak easily with the locals. telnar and I have talked a few times about going to South Africa, but the 30+ hour travel time each way has deterred me thus far.


3.) If you could improve one major area of your life, what would it be? And how would you improve it?

Oooh, this is a tough one. The main things I'd like are the financial stability to quit my job, and to live closer to Terry. Being closer to my long-distance friends and family would be awesome too, but that's not likely to happen since most of them don't live anywhere near each other. I don't really have any problems that couldn't be fixed by another $750,000 in retirement accounts and a personal teleporter. :)

Assuming the question is 'in the realm of the reasonable', I'd like to switch from career banker to career writer (hey, no one ever blames writers for wrecking the economy). But writing is still work, and I'm (a) not sure I will like it better long-term and (b) reluctant to gamble with my financial situation by making the switch and (c) too lazy to work two careers at once in order to find out if it would work before I commit to it.

There's a lot of laziness/fear of uncertainty ruling my life -- same reason I'll probably never move. I don't want to put a lot of work into something when I'm not very confident of the reward. :/

4.) Who is your favorite author? And why?

Diana Wynne Jones. This is also pretty hard when I think about it, but Jones is the author that leaps to mind first. She passed away just a couple of weeks ago, I am sad to say, but I love her books. She wrote mostly young adult fantasy, and mostly standalone titles. Her stories have style and wit and charm and magic and often a little romance, which is everything I want in a book. I also love that she wrote standalones in a field that often seems overrun by series. She wasn't afraid to let her characters have their happy ending and then move on to new ones.

5.) Do you plan to come visit us (in NH or MA) again this summer? :-)

I do, actually! I've been meaning to talk to you about this. I'm going to New York in June for beetiger and lediva's anniversary party. They're hiring a party bus from NYC to Boston on Saturday, so I was going to ask if I could visit all of you when I get to Boston. Which would be sometime very late on Saturday, so I'm not sure how the logistics would work out, but I figured I'd ask. Hope to you in a few months!

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Margaret gave me five things to talk about too, but I'll save those for a second post, since I really should be working on fiction now. :)

Technically, ganked from terrycloth, who did it back at the dawn of time (or at least LJ). I thought it'd be interesting to do after several years here.

01. Your live journal "user name" & what it means: Rowyn is my favorite misspelling of Rowan. My earliest online handle, back when I was using the university's VAX and only talking to the local community, was "Cat", which is deeply and profoundly too common. I never got involved with Usenet, but in '91 I got onto FurryMUCK, which was my first real experience with the Internet. Since Cat was taken (duh), my first character there was Blacksox, who no one only tuftears and jordangreywolf remember. Blacksox had a background and personality different from mine, and she was shy and hesitant. My lesson from this character was "do not play shy characters online, because it's incredibly boring waiting for someone else to notice you. Also, no one can tell that you're quiet because you're playing someone shy, and they're more likely to assume you're not interested in being social and probably wrapped up in page/whisper conversations." My next character was Ghostdancer, who was not shy but didn't make friends easily either. Then I decided to play someone who was outgoing and cheerful and peppy, and made up Shirp. Shirp was quite successful and made lots of friends, but pretending to be cheerful all the time got on my nerves. Eventually, I decided it'd be easier to play a character whose personality would be basically mine, and invented Rowan. She's a shoggoth because I'd just read At the Mountains of Madness and thought that shoggoths got a bum rap from Lovecraft.

Rowan sort of stuck, as the character that was easiest to play and most like me, so I kept using the handle elsewhere. I picked the handle because I liked the name, and also because rowan wood is supposed to be resistant to magic, and I thought that was cool. For a long time I resisted switching to a misspelling, but now I've pretty much embraced it, because it's convenient to have an unusual handle.

02. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest) how well does your livejournal represent who you actually are?: 7 or 8, I'd say. It's distorted less by self-censorship (though there's some of that) than by the various things that I do or are a part of who I am but I'm not interested enough to write about.

03. How much about your life do you post to lj?: A significant fraction of it. Most of the things that are important to me I've mentioned somewhere in the last seven years of posts. A lot of minor events and thoughts I never get around to writing about, though.

04. Is there anything you refuse to post about?: There's not much that I really refuse to post about. There are some things I don't post about very often, like depression, or in much detail, like sex. For a long time I didn't post about religion or polyamory because I was scared to. I got over it for a while, but I'm pretty much back to being too scared again. And there are some things I don't post about because doing so feels awkward or requires more explanation than I feel like giving. Now that I think about it, there are a few things that I'm never going to post about, because they're things that were told to me in confidence, or confidential information about my job. Or things that would be horribly, horribly rude and tacky to talk about.

05. On a scale of 1-10 how interesting do you think your own journal is to others?: It varies. I think my vacation write-ups, for example, are only of interest to me and the people I visited. The essays and the little snippets that I write down because they amused me are of more general interest. Taken as a whole, probably a 6 or a 7.

06. From who/how did you find out about lj?: gen, I think. There was a general mass exodus from OpenDiary due to mismanagement of the property, and several of my friends jumped to LJ. Gen gave me an invitation code to get a journal, because back then you still needed one if you wanted a free account. I upgraded to paid after I'd been around for several months.

07. Has anyone ever joined lj because of you?: jordangreywolf did, I think. krud42 might've, technically, but he's never really used his LJ. Those were both during the exodus from OD. I believe I got tahkhleet started on blogging when she joined OD, and she followed me to LJ. ltwarhound and telnar even more technically, because they don't use their LJs except to read my friends-locked entries and leave comments.

08. What proportion of your posts are friends only?: Um. Some? Generally, I friends-lock posts if I'm giving real names for people or the place that I live. Every now and then I do private or heavily-filtered posts on the topics I don't want to talk about in public (see #4).

09. What is your favorite interest on lj?: Um. Rulesbreaker? Honestly, I pay no attention whatsoever to the interests list. My own list is mostly stories I've been involved with, which I thought of adding because jordangreywolf had added them and that amused me enough to do it one day in the distant past. I hadn't thought about it in years until I got to this question.

10. Has anything on lj ever caused you to establish, rethink, or even change your belief or position on something?: Yes, although it's more of a slow evolution than a "this is the entry that made me decided I believed X".

11. How often do you respond / comment on other peoples journals?: Pretty rarely. I read my entire friends list, which is forty-fifty entries per day, and I usually only leave two or three comments in a given day.

12. Do you prefer to write in your journal, read other journals?: Read others'. Writing is hard.

13. Have you ever had something mean said to you or been stalked, harassed, or got into an argument/flame war on lj (or did it to someone else)?: I've gotten into a few (very few) heated arguments, and a few more serious disagreements. I've left comments in flamewars I've seen on other people's journals, but never flamed anyone (defining "flame" here as "remarks made primarily to annoy/upset the other party and with no particular interest in communication"). Or been flamed myself, beyond a forgettable troll or two that might've left a nasty comment that I opted to ignore.

14. Have you ever banned someone from your journal?: Nope.

15. Who are your favorite lj friend(s) and why?: This would be a long list.

16. How many of your LJ friends have you actually met?: Um. A lot. *counts* 64? Often I'll add the LJs of people I've met in RL, if I find out they've got one. Still. That's more than half, especially when you consider that of the 116 journals on my friends list, several are from people with multiple journals.

17. Of all of the people on lj you know of, who is the most like you?: ... I have no idea. I actually want to say tahkhleet, even though we don't share a religion, or a political outlook, or the same kind of emotional or mental processes. But she's the person I understand best and who understands me best, and the one I feel the most kinship with.

18. Why are you most likely to add someone to your friends list?: One or more of the following: 1) I met them in RL and liked them. 2) They left a comment in my LJ or someone else's that I particularly liked and after looking at their journal I decided I wanted to follow it. 3) One of my friends linked to an essay in their journal that I liked.

19. Do you automatically add friends to your journal if they add you first?: No. I don't have any problems with people adding me, but I don't generally add back unless one of the criteria in #18 is met.

20. What is the most likely reason you wouldn't add someone to your friends list?: I don't add people very often any more, since I'm at about the limit of how much LJ reading I'm willing to do in one day. So that's the most likely reason: I don't want to make time to keep track of the writing of any more people.

21. Is your "significant other" on lj?: Technically, Lt. Warhound has a journal, but he doesn't write in it (see #7). terrycloth has a journal that he actually writes in, but he isn't really my SO. Does that combine to make a yes?

22. Have you ever wanted to meet someone on lj?: Yes! A lot of the people I've met from LJ I didn't meet because I knew them on LJ, but quite a few of them I did. I started to name some of them, and then realized that this list is also too long.