(no subject)

[cimorene]

hollsh wants me to

1. My first memory of any novel is of my mother reading Patricia C. Wrede's Talking to Dragons (the first published book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, the source of the name "Cimorene") out loud to me on a plane ride when I was three. 



2. I watched some early Buffy the Vampire Slayer on tv when I was in high school, maybe a few episodes, and thought it was boring and incredibly stupid - mainly, I think, because of conditioned tendencies to look down on media sf and a natural aversion to television. This was the cause of my first big fight with wax_jism, even before we were ever dating. I had to eat every word when she made me watch the first five seasons and the first three seasons of Angel in a three-week-long marathon when I first came to visit her in Finland. 



3. I can't ride a bike. When I started learning how to, we lived in an apartment complex with some sidewalks and relatively low-traffic parking lots, but before I would take off the training wheels we moved to a neighbourhood without sidewalks on the corner of two of the busiest residential streets on our side of town. There was nowhere safe to practise and I was lazy and my parents never pushed the issue at all - unfortunately. EVERYBODY, JUST FORCE YOUR KIDS TO LEARN, OKAY? WHAT IF THEY WANT TO MOVE TO A EUROPEAN CITY SOMEDAY?



4. I used to have a needle phobia - one time I had hysterics and kicked a nurse and had to be held down to get a vaccination - but I overcame it when I was fifteen because I wanted desperately to go to Japan and had to get a tetanus shot first. I still can't watch needles piercing flesh on screen, though.



5. The first intense girlcrush I can remember was when I was in fifth grade, and I totally had a thing for a couple of my teachers and this one seriously gorgeous girl (I think she was the homecoming queen later. I cannot believe, in retrospect, how much I stared at her ass) around when I was a teeniebopper, but I really had no clue at all that I was bisexual until I was away at college already. It was silviakundera's femslash that made me wonder, but I didn't believe it at first because I'd always thought gay people were so cool and I was sure I would have known earlier if I were one. When I told my two closest friends and two closest cousins at the time, two of them surprised me utterly by expressing that they had already suspected (even though I had not!).



6. My great-grandfather (dad's dad's dad) was the son of a rich Russian jew who owned ten apartment buildings in Moscow and sided with the Whites in the first Russian revolution. He and his first wife fled by train across Asia to China, and he established himself as an opium smuggler there and made a fortune smuggling that opium into Canada; he met my great-grandmother, his second wife, in Toronto, when he hired her as a private nurse when he was sick, and he showered her with expensive presents for a long time before she would agree to date him. They divorced four years later. Around the time my father was born, he shot his third wife and then committed suicide with the same gun.



7. My first complex sentence was "Well, actually, Mommy, I'll have water," when I was 11 months old.

Comments

[hollsh.livejournal.com]

Dude, your great-grandfather's life sounds like a movie plot.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

The twenty-year break between that divorce and the suicide could be awkward on film though. Actually I think he had a couple of other kids, I just don't actually know much of anything about his life after the divorce. He wasn't totally alienated from my grandfather, though. He took him on vacation to Mexico once.

[hollsh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you'd have to fast forward that.

Geez, what a life, though!

[copracat]

but I didn't believe it at first because I'd always thought gay people were so cool and I was sure I would have known earlier if I were one.

Good thing I'd finished drinking my tea!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I dunno. I AM one of the chosen ones!

[morningfine]

Hey, what. I CAN'T RIDE A BIKE EITHER. I have zero patience for anything I can't get the hang of within five seconds, and it was worse when I was a kid. I think you're the first person I've ever met who shares this incompetence!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

It's weird since you grew up in a little Finnish town! I didn't realise that about you.