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cimoreneCompletely revised and up to date: January 2023
Abstract. I am a (1) Fandom OldTM (2) USan (3) expatriate living in Finland because (4) my wife
- I was born in 1982 (Dec. 9).
I had time for 1½ years of liberal arts college before being interrupted by a mental health breakdown and losing a year to my dad's car accident in 2003. I moved to Finland in 2004 to be with
waxjism and studied 3 years in Swedish at Åbo Akademi (social sciences), quit without writing any theses, then worked as a freelance translator of Swedish/Norwegian to English for a while. I briefly studied classroom assistenting, spent 2 years learning Finnish in intensive classes, did various work practice stints in childcare and retail, and now work part-time as a secretary for an office of the Finnish Red Cross. - I'm an American raised in the South.
I grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, otherwise known as the Heart (or, if you're my Dad, the pancreas) of Dixie. This is the deep south and the college football capital of the country. Alabama sits on the Gulf of Mexico between Mississippi and Georgia. It's a socially conservative, highly religious, poor and rural state, still generally underperforming most of the country except in the area of spending on highway maintenance. I am not a proper Southerner, do not speak with an accent, and was transplanted there at the age of 7. My mother is midwestern and my Dad is of NYC immigrant stock and grew up in Virginia where his parents were professors.
- I live in Finland.
I moved to Finland at age 21 to be with
waxjism. Finland sits between Sweden and Russia, near the arctic circle. Even though I live on an island at the southernmost part of Finland in the archipelago, right in the Baltic Sea, we only get a few hours of sunshine per day in the winter. In the middle of summer, the sky never gets completely dark. It's very cold. I hate this aspect of the weather, but I love Finland. I received Finnish citizenship in 2022. - I'm a queer woman in a lesbian relationship.
Pursuant to #3, my wife,
waxjism, is a Finn of the Swedish-speaking minority (so I also speak Swedish).She does her own fandomy things and sometimes our fandoms overlap. We met in Lord of the Rings fandom in 2002. I moved here in August 2004. We got married in Iowa in October 2009. She has two brothers, and the eldest has 4 kids, Wax's goddaughter and a set of triplets; the younger has 2 more. - I read in a variety of fandoms and maintain recs (my old, pre-ao3 recs are at http://www.pinboard.in/u:cimness, and AO3-hosted works are bookmarked with AO3 bookmarks - I haven't really got a unified solution there yet) (Also write, but in fewer fandoms, and comparatively little in the last 10 years or so; it's depressing.)
I entered slash fandom with popslash in 2001 and have since read in a wide variety of fandoms. I've written in a few as well, most notably Star Trek:TOS, LOTR/LOTR RPS, bandom (MCR), Sherlock Holmes (Granada/book), and Prince of Tennis, but I read multifannishly and tend not to immerse myself fully in a fandom. I sometimes suspect I will be remembered best for writing gay fish sex about Finding Nemo, though. I have many OTPs, but Kirk/Spock is maybe the OTPest. Over time my favorites for reading have included Due South (Fraser/Kowalski), SGA, bandom, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Teen Wolf. In the last year I have read (and reread) a lot of Stranger Things, The Dark is Rising, Good Omens, and Highlander.
- Besides waxjism, I live with 3 cats and 2 bunnies.
Our cats are Cornish rexes - highly social and talkative, and known for their very fine, short, curly fur. Snookums is my baby and has feline diabetes; he's 14 years old. Tristana is about two and a half and is a little bundle of mischief; we got her as a kitten and she is Uncle Snookums's (they are actually distant cousins) #1 fan. They're very sweetly bonded. Anubis is Tristana's first cousin, one year younger, whom we are fostering, and we've been unable to get him to stop attacking get every time he sees her; so they have to be completely separated inside the house and we are therefore cat divorced and exhausted (because no Cornish rex would consent to being locked away from humans for more than a few minutes at a time, we are barely able to steal any time together without a cat crying and screaming at the door).
Our bunnies, Rowan and Japp, are teddy dwarfs, a breed of dwarf angora rabbit popular in Europe. They were born October 1 2015 and bred by a friend. My photoblog dedicated mostly to the pets is currently still on Tumblr atteaandmisanthropy.
- I'm politically progressive.
My parents are firm leftist Democrats, formerly activists. I remember campaigning on streetcorners for Dukakis with my mother in the 1988 presidential elections, and some of my earliest memories are of chanting and marching in protest marches with my parents as a toddler, when my mother was the president of the New Orleans chapter of NOW (the National Organization for Women). In Finland I vote Green as a policy (and usually look for an immigrant woman to vote for).
- I suffer from anxiety and depression.
I'm an introvert and often anxious in social situations, so I dislike big crowds, long amounts of time spent in public (like, a whole day), or meeting new people. My anxiety isn't super-severe like panic-attack inducing (I take benzos on an as-needed basis for my anxiety attacks, which my first psychologist hilariously told me were 'Not anxiety attacks, they're just attacks of acute anxiety', a quote that will live forever in my store of dinner table anecdotes). It does get in the way a lot, though, like with my periodic monumental avoidance of all types of social interaction from email and comments to trips to the grocery store. I post about this from time to time. I'm currently in the process of being evaluated for ADHD in the hope that that may help my executive dysfunction difficulties.
- I'm [pick one: sort of, half, slightly] a Jew.
I identify to a certain degree with my Jewish heritage, which I am in practicality somewhat estranged from due to my family's being isolated from religious practice and cultural community for several generations.
If you care for detail, my dad is a Jew, but both of his parents were raised atheist and without attending temple. My paternal grandmother felt a sense of loss about this, so she instituted secular humanist home celebrations of Hanukka, Passover, and Purim when my dad was a kid. These were based on library research and liberally incorporated social justice influences (her Passover seder includes Pete Seeger and Martin Luther King Jr). I was raised on my grandmother's holidays and a handful of children's books about Jewish holidays, but isolated from any Jewish community and any concrete experience of Jewish identity. I have complicated emotions about all of this, but it's always been important to me. - My father has been quadriplegic since a car accident in 2003. He is in a wheelchair.
In the accident he suffered a spinal cord injury relatively high on the spine, C6/C7. He isn't a complete quadriplegic; he does have most of the use of his arms. He was in rehabilitation the summer of 2003. My dad and I have always been extremely close, and his injury hit me hard at an already-vulnerable time. I'm a homebody, and for many years he was my closest friend. He recovered fully and worked full-time until 2021. He is a paleontologist and is also involved in sff fandom. He and my mom are both retired now and live in Louisiana with my sister and brother-in-law. He has hired assistants who come during the day.
- EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS INFO! [Expanded as needed]
- I was a regular for years at Fandom Wank and support it (its right to exist and its entertainment value) in principle. In general, I have an interest in meta and how fandom behaves including what some people most recently call the Discourse, in both its senses.
- I believe in the scientific process and subscribe to a supernatural-free worldview. Briefly, I am an atheist (for comprehensibility, but I usually avoid the term due to nasty celebrity and 'atheist movement' connections), but this also means that I am a non-believer in, in no particular order: organized religion, unorganized religion, magic, superstition, luck, UFOs, ghosts, astrology, tarot and other claims to psychic powers, junk science, health and food fads, and conspiracy theories of any stamp. I was raised Unitarian Universalist.
- For the most part, the only information I will post access-locked has to do with [school or work] activities which I wish to keep out of search engines, so very very rarely. If you are a fandom person as opposed to a spam bot, and I've seen you around or exchanged a few words with you or we have acquaintances in common or for some other reason you wish to have access to my locked posts which may be largely rants, feel free to drop me a note or message to that effect. And if you want to follow me feel free to introduce yourself.
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(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 03:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:42 pm (UTC)Hey, if my husband weighs, like, 195, and I weigh 150, does that make me, like, his better 43%?
(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:44 pm (UTC)and also, i like how you think.
(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:49 pm (UTC)There is a
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Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 03:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:35 pm (UTC)Psy: ...it will haunt me til I die...or longer. Probably longer.
(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:37 pm (UTC)I'm thinking I might just have to do one of these posts myself. Mostly because I love talking about myself, hehe. ;) <3
(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:40 pm (UTC)i try to make people forget i'm american, too, so that's all right. i've even got to the point where hearing other american accents in public squicks me!
(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 04:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:24 pm (UTC);)
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Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2006 05:57 pm (UTC)*snicker*
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Date: 10 Jul 2006 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 11 Jul 2006 09:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 11 Jul 2006 09:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 13 Jul 2006 12:43 am (UTC)Now let me pinch your cheeks.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Jul 2006 10:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16 Apr 2009 12:12 am (UTC)And btw I also know another American-born educator of young kids in Scandanavia, but she lives in the Faroes - she has for more than 30 years. She founded a school there.
(no subject)
Date: 16 Apr 2009 09:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 16 Apr 2009 02:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 17 Apr 2009 06:41 am (UTC)