quizzerie

Okay, all my mental powers shall now be devoted to responding to this meme, kindly supplied by Susoz, despite the fact that best answers have been pilfered already by Pavlova Cat, Laura, Kate, et al.

1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought?
...if you put product in your hair it might look marginally less wild, then again it might look as if there's cum in it, a la Cameron Diaz in Something About Mary (the light's not very good in my bathroom)...

2. How much cash do you have on you?

$57.80, because D insisted on CC'ing dinner.

3. What's a word that rhymes with “DOOR?”

'More' (now, that has to be a bad sign)

4. Favorite planet?
Pluto.  I was fascinated by this dark planet as a child.

5. Who is the 4th person on your missed call list on your cell phone?

Sigh.  Do I have to do something athletic like walking across the room to get my phone... It says 'no missed calls'.  How's that for efficiency?

6. What is your favorite ring tone on your phone?

No such thing, I'm sure.  I used to have 'Vertigo' on my old phone.  That was a bit weird.

7. What shirt are you wearing?

A blue T-shirt with a boat neck I bought in late '96 at Portmans in Bourke St Mall.  (You really don't ever want to end up against me in a lawsuit; I really will remember all this weird shit, including what you said on the third of March in 1983, etc.)

8. Do you “label” yourself?
All the time.  I am addicted to personality quizes.

9. Name the brand of your shoes you're currently wearing?
I’m not any wearing shoes. I'm sitting with my feet tucked behind me on a couch.

10. Bright or Dark Room?
depends what time of the day... actually, it depends what season -- bright for a Melburnian winter, dark for a Territorian summer, etc.

11. What do you think about the person who took this survey before you?
Which one of them?  If it's the one whose site I took it from (via Susoz) I dunno: some barefoot American wearing a ratty T-shirt.  The person who wrote the quiz, however, has a precarious grasp of punctuation.

12. What does your watch look like?

Check out the skin damage:

I had nicer, more delicate-looking silver-and-gold watch I bought for $40 at Target on Bourke Street in mid-1999 but I lost it walking drunkenly through Darwin one night earlier this year.

13. What were you doing at midnight last night?
Watching House.

14. What did your last text message you received on your cell say?
'Still right 4 tea?'

15. Where is your nearest 7-11?
That's a really good question: Adelaide?  Darwin?

16. What's a word that you say a lot?

According to my students, 'um'.

17. Who told you he/she loved you last?
Otty did, in cat language.

18. Last furry thing you touched?
Otty, doing his dance of the seven tails at the end of the sofa.

19. How many drugs have you done in the last three days?
Unless caffeine and pinot noir count, none.

20. How many rolls of film do you need developed?
None.  But I have several unused film cannisters -- wonder if they'll ever get used.

21. Favorite age you have been so far?
I don't know why, but 27 seems to be the answer, maybe because it's one of those 'not too old, not too young' ages, maybe because you still feel on the 'brink of promise' at that age.  My age was also often guessed as being 'about 27' until I was about 36, so perhaps that adds to the mystique.  In general, the late 20s and early 30s seemed pretty good.

22. Your worst enemy?

Myself, and the wonderfully protective power of negative thinking, of course.

23. What is your current desktop picture?

See below: I can't get the formatting right on this meme.

24. What was the last thing you said to someone?
'Bye!'  (This is excluding what I've said to the cats on coming home.)

25. If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to fly what would it be?
Fly, definitely...

26. Do you like someone?
No, if that's 'like like'.  Really a bit challenged on that score, out here in the desert at the moment (and unlikely to 'fess up in a meme, anyway.)

'Yes', if you just mean cats and members of the local bike club.

27. The last song you listened to?
Er, something by Sheila Chandra. I couldn't tell you which track, really.  It all sounds the same.

28. What time of day were you born?
11.10 pm.  In time for a little late night reading or DVD-watching (wonder if there's something in the 'owls versus fowls' thing here).

29. What's your favorite number?
7.  I've always said 7, which is supposedly of some numerological significance to me.  (The other number is a '6', numerologically; I'm all at sixes and sevens, apparently.)

But then again, lots of people are into 'seven'.  It's that  kind of number...

30. Where did you live in 1987?
In a tiny terrace house on St Johns Road, Glebe.  Years later, in a conversation with an Abl person I was working with, we realised that we would have been living doors away on this very same road at exactly the same time.  That sense of paths crossing but not meeting is always a little weird -- separate spheres and all that.

31. Are you jealous of anyone?
Yeah, indubitably.  I'm that kind of insecure and competitive person.

32. Is anyone jealous of you?

I sincerely doubt it -- you know, single woman in late mid-youth, living in middle of desert, surrounded by cats.   Great target of envy. 

On the other hand, Leonard and Otty are highly jealous of Jessie, for being allowed to sleep on my bed.

33. Where were you when 9/11 happened?
At home, possibly in bed, because if I'd been watching Lateline, I would have known it had happened.

34. What do you do when vending machines steal your money?
Kick and shake them, plot and scheme to work out way of getting money back.

35. Do you consider yourself kind?
Yes, it may not seem like it, but I believe I am to my detriment.  In fact, I am a Soft Touch, greatly attractive to stray cats (in fact, stray animals of all kinds), old people, small children, pelicans and minority groups.

An Abl woman who didn't know me all that well once asked me, 'Are you the kind of person that spastics come up to in shopping centres?'  And that's about right, despite all the stuff about how I'm meant to be an intimidating feminist intellectual, etc.

36. If you had to get a tattoo, where would it be?
On the top of my left upper arm.  (Actually, I've been forbidden to get celebratory tattoos by a firm-minded friend.)

37. If you could be fluent in any other language, what would it be?
Either French or Spanish (I've dabbled in both; shouldn't be so hard for me to achieve foreign language fluency in my lifetime, but it has been.  I blame this on having attended an Agricultural high school.)

38. Would you move for the person you loved?
Yes, I've moved for so many other reasons already -- why not?

39. Are you touchy feely?
Only with cats.

40. Whats your life motto?
Oh no, not a motto thing: I can't stand mottos.  Would probably be better off with a headstone thing.

41. Name three things that you have on you at all times?
My clothes?  Not even them.  I presume this excludes nudity, really, but even then, I usually have five studs in my ears and often a necklace and...my watch, maybe. 

42. Whats your favorite town/city?
Well, there's no town like Alice -- 'everything a reasonable girl could want'.

Apart from that -- the predictable places, like Rome, Paris and Dublin.  Am now a big fan of New Orleans.  Also -- Gordes in the south of France; that was nice.  And Santiago de Compostela.

43. What was the last thing you paid for with cash?
That' s surprisingly difficult to retrieve from the memory banks, but I think it was rental of two House DVDs plus two Freddo frogs.

44. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper and mailed it?
I have done this, yes; I just can't quite remember when.  I used to be big on this; I definitely wrote and posted about ten postcards from America.  I remember writing someone a letter and posting it in Venice six years ago -- will that do?

45. Can you change the oil on a car?
Yes, but I haven't done it in ages: eek.

46. Your first love: what is the last thing you heard about him/her?
Working as the Registrar of a Tribunal.  Hates the idea of full-time work as much as I do -- and fights with his wife about who should be the part-timer.  (What is it about Gen-X?)

47. How far back do you know about your ancestry?

On my mother's side, we go back to Sir Thomas Pryor, some dude buried in Trinity College chapel, Dublin.  On my father's side, only great-grandfather Elsewhere, who was superintendent of the West Australian police force in the 1880s(?), before he went off the rails (if he wasn't already off them).  This gentleman goes back to the Curragh in Ireland but as there are four other contenders with the same name, same father's name and similar birth year, that's where the buck stops (also because great-grandfather was great obfuscator of personal details).

48. The last time you dressed fancy, what did you wear and why did you dress fancy?
I think I wore some imitation ivy leaves woven around my head.  Don't ask me why. TPS knows.  The Xena costume was heaps better.

49. Does anything hurt on your body right now?
My neck, because it gets tired of all this laptopping.

50. Have you been burned by love?
Yes.  Of course. (Are we over now?  phew.  That was a marathon.)

Comments

[Kate]

hey that was longer than the one I did...

[elsewhere]

A ha! Pav Cat must have edited the meme or something (*immediately points finger without undertaking investigation first*)

[Pavlov's Cat]

Oi! I SAID I'd edited it! I GAVE the original link!

I dunno -- you lot that were taught to read with flashcards... It's a worry. (Oooh there'll be hate mail now from Whole Language people now.)

Good on El for doing the full 50, I say. I originally did that, looked at the VERY long post it made -- I do go on -- and decided it really was just too self-revealing, and that my answers to the ones I cut were too boring. I forgot how much people love memes, and now I'm tempted to go back and answer the 15 questions I left out.

[elsewhere]

Apologies, just laziness here (that was quick off the draw, tho!)in not checking your original post. Perhaps a new, 15 question meme is in store?

I don't know how I learnt to read, because I remember sitting on the mat in Kinder, thinking it was all boring and wondering why they used easy words on the flashcards like 'stopping'. (Actually, I remember being some kind of reading pain who complained about other kids' stumbling attempts to read.) I suspect I absorbed 'reading' somehow from being read to by my parents and from watching my older sister learn how to read.

[Pavlov's Cat]

With you on the absorption of reading. I vividly remember the moment I first "got" reading: I read out a label on a shoebox in the top shelf of my mother's big wardrobe that I could see over her shoulder while she was doing up my shoes. But the technique by which my generation was taught was pure phonics, which I think generally led to slower but more careful reading practices.

Re quick on the draw -- that's just thesis-examining avoidance behaviour.

[Kate]

Oh yeah. Whoops. Oh well. (In my defense my eyes were -- and stll are -- bleeding from trying to read Wine Grape Crush statistics and/or boring boring charts about structured wiring. My reading comprehension skills do tend to suffer after about 6pm.)

[elsewhere]

Well, I am in article-finishing avoidance here -- just don't want to write that final par that pulls it all together.

[Pavlov's Cat]

I have been known to spend longer on a final paragraph than on the whole rest of the article. Which is probably not what you feel like hearing someone say.

Kate, you are a hero. Wine Grape Crush statistics, eeww.

[Kate]

I hate final paragraphs, and as a result, mine tend to suck quite enormously.

Wine story done so I can go back to enjoying verdelho instead of writing about it.

[elsewhere]

I'm terrible with closing sentences -- it's like a disease. mine can almost always be dispensed with.

[susoz]

My closing paragraphs tend to be very weak and rushed. It's recently come to my attenton that this is a metaphor for not wanting to finish.

[Cristy]

I am kind of glad that PC broke it up - it made it easier to do.

I did notice that you said in your original post that you had edited the questions down, but, for some reason, thought that this meant that there were hundreds of them...

I also hate finishing off articles etc. It is always at this point that I realise that I haven't really made the point that I was trying to make and now it is too late. I tend to aim for the "opening things out" paragraph, and this often fails.

[elsewhere]

Hmmm, are you sure that the 'opening things out' par isn't the introduction?

[Mikhela]

Reasons I envy Elsewhere
- writes like a dream
- living in amazing place
- strong , independent, very cool
- & fit
That said, my own life is pretty good too - it's not like I'm lying awake tossing & wishing we could trade places. But there are definitely things in your life to be jealous of.

[Janet]

Am delurking, hello, and nicking this meme, eventhough I'll be at it for ages.

[elsewhere]

Thanks, Janet & Mikhela.

I'm pretty jealous too, M, especially if you live somewhere near the Sunshine Coast.

[Nick C]

I'm jealous of you too. You know, the whole smartness thing...

[elsewhere]

Heh. And you're so dumb, Crusty...

[seababy]

I've just bought adobe photoshop offered for very low price at http://www.software-cheap.net but they sell it without the box and manual. Just wanna know what's there so special in the manual taking in account that i'm already familiar with photoshop?
any feedback please?