@roseapprentice tagged me for a question meme
Rules: Tag nine people you want to get to know better. You can tag less, if you like. Or no one, if you feel like it. Who needs rules anyway?
I work in a long-term storage facility (warehouse) for a university library. This means I sort/label/data-input incoming new books (mostly Fine Arts for the past year or so, but they seem to be shifting us into Geography, Computing and Engineering, which is much less fun to flip through, tbh), pull/return any books/collection-boxes/pallets requested by University employees/students from the depths of cold-storage (it is 63 degrees Fahrenheit in our units, to keep humidity low despite central Texan climate, to preserve older books), and otherwise mostly spend the day between delicate work with tomes of various ages (some very dusty and old, some new, some in between like the Netscape Navigator guide last week) and just plain moving heavy objects (boxes/trays/carts/wheeled-shelves full of books which for their weight you might as well conceptualise as paper bricks with useful shit writ in them somewhere) by hand or by forklift. I both handle books all day, and get enough physical exercise that I am as fit and muscular now as I was when I was 19. Also they hired my sister, too, so she could escape the living hell of her previous job working in retail for a Pier 1 knock-off store. (Not actually Pier 1, but most of their stuff wouldn’t be out of place there.)
I enjoy the physical labor because it lets my mind wander freely throughout the day, allowing me to absorb a lot of data via podcasts or just zone out while singing loudly in the echo-y cold chamber. I love the comforting organisation of places which collect books, and I find some of the weirdest stuff when the Fine Arts library is the main one sending us new stuff. (Someday I will do a few posts of Weird Shit I Found At Work.) My sister even loves it when the medical science books with photos and illustrations come in, because she’s a morbid creature, but also an aspiring neuroscientist or dermatologist; she leans more towards the former, but she loves the study of dermatology so much that I wonder how solid that dedication really is. Once she stops recommending pimple-popping videos to my best friend, I’ll stop considering dermatologist as one of her potential career-paths.
Anyway, the main point is: I fucking love this job. My boss is gay and recommends to me punk bands I did not previously know, even, I just. I love it here. Also he gives us all cosplay advice. It is GREAT. But it’s only a part-time gig, so I barely make enough to scrape by, and dude, poverty is a bitch. I would love to make more than $15,000 per year again, tbh, because being raised in a capitalist society makes it really hard to overcome depression and self-worth issues while you’re under the poverty line but don’t qualify for any real assistance, especially in the dystopian wasteland of Texas, and that has really impacted my life since I lost my previous job over a year ago, had to sell my house and start all over.
Ideally, I’d have a gig similar to this full-time, and thus have enough financial security and free time (having a lack of the former mitigates the usefulness of the latter due to the stresses of poverty, I already knew, but got to know very personally since 2015) to be able to write my own original fiction and grow medicinal herbs (marijuana if I am honest, because I have a reversed curvature of the spine in my neck that causes me chronic pain, and all other pain-relief forms aside from that either incapacitate my forebrain, are heinously addictive, or both, so heyyy THC is my friend) and fruit/vegetables (farmer’s markets are good places) on the side. That’d be living the dream, for me: book-handling for my day job, writing after that, and a big damn garden that my botanist father will be proud of me for achieving.
What are you talented at?
Prevarication, bullshitting (subtly different), storytelling (even more subtly different, with fiction), cold-reading, verbosity, improvisation, photography, talking to strangers and striking up congenial rapport based on nothing in common, as well as being a font of obscure information about science and history and human psychology. Also tripping over nonexistent barriers.
What is a big goal you are working towards (or have already achieved)?
I wrote two novels by the time I was 16, but neither of them had a plot. I didn’t learn how to write an actual plot until I was 18, but haven’t managed to write any original fiction (as opposed to fan fiction) since then. I’d like to amend that, at some point, as soon as I figure out wtf to write a novel about.
What are your aesthetics?
Take slate blue, and blue it up a few shades, but keep it nice and dark and unshiny. Now turn that into an antique chaise lounge. The wood bits should be a very dark-stained oak, or ebony. Around it, there are mismatched styles of bookshelf, but they cover more than one wall (two of the shorter, wider ones stack atop one another and are full of fiction alone, but they stand no taller than the 7ft-shelf beside them which is all comic books except the top shelf which is collections and leather-bound classics like the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and all of Poe’s works, and on the other wall a smaller, redder shelf only 5ft tall full of mostly reference and photography books).
Nearby is a large window. Outside is a rainstorm. In the distance, where the rain has already passed them by, a pack of coyotes is howling. Slightly closer, a flock of corvids (ravens? crows?) complain to one another about the storm. Together, it’s all music.
On the other side of the window is a sage-green and stately wingback armchair with a sleeping brown/grey tabby cat on the seat.
I am on that chaise lounge. There is a nearby ratty and battered coatrack from the 20s by the door, from which a dark green trench coas and a light-weight leather motorcycle jacket both hang, along with a black newsboy cap. At the base of it, two pairs of boots and a pair of slim-fitting athletic shoes I originally got for fencing purposes rest at its base.
The tea is probably Gunpowder, Lapsang Souchong, or an experimental Taiwanese/Nepalese tea of some sort. Next to it is a stack of Thin Mint cookies from the Girl Scouts and the book I am currently reading. (Right now: Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, because it arrived today and I am HYPE.) On some days, the aroma of vapours from my rice-cooker, or the aromas of pasta and/or slow-cooked meats seep up from downstairs.
The cats are all safe inside. The rain grows louder.
Books, mostly, but also… I am a magpie. I also used to have a kleptomaniac streak, before I broke the habit after graduating high school. I collect interesting shiny objects, pocket knives, craft supplies (this is the only way I can explain the shoebox of broken glass and mirror shards in my closet, the geological specimens, the dumpster art canvases I plan to paint over at some point, the magazines I might use for reference or collage purposes, and the chunks of Obsidian which I have accumulated over the years to most people; fun fact: one of those pieces of obsidian is the size of a brick), cheap shitty swords (started as a joke and to be fair I have only 6, not counting the scimitar which is actually half-decent quality but the tip sticks out of its sheath and I once tripped and fell into my closet and that tip stabbed me in the arm so I have literally fallen on my own scimitar and lived sorta, and it is a large scar), and trench coats.
What is a topic you are always up for talking about?
Intersectional feminism. QUILTBAG issues because I am queer as a 3-dollar bill. Politics. Black lives mattering. Scientific progress. Storytelling. Public education. Civilization. Antifascism. Mythology. Human history. Comic books. Music history. The list goes on. My interests are eccentric, broad, and varied.
What’s a pet peeve of yours?
When American conservative politicians promote people to leadership of government offices, while those promotees are publicly acknowledged for their lust for the chance to destroy the government services those offices are supposed to respect, run and improve.
A lot of people consult me for it, so I guess I’m doing something right. It’s best applied on a case-by-case basis, though.
Galloping Steeds - Tengger Cavalry
Stars and Stripes of Corruption - Dead Kennedys
If I tag you, it is because I like you. No actual reciprocation needed, but do know I like you.
@seizure7, @flight815kitsune, @eternal-love-song, @valeria2067, @my-name-is-darling, @ladyhedoniste, @doesitlooklikeineedanotherfandom, @ancientwinters
