Totoro & Whisper of the Heart <3
These are meandering, introspective answers, because I thought that’s what these prompts would produce (and why I wanted to answer some):
My Neighbor Totoro: Favourite mythical creature?
Oh man, 6- to 14-year-old me loved unicorns. Now, though, I think kitsune or sphinx would have to take that title. Kitsune, though, are barely mythological, which is the beauty of kind of folk tale/practical demonology type creatures created to exist mundanely alongside us.
Medusa is also cool as fuck.
Whisper of the Heart: What are you most passionate about? Why?
Ah, this question. I distinctly remember having to do a project over my passion in the sixth grade, and feeling utterly perplexed by the prompt; the concept, even now, makes sense to me on a logical level—it’s something you want to pour yourself into, that you want to define you—but not on a personal one.
Back then, I chose the answer I thought made most sense: Figure skating. I did it every day of the week, 50-odd weeks a year, for 2+ hours, so I figured (ha!) I was passionate about it. But I didn’t necessarily feel like it defined me or that I would be less if I stopped doing it, so I felt odd claiming it was my “passion” and I think the subsequent
I think my friends would label me a very passionate person about a number of things. In no particular order: Being right (many exes), doing things well (coworkers), righting injustice (friends), attempting to say things clearly and as accurately as possible (again, many exes, downtrodden after wandering into one too many “arguments” about a topic they thought was mundane and settled), understanding a topic as thoroughly as possible (ditto)…etc. etc. I don’t really see these as things people usually count as contenders for a “passion” though…
I think, however, all of them (and this answer) have a common theme running through them that gets somewhere near my passion, which maybe on an every-day level could be labeled “writing.” I think I mostly just want to figure things out, and I think, despite all my existential gloom and tendency toward nihilism, I am most passionate about understanding the world that I am alive in, because I am equipped to understand it and because I am alive in it. The nihilism sneaks in anyway, though, because I think this is an impossible undertaking :)
Tl;dr, for some reason, I am most passionate about figuring out why the hell I am (we are all?) alive.