wshaffer

How this works:
You comment, I give you an age (please tell me how old you currently are - I don't know all of your ages) and you fill out the meme questions.

wordweaverlynn gave me 23.

I lived in:
An apartment on Hearst Ave. in Berkeley with Daniel. My favorite thing about that apartment was that it was easy walking distance from both the U.C. Berkeley campus and Comic Relief and The Other Change of Hobbit. And that the living room window faced out on a large tree, and racoons would occasionally climb the tree and peer in the window at us while we ate dinner or sat on the couch and read.

I drove:
A dark blue Acura Vigor, handed down from my mother. I preferred to walk or take BART for most trips.

I was in a relationship with:
Daniel and I had just gotten married two weeks before my 23rd birthday.

I feared:
My graduate school qualifying exams. I knew that if I failed them it would throw a major wrench into my life plans, and yet I wasn't completely sure that I wanted to pass them either. (I did pass on my first try, though it was a near thing.)

I worked at:
I was in the Ph.D. program in chemistry at U.C. Berkeley. I think the year that I was 23 I was still taking coursework, working as a teaching assistant, and doing research towards my ostensible Ph.D. thesis.

I wanted to be:
At that point, I still wanted to teach and do research in chemistry at a university, although I was starting to have some doubts about whether academia was really a good fit for me.

Comment to this post, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

retsuko gave me the following:

high school: After I finished 10th grade, my parents moved us across the country from Orlando, FL to La Jolla, CA, in the process moving me from a smallish private Episcopalian prep school to a medium-sized southern Californian public high school. What I remember very vividly about my early weeks at my new school was the exhilirating sense that I could completely reinvent my identity. I'd been at my previous school since 6th grade, and was pretty well pigeonholed socially as The Huge Nerd. For a very brief period at La Jolla High, I didn't have to fit anyone's preconceived notions of who I was. In the end, my essential nature won out, and I became The Huge Nerd in Doc Martens. Which was a small but surprisingly crucial difference.

aliens: The first piece of fiction I can remember writing was a story about an alien visiting me and taking me on a visit to his home planet. I was about 8. I illustrated the story in crayon, and then alien looked surprisingly like a Terileptil, even though I'd never seen any Doctor Who when I wrote it. I still have the story.

yogurt: Tzatziki sauce recipe: About 1.5 cups Fage Greek yogurt; 1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, grated, and with as much water as you can manage squished out of it; a couple of cloves of garlic, finely minced or grated on a microplane grater, salt and pepper to taste. Lovely with pita and anything you might put in a pita.

fanfiction: Prior to this year, I'd have said I wasn't really a fanfic writer. I'd done a few bits and pieces of Doctor Who fic, but never really got into the swing of it. So far this year, I've written two short Dr. Seuss/Doctor Who crossover pieces plus a dozen short Skyrim vignettes, which is a lot of fanfic for someone who never writes fanfic.

My fanfic in general is characterized by being both funny and sentimental. (Even when I initially attempt to evoke a different mood altogether.) I would like to write a something dark and cynical some day, just to prove that I can. Although dark and cynical doesn't really work with my core fandoms.

Wonder Woman: I think I may have seen a few episodes of the Wonder Woman TV show in reruns when I was a kid. Never read the comics. Wonder Woman was undoubtedly an important influence on my favorite female superhero, Promethea, but other than that I got nothin'.

cats: When I was 4, I fed a stray cat that wandered into our yard. She lived with us for the next 17 years. I think this shaped my attitude towards pets in general - I always feel that they adopt me, not the other way around.

Halloween candy: I really dislike candy corn, and used to give away any I received when trick-or-treating. The items I always most hoped to find in my trick-or-treating bag were miniature Hershey's Special Dark and Nestle Crunch bars. I liked Sweettarts and Jolly Ranchers pretty well, but really when it comes to candy, I've always been into chocolate. Easter always knocked Halloween into a cocked hat when it came to candy anticipation.

I couldn't resist doing this meme, even though the idea of trying to do a total ranking of every televised Doctor Who story makes my head hurt. Even ignoring the fact that I haven't seen about a quarter of these stories (shameful, I know - I'm working on remedying that), how do you compare "The Aztecs" to "Love and Monsters"? They're really not remotely trying to do the same thing. Not to mention that there are episodes on this list that I haven't seen since I was 13 or so, and was a lot less critical about my Doctor Who

Still, I couldn't resist. The idea is: put stories that you think should be ranked higher in blue, stories which should be ranked lower in red, and stories you haven't seen in italics. (For any story that exists only or primarily on audio, substitute "hear" for "see".)

( A big long list of Doctor Who stories )

As I suspected, I marked a lot more stories for bumping up in the rankings than I marked for bumping down in the rankings, which does leave a little bit of a "but something's got to be last" problem. Some notes:

• My marking "Robots of Death" for bumping up when it's already in the top 10 is a bit frivolous. However, if I had a an absolute favorite Doctor Who story ever, "Robots of Death" would be it, so I had to give the nod to it somehow.


• I've actually seen "Tomb of the Cybermen", when it came out on VHS. However, I don't remember any of it, so I've listed it as unseen.


• I don't see "Utopia" on this list - I guess it must have been folded in with "The Sound of Drums" (which I also don't see listed) and "Last of the Time Lords". I'd have ranked "Utopia" higher than the other two, although probably not higher than the position that "Last of the Time Lords" occupies on this list.


• "Father's Day" was the first episode of new Who that I actually managed to see, and so it will always hold a special place in my heart.


• "Greatest Show in the Galaxy" has the dubious distinction of being the only episode of Who that I switched off because it was too damned embarrassing. (The rapping MC. Shudder.) I was a teenager at the time - when the story comes out on DVD, I'll give it another go with an open mind.


• While I won't argue for "The Time Monster" being good exactly, any episode in which Roger Delgado puts the moves on Ingrid Pitt can't be all bad. I've always found it at least entertaining. No way is it the worst Pertwee story.


• This falls in the category of stories I haven't seen in over 20 years, but I liked "Time Flight". Possibly because I saw it when I was young and unsophisticated enough to actually be surprised when Kalid turned out to be the Master in disguise.

Not that I expected much from a personality test that has you look at pictures, but even within the astrology-like one-description-fits-all nature of most personality test results, I can't really make this one fit...
( Cut to save space... )

The bit about seeking out other people and being energized by being around others is debatable, but this is the hilarious bit: "You like to deal directly with whatever comes your way without dealing with speculating possibilities or outcomes you can't control." Dude. I do nothing but speculate about possibilities or outcomes I can't control.

So, I saw this "Which member of UNIT are you?" quiz over on jw_77's LJ. And I thought, "Oh no! I can't take that quiz! What if I turn out to be Mike Yates?"

Sure enough:


Do I get some credit for not totally rigging my answers so that I'd turn out to be Liz Shaw?

As I said in my last post, I wanted to do the same meme, but looking at my desk at work. Sitting in my cube now, here are some of the more interesting things I can see:

• 1 large coffee mug with VMware logo, currently holding French roast coffee with a splash of soy milk


• 1 coffee mug with Thermo Finnigan logo, currently holding a collection of pens and pencils


• 1 black coffee mug emblazoned with the acronym "RTFM" (as pictured in my user icon), currently empty


• Postcards of Caravaggio's Head of Medusa, Artemisia Gentileschi's Beheading of Holofernes, Chagall's I and the Village, and Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy, tacked to the cube wall


• 2 foam stress balls, 1 hot pink, 1 neon orange, with smiley faces printed on them


• A rotring Core fountain pen, fine nib, filled with black ink, and a Lamy Al-Star green anodized aluminum fountain pen, fine nib, filled with purple ink


• 2 foam gliders, decorated to look like the space shuttle, that were given away as swag at a conference I attended


• A poster depicting Daleks against the Manhattan skyline


• A tiny toy black Dalek. Its head was glued on backwards, so the poor thing can't see where it is shooting (which is at the foam spaceshuttles)


• A small notebook with a blue leather cover, purchased in the San Lorenzo street market in Florence. It serves as emergency backup memory.


• A junior-size Circa notebook, which holds my calendar and work notes


• half a dozen blank pads of paper, ranging in size from 3" x 5" to 11" x 17"


• a terra cotta pot with 5 tiny succulents, 3 of which are looking ill and 2 of which are flourishing

In short: caffeine-addicted Doctor Who fan with foutain pen fetish and pronounced anti green-thumb.