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Yeah, that meme that's going around. I got mine from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sotto_voice.
Association Meme: Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
1) Really long works of literature
You know what the hardest thing about reading a gigantic book is? The physical act of actually reading it. I can't just slip Les Mis into my purse on the way out the door - if I want to read it outside the house, I gotta break out the backpack. And I use my backpack way more often than I do my purse anyway, but sometimes I don't feel like dealing with it, so if I'm reading an enormous book, I then have a choice to make.
Other really long works of literature I have gotten a lot of mileage out of include:
Gone With the Wind. I read it for the first time in, I think, fifth grade, and read it about once a year after that for the rest of my school career. It's been forever since I read it, I need to do something about that. Looking back on it is mostly an interesting demonstration of how reading comprehension improves as you grow older - just because I could read GWTW when I was eleven doesn't mean I understood half of what was going on. Every rereading showed me something new, not just because it's a giant book and I'm kind of a speed reader and tend to miss things, but because every year I was older and a little more able to understand what the characters were going through. By the time I was eighteen, it was a completely different book.
(Fun fact: thanks to the fact that American history classes tend to try and speed through the history of the country as fast as possible and still never make it all the way from the Revolutionary War to the present times, GWTW remains the source of most of my knowledge on the Civil War. I know it's a highly biased source - and another thing I came to understand better with age - but Margaret Mitchell did her homework.)
The Stand. I love to read the first third of this in public, during cold and flu season. Reading about Captain Trips while people are coughing and sneezing all around me is awesome. I read this for the first time in, I think, my sophomore year of high school. I attempted to do a book report on it (or whatever the fuck they called it in high school, something that sounds a little less fourth grade), only to discover that it was basically impossible to do a thorough report that would be significantly shorter than the book itself, so I decided to narrow my focus and just relate Larry's storyline in my report. This was deemed acceptable.
Last time I read The Stand, it was the original, abridged version, which I hadn't read before, and I discovered that when the unabridged version was published, not only was it way longer (including stuff that I was surprised not to find in the original, like the college scene with Nadine and the planchette), but King had reset it to be ten years further along than the first edition is set.
(And yes, I have the comic miniseries. I have not read it all, but based on the character designs alone, it is made of win.)
GWTW, The Stand, and Les Mis are my desert island books, because they are so damn long that it would take a lot longer to get bored with them than it would with novels of more average length.
2) Obscure musicals
Hee. Apparently my love of The Fix, and subsequent wondering of what other awesomeness I've missed just because it didn't get popular, has fooled Lexie into believing that I know stuff about musicals. The truth is, as far as stage musicals are concerned, I am brand-new and most of my small collection is stuff like Les Mis and Evita, which could not be less obscure if they tried. The most obscure soundtrack I have, other than The Fix, is probably [title of show], which is really only obscure to people who aren't familiar with musicals.
On the other hand, I recently tracked down a copy of the Cannon production of Sleeping Beauty. I used to have one of those audiotapes that told the story along with a book and included all the songs, and I listened to it so often as a wee one that I can still sing some of the lyrics from memory, and they will probably be the last thing I forget before I die. But Cannon went out of business and none of the musical fairy tales they did seem to have come out on DVD, so pretty much have to get lucky and stumble across a VHS. I got mine on Amazon after years of it being listed as unavailable, with no used copies for sale.
ANYWAY. It is every bit as ridiculawesome as you might expect of a musical from the late eighties featuring Morgan Fairchild (and a stunt voice, I'm pretty sure, this being well over a decade before stars singing their own roles became fashionable) and lyrics such as:
Our clothes are worn and tattered so they rip!
*ripping sound effect*
We haven't got a spindle so they rip!
*ripping sound effect*
Our clothes are worn and tattered and our wardrobe is so shattered
And we haven't got a spindle so they rip!
*ripping sound effect*
My favorite part is how, sixteen years after banishing spindles, it FINALLY occurs to someone to look into this strange and mysterious concept of "importing goods" so that everyone in the country doesn't end up bareassed. I know that's a weird thing to pick on, but it's such a HUGE plot device and so much is made of it that it's like the movie is DEMANDING that I put way too much thought into it (read: any thought at all).
3) Red Sox woo!
Look, I'm just quoting Lexie verbatim with these. ;)
I am not as much into baseball as I was before - I've been drawn back more into media-based fandom over the last year or so, it's hard for me to split my attention the way normal people can. (Yay, ADD?) But the Red Sox the team that got me started in baseball, and I will always love watching baseball, and you know what? If I can, as a brand-new baseball fan still learning the more basic rules of the game and the way it's played, survive the BAPTISM OF FIRE that was the 2003 ALCS and return with great enthusiasm for the 2004 season, then as far as I am concerned I will always be a baseball fan no matter how far I drift into other things.
4) Food service industry
I like making food. I like to cook. But real cooking will always be a private thing and a hobby for me. I work in a pseudo-restaurant that doesn't even have any tables, making pizza and pasta, and the most complicated dish I've made is probably the garlic chicken pasta bowl, and that is precisely as far into the restaurant business as I ever want to get. I like my job (though I am going to have to find a new one before I fucking kill my control-freak overly-assertive-alpha-male twit of a manager) and I like making food and feeding people, and it beats the hell out of other jobs and fast foods places I've worked, but it's not something I want to stick with professionally.
5) Maaaaaaaine
Born and bred Mainer, living in Portland. Portland is the biggest city in Maine and it's still so small that Boston could have it for a snack and NYC wouldn't even notice swallowing it. (And no I have no problem telling people online where I live, because that kind of detail is so pathetically easy to find on the internet that if anyone really wants to stalk and kill me, my keeping the name of the city I live in to myself is not going to make a damn bit of difference.)
Maine is very pretty, very peaceful, and very boring. The job market is very crappy, which is why younger people tend to flee the state after completing their educations. I will probably have to do the same - not a lot of library jobs going around up here. I won't miss Maine, but god I will miss Portland. I love living in Portland. When I was younger, I thought that I'd never be able to stand living in a city, and I really only moved here because I don't drive and it's the only place in the state with quasi-reliable public transportation, and now I don't know why I ever found the idea of living in a city unappealing. I love it. I love that it's never totally dark and never totally quiet at night, I love that it's not a day in Portland if I haven't heard sirens wailing past, I love being able to walk a mile and find half a dozen different things to do, I love the big stupid hill I have to hike up coming back from school or work - Portland is awesome. I don't know if I ever want to not live in a city again.
sotto_voice.Association Meme: Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
1) Really long works of literature
You know what the hardest thing about reading a gigantic book is? The physical act of actually reading it. I can't just slip Les Mis into my purse on the way out the door - if I want to read it outside the house, I gotta break out the backpack. And I use my backpack way more often than I do my purse anyway, but sometimes I don't feel like dealing with it, so if I'm reading an enormous book, I then have a choice to make.
Other really long works of literature I have gotten a lot of mileage out of include:
Gone With the Wind. I read it for the first time in, I think, fifth grade, and read it about once a year after that for the rest of my school career. It's been forever since I read it, I need to do something about that. Looking back on it is mostly an interesting demonstration of how reading comprehension improves as you grow older - just because I could read GWTW when I was eleven doesn't mean I understood half of what was going on. Every rereading showed me something new, not just because it's a giant book and I'm kind of a speed reader and tend to miss things, but because every year I was older and a little more able to understand what the characters were going through. By the time I was eighteen, it was a completely different book.
(Fun fact: thanks to the fact that American history classes tend to try and speed through the history of the country as fast as possible and still never make it all the way from the Revolutionary War to the present times, GWTW remains the source of most of my knowledge on the Civil War. I know it's a highly biased source - and another thing I came to understand better with age - but Margaret Mitchell did her homework.)
The Stand. I love to read the first third of this in public, during cold and flu season. Reading about Captain Trips while people are coughing and sneezing all around me is awesome. I read this for the first time in, I think, my sophomore year of high school. I attempted to do a book report on it (or whatever the fuck they called it in high school, something that sounds a little less fourth grade), only to discover that it was basically impossible to do a thorough report that would be significantly shorter than the book itself, so I decided to narrow my focus and just relate Larry's storyline in my report. This was deemed acceptable.
Last time I read The Stand, it was the original, abridged version, which I hadn't read before, and I discovered that when the unabridged version was published, not only was it way longer (including stuff that I was surprised not to find in the original, like the college scene with Nadine and the planchette), but King had reset it to be ten years further along than the first edition is set.
(And yes, I have the comic miniseries. I have not read it all, but based on the character designs alone, it is made of win.)
GWTW, The Stand, and Les Mis are my desert island books, because they are so damn long that it would take a lot longer to get bored with them than it would with novels of more average length.
2) Obscure musicals
Hee. Apparently my love of The Fix, and subsequent wondering of what other awesomeness I've missed just because it didn't get popular, has fooled Lexie into believing that I know stuff about musicals. The truth is, as far as stage musicals are concerned, I am brand-new and most of my small collection is stuff like Les Mis and Evita, which could not be less obscure if they tried. The most obscure soundtrack I have, other than The Fix, is probably [title of show], which is really only obscure to people who aren't familiar with musicals.
On the other hand, I recently tracked down a copy of the Cannon production of Sleeping Beauty. I used to have one of those audiotapes that told the story along with a book and included all the songs, and I listened to it so often as a wee one that I can still sing some of the lyrics from memory, and they will probably be the last thing I forget before I die. But Cannon went out of business and none of the musical fairy tales they did seem to have come out on DVD, so pretty much have to get lucky and stumble across a VHS. I got mine on Amazon after years of it being listed as unavailable, with no used copies for sale.
ANYWAY. It is every bit as ridiculawesome as you might expect of a musical from the late eighties featuring Morgan Fairchild (and a stunt voice, I'm pretty sure, this being well over a decade before stars singing their own roles became fashionable) and lyrics such as:
Our clothes are worn and tattered so they rip!
*ripping sound effect*
We haven't got a spindle so they rip!
*ripping sound effect*
Our clothes are worn and tattered and our wardrobe is so shattered
And we haven't got a spindle so they rip!
*ripping sound effect*
My favorite part is how, sixteen years after banishing spindles, it FINALLY occurs to someone to look into this strange and mysterious concept of "importing goods" so that everyone in the country doesn't end up bareassed. I know that's a weird thing to pick on, but it's such a HUGE plot device and so much is made of it that it's like the movie is DEMANDING that I put way too much thought into it (read: any thought at all).
3) Red Sox woo!
Look, I'm just quoting Lexie verbatim with these. ;)
I am not as much into baseball as I was before - I've been drawn back more into media-based fandom over the last year or so, it's hard for me to split my attention the way normal people can. (Yay, ADD?) But the Red Sox the team that got me started in baseball, and I will always love watching baseball, and you know what? If I can, as a brand-new baseball fan still learning the more basic rules of the game and the way it's played, survive the BAPTISM OF FIRE that was the 2003 ALCS and return with great enthusiasm for the 2004 season, then as far as I am concerned I will always be a baseball fan no matter how far I drift into other things.
4) Food service industry
I like making food. I like to cook. But real cooking will always be a private thing and a hobby for me. I work in a pseudo-restaurant that doesn't even have any tables, making pizza and pasta, and the most complicated dish I've made is probably the garlic chicken pasta bowl, and that is precisely as far into the restaurant business as I ever want to get. I like my job (though I am going to have to find a new one before I fucking kill my control-freak overly-assertive-alpha-male twit of a manager) and I like making food and feeding people, and it beats the hell out of other jobs and fast foods places I've worked, but it's not something I want to stick with professionally.
5) Maaaaaaaine
Born and bred Mainer, living in Portland. Portland is the biggest city in Maine and it's still so small that Boston could have it for a snack and NYC wouldn't even notice swallowing it. (And no I have no problem telling people online where I live, because that kind of detail is so pathetically easy to find on the internet that if anyone really wants to stalk and kill me, my keeping the name of the city I live in to myself is not going to make a damn bit of difference.)
Maine is very pretty, very peaceful, and very boring. The job market is very crappy, which is why younger people tend to flee the state after completing their educations. I will probably have to do the same - not a lot of library jobs going around up here. I won't miss Maine, but god I will miss Portland. I love living in Portland. When I was younger, I thought that I'd never be able to stand living in a city, and I really only moved here because I don't drive and it's the only place in the state with quasi-reliable public transportation, and now I don't know why I ever found the idea of living in a city unappealing. I love it. I love that it's never totally dark and never totally quiet at night, I love that it's not a day in Portland if I haven't heard sirens wailing past, I love being able to walk a mile and find half a dozen different things to do, I love the big stupid hill I have to hike up coming back from school or work - Portland is awesome. I don't know if I ever want to not live in a city again.
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From:
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Have you ever looked into foreign musicals? The Germans have a bunch of amazingly cracktastic, earworm-filled costume-drama musicals--Elisabeth is the best (and best-known) example, and then there's Tanz der Vampire and Die Drei Musketiere and and Rebecca. And Der Glöckner von Notre-Dame, aka the stage version of Disney's Hunchback that never made it out of Berlin because it had too much character death and other not-kid-friendly stuff from the book.
The recordings are a bitch to find and cost an arm and a leg to import, but LJ has a thriving black market of share/trade communities full of people who like obscure musicals. And I'd be happy to send along mp3s of Elisabeth or Glöckner.
From:
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HOW HAVE I GONE TEN YEARS NOT KNOWING THIS OMG.
And if you want a foreign-musical hookup, my friend Shannon has every single cast recording of every weird foreign musical in the history of the universe.
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