silver

Meme from lilithnaamah:

How this works: Comment with your favorite color and I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better. Update your journal with the answers to the questions. Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

1. What is one thing everyone should know about you?
I read a lot of books. I love words and things similar to that (calligraphy, languages, literary criticism, linguistics, etc.) If you get that, we'll probably get along swimmingly.

2. Red is the color of passion. Who is your biggest fictional crush?
I have so many. (I never deal well with favourite questions.) Mostly it's the hyper-competent and powerful characters. Take Carol Berg's Collegia Magica novels - I was meh with Dante (he was a pretty good wizard, twisted and tortured past, incredibly ripe for fandom h/c and whump) but h/c's never done much for me, so it was Ilario who was my absolute favourite. (I was so disappointed when the third book was narrated by Dante instead of Ilario! Aww.) He is a fantastic actor pretending to be a foppish useless brother to Queen Eugenie, but he's actually a phenomenal swordsman and maintains the disguise to help her. Also, characters like Hermione Granger and Bellatrix Lestrange for the same reason - they're both incredibly powerful and competent witches, especially Bellatrix, who has clearly proven herself to be good enough to stand as Voldemort's right hand - forget Lucius Malfoy. I mean, she's a horrible person who killed and tortured others mercilessly, was slavishly devoted to a man even worse than her, but. Well. Same goes for Melisande Shahrizai, who knows exactly what buttons to push to achieve exactly what she wants, and knows precisely how to manipulate people and events. Back in the duelling arena, Joscelin Verreuil and Bao both. Gwalchmai ap Lot (Sir Gawain) from Hawk of May. Also Obi-Wan Kenobi: I always fast-foward through the cringe-inducing Anakin/Padmé moments in The Attack of the Clones - and I ship them! in text form - and skip to where Obi-Wan is off adventuring. (Knighted for duelling and defeating the first Sith to appear for centuries, while still a Padawan! How could I resist?) And then the usual slew of suspects for impressionable young girls - Rhett Butler, Fitzwilliam Darcy, etc. But not Heathcliff, because I loathed every single character in that novel, up to and including Lockwood and Nelly Dean.

I don't always come out with OTPs, but I often do emerge from books with one true characters.

3. What is the worst movie you've ever seen?
I almost never watch movies unless someone makes me, so I have a pretty limited pool of movies. I suppose the worst is Revolutionary Road. I had to watch it in class, and just eurgh. I'm sure it has great value in some film-related capacity (and looking at the Wikipedia page, it looks like Winslet won a slew of awards and the movie was favourably received by critics), but man, I did not need to sit and watch a depressing film for two hours. The only consoling bit was the look on DiCaprio's face as he emerges from the hospital doors at the end - I have never seen such an obvious manifestation of someone looking completely and utterly shattered.

Also I accidentally went into the theatre too late, and saw the last half hour of the nearly universally-panned Green Lantern movie, but mostly that film just didn't make sense.

4. Going along with the memory theme, what is your favorite childhood memory?
Hm. One of my favourites is my dad teaching me how to skate. I used to live a couple blocks from my elementary school, and they had one of those outdoor rinks set up on their property - the kind where you spray water on the ground with a hose, and then shovel off the snow that accumulates. Anyway, at some point I'd learned to sort of skate on my own in a straight line, but I couldn't figure out how to turn. I asked my dad, who was next to me, and he said, basically, that "You have to feel it. Feel like you're going left" and couldn't explain further. It was really kind of confusing - I mean, what? - but it worked, and I didn't skate right off the rink!

(Now I know that you lean your weight and use the edge of your skates, but hey!)

5. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
I like living where I live, but if I had to move, I want to live somewhere in Europe, probably either France or England owing to language. One of these days I really, really want to travel Europe by myself and indulge myself in visiting all those places I've learned about in history. I tried persuading my parents to go to historical places, but they weren't really interested; history's not really their thing, so we went to tourist attractions but not the places of historic significance. The Eiffel tower isn't very interesting, but I did want to go to la Place de la Concorde.

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I think I would see my present day self as someone who over-complicates issues and probably would be surprised that I'd turned into me. I remember the world being far more black and white then, although there is a tendency to see oneself as having grown. Likely disappointed, I suppose.

You know the feeling, when you're going about your life, as usual, when you see something, hear something--smell something familiar--and suddenly, you're in the past, seeing memories?
I saw that today; it was a sunbeam, actually. I saw that sunbeam and thought suddenly of the time I spent three weeks at a cadet camp, one to make you a better instructor. I remember I had borrowed a book from my roommate--one on the vicious politics of the fifteenth-century, I think--and was lying on my stomach, reading. The sun was setting, and it threw a golden cast on everything--on the rust-colored iron bed frames, the white walls, the vinyl-tiled floor--making the room not an old thing from the 1950s, but instead--well, those are the inexpressible words.