taimatsu | Meme!

100 things about me.

Any sentence or partial sentence with a * after it is in the words of

baratron or someone she was quoting. Thanks for the meme!

1. My middle name is Clare. Without an 'i'. I don't know why my parents chose to spell it that way, but I prefer it.
2. My parents chose my names because they're short, not easy to abbreviate, and are saints' names. They also thought, for some reason, that 'Lucy' was a fairly unusual name, because at the time I was born they didn't know any. Then they met loads. Oops.
3. I have two brothers, aged 19 and 15. We get on pretty well. They're called, respectively, Giles Benedict and Hugo Aelred. Hugo spent years not being able to spell his own middle name.
4. I have one living grandparent, my father's mother.
5. For a variety of reasons, I was always closer to my mother's parents than my father's, and I really miss my mother's mother, who was also called Lucy. She died just over a year ago.
6. Most of the time, I'm in the middle of at least three books at a time.*
7. I find hard SF to be very boring. I like stories about people, not things.*
8. I like eighteenth-century novels, biographies, non-fiction dealing with personal experience, and a huge range of other books.
9. I beam happily at the mention of Jane Austen.
10. I tap my fingers quite a lot. When I do this, I almost always have a tune, or at the very least a complex two- or three-tone rhythmic pattern, in mind. It often sounds a little like 'swing'-type piano music in my head.
11. I have never broken a bone.
12. This is probably because I am horribly careful about things like falling, running, and active sport. I hate injuring myself.
13. Despite this, I sometimes leave my pincushion on the floor in my bedroom and have twice recently stood on it and ended up with it stuck to my foot. It hurt.
14. I have a couple of scars; one, on my left knee, from cutting it open on a tiled step on holiday in Italy at the age of 11 (three stitches, no anaesthetic, ask me about it sometime) and the other behind my left ear, from a tympanoplasty at age 9.
15. I only know the word 'tympanoplasty' because I went for a hearing assessment a few weeks ago and it was on my patient card.
16. As a result of said hearing assessment, I should be getting a hearing aid for my left ear in the next few months.
17. This makes me both nervous and very excited.
18. The reason I am partially deaf is that the bones in my left middle ear are malformed, and far too grossly so to be surgically corrected.
19. I compensate by using my right ear almost as a radar dish, and sweep rooms for conversations.
20. I hate missing out on things through not hearing properly.
21. Ideally, people would always walk and sit on my right, say my name or otherwise attract my attention before speaking to me (otherwise I will miss the start of the sentence through concentrating on hearing something else) and never say 'Oh, nothing.' when I don't hear something and ask what it was they said. That really, really annoys and upsets me.
22. Stereo headphones are a real pain in the neck, especially trying to listen to Beatles songs or duets from West Side Story with the voices split between the two earpieces.
23. I'm a grammar fascist.* I really dislike misplaced apostrophes and other punctuation.
24. I also detest txt-spk and almost always write text messages in whole words, even before I had a phone with predictive text capability. I cannot stand 'ur' for 'you're' or 'your' or 'you are'.
25. I never learned to ride a bicycle. I simply don't have enough sense of balance for it.* I think it's my ears.
26. I can't drive either. I was going to learn when I was 18, but never got round to it. Then I moved to Oxford, where you don't need a car.*
27. I considered buying a tricycle, but I tried one out and got scared by how high up off the road I was, how unprotected I felt, and how fast it went.
28. I think I'm less outgoing than I used to be. This might be partially a consequence of aspects of my last relationship, or more deep-seated stuff.
29. Then again, I've never been very outgoing.
30. There was a brief stupid tease-fad at school, when I was about 14, where a couple of girls would go round saying to people 'Are you queer?' or 'Are you bent?', and since I had no idea of the sexuality-related connotations of this I defiantly said 'yes!' This now makes me both cringe and smile.
31. I used to be on the debating team when I was in the sixth form, and I miss that. I once played God in a balloon debate, and got thrown out. Tchah.
32. I was a stalwart of three choirs, two orchestras and several miscellaneous music groups between the ages of 10 and 18. Now, I don't play or sing in anything except the odd roleplaying game. This is bad.
33. I play, in decreasing order of ability, the flute, guitar, recorder, piano, cimbala (Polish zither), cithare (French liturgical zither the size of a coffee table), dzidi (Chinese flute, with buzzing parchment membrane), ocarina, quena, and zummara (Arab bamboo double-reed instrument).
34. I own all of those instruments.
35. I long to buy and learn to play the shakuhachi, violin and harpsichord. Mostly the shakuhachi though.
36. Oh yes,and the bass and sopranino recorders.
37. I really like listening to Elton John. This is connected to the two facts below.
38. I have a very strong liking for the music my father used to play at top volume when I was little, to which we all used to dance about in the living-room.
39. This included Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Meat Loaf (Bat Out of Hell II, which I have just bought myself) and the Travelling Wilburys.
40. 'Tweeter and the Monkey Man' always used to scare me a little.
41. My dad's music tastes have mellowed as he's got older. He now listens to Late Junction a lot (it's a radio show).
42. I went to my first gig at 19. This struck me as depressingly old.
43. It was Idlewild. They weren't that good.
44. I haven't been to many since.
45. I barely had a sexuality before university.
46. Then I had lots and lots of one. Several, actually.
47. I realised I was not-straight on November 5th, 1999, and came out to someone for the first time the same night. Then about eight people over the following three days.
48. It took me till the following Easter vacation to tell my parents.
49. They were fine with it, though less fine with other, semi-connected stuff.
50. They even guessed before I did.
51. Yes, that freaked me out.
52. I feel as though everyone knows everything about my sexuality already, so I think I'll shut up about it. Feel free to ask, though, I like talking about these issues.
53. I am wildly ambivalent about marriage.
54. On the one hand, I think that religious marriage is the only way to properly conduct a long-term relationship [for me].
55. On the other hand, I can't bring myself to consider ever having one, and I consider civil marriage pointless and meaningless, mostly. For me, not for other people.
56. There are myriad reasons for this, and I'd love triggering to talk about them.
57. I don't keep a Little Black Book. I do keep a Little Discreet Notepad File. No details, though.
58. Wow, I'm more than half-way through! The power of work-avoidance, eh?
59. I have never used any recreational drug apart from alcohol, and I've been drunk maybe twice in my life.* I have never lost control of myself through intoxication.
60. I'm quite proud of that fact, though I'm not sure why.
61. People who carelessly intoxicate themselves in such a way that they have to be taken care of by others really annoy me.
62. Yes, I do feel like a failure for dropping out of Oxford University, whether I should or not.
63. I hate going to public events alone.* I have weaned myself off this for the purposes of seeing obscure films at the UPP, though.
64. I have had many long thoughts about gender and sexuality and things like that, but most of them can't easily be condensed into short facts for this meme. Blast.*
65. I don't like the way trainers look on feet. I'd like some really comfortable, supportive ones, though, for exercising.
66. I don't consider that I belong to any Christian denomination at the moment, though I do consider myself a Christian.
67. I was baptised and confirmed a Roman Catholic, and communicating the previous fact to my parents just hasn't happened yet.
68. I will happily discuss theology and Biblical exegesis with people.
69. I hate making phone calls - especially to people I don't know. I have got used to this at work, though - there I have a script that I can just trot out as to who I am and why I am calling.
70. Ironically, I think these days I am actually better at making calls to people I don't know than people I do.
71. I communicate far better in text than in almost any other format, possibly even including RL face-to-face.
72. I do also recognise the dangers of this. Good textual communication from me tends to be really quite logical and phrased very carefully. It's probably missing lots of emotional content. I can be quite lacking in coherence in person.
73. It is really important to me to be hugged and caressed a lot.
74. I really like Chinese food. I also like Japanese food, including sushi, but not wasabi.
75. If I cook for myself, at least 70% of the time it will involve pasta.
76. I have developed a fondness for tiny pasta bows (farfalline) which are really supposed to be used in soup.
77. I used to think I was really quite satisfactorily attractive, and never really thought about it. Then I put on some weight and spent 18 months being told I had a big nose, and this has left its mark. I am now quite pathetically grateful for compliments about my appearance.
78. My LJ username is Japanese for 'torchlight'; which word I discovered when looking up equivalents of my first name in Japanese.
79. An equivalent of my first two names is 'Hikari Kagayaki' which means 'light, brightness'.
80. I really enjoy languages, and have studied French, Latin, Biblical Greek and Spanish in a formal setting, and Romanian, Japanese and a little Esperanto outside it.
81. I was really, really bad at the Biblical Greek. Just don't go there.
82. I am way better at modern languages than at classical ones.
83. I am dying to learn Japanese. At the moment, I can say 'I am a crybaby', 'London is beautiful' and 'I am a second-year college student' none of which statements are actually true.
84. The Romanian was worse, though. At the time I was using it, I could understand a lot of basic words and could say a few simple sentences, but as for complex sentences, I ended up with 'Am doi copii, o fata si un baiat'.
85. Sadly, that means 'I have two children, a girl and a boy'. That's not true either.
86. I very much dislike being too cold. I get tense pains in the muscles of my abdomen, and shiver a lot.
87. I bite my nails. I've made one serious attempt to stop; then I think I had an exam or something and went right bat to square one within hours.
88. I really like chocolate, except white chocolate, and really dislike any sweet wholly or mostly composed of sugar.
89. I am well-known for being unpunctual. Lucytime is notorious. This annoys me but not enough for me to have really done anything about it yet.
90. I keep meaning to learn Perl, but haven't yet.
91. I like the sound of my own voice the way I hear it, but hate the way it sounds to everyone else.*
92. The first album I bought (double cassette) was the Beatles 'blue' anthology.
93. Sometimes I write prose, but it's not very good. I can't write unless it's based on my own experience.
94. I do write sonnets, though. They happen infrequently - should you get one written for you you are a very special person indeed.
95. I love chocolate raisins and hate chocolate peanuts.
96. I considered becoming a nun around the age of 13.
97. I recently bought myself a hundred-year-old brown silk parasol. It's lovely.
98. I roleplay.
99. I like interesting underwear.
100. I feel as though I ought to have something absolutely enthralling for the last item, but I can't think of anything.

I can think of a lot more things I haven't said, though.