7 Quirky Things Meme

[adelynne]

I got tagged by hamsterwoman last week. Perhaps it's a quirk that it took me so long to come up with quirks.

1) List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself
2) Tag seven people to do the same.
3) Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you want to tag whoever wants to do it.

1. I go on binges - food, social, books, papers - of intense concentration. When I'm not on a binge I can still do these things well, but it's not the same as the amazing clarity and focus when I'm "on." Part of the problem with editing/writing the novels now is that I haven't been "on" a writing related binge in more than a year. I have the same thing with certain games - spider solitaire or arkenoid - and I visualize the game as I fall asleep when it's really bad.

2. When I get a song stuck in my head I can listen to it on loop for a good, long time before I get tired of it and it leaves.

3. I'm naturally a social person who has a learned response of being extremely shy. When I was much younger (less than 10) I was very outgoing and my cousin (who stuttered) would ask me to make friends for the both of us. But when I got to America I was ostracized by my peers due to funny accent and a lack of designer clothing, so I kept my mouth shut and stayed away from the center spotlight. This results in my being incredibly hard to talk to the first couple of times, but very eager to make friends thereafter. A couple years ago I learned that being quiet and keeping to oneself can often result in worse problems than speaking up and saying something stupid, so every time I'm in a situation where there are a lot of people I don't know I take a few deep breaths, find a conversation I'm vaguely interested in, and try to join in.

4. I think I might have kept a great salon, had I been born at the right time. I love nothing more than to have my friends around a big table having just eaten a good meal and drunk a good bit of their alcohol of choice, all talking loudly and debating the merits of Transformers and other Saturday morning cartoons. I can't really participate in the conversation - having gotten to the States too late and being a late riser - but I love just feeling the conversation rush over me.

5. I do have an accent, but it's a tiny one - the most undetectable in my family. People who've recently come from Ukraine can spot it with ease, down to the right city, which is impressive. The one time it really does pick up is when I switch from Russian to English - it fades from very noticeable when I start speaking English to barely there by the end of the sentence.

6. I love decor and trying to decorate my home, but I fear I have no taste to do it right. I seem to be doing well with the new place, though (which has a china cabinet!!). Now I'm only frustrated by the lack of expediency in the delivery of the pieces we've ordered. The housewarming is on Sunday and the sofa's not here yet!

7. When I get bored, I make lists of things to do. This often happens in class, and I get an odd joy from crossing off things I've done, so I sometimes write things to do from the morning that have already been accomplished just so I can cross them off. It keeps me organized, but it also leaves pieces of paper everywhere I find months later. In undergrad, my roommates would find my lists a semester later and be amused.

Now I tag buymeaclue, fuyu_no_fuhei, grailquestion, lareinenoire, mrsix, lunaratu, and solnishka.

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

My binges do also extend to other things than food -- especially games. I generally avoid exposing myself to video games now, because I used to sit there for hours a day, days upon days, playing a PC version of those old arcade games, and I would fall asleep to the vision of little green spiders bouncing in front of my eyes, and dream of the little buggers, too.

Remind me, how old were you when you moved to the US? And which city/area did you move to? (I guess I was lucky -- SF has such a huge population of immigrants, kids don't seem to think funny accents are that big a deal, or lack of designer clothes, for that matter -- in public school, anyway. It hadn't even occurred to me that an accent could be a problem... :(

I did go through my own extrovert --> painfully shy conversion when I was about six. Nobody was ever able to figure out *why*... I still tend to be rather quiet/reserved when meeting people for the first time -- I think I've finally figured out that it's not shyness anymore that's behind that, but observation time and figuring out how best to act with a particular group of people -- and once I've figured that out, there's no shutting me up once more.

I have a small remnant of an accent, too -- I can hear it, especially if I'm feeling self-conscious (one reason I kind of hate reading aloud in English, especially poetry), and some people say they can hear it (though usually not identify it -- it comes across as "trace of generic European accent"). When I switch between Russian and English, there is sometimes that transition period, but, even more oddly, when I do a lot of switching back and forth, my vowels get all confused -- they don't sound like either Russian *or* English vowels, but some weird refugees from a Scandinavian language, with umlauts and stuff. And then my husband mocks me. :)

[adelynne.livejournal.com]

I was almost 8 and I moved to super-rural Ohio (not quite farms, though no sidewalks). The first place we lived was actually immigrant-heavy, but when I was 10 my parents bought a house and we changed school districts to the more snobby place. I might have been the only person who spoke Russian in my entire class from the time I got there to the time I graduated.

I actually like my accent now. I wish I could hear it, though, because I can't. And I wish I could make it more pronounced intentionally, but I can't do that either.

Doyle mocks me whenever we come across a word in conversation that I clearly read before I ever heard. I never pronounce those right, and it takes several attempts to learn.

[zayichik.livejournal.com]

It is from you, dear Janie, that I learned the joy of crossing things off a list. Every single damn day you'd make a list and cross things off, like "get breakfast", "go to class", "pick my nose". I now do it too.

And yeah, my mom made the observation very early on in our living arrangement back in 2001 that you seem to be the social center.

[adelynne.livejournal.com]

Ex-nay on the rl nickname in this journal-ay. ;)

Well, what can I say? I'm addicting. Like crack.