![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. These were given to me by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chomiji.
community theater.
That's really just the one company-- the only community theatre I'd been involved with previously was at the ashram.
This is the classic example of the chance occurrance that changes lives. Fourteen years ago I went to a job fair, and the Virginia Avenue Project hired me as their stage manager. They liked my work and hired me again, and I kept saying yes. The point when I consciously realized that the company was important to me was when I began telling regular jobs I applied to that I would require time off to do VAP shows, and if that would be a problem for them, I didn't want the job.
I buy the kids books and give them tours of the booth. They flop down next to me in fields and watch for shooting stars. They grow older, notice they're taller than me, go to college. They only see me a couple times a year, but I'm always there. I'm still there.
children's literature
When I was a child, I loved books more than anything else in the world, except maybe animals. Now that I'm older and love so many things, it's rarer for a book to completely entrance me the way nearly everything did when I was a child. But when I re-read those books, or occasionally read a new one, that same quality of love and longing returns. (Or not, in some cases.)
I still love Mary Calhoun's The House of Thirty Cats, Lois Duncan's Down a Dark Hall and Hotel for Dogs, Alison Uttley's Sam Pig and Tim Rabbit series, Noel Streatfeild's Shoes books, Willo Davis Roberts' The Girl With Silver Eyes, L. M. Montgomery's Emily series (better than Anne, I thought even then), and many books I have never been able to find again: The Peacock Garden by Anita Desai, a "secret garden" story in which a Muslim girl hides from Partition violence in a walled mosque, and makes it her solitary paradise; books about tigers, a good little rakshasa named Dariba, and another about a brother and sister named Sudhir and Shailie, who are threatened by a jackal-headed man and must find their lost father.
Maybe some day I'll find them.
writing
Published or not, writing and storytelling is what makes me me. If I don't have an audience or a pen, I craft sentences and stories to myself inside my head. If you could see the metaphoric shape of my soul, it would be a pen and paper, or maybe just a blizzard of detached words, like the mushi-words that escape from the books in the "Sea of Brushes" episode of Mushishi.
weirdness magnet
See the "it could only happen to Rachel" tag. Possibly also the "be a fireman" and "eldritch horrors" tags.
I really can't explain this. Some of it is that I can make a small incident into a good story. Some is that I pay attention. Some is that I am posssessed of both a 'satiable curiosity and not a lot of fear of death. Some is that I used to live in India and now live in LA, and neither of those are boring staid places where nothing weird ever happens.
None of that explains the Tokyo pole-kisser, or the date who wanted to set the world record for jumping out of a plane without a parachute, or the SUV that just happened to burst into flames and explode when I was driving by or the many other car fires I've seen, or the Whole Foods juice incident, or the many peculiar moments I never got around to writing up. The first time I was showing Yoon LA, we were stopped at a crowded street when an Ent casually walked by.
I don't believe in God, but this sort of thing almost kind of makes me. Because if I suddenly landed in a comparatively normal life, I'd miss the hell out of the one I have.
India
The source of more conflicted feelings than anything else in my life but romantic relationships. I love it and hate it, I get angry and defensive when outsiders insult it, I keep having to remind myself that I'm an outsider too, I wish I'd never been brought up there, I wish I had been brought up there but under better circumstances (in a city, in a town with other foreign children, not in an ashram), I wish I'd actually been brought up in the culture instead of in the cultural bubble of the ashram that left me baffled by both mainstream Indian and my own US Jewish culture, I wish I'd left speaking fluent Marathi, I wish I'd known to bring my books with me when I left because I've never been able to find them again, I spent years literally trying to block out its memories from my mind, I wish I could remember it better, I'm glad I remember it as well as I do.
chomiji.community theater.
That's really just the one company-- the only community theatre I'd been involved with previously was at the ashram.
This is the classic example of the chance occurrance that changes lives. Fourteen years ago I went to a job fair, and the Virginia Avenue Project hired me as their stage manager. They liked my work and hired me again, and I kept saying yes. The point when I consciously realized that the company was important to me was when I began telling regular jobs I applied to that I would require time off to do VAP shows, and if that would be a problem for them, I didn't want the job.
I buy the kids books and give them tours of the booth. They flop down next to me in fields and watch for shooting stars. They grow older, notice they're taller than me, go to college. They only see me a couple times a year, but I'm always there. I'm still there.
children's literature
When I was a child, I loved books more than anything else in the world, except maybe animals. Now that I'm older and love so many things, it's rarer for a book to completely entrance me the way nearly everything did when I was a child. But when I re-read those books, or occasionally read a new one, that same quality of love and longing returns. (Or not, in some cases.)
I still love Mary Calhoun's The House of Thirty Cats, Lois Duncan's Down a Dark Hall and Hotel for Dogs, Alison Uttley's Sam Pig and Tim Rabbit series, Noel Streatfeild's Shoes books, Willo Davis Roberts' The Girl With Silver Eyes, L. M. Montgomery's Emily series (better than Anne, I thought even then), and many books I have never been able to find again: The Peacock Garden by Anita Desai, a "secret garden" story in which a Muslim girl hides from Partition violence in a walled mosque, and makes it her solitary paradise; books about tigers, a good little rakshasa named Dariba, and another about a brother and sister named Sudhir and Shailie, who are threatened by a jackal-headed man and must find their lost father.
Maybe some day I'll find them.
writing
Published or not, writing and storytelling is what makes me me. If I don't have an audience or a pen, I craft sentences and stories to myself inside my head. If you could see the metaphoric shape of my soul, it would be a pen and paper, or maybe just a blizzard of detached words, like the mushi-words that escape from the books in the "Sea of Brushes" episode of Mushishi.
weirdness magnet
See the "it could only happen to Rachel" tag. Possibly also the "be a fireman" and "eldritch horrors" tags.
I really can't explain this. Some of it is that I can make a small incident into a good story. Some is that I pay attention. Some is that I am posssessed of both a 'satiable curiosity and not a lot of fear of death. Some is that I used to live in India and now live in LA, and neither of those are boring staid places where nothing weird ever happens.
None of that explains the Tokyo pole-kisser, or the date who wanted to set the world record for jumping out of a plane without a parachute, or the SUV that just happened to burst into flames and explode when I was driving by or the many other car fires I've seen, or the Whole Foods juice incident, or the many peculiar moments I never got around to writing up. The first time I was showing Yoon LA, we were stopped at a crowded street when an Ent casually walked by.
I don't believe in God, but this sort of thing almost kind of makes me. Because if I suddenly landed in a comparatively normal life, I'd miss the hell out of the one I have.
India
The source of more conflicted feelings than anything else in my life but romantic relationships. I love it and hate it, I get angry and defensive when outsiders insult it, I keep having to remind myself that I'm an outsider too, I wish I'd never been brought up there, I wish I had been brought up there but under better circumstances (in a city, in a town with other foreign children, not in an ashram), I wish I'd actually been brought up in the culture instead of in the cultural bubble of the ashram that left me baffled by both mainstream Indian and my own US Jewish culture, I wish I'd left speaking fluent Marathi, I wish I'd known to bring my books with me when I left because I've never been able to find them again, I spent years literally trying to block out its memories from my mind, I wish I could remember it better, I'm glad I remember it as well as I do.
Tags: