#and once in a blue moon someone would post an mlp base or an anime base

[gorillaxyz]

ohhh i should draw my s/i with him using anime bases YESSSSSSSS

[icarus-suraki]

weird asks: 4, 9, 15, 21, 40, 49, 61

Sorry for the late reply. My depression decided to sneak up behind me and steal my corpus callosum.

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?

I don't actually know, so I'm making this up based on what I recall... Bright but somewhat inattentive. Can't write a lowercase R in cursive to save her life (I got bad grades in handwriting all through 2nd grade). Sometimes anxious. Not a troublemaker at all; if she is disruptive, it's by accident more than by intent. Very creative and imaginative.

9. favorite smell in the summer?

There's this smell I'll come across in the evenings sometimes, especially when I'm driving home from work on these little country roads around here. I always thought it was clover, but I think it's maybe elderflower? It's sweet and floral, but not a "bright" sweetness; it's more of a dark floral, if that makes sense. Kind of low and evening-colored (that makes sense, right?). But it's fantastic to just find myself in a cloud of it on a humid evening. I will literally drive with my car windows open some nights just to smell it, it's that good.

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?

This is tricky because the things that I liked the most weren't books, per se. I absolutely loved Hamlet and King Lear (King Lear is always associated with the Led Zeppelin "Stairway to Heaven" poster--long story). And I absolutely loved T. S. Eliot's poems. Like, damn, this is so much better than the rhyme-rhyme-rhyme shit I'd seen before. Like, sir. Damn. That was all high school, though. College? Hmm... See, I was an English major so I read a lot (or claimed to have read a lot and just BS'd my way through the tests). Reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner was a Moment, in part because I realized that my mom had summarized the story for me when I was a kid. Same thing with Spencer's The Faerie Queene--I think I surprised my professor with that one. Once I hit post, I'll probably think of a bunch of others.

21. obsession from childhood?

Oof. That depends on what age we're talking about here. Because Sesame Street was a big one when I was very small, then Muppet Babies when I got a little older. Any Muppet thing mesmerized me, according to my mom (I still love them). I loved playing dress-up (let's be honest: I still do, only I call it cosplay now) and dancing and playing pretend (and I still do). I drew constantly--especially bleeding hearts flowers, but also anthropomorphic animals in elaborate outfits and these creatures I called alligator birds. My Little Pony toys were everywhere in my house growing up--the original MLP, the good MLP. That was definitely still going strong in elementary school. I was really into A Wrinkle in Time and most of the other Madeline L'Engle books in about 4th grade onward. 6th grade I was hung up on blue-and-gold celestial designs (it was the 1990s) and everything purple. I got ahold of a really basic AM/FM cassette Walkman about this time and I discovered that there was actually Good Music in the world, not just children's music and I got so obsessed with just what you could find on the radio. I used up so many batteries and just wore out headphones and it was wonderful. I know somewhere in this span I started reading the Elfquest comics (n.b.: I was probably too young but I only realize that now) and got really into wolves and the particular version of elves that Wendy and Richard Pini created (I would shank someone for a chance to meet them) and did a lot of drawing of Wendy Pini's style of elves. I think I discovered anime by way of Sailor Moon when I was about 12 or 13 (and that's still an obsession) and started drawing anime-style characters A Lot. Somewhere in middle school, some friends and I started doing text-based RP via email, which sounds bizarre but we sure did it and it was very Mary Sueful but we had fun. I started writing a lot in and around then--maybe 7th, 8th grade? Mostly fantasy and, of course, lots of Mary Sues (but I really think that the Sue Stage is an important developmental stage, truly). I got sent a quiz by a friend in about 7th or 8th grade that was supposed to determine if you were a "starseed" and that got me into UFOs and Atlantis and ESP and some New Age-y stuff, which was actually a lot of fun (bless my mom for tolerating that). And since I was getting bullied a bit at this point in my life, maybe it was good that I had this "I'm special, I'm actually from another planet and I am important there" thing to hang on to. I know I was super-obsessed with the computer games Myst and Riven about this time--to the point of writing self-insert fanfiction. The hyper-religiosity (mainstream religion, mostly variations of Protestant Christianity) period among myself and my friends was no fun, but there we were, and I guess that counts as an obsession. There are theories that this developmental period is some of the background to the Salem Witch Trials, but I digress. I guess that gets me up to about high school. So, how's that?

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?

I mean, I guess there were always the bomb threats that made us all evacuate the school and hang around outside for a while. I didn't witness it, but I heard that once the cops brought drug dogs through the school and this one kid jumped up, grabbed his backpack, and ran out of the school and into the woods nearby because he had a bong in his backpack. There were the kids who'd stage a fight in the courtyard of the school so everyone would come running over and then their friends would throw water balloons on the crowd. There was this one girl who told people she was from another planet, and that was weird (me. that was me.). I dunno, I don't know of anything really weird happening at my school, in any grade. It was pretty quiet.

49. what saying or quote do you live by?

"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?" --Tuco, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?

That's a tough one... It might be "the heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit" which comes from the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses.