7 posts tagged “qotd”
What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?
1. The New Yorker
Have for years, probably always will. My favorite magazine by a long shot. I try to read it every week, and often it's the only non-academic reading I do. It's also my only source of really in-depth foreign policy analysis.
2. Time Out NY
It's only $10/year and the best for newcomers to NYC.
3. Entertainment Weekly
I love this magazine and although it's kind of expensive, it's so snarky and entertaining. I barely even have time to watch TV or go to the movies and EW keeps me up to date with all things popcult related.
Other magazines that I like: Wired, Zink, the Economist, Harpers, the Atlantic, none of which I have time to read.
What are your favorite and least favorite words? Any reasons why?
Question submitted by Byrne.
Great question!!
Favorite words:
* Supercilious
* Conversant
* Problematic / problematize (business-speak/academic jargon)
* A billion more I can't think of right now
My favorite Spanish word is "azafata" which means "stewardess", IIRC from 7th grade Spanish.
Least favorite words
* "Make Love" (ok, that's a phrase)
* Cuddle
So I'm a big cold bitch with a heart of ice, okay? At least I have an excellent vocabulary.
What was your favorite candy when you were a kid? How does that compare to now?
I was a big fan of Gummi Bears and still am. I was kind of a glutton as a kid, especially 7th-8th grade where I was pretty chunky, and my mom would bring home entire pounds of gummi bears from the supermarket and I'd devour them all while sitting in my room writing in my diary and taping Depeche Mode songs off the radio. EMO! Although there was no such thing then.
Now I try to stay away from candy, but I still eat way too much of it. Given my druthers, I pick Twix over everything else. But pretty much any kind of candy works for me.
I grew up in suburban Westchester county. in the US, your grasp of American history is strongly dependent on where you grew up. For example, in New England American history consists primarily of all events leading up to, and including, the Revolutionary War. This is mostly because walking down the street to the church graveyard to do grave rubbings of fallen Revolutionary soldiers is a much cheaper field trip than anything else. This seems to be fairly standard: my friend Sydney grew up in Alabama where the war was referred to as "The War of Northern Aggression", whereas my friends in the Pacific Northwest spent an inordinant amount of time on Lewis and Clark.
Anyway, the field trips that I can remember clearly are:
1. The Natural History Museum in NYC
2. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC (My parents took us here, so I guess it is not really an official field trip, but it was so my brother could do research for his sixth grade project on James Rosenquist, and I remember it very clearly).
3. The police station (woohoo)
4. The nuclear power plant (Indian Point)
5. A LOT of Revolutionary War-related sites, including graveyards, road markers, broken down old houses, and "George Washington Slept Here" plaques on hotels
And then we did a trip to an outdoorsy place called Hillside in fifth grade, which was a big deal because it was a week, and you spent the whole year on Orienteering and Spelunking. In seventh grade you did Nature's Classroom, which was the same thing but worse, because seventh grade is worse than fifth grade, and in eighth grade you did the Washington Trip, which was awesome because you stayed in HOTELS and got to go to the Smithsonian and the Air and Space Museum and all the monuments (and you could shop. I do remember tearing up when I saw the Declaration of Independence, probably due to all the colonial American history I had been exposed to as a child). By ninth grade we were going on band trips to Virginia Beach which were just an excuse to go screw around on the beach for a week.
But the most memorable was one that my sixth grade Gifted & Talented class did, where we went to New York, ate at the Hard Rock Cafe, one girl got her hair cut at Vidal Sassoon, and I'm sure at some point we did something that had some educational value, but I'm not sure what. Oh, I think it was the Museum of TV, Radio and Film, which is awesome, but is in Queens.
What's the oldest digital camera photo you have on your computer? When is it from? Let's see it!
I actually am using my work computer and have no photos, but I did discover an ancient photo album on Yahoo! last year, so here's a few from there. This one is from New Year's Eve 1999.
That's Adam, me, and Joel on Shirley's couch in her old apartment.
Here's one from a few months later (2000 sometime), when I had the classic Bettie Page that was so popular that year:
Shirley's kitchen at a "rock star" party. Stephanie is getting married in Sept. to the same guy she was dating in this picture (six years ago!), Angel is married now and I was her bridesmaid in her wedding this spring. And I still have dyed black hair with bangs, although thankfully not curled under like that. And I would never wear a ringer shirt from Delia*s.
I can't really say that I hobnob with particularly famous crowds. I know a lot of indie musicians, but that's hardly saying much if you lived in Seattle for any length of time. I did meet and hang out with Kim Deal when I was a junior in college, though, and that remains to this day probably my most memorable and braggable experience.
I'm in Austin right now, so minimal books:
The new War Fiction issue of the New Yorker
Counting Sheep by Paul Martin, about sleep
and at home I'm slowly, slowly working my way through Arundhati Roy's "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire", which I may or may not ever finish.
