Six is a good number. Kind of forces me to think about which of the hundreds of songs I love most fall into top two through six. I rarely just sit down to listen to songs, for a couple of reasons - I didn't really discover music until I was about 22 and tend to forget it's a thing, I'm a very visual listener who can barely hear people over the phone without something to occupy my eyes (it's easier with the phone in my right ear, though) - but I do love music. I've got a rating scale that goes fine-good-great-masterpiece-archetype, that's a whole other thing that may wait until I start this music blog I've been thinking about. But you'll note the scale doesn't have any place for "bad" music.
But yeah. The #1 spot is reserved for The Awakening. This three-channel midi tune from a SNES game is, in my considered opinion, the greatest song in the world. Its base movement of thirty-three notes transport me to a world i discovered all on my own in the summer of '97. A wholly alien world, vast and strange and full of heartbreak and war and people trying, trying so hard to be near each other, to fill the holes in each other's lives, to repair the world, to stand up against the cruel, power-hungry rulers of the world. Okay, the song doesn't say a lot about that, although the collective 60 songs - at least 58 of which complete masterpieces - on the game's soundtrack might say something, so there's a little bit of confluence there. Helped by the confusion of several tracks using the same tune as The Awakening. See, "The Awakening" is the name of the theme of the main character Terra, but "Terra's Theme" is the name of the main theme of the game which is sort of a marching band version of The Awakening. And so on.
So, what else? Songs that have been on my mind (and my Youtube player) a lot in the last year include The River, Black Parade, Make Them Gold, Times they are A-changing and Lost on You. Obviously we're going to have to go over them one by one.
"The River" is the best example here of what I mean by the classification "archetype". It's not as good as "Born in the USA", but it does a slightly superior job of digging up a complete skeleton from the earth that's much older and bigger than any individual band. The story it tells is not universal, of course, but it's a story I think everyone can recognize and believe in and feel in their bones an ache of sympathy for. Get me drunk sometime and encourage me to invent some music for the song I wrote where the guy in "The River" and the girl in "Fast Car" meet each other.
The memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse?
Speaking of haunting things, these lyrics. Springsteen's simple valleysman character may not have the wit to avoid doubling down on the word "haunt", but then he goes around and asks the question of what is worse than lies? I don't know. I guess it's the unspeakable thing that his life has become. I love it. I've got chills.
On "Welcome to the Black Parade", as we speak I have the third book of Gerard Way's comic Umbrella Academy on the table behind me, from the library. Both that and my late discovery of My Chemical Romance may tell you how bad I was at being a teenager in the 1990s. I believe in most chat rooms on the Internet, randomly shouting "WHEN I WAS" will trigger an ironic nostalgia, but my love for the song is both recent and sincere. It seems earnest to me in its attempt to communicate a sense of youth, of importance, of ambivalent feeling towards one's father, and most of all raw, overwhelming emotion. It does some cool stuff with stylistic changes through the song. The music video with the sparse colors, the quasi-skellington costumes and the prevalence of more or less symbolic televisions, is such a highlight of the golden age of MTV. But beyond all half-assed rationale, I just like it. It's not the best song of all time or even in the top 100, but that's clearly not stopped me from listening to it day after day.
"Make Them Gold" on the other hand feels like a very constructive song to listen to. Its relentless positivity, the bright voices of the singers, the energy that can only be described as "upbeat", it's like health food for the ears. Funny, such an easy song to love seems to mean I don't have a lot to say about it.
"The Times they are A-changing", specifically done by Tracy Chapman, is similarly a lovely song with an important message, but painfully delivered. This I find irresistible. Probably the same reason I'm interrupting my third BoJack Horseman rewatch marathon to do this assignment. Why this cover? Well, Dylan wrote the song, there's no denying the genius of that, but listen to the way Chapman sings the words. I've not found one recording where Bob Dylan sings it like he means it. But Tracy Chapman sounds like she's thinking very carefully about what the song is saying and very specifically means every word of it.
Don't criticize what you can't understand, she says. I wonder how many times a black woman somewhere have had to choke back those words to survive; how many have been killed just for looking like she might want to say them. And I listen to this song and I realize Tracy Chapman knows the answer. She understands more than I. We're going to have to shut up and listen to her and try to learn.
"Lost on You", then. I don't know a thing about LP other than apparently she's determined that people should figure out she's a lesbian within ten seconds of seeing her. There are probably nuances in the very personal story the song tells that are, shall we say, lost on me. But it feels like a breakup song anyone who's formerly been in an intimate relationship can get behind. It's catchy, it's full of inventive sound, it's just incredibly well made. LP has the skill of someone who's been learning singing and musical theory from birth (okay, that's one more thing I know) combined with a creativity that I don't think can be learned, and it's just a pleasure to listen to her.
And to see her, sure. A trans lesbian can dream.
2: If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?
Vladimir Putin. Unarmed in a locked room with no witnesses.
I don't know, there are two wildly different ways to take this question: Who would be good for you to meet, or who would benefit from meeting you. I'm more inclined to the second one, which may be because I'm such an enlightened, giving person nobody has anything to teach me as much as I have things to teach them, or because I'm so introverted I don't know how to get anything out of a sit-down with a stranger that I couldn't get just as well if not better from reading their books et cetera.
Honestly, if there is a person I'd want to meet for my sake rather than their's (or the world's, in the case of Putin) it would be you, dear reader. The "dear reader" I picture in everything I write, a woman much like myself. So much like myself I want to imagine if we ever met and sat down and got a chance to get to know each other we'd take hold of each other and never let go. If you exist on this Earth, then, yeah, you're the one I would want to meet.
3: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17.
"anybody need one halfway up a church? It looked as if it was intended to lead"
Alan Moore likes his churches, I guess. This is a line in "Jerusalem" which I'm sort of dreading to read. It's 1266 pages in paperback. Tightly spaced!
4: What do you think about most?
My stories, probably. I've spent so many years halfway living in the head of Jenny Creed, immortal time travelling half-dragon superhero. The thousands of years she's lived in my imagination has sort of given me time to think very hard about a lot of stuff. Well, it could be just an effect of being without a social or professional life for a couple of decades.
But there is a distinct possibility I have something more. I look at the very pointedly enlightened, utopian spacefuture of "Star Trek", I look at the unimaginably ancient and wise Doctor Who, I look at "The Good Place"'s Team Cockroach after they have spent so many thousands of Jeremy Bearimys learning about what we owe to each other, and I think that's kid stuff. I look at the Dalai Lama's tweets and think it's adorable how he tries. Seriously. I'm glad that these people (and the people writing the fictional ones) are doing what they do because clearly people need to learn this stuff and I'm a terrible teacher myself. I don't know how to explain most of the things I've learned, and it's unbearable to me when I try to tell someone something and they don't get it. So I'm glad someone is doing something. It's just constantly shocking to me how these things are widely regarded as extraordinarily educational and possibly out of reach for the common man to understand when what they're saying is all just basic knowledge, self-evident, so deeply ingrained in my mind I have trouble verbalizing it.
And hence the need for me to try and put stuff down in the form of stories.
5: What does your latest text message from someone else say?
"I have to at least try to make things that way"
Boy that sounds dramatic. I'm not even going to give you the context, that'd ruin it.
6: Do you sleep with or without clothes on?
Funny story, I've slept in the nude from the day I came out as transgender. Somehow making it real that way immediately made me more comfortable with my body, in a small but profound way.
7: What’s your strangest talent?
Maybe my extremely vivid imagination. The dividends of which discussed previously. I'm never able to actually fool myself, thanks to Mom very carefully teaching me the difference between reality and make-believe so I wouldn't kill myself after she read "The Brothers Lionheart" to me. But though the things I imagine aren't real to me, they're as if they were real. The only differences being a) me knowing it's not really real and b) real things taking way more effort. I could easily spend my day in solipsistic fantasies of having boobs, except it would always be embarrassing to me to pretend I really believed it.
8: Girls… (finish the sentence); Boys… (finish the sentence)
Gender essentialism is bullshit. That's the end of both sentences.
9: Ever had a poem or song written about you?
No but I did have a caricature drawn of me with my made-up girlfriend in eight grade. By the class virtuoso artist and violinist, no less.
In a shocking turn of events, when I revealed in tenth grade I'd made up Sara it was I who learned nobody had believed in her for even a minute.
10: When is the last time you played the air guitar?
About eight hours ago. It had to do with watching "BoJack Horseman" while drunk.
11: Do you have any strange phobias?
When I get really freaked out by, say, Junji Ito comics, alone in the dark, I become terrified of windows and mirrors. It's pretty weird, because in both cases I am scared of what I might find looking back at me. The worst monsters my unbound imagination can conjure are monsters who "look at me from behind the glass". They don't do anything else. They can look awful, giant bloodthirsty beasts who stalk the second floor apartments or twisted images in the mirror who don't move like I do, but that's just the brain working to justify the fear it's feeling. The fear comes from the idea of being seen. Specifically through glass. It could be as simple as someone spooking me by passing outside a window when I was very little, I don't know. But it's weird how powerful that fear gets.
12: Ever stuck a foreign object up your nose?
I think the last time I did that I was five or six years old. I got a pea stuck in my nose and freaked the heck out and Mom had to teach me to blow my nose as hard as I could mid-panic. Exciting stuff huh.
13: What’s your religion?
Humanism. I believe in humanity because I'm sure that we need someone to believe in us. And because as far as we can see we are the only animals who can look up at the stars and wonder if there's something bigger there, and who can develop the tools to figure it out.
14: If you are outside, what are you most likely doing?
Most likely? Going to the grocery store. What I most like to do outside is wander, watch nature, watch people, and search for my "dear reader".
15: Do you prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it?
In front. I take terrible pictures. Never held a camera I couldn't make take nothing but blurry Dutch angle pictures.
16: Simple but extremely complex. Favorite band?
If there was only one band I could ever listen to again it would be Nobuo Uematso, who's probably a band or at least has one to play his compositions. He's done the single greatest song in the world, see above, and many hundreds of masterpieces beyond that. I could live without the works of every other musician, but not his.
So that was pretty simple.
17: What was the last lie you told?
"I'm not going to eat this in one sitting."
18: Do you believe in karma?
I don't believe there's some universal force that delivers the correct consequences for our actions, no. Evidence would suggest there is just us.
19: What does your URL mean?
ODAW stands for both "Of Dragon and Woman" and "Optic Drugs Attack Waffles", two webcomics I've tried to make now and then since 2004. You can tell I started this blog with an eye to this, and have been unable to change the URL even though "Of Dragon", the main project, has since become "Songs of Truth" and also pretty firmly a book. Without pictures. In Swedish.
"Optic Drugs" is still technically ongoing though. It's on a "whenever I think of a joke in a comic strip format I haven't used before" schedule.
20: What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength?
My greatest weakness is perfectionism. Well, it would sound less conceited to call it "fear of failure". Apparently this is one of four common affectional disorders, caused by parents not giving enough support for or feedback on your work during childhood. I would have liked to spend days discussing each of my Lego creations, I'm not saying I was an easy child to please, but no matter who's at fault, the fact remains that trying to do anything at all to me feels like trying to step off a tall building.
My strength on the other hand, I have to think about. It's probably my supple, light-footed, Legolas-like mind, capable of bending around most any subject it can conceive. I'm not afraid to think new thoughts, to challenge my most foundational beliefs, to question how I know what I know.
I smoked the ganja one time (let's say as a way to deal with my Mom's death) (this shocks my cousin every time I remind her of it), and I had a hilarious and heartwarming hallucination where I perceived every object in my field of vision to be visibly vibrating with the depth of its inherent meaning, and that meaning was love. Don't think I wasn't aware that I was hallucinating; but the hallucination was that all matter in the universe is made out of love.
But then I went to sleep in my brother's bed and slept right through my meeting with the town's only amateur theater group that I had only just managed to get signed in on. I was in the grip of a potent, chemically induced apathy. I could literally feel my capacity for empathy breaking down. And, to the point of this story, in the middle of this high I was able to reconstruct it. I very self-awarely built myself the ability to care about other people from scratch, because I decided it would make it worth getting out of bed.
That's one strength I have, at least. The power to change my mind.
21: Who is your celebrity crush?
I think Lupita Nyong'o. It's not that she's hot and cool and a skilled actor and quite a force for truth and justice, not that there's anything wrong with that, but something about her makes me want to just hold her in my arms and shield her from the evils of the world. Probably mostly an impression of her character in "12 years a slave".
One time I had a dream where somehow she was three years old and I was babysitting her with my grandparents. I think I had to maintain the secret that she was going to grow up to be a big movie star so the timeline wouldn't go wrong, but she just kept being adorable and a great actor - she jumped down into a barrel full of plush animals over and over to play out funny exaggerated death scenes - and I don't think people were buying it.
22: Have you ever gone skinny dipping?
Yes. By myself. Not much of a story huh.
23: How do you vent your anger?
I take hold of anger when appropriate - mostly when it's time to yell at racists on Twitter - and then I let it go. This is one of those things I've learned that are hard to explain, but I don't have some sort of anger tap that keeps flowing and builds up a reserve that needs to be vented, because that's not healthy. If you feel like you do have that you've probably trained your body to enjoy that "venting" and therefore trained it to produce more of those brain chemicals that make you feel anger. The body gets better at whatever you do with it and stuff.
24: Do you have a collection of anything?
A vast library of music, books, movies and videogames probably counts. But more personally, I have a collection of weird little things. A yellow and white mouse made of rubber, about 3 centimeters tall. A huge coin with some medieval artwork and Latin words about S:t George, made of something that may be aluminium. A small metal cross with one arm ending in a big clear blue sphere. That sort of thing.
25: Do you prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online?
I prefer sending coded messages through ring signals like a secret agent. For instance, you could call and let it ring for ten seconds, break for twenty seconds and call for ten seconds more to signal "Dinner at my place tonight?" Cheap and amusing. Alas, no one of the two people I call can be bothered to sit down with me and develop even the most rudimentary system.
So, video calling would probably be better for me considering the concentration it takes to listen to someone I can't see. Don't know why I've never looked into it.
26: Are you happy with the person you’ve become?
No. I'm a work in progress.
27: What’s a sound you hate; sound you love?
I hate the sound of the alarm clock I had in school. Yes, twenty years later I still hate it. It made a brutal, rasping sound of static that was so irritating I got in the habit of leaping out of bed, with my heart in my throat, to turn it off the second it clicked to turn on.
And I love the sound of a cello. (I also love pronouncing it in Swedish, "sello" rather than "tjello".) It has been said it's the instrument closest to the human voice, which even though it's a skree and not a doot instrument I feel is true. (Did you know the four types of instrument are skree, doot, bang and bleep instruments?) I like to watch "Hero" just to listen to the background music. How can one describe what a cello does? It's a sound that's as comfortable in your ears as in your throat. You feel good humming along. There's been studies showing singing in a choir is the single most relaxing group activity there is, hitting directly on those evolutionary brain lumps that feel good when we're doing stuff with other people. Harmonizing with a cello or two is a lot like that probably, but without the need for words.
28: What’s your biggest “what if”?
What if I had been born with genitals matching my mental map of my body?
It's a whole thing. I've got this elaborate, indulgent fantasy about growing up more comfortable with my body, better trained to socialize with people and be aware of their needs and feelings. I'm raised with the expectation to "work" to accomplish stuff rather than "be a genius". I become friends with this girl I spend a lonely morning with building a snow fort outside the school entrance, instead of never speaking to her again in fear and confusion over children's idea of what relationship men and women are supposed to have.
I'm allowed to have honest, fulfilling relationships with other people without also having sex with them. I'm encouraged to help my family keep our house and little farm together and we never move into the city. Curious about people and not just books, I end up a single mother at sixteen. When the house gets too small for Mom, Stepdad, my brothers, my twins and me I end up taking over it, as I'm the only one who actually really wanted to live in the country. Comfortable with the staggeringly low rent and my stable disability benefits and a little under the table business renting out the garage to neighbors and doing web design, I lead a humble and happy life close to the dirt, nice and quiet except for Midsummer and Christmas when the large extended family gets together here, not that I particularly like the stress but they do take care of everything for me so it's not that bad.
Almost a paradise, until the twins reveal to me their classmate is getting abused by her daddy and I walk into town one night and stick a knife in his throat. A perfect crime, nobody suspects the kindly old maid who wouldn't even have the means, living without a car out in the country and all. And I can offer a space to the widow since our kids are friends and all and I certainly have room to spare and she discovers the joy of the country life and also women, and we live happily ever after.
Well, that's the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written.
29: Do you believe in ghosts? How about aliens?
How about alien ghosts? I don't know what these things have to do with each other. One supposes an afterlife which, against all available evidence, is in evidence in this world; the other supposes that out of the unimaginably large number of stars in the unimaginably large number of galaxies in the impossibly large known universe - and beyond, in the unknown - there is more than one that has produced life.
30: Stick your right arm out; what do you touch first? Do the same with your left arm.
A red bull can, a balcony door.
31: Smell the air. What do you smell?
Just my usual apartment smell. Might get more interesting when the Estradiol begins to take effect.
32: What’s the worst place you have ever been to?
I've been to an orphanage in Russia (1996) and I've been to the Salvation Army in Corpus Cristi, Texas (2001) and I'd sooner go back to Russia.
33: Choose: East Coast or West Coast?
Of North America? The west coast is where most of the people I know live, so.
34: Most attractive singer of your opposite gender?
Leonard Cohen.
35: To you, what is the meaning of life?
When I was 14 I decided it was to make people laugh. Now I'd say "To enable as many people as possible to do what they want, go where they want and be where they want". Creating possibilities for more people to figure out what they're living for, simply.
36: Define Art.
Oh boy we're trying to get deep now huh? I think art is anything that makes us proud to be humans. It can be the work of the hands that paint the sunset, the brain that inscribes meaning and draws inspiration from the sunset, or the heart that aches at the beauty of the sunset.
37: Do you believe in luck?
I think that's just a question of semantics. There are forces beyond any person's influence that directs the course of her life for good or bad, that's not a question of belief, just observable fact. If you shuffle a pack of cards and draw some good ones you can call that luck, or chaos theory, or magic, or probability. I don't see why you should worry about what it's called as much as understanding what you do understand and don't understand about this process.
38: What’s the weather like right now?
Too much snow, too cold to live.
39: What time is it?
2020:02:05:13:01. Let's see if everyone can work out which of these numbers is the month.
40: Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed?
I do not. I crashed a go-cart once in a way that told me I can't be trusted to keep my attention on the road.
41: What was the last book you read?
I'm currently halfway through the "Good Omens" script book. The last book I finished for the first time was "Record of a Spaceborn Few", by Becky Chambers. A funny and sad and earnest and hopeful look at humanity's future.
42: Do you like the smell of gasoline?
It has its moments. There's a certain mood for it. Breathless, bright, destructive energy. Hot, violent, chemical lifeforce. When you think about it the guzzoline is literal life-force, once living carbon based organisms compressed and refined to a state of almost pure energy. Of course it's unhealthy, basically inimical to life as we know it. Everything is bad if you have too much of it. It's a fire that only breaks. It's the idea of getting drunk, but taken up to eleven. Yes, gasoline smell has a certain romance to it. A bad boy kind of romance.
43: Do you have any nicknames?
Never had any I liked. Since I changed my name I've gotten a few "Ams" which seems okay.
44: What was the last film you saw?
Funny since you mentioned gasoline just now, it was "Mad Max Fury Road". Movie of the decade if you ask me. It's so dense with good stuff it's almost overplayed to reference all the kabillion articles that's already been written about it, but honestly, it is super hard to try and say anything new about it. I could watch it every day but it's hard to find the time.
45: What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had?
Well there was the time when I was born with an inside out vagina. But okay, I once got something like a cyst in my thumb bone and broke it like a twig. It was such an easy break no one believed it was broken, and my parents wanted me to sleep off the extra joint in my thumb so they wouldn't have to be at hospital all night. Had to get the thumb opened up and repaired with a piece of bone from my hip.
46: Have you ever caught a butterfly?
Depending on your definition of "catch". I had one living in my apartment for what seemed like most of last summer. Just the risk of having all you windows open all the time. It mostly sat in the least bright corner of the hallway ceiling.
47: Do you have any obsessions right now?
This endless quiz, "BoJack Horseman", writing my book. Those are the most prominent right now.
48: What’s your sexual orientation?
I like the ladies. I likes my women like I likes my coffee, sentient and electing to be part of my life by their own free will.
49: Ever had a rumour spread about you?
I've spent ten years fighting with fascists on Twitter. I've had the most banal, blatantly made up, hilariously offensive rumors imaginable told about me to my face. But no, as far as I know, no serious people have ever been telling things about me that haven't been true.
50: Do you believe in magic?
Depends on what you mean. What Grant Morrison calls "imagination technology" and what James Randi studies with the scientific rigor of the sun studying water on its surface are very different things. I believe it would be ridiculous to blindly embrace or dismiss poorly understood science as "magic", and I believe the best word to describe the process of mental discipline involved in changing your mind with intention and self-awareness, as discussed previously, is magic.
51: Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong?
No. I'm more interested in what people will do than what they have done.
52: What is your astrological sign?
Scorpio. One of my favorite jokes is taking any given horoscope and going "This describes me perfectly, and it's not even my sign!"
It's funny because it's always true.
53: Do you save money or spend it?
I think the question you're looking for is "do you make enough money to be able to save any?" I don't, really. Most of what I can put away is money I get from my dad on my birthday and Christmas. I don't make enough on disability to get any credit whatsoever. Been trying to save up for a trip to Iceland for the 2026 solar eclipse for a couple of years, but it's looking like my best bet is to become a rich and famous author before then.
54: What’s the last thing you purchased?
I guess that'd be a Patreon subscription to a Twitch streamer/model/fantastic person I know a little bit.
55: Love or lust?
Sure.
56: In a relationship?
I wish.
57: How many relationships have you had?
Nope. I mean none.
58: Can you touch your nose with your tongue?
Only if I bend my nose with my finger. Big nose, comically inflexible tongue.
59: Where were you yesterday?
Pretty sure I didn't leave home.
60: Is there anything pink within 10 feet of you?
Well, this giant, mace-like novelty lollipop has some pink on it.
61: Are you wearing socks right now?
Yes. It's too cold not to. I hate it. I'm always barefoot if I can.
62: What’s your favourite animal?
Octopuses. They're cuddly and have a bizarre set of powers and an even more bizarrer intelligence. I'm writing one story about a girl who gets superpowers from a bite from a radioactive octopus and one story with an octopus that's both a Druid's animal companion and a Sorceress's familiar, and I don't think I'm done yet.
63: What is your secret weapon to get someone to like you?
The Norwegian saying "Love without honesty is sentimentality, and honesty without love is cruelty". I try to treat people with both love and honesty. I don't know if it's working.
64: Where is your best friend?
About 400 meters to the right and behind me, and a couple of floors down.
65: Give me your top 5 favourite blogs on Tumblr.
medievalpoc.tumblr.com, animalssittingoncapybaras.tumblr.com, one-time-i-dreamt.tumblr.com/, livebloggingmydescentintomadness.tumblr.com/ and tehamelie.tumblr.com/. They probably speak for themselves best.
66: What is your heritage?
A quarter Danish, a quarter Finnish and mostly Swedish, with some possibly apocryphal Russian roots. I've seen a family tree that goes back to the 1600s. I'm telling you this so you don't think I actually just don't know when I tell you that I don't care.
67: What were you doing last night at 12AM?
Watching BoJack Horseman, drinking whiskey. It's been an ongoing effort for several weeks to try and adjust my sleeping schedule to stay awake past 8 pm and last night was a leap forward, so I'm happy about that.
68: What do you think is Satan’s last name?
Are we talking about Satan the tempter of forbidden knowledge, Lucifer the rebel or the Devil who reflects the worst of humanity, or some conflation of some or all of those characters who usually fall under the name? Okay, I don't think any of them have a last name, I just wanted to share this fun fact.
69: Be honest. Ever gotten yourself off?
Yeah, well, I've basically done everything by myself since I was about twelve. If I didn't handle my own business, no one would.
70: Are you the kind of friend you would want to have as a friend?
I really want to believe that, but I don't have enough friends to know for sure.
71: You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do?
In this hypothetical scenario I have a private sector job in the USA and I'm about three bad days away from being homeless? It's not like I can really understand the desperate circumstances of being at risk of being fired, but I can imagine that means the dog is fucked. But I have actually arranged my real life so that I'm always free to stop and help people in need. I'd probably save the dog even though I couldn't keep it in my hypoallergenic neighborhood.
72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid?
Yes, probably write like I'm going to die in a month, and definitely.
73: You can only have one of these things; trust or love.
Well I do have both of those, and I can tell you you cannot have love without trust. It's a fool's errand. Choose trust and you might have something from which love can grow. Choose trust and even if you're magically prevented from ever feeling love and you will at least have that one.
74: What’s a song that always makes you happy when you hear it?
So many. Even the sad ones. I love music, and so much of it is so good. I'll go with an unpopular opinion: Creed - Arms Wide Open. It's much harder to make a happy song interesting than a sad one. Put this next to let's say Hurt and tell me Mr Cash looking back at a long life of pain and betrayal doesn't make it much easier on himself when he wants to tug at your heartstrings than this little baby-face whatshisname does waxing cliches about being young and pregnant and full of hope.
75: What are the last four digits in your cell phone number?
Speaking of interesting, about the only thing I can say about those digits is that they involve my birth year. I figured that'd make it easier to memorize it. Still took me three or four phones to do that.
76: In your opinion, what makes a great relationship?
Love and honesty. *wink*
77: How can I win your heart?
Honestly (hehe) I'd be head over heels for you if I just got the idea that you liked me in any way.
78: Can insanity bring on more creativity?
Sure, but more creativity is not very useful in producing more or better creative work. Creativity is the spark in the darkness. It's not the matchstick, it's not the striking board on which you kindle it, it's not the candle, neither wick nor wax; it's not the heat of the flame nor the light. Just the ignition. The motion from inert matter to thermal reaction. The moment the fire comes to life. The spark.
79: What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far?
Telling people I'm transgender.
80: What size shoes do you wear?
45. That's not the largest you can possibly get in regular store, but large enough that I'm used to settling for what shoes they have.
81: What would you want to be written on your tombstone?
"How do you know what you know?"
82: What is your favourite word?
Probably "fantasi". It's Swedish for "imagination", but it also means fantasy as in the genre and fantastic as in reality-defying.
Imagination is the sole thing in the entire universe we can be really sure exists, you know.
83: Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word; heart.
This quote by some dead white man: "The heart has its reasons, that reason cannot know."
84: What is a saying you say a lot?
"The vague promise of restoring the nation's lost glory is the fourth item on Eco Umberto's list of fourteen things all fascist movements have in common." That one's gotten a lot of mileage since someone started saying "Make America great again".
85: What’s the last song you listened to?
Stop me if you've heard this one before. Once in the Nineties I was in a very famous TV show
86: Basic question; what’s your favourite colour/colours?
If I'm painting it'll usually be with the red-yellow spectrum, or the green-blue (with shades of yellow). Actually I can just show you.
87: What is your current desktop picture?
I can show you that too!
Vladimir Putin, obviously.
89: What would be a question you’d be afraid to tell the truth on?
Depends on if Russian intelligence is listening.
90: One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do?
Go nuts with my mace-sized novelty lollipop, probably.
91: You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power?
Gravity manipulation. With some practice, flying and bending time would be the least of what I could do.
92: You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?
If it's just experiencing the same thing again, I can already do that. My recall may not be total, but my imagination can fill in the gaps very handily. If I can change things, there isn't really any point in my life where doing things differently for half an hour would make a lasting difference. Not for the better. Tearing things down is easier, of course. But I guess I'd go back to the winter of '86 and write a letter to my Mom. Predicting Chernobyl and Olof Palme's assassination will be enough to establish my credibility and I can look up lottery numbers to make us rich and warn her that I'm transgender and Autistic and that she's going to die of a bleeding ulcer in 2012 and some stuff like that. There are a lot of ways to leverage information from the future in thirty minutes with a little planning.
I don't imagine that's the spirit of the question though. More like, what would be most worthwhile to experience again? That might probably be a sleepover I had with my cousin in about 2004. Such things we talked about, and most of what I remember is the feeling of branching off in our conversation tree and forgetting things I wanted to say.
93: You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?
Well, now I'm imagining a world in which 9/11 never happened. No war on terror, no explosion in terrorism, no rise of Daesh, probably. It was a massive freak accident they managed to pull it off, I believe there's a good chance erasing that one incident will keep anything on nearly that scale from happening to give the US imperialist machine an excuse to go into high gear.
Unless we're only talking about erasing "my experience". There's a curious conversation to be had about the physical component of memories, i.e. if I erase the experience of poking myself on a broken glass my body go back to its original shape? Then the glass can't have been broken, can it? That would create a paradox where the glass shard occupies the same point in spacetime as my foot. Experiences don't occur in a vacuum. Memories have physical substance. (Fun fact, a byte of data weighs in the neighborhood of a large virus or a molecule of plastic.)
And anyway I wouldn't erase a single memory if I could.
94: You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be?
I'll go with "whoever wants me".
95: You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?
The moon. By the Apollo 11 landing site specifically. Wait, there was no mention of a return trip. Then I can't afford to go anywhere.
96: Do you have any relatives in jail?
Not that I know. In my family I'd probably be voted the one most likely to go to jail.
97: Have you ever thrown up in the car?
A bus, once. I ate way too many cookies out of boredom.
98: Ever been on a plane?
Like ten times.
99: If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say?
"There's one question I'd like each of you to ask yourselves every day: Why do I know what I know?"
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