Things about me...
May. 2nd, 2009 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
...that I will probably never discuss here again.
I keep my fannish stuff and my real life stuff pretty firmly separated. But I thought (as you do) that maybe some context would be appropriate. So, some things that will never feature in my dreamwidth bio, because I am never going to talk about them, but which are important to me, or possibly important to know about me.
I'm thirtyish. My friends who have also turned thirtyish this year have decided that we are going to remain thirtyish until circumstances demand otherwise. We may reevaluate at 35ish, or hold off until 40ish. 40ish seems old.
Most of my career since college has been working for nonprofit organizations (charities, if you will, or non-governmental organizations, but I specifically worked for ones based in the US, and organized as such under the US tax code). I am passionate about access to housing and housing choice, which may or may not be code for low-income housing, shelters, and transitional housing. I have never been a crazy eco-hippie, nor will I be, but I am also passionate about responsible use of resources - that means that I want ordinary people to make reasonable choices about recycling, carpooling, buying local products and produce when possible. I am excited to see increased interest in green building, and I'm a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) AP (accredited professional), although I don't really expect to use the credential. I may update it, depending on what shakes out of their residential housing program and affordable housing initiative, but I don't think that a national program makes as much sense for single-family residential as it does for commercial buildings.
If I was a better person, I would teach. I spent ~2 years reading student essays for a state's standardized testing, and the percentage of students who could not pull together a single 3-paragraph essay was horrifying. I have extremely limited patience with the current trend of teaching-to-the-test that the US academic model seems to require, and honestly, I don't want to spend all day trying to corral 30 students. The last thing I want to be is a teacher who contributes to a student's continuing disengagement.
I just finished graduate school in December, and as an offshoot of my degree work, I took a number of conservation ecology courses. This has had the effect of making me far less fun at parties, and finally putting an end to my lingering desire to take vacations in Las Vegas.
I don't think I could ever be a vegetarian, but I make an effort to eat responsibly. I have a love for ice cream and dairy products that hamstrings that effort pretty efficiently. I try not to eat anything that I wouldn't be willing to personally harvest if I had to, but I don't have any problem with people who hunt deer, for instance, even though I wouldn't be able to do it myself. If someone comes up with a reasonable wildlife management method to keep game populations down in absence of non-human predators, I may reconsider my stance on recreational hunting.
I'm currently unemployed (hi, worst time to be looking for a job with no recent work experience, ever), and tenaciously hanging on to that "recent graduate" label.
I play video games (both computer and console) but less so today than I did a couple years ago. I have probably spent more hours playing Freecell or Spider solitaire than I have playing console games. I have definitely spent more hours playing MMORPGs than I have playing solitaire, but that, too, is ebbing.
I sailed through math and science in high school, to the extent that I got into a pretty stellar science and engineering college. I'm still not sure whether it was a mistake to attend, as I spent most of my academic career drowning, but I love my classmates and housemates.
I'm smart, and capable. I'm also lazy and shy by turns. I would rather read than do just about anything else, but I don't make as much effort to read nonfiction and news as I ought. I am addicted to long words, but I do a better job of reining them in in text than I do in speech.
My parents have been married for 42 years, and I would estimate that my father was out of town for work for what adds up to 25 of them. His retirement has been something of a trial for my mother. I'm an only child; I'm not particularly spoiled (in the my-parents-gave-me-everything sense), but I am certainly independent. I am aware that it is an accident of birth and a luxury that I grew up with my parents' attention and without ever worrying about whether we had money for food or clothes or housing
I'm female (like 85% of dreamwidth users) single, white, straight, and my current self will be very much surprised if I decide to have children, though I expect I'll get married someday if I ever get around to dating again. I tend to date someone for x months, and then not date anyone for the x months following. My last relationship, honestly, started as a huge mistake and lasted two years, and I'm just now getting to the point where I'm interested in talking to the same person every day again.
So... yeah. I mean, there's more, obviously, but I think that's enough, don't you?
Also, I did get around to setting up
write_good, and have posted some of my more spectacularly mediocre fic for critique, though no one's taken the bait yet.
I keep my fannish stuff and my real life stuff pretty firmly separated. But I thought (as you do) that maybe some context would be appropriate. So, some things that will never feature in my dreamwidth bio, because I am never going to talk about them, but which are important to me, or possibly important to know about me.
I'm thirtyish. My friends who have also turned thirtyish this year have decided that we are going to remain thirtyish until circumstances demand otherwise. We may reevaluate at 35ish, or hold off until 40ish. 40ish seems old.
Most of my career since college has been working for nonprofit organizations (charities, if you will, or non-governmental organizations, but I specifically worked for ones based in the US, and organized as such under the US tax code). I am passionate about access to housing and housing choice, which may or may not be code for low-income housing, shelters, and transitional housing. I have never been a crazy eco-hippie, nor will I be, but I am also passionate about responsible use of resources - that means that I want ordinary people to make reasonable choices about recycling, carpooling, buying local products and produce when possible. I am excited to see increased interest in green building, and I'm a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) AP (accredited professional), although I don't really expect to use the credential. I may update it, depending on what shakes out of their residential housing program and affordable housing initiative, but I don't think that a national program makes as much sense for single-family residential as it does for commercial buildings.
If I was a better person, I would teach. I spent ~2 years reading student essays for a state's standardized testing, and the percentage of students who could not pull together a single 3-paragraph essay was horrifying. I have extremely limited patience with the current trend of teaching-to-the-test that the US academic model seems to require, and honestly, I don't want to spend all day trying to corral 30 students. The last thing I want to be is a teacher who contributes to a student's continuing disengagement.
I just finished graduate school in December, and as an offshoot of my degree work, I took a number of conservation ecology courses. This has had the effect of making me far less fun at parties, and finally putting an end to my lingering desire to take vacations in Las Vegas.
I don't think I could ever be a vegetarian, but I make an effort to eat responsibly. I have a love for ice cream and dairy products that hamstrings that effort pretty efficiently. I try not to eat anything that I wouldn't be willing to personally harvest if I had to, but I don't have any problem with people who hunt deer, for instance, even though I wouldn't be able to do it myself. If someone comes up with a reasonable wildlife management method to keep game populations down in absence of non-human predators, I may reconsider my stance on recreational hunting.
I'm currently unemployed (hi, worst time to be looking for a job with no recent work experience, ever), and tenaciously hanging on to that "recent graduate" label.
I play video games (both computer and console) but less so today than I did a couple years ago. I have probably spent more hours playing Freecell or Spider solitaire than I have playing console games. I have definitely spent more hours playing MMORPGs than I have playing solitaire, but that, too, is ebbing.
I sailed through math and science in high school, to the extent that I got into a pretty stellar science and engineering college. I'm still not sure whether it was a mistake to attend, as I spent most of my academic career drowning, but I love my classmates and housemates.
I'm smart, and capable. I'm also lazy and shy by turns. I would rather read than do just about anything else, but I don't make as much effort to read nonfiction and news as I ought. I am addicted to long words, but I do a better job of reining them in in text than I do in speech.
My parents have been married for 42 years, and I would estimate that my father was out of town for work for what adds up to 25 of them. His retirement has been something of a trial for my mother. I'm an only child; I'm not particularly spoiled (in the my-parents-gave-me-everything sense), but I am certainly independent. I am aware that it is an accident of birth and a luxury that I grew up with my parents' attention and without ever worrying about whether we had money for food or clothes or housing
I'm female (like 85% of dreamwidth users) single, white, straight, and my current self will be very much surprised if I decide to have children, though I expect I'll get married someday if I ever get around to dating again. I tend to date someone for x months, and then not date anyone for the x months following. My last relationship, honestly, started as a huge mistake and lasted two years, and I'm just now getting to the point where I'm interested in talking to the same person every day again.
So... yeah. I mean, there's more, obviously, but I think that's enough, don't you?
Also, I did get around to setting up
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