Entries tagged with cty

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Interesting Interest Theatre, Round III

aedifica asked about: blue hair, chaos, do another, dream treatments, mud cult, nevermore, s.oteri, stargaet.

blue hair: I never considered the possibility of having hair of an unnatural color prior to 1995, although I did try coloring my hen Aurora's white hackle with dandelion petals, because I thought she would look good as a blonde. (She would have, too: she was an Egyptian Fayoumi, and a yellow hackle would have made her resemble a Golden Campine.) Then I went to CTY, and someone (possibly pyrogenic) decided that we should go for blue hair. I immediately decided that the idea was glorious, and was all for it. Sadly, it did not come to pass, as one of the RAs got wind of it, and Josh was the only one who was confident that his parents would fax in permission for the alteration. I eventually did go blue in 1998/99, and I loved the look, but the bleaching and maintenance were not fun. I went blue again in 2000/2001 briefly, but had to dye it black for a job. I've occasionally overdyed my very dark brown hair with blue since, for a fun blue-glow-in-the-sunlight effect, but haven't been able to keep that up. I'd like to have permanent dark blue hair.
chaos: Both mathematical chaos and chaos magic(k) fascinate me.
do another: This is from Support. I was never part of the Schools team, but the phrase got tossed around some, and it was also a catchphrase at my old tech support job.
dream treatments: This is from the anime Darkside Blues. It's been quite a while since I watched it; I should watch it again.
mud cult: This was a CTY event. There was a rainstorm over a weekend, and everything turned to mud. A bunch of us started playing in puddles and having a mudfight. First they banned throwing the mud, so we started chasing each other with handfuls of mud and *placing* the mud on each other. Then we got shooed on from that, as we were too close to out of bounds and getting too muddy. We re-convened in the quad, where the volleyball court had turned to mud also, and had a barefoot, bathing-suit-clad mud dance (asking for more rain for more mud). There were mud-chants. Eventually it was lunchtime. We tried to go in the cafeteria all over mud, but were unjustly barred entrance. We staged a sit-in until we got too hungry, then went and got showered off and came back for lunch. It was delightful fun.
nevermore: Another CTY reference; this refers to people who a) are in their last year due to being too old to come back next year ("my nevermore year") and b)people who are now too old and will not be able to come back. It is sad to be a nevermore.
s.oteri: This is from Margaret Wander Bonanno's Preternatural series, a species of telepathic space jellyfish. The novel deals with a first-contact situation between the aforementioned telepathic space jellyfish (yes, it's okay to laugh) and a series of creative and messianic types throughout history, which culminates in contact with a novelist who has written tie-ins for a certain popular science fiction show, and the aging cast of that selfsame show, which is a thinly-disguised Star Trek (no, seriously, "thinly disguised" is an utter understatement, and Karen is the most delightful self-insert ever, and I love her (and Margaret) to pieces). For reasons that are difficult to articulate, the novel was a seminal work in my adolescent career. It remains a favorite, particularly the s.oteri named Azure.
stargaet: This is, um. Picture this: it's 20 hours until the end of National Novel-Writing Month, and you have about 12k words to go. What do you do? Obviously, you write crackfic about being naked in the gateroom. NUDE STARGAETS. OMG.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: 94044
Current Music: "Bye Bye Beautiful", Nightwish

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Interesting Interests Theatre:

ursamajor picked the following interests of mine to ask about:

poodle! stop humping!, yeeth, Cordelia Vorkosigan, duct tape sword guys, ectogenesis, egyptian fayoumi, Liquid Satan, Malkavian

She mentioned that most* of them sounded as if they were fantasy-related. In actual practice, the links are often tenuous at best.

( Read more... )

Curious about some of my other interests? Ask away! Want to have something to write about? Say the word, and I'll pick a handful of yours for you to post about.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: 40 miles, 3,000 miles; 6 years, 12 years -- does it make a difference?
Current Music: "Bizarre Love Triangle", New Order

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80s Music Friday: "Bizarre Love Triangle", New Order

I went to the 1994 and 1995 Center for Talented Youth camps run by the Johns Hopkins University. There's a crazy little youth culture that springs up out of CTY with heavy traditions and music and cult happenings taking off like wildfire. "Bizarre Love Triangle" is one of the canon songs, the music that always has to happen and stays the same from year to year, site to site. I don't remember it from then, but I was collecting the canon songs in late 2000 and early 2001. This song was new to me when I was first falling in love with Darkside. This song was new to me when my heartsister and I both fell in love with Darkside at the same time. The title of the song spoke to me, and brought back memories of all the bizarre love triangles I've ever been in, starting with

pyrogenic and

boojum and the Lady E.

This song follows me everywhere. It's one of my desert island songs. A lot of canon songs are desert island songs for me. They stick with you.

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cty_therapy ramble turns into a little essay.

Perhaps older gifted students should be told more about the adult stages of mental and emotional development, to encourage them in realizing that they haven't stopped once they leave college, or whatever it is that they're doing. If they have those points of comparison, there's also the room for realization that perhaps they've stopped in one area, but they could sure focus on another area that they're interested in.

The intellectual seems to be the major skill group that gifted teachers focus on; there are a lot of other areas where gifted people can stand to focus. There's intellectual maturity, and there's also social and emotional maturity, general horse-sense, physical well-being (though once one hits a certain stage in physical development, one then starts to compare it backwards with younger ages) in flexibility, endurance, coordination, and presence-in-body as well as muscle tone. There's spiritual development. There are so many different varieties of art to explore, both as an active artist and a (relatively) passive appreciator.

There's also the matter of longer lifespans extending the stages of life. Some people act teenage until they're out of their 20s. I went to writing group with a lady who still has all the personal responsibility of a teenager, and she thinks it's no big deal, because Daddy will take care of it all.

After a while, age stops being quite so much of a factor. There are basic levels in skill that every adult should have (change a baby, change a tire, comfort the grieving, cook a meal, et cetera, ad Heinleinium) but after that it's an open playing field for anyone who has either the natural talent to attain mastery without overmuch teaching, or puts the hard work and study into it. For example, there is cook a basic and nutritious meal, then there's cook it well, cook it better than average, cook it at the quality of a decent restaurant, and cook it like a highly trained chef. Likewise, some people have to have a whole pantry full of possibilities in order to produce a meal, where others can whip up amazing things by improvising from what happens to be on hand, even if what happens to be on hand is pretty sad.

The average adult has basic proficiency in the areas crucial to survival, with some sharpening of the skills here and there, and only has a certain amount of skill points to distribute. An above-average adult has a lot more skill points, whether they're all focused on one area of study (as an example of someone gifted in one general field, Britney Spears spent all her skill points on appearance, musical performance, and celebrity with some social; I've never heard any rumors about her secretly being highly intellectual) or distributed across a lot of fields Renaissance-man style, so while someone may be only modestly successful in a lot of areas, that's still a lot of areas.

Then there's the matter of prodigy vs. hard study. So I may be immensely talented in one area just to start out, and I've polished it until I am comparable with people who have spent all their life studying it, but I've now topped out at what I feel I can attain in that area. OK. What next? Or I may have worked really hard at something I want to do, but I'm not as good as someone who's younger than me -- who may have been marvelously proficient and had a huge natural aptitude for it, and had all the right teachers at all the right time, whereas I did not have that aptitude and worked right hard to get to where I'm at.

Right now I'm boggling over the idea that I may be more socially proficient than Dad. I used to think that Dad was nearly totally smooth at every social move he made. Since spending the past several years honing my social skills at my dead-end job, and running into a recent recording of Dad at a university reunion where he completely flubbed his social roll in an altogether typical way, I've realized that I have a better sense of social harmony and public speaking than Dad does. Ten years ago, I would have brushed it off as "Dad's being embarrassing again". Now I know it's because Dad overthinks what he's about to say a long time before he says it, and cannot speak off-the-cuff about things he considers important, so naturally he may not be able to adapt to a different prevailing mood than the one he is prepared for.

(Context is having a midlife crisis, and/or doesn't know what to do with her vacation.)

Current Mood: lazy
Current Location: tempe mission palms hotel
Current Music: conversation and wind

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Nonstop

It's a little hard to distinguish some of the Ms. Ethnic World contestants toting costume from con-goers. Except the ladies in question don't have con badges.

Darkside was Not There, as he'd gone off with Friends -- I probably should have called ahead, his father said. Yeah, I probably should have, but it was all right for me to make the trip there. There from here at the con site is not half as far as there from home base. And I felt like I needed to get some air.

I seem to have collected a bit of a fangirl. That amuses-and-delights me ever so greatly! I have a very small handful of amusing filksongs. It's evidently nice to have original and amusing material at circles.

Some complete random just came up to me to dump his squee about talking to OMG GREAT WRITER. He'd evidently been sitting HARD on his inner fanboy throughout the twenty-minute conversation, and had to talk to someone, anyone, including the random chick with laptop, about it lest he explode. The transaction has left him less in danger of going 'splodey, and me possessed of a bigger grin.

Fandom is a small enough community that I bet people on the Bujold list who know me online are here at the con right now and don't even recognize me. (And I don't even recognize them, because the badges? So not particularly readable. Or informative.)

I guess I would be getting more out of the con experience if I had more of a crowd (a few people are good; for someone like me, an active crowd is so much better) ... and partly, everything compares back to CTY. This isn't CTY. I should probably stop expecting it to be, but anything that isn't even approaching CTY is going to be a bit of an anticlimax. It may be delightfully fun and worth the repeating, but ... not what it could have been.

Current Mood: still nostalgic (but feeling much better now)
Current Location: an uncertain slippyslide somewhere in the space/time continuum
Current Music: giggling; my roommate typing

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July 4, 1995. Clinton, NY. The soccer fields near the Great American.

Wanna know what happens when a granola bar meets half a box of (squished) Junior Mints?

Pickles and ice-cream!

(cue a whole bunch of talented yeeth cracking up laughing and telling an ADHD teenage guy who eats like a hummingbird that he must be pregnant)

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: singing dirges in the dark
Current Music: "American Pie" in my head

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Now for ten years we've been on our own / ... / but that's not how it used to be

Since CTY came up in the last post, I had to poke around Google. digiclan.org has a whole lot of old stuff on it. It wasn't my clan, not really; I was just one of the offshoots. Sort of. I wonder if there'd be any interest in an argh-and-spink wiki. That could be fun. I was poking around the digiclan site, and I had my hand over my mouth and nose in that way that women do when we're not sure if we're going to cry or not. It's been so long. So, so long. Trust in Snapple.

There's just this sense of loss and longing all rolled up into one. That exceptionally geekycool teenager is not me, anymore. If I'd been less focused on Shawn, would I have been more of a part of them? What if I'd lived in another state, any other state? What if I'd had the freedom to roam about the country to go see them all? What if I'd stayed with the Lady E and married her? What if I'd gotten an e-mail address sooner? Unless I unhinge my mind enough to go skipping between potential universes (again), I'll never know. I don't want to leave my life-that-I-have. Interests/Hobbies: listening to woeful (or, less often, gleeful) tales of people's lovelives OMG that was me vs. Shawn; I don't even think I have half the e-mail archives that I had of all that rich intertwined text where our hearts & souls were laid bare... "It's called nostalgia, dear."

The media. The traditions. The people. Oh, the people. My people. My friends. There was the time before CTY when I was always an outsider. When CTY came, I became an insider. And it wasn't the kind of thing where you had to change your whole personality to like what the popular people liked. It was getting people who liked the same things, so once we connected, we were automatically cool. We shared around more cool stuff. I'd never really thought about black nail polish until we started wearing it. There were all these things I'd never done before, things that were excellently cool, that automatically became enshrined above and beyond their inherent coolness just because I'd never done them before and it was us. Insane injokes. Self-referential references.

Sugar high hair dye kamikaze fruit fly. ... It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel...
it's the end of the world as we know it ...

LIVE! LIVE! LIVE!

Argh & SpInk missed our ten-year reunion. Josh and I got together for a bit in the winter and it was great, but it ... it wasn't ...

I met a girl who sang the blues / I asked her for some happy news / but she just smiled and turned away...

...I'm not sure if I'm going to start with laughing or crying or both. Either case, I'm going to curl up in bed soon, with my nice safe rocks and my nice safe ~~shoe~~ lightsabre.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: "Stormbringer", by Deep Purple, on Pandora: Finest Workstati

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Five pivotal albums (lemming)

Rules
List 5 albums that are pivotal to you. Write about a special memory for one song from each album. Tell us who the albums make you think of. Tag 5 friends to do the same.

pyrogenic did this one, and I just have to jump onboard, though I may skip tagging specific people.

Flood, by They Might Be Giants ~ 1995/6

Picture a 15-year-old Lunatic, wearing a black ribbed tight-fitting t-shirt (back when those were just starting to come in) over a long flowy straight pink skirt. Picture her chin-length brown hair flying around as she dances barefoot, barely aware of her surroundings. You can't go back to Constantinople / It's a long time gone, Constantinople...

pyrogenic was there. moonberryq was there. Alice was there, and Emily, and Dave, and oh! So many of us. Kathy. Amol. Jimmy. Gella. Rebecca/Gertrude. boojum was an invisible presence. She'll be waiting in Istanbul. I know I'm forgetting people. But we were there, and it was timeless, and how we danced. (I got the album somewhat after coming home, and played it endlessly.) It was the album of friendship and quirky humor and noticing that lyrics that read dreadfully on paper just worked in the music.

It's nobody's business but the Turks.

Document, by R.E.M. ~ Late December, 1995

I slip the CD caddy all loaded up into Majel (the pretty Quadra 660 AV named in honor of the noted voice actress Majel Barrett, as the computer could speak in a calm female voice and take voice command), and select my favorite songs to repeat themselves several times. It's a party, with the adults downstairs, and me holding quiet court upstairs in my new room with the screensaver and my new lava lamp lighting up the room. I am dating -- almost engaged to -- the most beautiful girl in the world, and I am so very happy. I giggle and whisper with Dad's co-worker Glenn's daughter Sara. Sara is a year younger than me and a year older than my baby sister Tay-Tay. We've had such fun in the past playing together, and I want to tell her my secrets.

I've been testing to see who I can tell about my girlfriend. So I tell her about my friend Savil who's dating a girl who goes to the U. "Eww, gross," Sara says. I go silent, and eventually Sara wanders off to re-join the party.

It's the end of the world as we know it. I'm drifting away from the people my parents have chosen to populate their lives with. I am making this conscious disconnection from them. I can't make them accept me. I have to just step back, lest my wiring and my love disrupt my parents' lives. But. I feel fine.

Parallel Lines, by Blondie ~ 1997

I'm sitting outside Austin Lathrop High School after the Driver's Education class with Mr. Bodle, with the tape player that's been in the household for years in my hand. It's got fresh batteries. It's only monaural, but it's what I have. I'm snuggled up in the battered brown leather jacket with the vastly inaccurate map on shredded silk lining inside. The jacket was from a thrift store, and I love it so much, because it makes me look so vastly cool (I fondly believe). It isn't black, but it is leather. "Fade Away and Radiate" is in my ears. I am alone, for the moment, and waiting. I do a lot of waiting alone in these moments, but I'm singing to myself, loud and proud and strong. Sometimes it's for joy. Sometimes it's to shout out the pain. But I'm always singing.

That's a Shawn era, with Shawn a silent presence just in front of me. I trailed after him like a guardian angel, and that's how Death Child always saw me. Shawn was turned on to the TV culture, and I wasn't.

Aquarium, by Aqua ~ 2000

This is the album of my relationship with BJ, the good times and the surreal times. It might not have been, except George left it on for three days straight on repeat, sort of to counteract the fact that BJ and I were having noisy sex. "Good Morning, Sunshine."

George. BJ. BJ's scary little brother. Sue-bug and John. The whole crowd at work. Bonnie the little red car and long drives at night for the sheer joy of the road and motion. My virtual aunt renting us her little cabin. Independence.

Country Grammar, by Nelly ~ 2001

I moved in with Sis in April of 2001, and our musical tastes clashed. She loved rap. I hated it. I loved R.E.M. She hated it worse than she hated country music. We eventually worked out that she couldn't take twangy minor chords, and that I did not do weaponry and lip service to "no drama" that worked out in practice to shooting anyone who tried to start drama. She conceded that she liked some of their covers that didn't have the problematical chords. I conceded that the beat and sound of nonviolent rap songs could be all right.

Think of a hazy hot evening in late April or early May, with two white girls in a beat-up old used Buick Skyhawk with about three weeks more life in it cruising down the streets of Phoenix, windows down with no AC, belting out the chorus of "Ride Wit' Me"...

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Malcolm in the Middle is a very CTY show. The kid is bright and dealing with all the same crap as we did and do. He is us

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In the "geeky and strange" files, I've been contemplating getting myself one of those danged debossed silicone rubber bracelets in a pale green, hopefully with my name on it, but definitely with "CTY CLN.95 Hamilton College" -- if you were there then, you'll remember our shackles! I wore mine for several weeks after camp ended. Sometime during intersession, I think, I modified the thing very carefully with a pair of scissors, making the hole in the plastic like a buttonhole, but relatively invisibly. I could take it off at will, and put it back on before I got caught.

http://www.goodsforgiving.com/wristbands.html has reasonably-priced single bracelets, but a horribly limited character limit. 20 characters? Not going to work for what I want.

But. Time for me to start getting my geek on again.

Current Music: R.E.M. - Superman

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A day

She has never been out of the country, broken a bone, or smoked a cigarette; she plans to someday visit Japan. This is [azurelunatic]. (introductory notecard from Speech class some years ago)

I'm hoping that my currently unhappy sleep schedule normalizes some. I think I have it on the brink of behaving, but I'm never quite sure until I actually find myself in bed waking up the next morning.

Cleaning is a waltz, and I'm never sure whether I'm taking steps forward or backward, and which side I'm going. Worse, I'm the one leading, and I don't have a partner. Granted, the last time I waltzed where both of us knew what we were doing, I nearly got danced off the stage (thanks, Fuzzy) ... maybe leading without a partner is not so bad? But I do love waltzing. (Did you know that Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" is a waltz?)

The kitchen is its usual state of disaster area. I'm trying to get my coffee in shape to share with my co-workers. I almost never drink coffee at home, but I will drink coffee at work. This means that I have coffee I'll probably never touch unless I take it to work. Some of it is regular-ground, some of it is espresso-ground, and some of it is Turkish-ground. I decided to actually prepare some of the Turkish-ground. The proper method involves the stovetop, as I looked the recipe up. I was delighted by the scent, and I dropped some chocolate chips in, just on impulse, and the results are decent enough, if not exactly traditional.

If you're a barista, and your customer is supposed to be on decaf, but you give them wildly strong thoroughly caffeinated Turkish coffee ... would that be grounds for dismissal?

It's the ten-year anniversary of my last year at CTY, and the angsty CTY-deprivation posts on

cty_therapy and similar communities are inspiring me -- I've been over the angst for a while, since LJ is my new CTY (sort of ... no few of the CTY folks are here) and I have enough mobility and free time to meet up with people should things really get lonely -- but the posts about canon music are making me want to compile my own personal canon playlists. So I've been working at that, which means listening to a lot of music and trying to weed out the ones that don't go on the canon list so I can narrow things down better. There are some songs that aren't official canon, but are personal canon. There are some songs that I never heard while I was there, but fit so well after the fact that they need to be included. And it doesn't do any good just as audio. There are the explanations of why each song fits, there should be photos ... all of these things I need to hunt down to do proper homage to that very pivotal point in my life. Better to celebrate it than to mourn it.

( Gratuitous Lyrics: ''Won't Give In'' )
I'm also trying to work on a caffeine icon for myself. I've been working on scraps of "A Cup of Time" here and there between the cracks. I've been working on Crossover a bit. I've been getting stuff typed up for my magicgeeking document. (That's something that dreadfully needs editing and putting together into coherent order as well as more content and focus. Geeze.) There's stuff that wants hole-punching. The Little Fayoumis still has an afghan that isn't even half-made. (I need to poke Sis for a good mailing address.) I have some fabric, some elastic, a sewing machine, thread, and scissors. I have grand ideas involving skirts, but somehow none of them have shown up on my actual "I'm doing this right now" schedule. I need to fix that.

Meanwhile, things like dishes and sorting papers and getting shoes put away are getting done. Tomorrow will be insane, but I can live with that...

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: traffic

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Bookmarks & links:

Two

cty_therapy discussions involving canon:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/cty_therapy/329358.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/cty_therapy/330737.html
Note to non-CTY fen: "canon" in this case is the body of music established as classics and vital to the soul of the Center for Talented Youth programs, rather than the works by the actual author as opposed to fanfic.
Also, the founder of CTY died.

Bracelets:
http://joyascanada.tripod.com/id230.html
(Naomi absolutely adores the one with her name on it.)

Fic rec:
http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Bexis/Harry_Potter_And_The_Fifth_Element/index.html (WIP, has plot, pairings include Harry/Hermione, now proudly AU with some HBP-compliance)

New stuff with LJ:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/87537.html
Paid users can now buy 100 userpic spaces.
Also, random stuff including terminology changes.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Don McLean - American Pie

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Nostalgia on a toasty cracker

There are some things that just bring back all the interesting fun of being teenage. Memory-triggers for CTY are one of them, and association with people I haven't really seen much of since high school.

Fuzzy was my high school career, pretty much. Gods, you guys are going to get so sick of me blithering about him, but at least this time it's happy blithering, more or less -- not wailing about how he stole my soul. Reasonably happy. We clicked so hard, and we're clicking again. It works best when we're bouncing ideas off each other. We work best in person, of course, clustered around a computer -- probably both of us on separate computers, me writing and him drawing, me committing the best ideas to a file or five.

I miss all that, and I'm getting it back.

There's a vital element to the apartment that's here now that I have a working altar set up in the middle of it. It was missing before. There's something about my life that goes into hibernation when it isn't in the presence of both active and passive "extra" magics -- things that are above and beyond the little magics that constantly surround me. Now it's alive again, and it should stay that way as long as the altar's active.

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Past People (crossposted to cty_therapy)

witchofrock. We met in

glamourbombs because we were both in Phoenix in a big "Let us meet local people" thread, and we started hanging out. We met back last June.

So tonight we were talking, and for whatever reason, New York State came up, and she mentioned that there was more to the state than NYC, there was also upstate -- and I mentioned that yeah, I spent a couple summers there in an academic camp.

Turns out that Clinton, NY was her home stomping grounds, and she hung out at Hamilton College. She was at the same fireworks display that we were, and was annoying the kids in the matching T-shirts with her friends in '94 and '95.

We did some retroactive bonding, though we would not have gotten along then. I shared the story about how

pyrogenic got lost going for ice cream, and of course she knew right where he'd gotten lost going to the Great American, and she knew about the black Wet & Wild nail polish with the silver sparklies...

Most excellent.

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cty,
darkside

So not his oblivious fault

votania said that she hated to see what he put me through.

Fortunately for the health of my friendship with him, that's not entirely correct.

If he knew what were going on in my pointy little head, things would be much different. The thing is, though, he somehow has missed out on the subtlety that when I tell him, "I miss you", this is an understatement that means, "

garnetdagger has been making will saves so that we don't cry ourselves to sleep at night if we don't get to talk to you at least twice a week and don't get to see you in person at least once a month."

I missed CTY like that, OK? It's not my thing to miss anyone so badly. I missed Shawn horribly when he visited his father for the summer, but most of that was the fact that I knew he was in deadly danger, and he was my responsibility and I couldn't do shit about it. I'd miss the Little Fayoumis like that if he went to spend the weekend at Grandma's house without us (for the same reason I missed Shawn: because not only do I love him, I know he'd be in danger, and I wouldn't be there if something happened). I missed the Lady E., and I miss my Pretty, but not like that.

When I'm away from Darkside, and he's away from me? I get morose, and miss him, and invent inane excuses to call him, and sulk if he has to go, and call back again as soon as politely possible. (Usually, this means one call a day, two tops, unless there's a reason for calling more, like he has to do something right now but try back later. I avoid calling him on days when I know he's going to be busy.) He seems to get more grumpy.

In short, I miss him. He will be told what that means, since he seems to have not picked it up on his own...