That "for it is Sunday quiz"

[avenueyew]

gothwalk  posted a quiz. It's a good reason to remember I have an account here.


Describe your style. What is your aesthetic comprised of?
If it has leaves I like it, pretty much guaranteed, swoops or spirals of flowers, leaves, fungi, interesting branches will seal it absolutely.  I am a naturecore/dryadcore woman through and through, the older I get the more I just go for it.  I still like a mashed up dark academia and art noveau style; if I was to start exploring expressing things in original art I suspect that's where it would go.  Give me lost old building with organic looking multi-paned windows, large trees and climbers, an apparently chaotic profusion of flowers and herbs that would have some secret form and meaning.  Or give me huge stoned ruins scattered across a forest clearing being gently consumed back into the landscape.   I'm absolutely druid material.  It would completely depend on who I hung around with whether I would retain some urban influences of go full feral.  I also tend to adore Chinese and Japanese nature and garden art, I admire the style, colour and attention to detail and the way the presentation of it is different enough to make me consider it differently.  I like black and green and silver.  I like chaotic seizing of moments, I like sensuous natural things, with evocative scents.  I like structural order but not front and foremost to the brain's attention, so many things are naturally wilderness (literally or metaphorically), sometimes trying to make it take an artificial shape is a personal defense mechanism.    I also like all the misunderstood critters like spiders and mice and bats and frogs.  Not wasps though, I know they're necessary but they still give me the heebie jeebies.  

What is your favourite type of weather? What do you like to do during this weather?

Not hot.  I like the transition seasons best, Spring and Autumn.  I like being out in weather that makes me feel alive but not in the 'fear that it may not continue' way.   I like to feel cool in face and feet and a breeze pulling at the strands of my hair but not attempting to whip my eyeballs out of their sockets.  Sea winds are spectacularly refreshing.  A blue sky day that has a breeze picking out the colors of flowers and all the various shades of green in summer is a blissful thing, but a blue sky day in spring or autumn feels like a miracle with no danger of oppressive heat.    Snow is an amazing thing but yeah, probably because it's rare, but I adore the stillness of a snow day.  Sparkling hoar frost mornings with startling blue skies are spectacular.  The low gathering silver mists on the bog at twilight.  I like summer rain, or indeed any rain that doesn't feel like it's making a personal attack to make you chilled through to your bones.  I have no fear of being soaked through unless I wearing jeans and have a distance to walk or it will make me cold.  I don't generally feel the cold.  I detest, with all my heart, days that make my feet swelter when I HAVE to wear shoes.  

Describe yourself in 5 words.

Mostly kind, enthusiastic, interested, patient and empathetic. 



Do you like to read? What sort of books do you read? Do you have a favourite?

One of the strangest effects of various episodes of depression has been to change me from the sort of person who would have taped cut panels of cereal boxes together to have at least the semblance of a book to read to one that actually finds it a bit hard to get started reading a book.  If I get started I will usually plough or through until it is done and enjoy ever second of it in my old manner but the getting started is problematic.  I blame twitter and the internet generally, sometimes I know I don't have "much time" so I feed my need to pour words over my eyeballs with internet quick fixes.  I definitely think I have a residual "you can't read a book unless you have a lot of time to do so and you have work (paid variety) that needs doing. Even when I don't.  I really don't get my brain.  It seems to be all or nothing.  I still like, indeed need, to read, constantly, it's just my efforts in this area tend toward the quick fix.  I will tend towards fantasy more than sci-fi, nature writing and books about medieval social and craft NOT military history. Of and fungi research now too. 

Do you like sweets? What kind do you like? Can you cook or bake? What do you fancy eating?

Sweets as in candy - Not as much as I used to, I don't even like chocolate as much as I used to, though I still adore orange chocolate.  If they're sitting in front of me I find them hard to ignore, it's not that I really even want them but a little voice goes "sugar good, mouth like sugar instant" and manages to convince me it'll be worth it.  It rarely is.   I like chocolate covered fruit and dried mango in particular.  I will eat raisins happily instead of sweets now.  There are Finnish rowan jellies I like a lot.  I do find I'm far more frequently thinking crisps would be nice.  (my gallstones vehemently disagree) I adore cake.  I adore it far too much. I dream about cake, all sorts of cake.  I don't like very heavy rich chocolate cake so that would be the safest to have around me.  My mother's pavlova is the best dessert on earth (chewy in the inside, no sugar in the cream, loads of fruit)  I love pastry things and crumbles.  I used to be a really good baker but I am overweight and I have a coeliac son and my other son only eats a small amount of things I would bake.  I used to be an excellent pastry maker and really good at both soda breads and scones.  I make *fantastic* custard in my own opinion and really good fruit tartlets.   Good at medeira mixture anything, my sponges in later years are tending towards dry (I blame not enough practice and fan ovens)   I crave cake a far bit.  I do not need cake.  The best food items in all the world are gyoza.  


Which time era do you fancy? Why?
Any, all, for different reasons.  I love what makes people tick, I would like to see the various ways and means in which that changes.  At the moment I would genuinely like to be able to see stuff from the 1920s, to see how people explored their enormously changing world.  I would like to explore the Montmartre region during the life time of Toulouse-Lautec, I would like to see old farms growing flowers for the perfume industry, I would dearly like to know what Irish medieval life was like in my home area, I would like to visit old markets, especially a spice market filled with new and exotic finds from the New World, and even before, to travel on the silk road ... loads of things.  I would be happier with a Star trek "observation level" participation though, I don't fancy my chances surviving otherwise.  I suspect I would find the needless misery of others hard to take too.   I would like to know what it was like to stand on newly laid sun warmed stones in Rome, to watch Venetian glass workers at work or medieval dyers and pigment makers, apprentices at work.   


A fact about you not many know? Do you have a hidden talent?

Hmmmm.  I don't know if there's many of these.. I tend to be pretty upfront, if I share things with you there's really not a lot I wouldn't share.  I suppose maybe that's a thing, people may think I'm more reserved than I am.  I tend to need someone to ask me a question if they'd like to know something about me because I presuppose that they would not.  If I'm asked something I will tell.  This might need to come with a safety warning mind.  If I have a hidden talent it's probably hiding from me too.  

What mythological creature would you be and why?

A dryad or a wood spirit of some sort.  I get to hang around in the woods all day watching stuff grow and animals and birds getting on with their lives and no one would expect me to fix a stupid coding error ever again.  

Are you a night owl or an early bird?

Totally a night owl.  I resent the fact the morning people got the drop on deciding what the working day was just because they were up first.  My brain comes online in the afternoon and twilight is the best part of the day.  

One thing you could spend hours discussing?

You, the person reading this.  Any person.  What makes you tick, why you do and like and tend to the things you do.  What you like and how you see the world, your impression of life the universe, sex, death, invention, necessity, philosophy, what we're really want to do and why we're doing capitalism instead, the ways in which  beech trees are different than hazels, the manner is which metal behaves in a molten state, how things I don't know about smell, how the recipe for .. well anything.. came about, what you would do if you could create a universe.  How things make you feel, how you think they make others feel, if you believe in a divine presence and what it is, how you think memory works, what your memories are to you, how you process your thoughts and feelings, if you think processing them is important or incidental, if your life is a series of experiences you just experience without comment or analysis of if the comment and analysis is important and if so how much so.  If you would live in another time or place, are you a city dweller.    I like people, I like how they're put together.  I don't want to be rude and ask unwelcome questions but you, all of you, is interesting.  


Are you afraid of the supernatural? Do you have any scary stories to tell?

No, I don't really have strong feelings about a supernatural anything.  I think there's plenty of natural stuff I need to expend energy on dealing with and if something supernatural wants me to pay it some mind I reckon it'll let me know and I will deal with it then.  I don't tend to blunder around *too* much in a way I feel would cause too much attention to fall upon me.     I remember the Friday before my brother died having an deeply uncomfortable feeling of dread that I mentioned to some work colleagues which was comforting in a weird way afterwards when I got an equally impressive feeling that things, while horrendously shit, were also broadly okay.     I also remember once driving with my ex through parts of Meath on the way to Newgrange and both of us falling silent  at the same time and then both admitting, after 15 minutes drive, that we were feeling anxious and keen to get out the area as quickly as possible.  


What makes you infuriated? Do you get upset easily?

 Fury is a weird thing, I have only really started feeling it sometimes again recently and it's been ... kind of horrible figuring out what to do with it.   I'm not sure I'm qualified to deal with this question having apparently relapsed to my teens.   At the moment I need to be very careful I'm not just venting.  But making the list are small minded, callous people with short term selfish goals.  People treating other people badly persistently.  People not making any sort of effort to sort a long term problem - it doesn't take much to convince me they're trying at all and then it's fine - but just throwing hands up and refusing to take any sort of responsibility after a long time makes me twitch.   I honestly don't know if I get mad and/or upset easily, I think I do sometimes but other days I think I am a very patient sort of person who doesn't get upset or bothered by an awful lot.  I suppose there are exercises in finding boundaries, and this has been raising some very interesting learning points for me. I have always been a very empathetic person, I found it very easy to see how the other person might feel - this becomes a problem in that you end up not being able to express any sort of personal position because you always argue yourself out of it.  I don't think it's any particular secret that a previous long term relationship I was in was..difficult.. so there were a lot of things to unlearn that took a very long time .    Getting the balance right is a constant work in progress in life I feel.   I get upset on other people's behalf and it's crippling when I know I'm at least part of the reason. 


What do you find beauty in? What is the definition of beauty?
Without going all Polyanna on it there's not much I can't find beauty in.  There are plenty of ideas out there that are downright ugly and they're getting an alarming amount of airtime.  But things tend to be lovely, the more so for me having any sort of affection for them.   I love miniature and details, I love natural, I love things people spent time and energy and enthusiasm on, I love colour, the manufacture of colour, the feel and scent and molecules of it.  I love enthusiasm.  If you love something and find it beautiful and communicate it to me I will find it beautiful too, if only because you do.