FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
Secretarial temp. The first summer I temped, I went to a variety of jobs. At one of them, they decided my name was Kathy. They argued with me about my own name. The second summer I temped was the summer before I started at LLNL, and I had a long-term temp job. I had to list my temp supervisor on the LLNL forms, so I warned her that the Feds would be calling her for a background check for my next job. "I'll just tell them you tried to blow up the place!" she said cheerfully. "Do not do that," I said. "The Feds have notoriously little sense of humor about people who will have access to nuclear materials." Her eyes got round: "What do you do?" I told her I was a nuclear physics grad student, and when she could speak again, she said, "No wonder those spreadsheets took you no time at all!" That's right: nuclear physics makes you a whiz at Excel. She spent the rest of the summer apologizing for asking me to do things, and I had to keep assuring her that I was being paid to help her. People stared at me in the break room at lunchtime after that.
"Development Office" phoner. I called people's parents and asked them to give money to my college. It was my first workstudy job, before I could get the department to give me a job, and it wasn't much fun. Most people's parents either had already given or had no intentions of doing so. The thing that saved this job was that I really didn't care, and I figured there was very little way I was going to convince someone who was hassling me to give money to the college, so I would say saracastic things about my own job. Then they still wouldn't give money, but we'd have a bit of a laugh before I hung up. Oh, and here's the thing about Gustavus demographics: my territory was all states that were not Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The people who had parts of Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin had lots of alumni parents, but Gustavus had undergone a recent demographic shift, so not only were people less connected to Gustauvs from a distance, but they were also more likely to be paying $N thousand/year to the college at the moment.
Physics tutor. Mostly this was a fun job. Mostly I loved this. There was one half-hour with a pre-med, trying to convince him that if T - W = 0, T did not generally equal -W. I really hope he did not get into med school; heaven knows our department did its part in the weeding process. The other PITA was that we had two classes for pre-meds, one with and the other without calculus. Occasionally someone from the sans calculottes would come in with a question, and I would have to rederive how to explain it to them with discreet math, because I was thinking of these things in calc terms exclusively. Particularly E&M. You can't really teach electromagnetics without integral calculus. You can hand people formulae, but that's different. So I would ask them to give me a minute while I remembered how to do it there way, and then I would do integral calculus on the blackboard until it became clear how to make it clump up again, and sometimes I would get excited and bounce, and they would stare at me with big round eyes. (Umm. Possibly a theme.)
Physics lab TA. Again, mostly a lovely job.
FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER
Real Genius
The Princess Bride
Sneakers
Galaxy Quest, even though the ending makes me cry. What? It does. With the fan kids. That's us, folks. You can derive all kinds of messages from that movie, but for me the message is, "Obsessive geekiness will fill your life with wonder."
FOUR CITIES YOU'VE LIVED IN
Omaha, NE
St. Peter, MN
Concord, CA
Hayward, CA (The most important non-current ones.)
FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH
Gosh, four? That I love? That's kind of a lot and kind of enthusiastic, isn't it? I am reminded of the old lady in the LM Montgomery novel who didn't think girls should say they loved turnips in the same tone as they loved their mother or their Savior. Well, and nor do I; turnips are just not that good. Anyway, there's "Babylon 5," because of Ivanova. I mean, there are other things with Bab5, but Ivanova is my favorite TV character of all time.
We've watched "The Simpsons" off and on longer than anything, so I guess that counts. And I wanted to love "Freaks and Geeks." It made me squirm half the time, but I loved about half of each episode (overlapping with the squirming bits, I'm afraid).
FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION
Umm. See, I've been to 49 of the United States. We used to take vacations every summer like that. So there are lots of places I've been on vacation. The farthest ones, in temporal order:
We went to Scandinavia when I was 9-turning-10. My tenth birthday was with our Swedish family. They told my mother they'd made a cake for breakfast, and she was a little alarmed, but it was a banana torte topped with berries, not at all too sugary for breakfast. They woke me singing like you do. We visited a local Kristina Kirke because it's part of my name. They arranged for English language tours and all sorts of things. I loved Norway: Norway felt right in my bones, and I would gladly go back. I loved Sweden: our family and family friends made it wonderful, and it's all green-and-blue smelling anyway. I was cautiously fascinated with our one day in Helsinki but was not yet a Finnophile at 10. Copenhagen did not charm me after the exotic delights of Helsinki, the stark beauty of Norway, and the homey forthrightness of Sweden. Perhaps I would have felt differently about Copenhagen if I'd come to it first or from further south, but to me it was the friend of a friend you don't really click with. You can see that it has many fine qualities, but they just don't move you particularly. Also, a pigeon shat upon me in the Copenhagen train station, which will tend to jaundice one's view, if unfairly.
When I was 16 and had just graduated high school, I went with the French Club, including
For my grandparents' 50th, five years ago, my folks took them and
And this summer was London, and many of you have seen pictures from that, as they are on my other website.
FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY
Lj
BoingBoing
The stuff on my links page, mostly, but lj has aggregated a lot of stuff for me. Feeds are our friends.
FOUR OF YOUR FAVOURITE FOODS
Cherry tomatoes, fresh, not the supermarket kind
Blueberries
Dark chocolate
Really sharp cheddar. Really, really, really sharp. The elderly kind of cheddar. The kind of cheese that's older than all of my friend Heathah's kids.
FOUR PLACES YOU'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
There are not four places I'd rather be right now. I like it here. If I wanted to go down to the living room, I would.
Seriously, there are places I would like to visit in the future, but right now I am drinking my morning juice and water at my computer, wearing my sleepshirt and my glasses, and if I was somewhere else I would likely not have my right stuff, or I'd have to be showered and dressed, or...yah. Right here is good. It suits for the moment.