15 posts tagged “qotd”

Do you have a sixth sense?  How do you experience it?

I am a food psychic. I can look at any restaurant and tell you if it's good or not. What's more, you can set me down in any unfamiliar neighborhod, anywhere, and I can find a good restaurant. I have been known to tow people for three or four blocks because "I know there's a good place to eat down this way..." even if I've never been there before, and I'm always right.

It's a very handy talent, especially while traveling, but it has its drawbacks. I can also tell when a place is not good, and I won't eat there if my food psychic sense tell me not to. Unfortunately, there are wide stretches of territory where there is nothing  good to eat, and my pickiness has been known to annoy traveling companions. On the other hand, it's kind of satisfying when traveling down the interstate, and my companions are grumbling because they're hungry and I won't stop because "there's nothing good there anyway," and I suddenly say, "Oh, oh, take this exit!" and guide them to that cute little diner with the great pie, or the unexpectedly fantastic Chinese takeout place, or the Mexican place where nobody speaks English but the food is perfect.

I'm a food psychic. It's what I do.

If you could have three wishes from a genie, what would they be? 
Submitted by tatteredhalo.

Anyone familiar with folklore, or who has watched enough episodes of The Twilight Zone, knows how dangerous wishes can be. Wish for world peace? Every human being drops dead. Wish for fame and fortune? Suddenly you have a billion dollars that turns out to be stolen and you are a famous criminal. You know how it goes - there are always loopholes, and the genie is always out to get you. I think it was a Simpsons episode, too.

I need to be careful about wording these wishes, then, because to be on the safe side I have to assume a malicious genie. While I would love to have world peace, or an end to environmental degradation, or Bush out of office, it seems like the bigger the wish, the bigger the potential screw-ups. I've also got this ethical problem with imposing my will on others using magic. So, in the interests of not making things worse for everyone, I'm keeping my wishes small and selfish.

1. I wish that I really enjoyed exercising - like, as much as I enjoy eating chocolate or playing video games. I want exercise to feel like a special happy treat every time I do it.
2.I wish my life to work itself out such that, without bringing harm to disablitiy to myself or others, I have the time and financial wherewithal to really pursue the things I'm passionate about.
3. My third wish is something that I can't share in public yet. But I wish it. Oh, how I wish it.

Who was your first celebrity crush?
Submitted by Glory.

I'm not sure I've ever had a "celebrity crush" - my crushes are generally on fictional characters. Usually, if I've fallen in love with a fictional character who is played by a particular actor, I find I have no attraction at all to the actor if he's in another role or being interviewed as himself.

My first crush like this that I can recall came when I was in fourth grade or so. I remember it was fourth grade because I clearly remember gazing out the window and coming up with stories in my head about me interacting with this particular character, and that window was definitely in my fourth grade classroom. I have to confess that as a fourth grader I was deeply in love with Barnabas Collins, from Dark Shadows.

I don't understand it one little bit. It's just not right. I never told anyone - all the other little girls gushed about cute-boy pop stars, but who did I want? The creepy old vampire dude. I pretended to appreciate the cute-boys, because it was expected of me (I did that often as a child, about many things), but I never really did. It was Barnabas for me.

Barnabas

What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.

I do not have a favorite poem - it would be like having a favorite food; so many are luscious and wonderful, how could anyone pick just one? Below is one that I love, and one that I remembered after hearing recently of the death of another famous blonde.

I have come to claim Marilyn Monroe's body

How have people mispronounced your name?  How is it supposed to sound? 
Submitted by Lorie.   

My name is hard to mispronounce. I don't think it's ever happened before. It is one of those androgynous names, though, and the spelling gives no clue to gender. There are people that I communicate with regularly through email, in a professional context, who address me as "Mr." I don't correct them because I don't know how, and it doesn't seem to make any difference - I communicate in email business-speak with these people and it would look odd to suddenly interject a personal note about my name. My gender is meaningless in this context. One person has been calling me "Mr." for almost two years now and I wonder what will happen if he ever has to contact me by phone.

I could solve the problem by including a "Ms." in my email signature. but I don't like how that looks. None of the available titles seem right - "Miss" is too cutesy and young, "Mrs.", though technically correct, feels inappropriate because I don't use my husband's last name. "Ms." is what I use when I have to use something, but I don't like it. It's an abbreviation that's short for nothing, and it's more irritating to me than being occasionally called "Mr."

The only solution is for me to get my PhD and become "Dr." It wouldn't clear up the gender confusion but it would look very satisfying in front of my name.

What method do you use to prepare your coffee or tea? 
Submitted by AgentBouche.

Coffee gets ground and made in a drip coffee maker. Tea - well, it depends on the tea. I have a nice Swiss gold filter that fits into the top of the teapot, and my habit is to fill the filter with whatever I currently want in my tea. I always have many different herbs on hand and make various blends based on need and my taste at the moment. Black tea comes from Chinatown - I've been getting into trying different varieties. I have a ceramic mug with an insert and a lid for brewing black tea. At work, I keep a box of TJ's green tea, bagged, to sip on during the day.

I drink lots of tea.

If you were stranded on a desert island, what five people would you eat first?
Submitted by James Poling.

Some of these QotD's have been good, some have been kind of dumb, but this one wins the prize for dumb questions. There isn't enough information in the question to give an answer. What is this scenario where I get to pick and choose who gets eaten? If there are a large group of people and we're all trapped, the one that gets eaten is the first one to die. How would I know which five to eat first? I don't even know who is on the island with me.
If the scenario is that I get to pick and choose who I'm stranded with, well, then I'm stranded with a large flock of chickens and a ruggedly handsome desert-island-survival expert. The first five to get eaten are the five hens who lay the fewest eggs. We all live happily ever after, the end.

What did you dream about last night?  

It was kind of vague, something to do with my sister. I'd rather write about the dream I had a few nights ago.

I was a princess. At least, I thought I was a princess. My parents died suddenly and I was thrust into power. I invesigated my parents' death because something was odd about it, and in the process uncovered a nefarious plot. I wasn't a princess at all. I was an NPC in a role-playing game. Some of the people around me were real, but most were not. I got a terrifying glimpse out of the game and saw the players, those I had thought of as friends or courtiers or servants, as all-powerful god forms living in a bizarre world that looked sort of like a suburban living room. I realized, in a dreamlike way, that I and some of the other NPCs had been endowed with free will to make the game more interesting, and that we were the important gamepieces - the goal was to manipulate particular NPCs in key positions of power in order to help the player's chosen faction. The death of my parents had been a game move, and I was in constant danger. Every time I met someone, I had to figure out if they were PC or NPC.

There was no resolution to this dream - dreams, sadly, rarely have story arcs. I'd kind of like to know how it ends, though it seems like it can't end well for the princess; the game will end no matter what and there is no possible way she can win because she's not even one of the players.
 

Who taught you how to cook?
Submitted by Donna.

This could be easily answered in one word: Mom. Answering in one word destroys the purpose of answering these qotd's, since as you may have noticed I use these things as writing prompts to get some practice in. Nobody actually cares about my bagel preference.

She didn't really "teach" me to cook, though. She never sat me down and said, OK, this is how we make potroast. I seem to have absorbed it all by being in the kitchen, seeing how she cooked, and eating her food. "How to cook" is kind of complicated. I've picked up various techniques and recipes over the years, and I can make all kinds of things that I never learned from her. The "how" that I learned from my mother was how to stretch ingredients, how to take "nothing for dinner" and make it into something (a talent my husband claims is supernatural) and, somtimes by omission, the deep connection between being fed and being loved.

What was the one toy you wanted as a kid that your parents never bought you?
Submitted by Princess of Darkness.

We were never that big on toys in my house. It might be because we didn't have a TV, so we didn't really know all that there was out there in the way of fascinating plastic crap. I remember seeing some of the things other kids had and feeling brief twinges of envy, but there was never an overwhelming feeling of "I have to have that now!" Begging for toys most definitely wouldn't have worked - asking relatives politely might have gotten me what I wanted at birthday or christmas time, but then again, it might not. Asking the parents never worked, and begging would just have gotten me banished.
I always liked video games and was really happy to play my cousins' Nintendo machine, but I don't think it occurred to me to want one for myself - it was just fun playing theirs. I was acutely aware that we were very poor and certain things simply were not for me. We did have what passed for a computer in those day, and I learned how to program in BASIC at a pretty young age. I made the kind of text adventure games you might expect from a creative ten year old, but it was no fun to play them myself. I remember getting computer magazines that had code in the back, and you typed in the code and when you were done, ta-da! it was a game. I liked it the same way I like following crochet patterns now. They were all pretty simple, though, kind of like my crocheting. If anything had existed like a Playstation or the kind of PC gaming that is possible now, I probably would have held up a Best Buy to get it for myself. I used to dream about what is ordinary now.