Get to know me!

[halloweenjack]

Via three or four people on my flist:

The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about one another. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

Comments

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

How'd you end up in a library?

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

In the late eighties, I was utterly without a clue as to what I wanted to do career-wise, and I briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a file clerk for the FBI in DC. My Aunt Ellen, a former librarian and life-long liberal, sent me an article from The Nation about librarians who'd turned away FBI agents who wanted to look at circ records without a warrant. At about the same time, a college friend who'd gotten a job as a library clerk mentioned that one of the job benefits included a tuition waiver good at any state university, including the one with a library school. Those two things got me thinking...

[mary-mayhem.livejournal.com]

Tell me about the music you love.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

That's such an enormous subject for me that I'm not sure where to start. I think that in the general sense, I'm becoming more aware of that process that so many people go through occurring in myself, where I pretty much stop listening to new music and stick mostly with the artists and songs that I listened to in high school and college. Those records are very emotionally important to me--I sometimes refer to the Bruce Springsteen albums Born To Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River as the Holy Trinity--but I think that that sense of renewal and emotional connection that I depend on music for depends on the willingness to take risks and try new things, rather than going to the same old wells over and over until they run dry from the contempt of familiarity. (I do go back to records that I haven't listened to for a while and am surprised by what I take away from that, and how it's different from my previous experiences; as I've started walking again on a daily basis, I have picked up some albums that I've never owned on CD, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Bernstein's recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Songs From Liquid Days by Philip Glass, and--brace yourself--Rebel Yell by Billy Idol, which is one of my favorite albums of the 80s; it's this great blend of post-punk and synthpop. They're all quite enjoyable as a soundtrack to walking during my lunchtime.)

I listen to NPR, and while most of that is classical (and I swear that they recently played Dvorak's New World Symphony twice in the same weekend--come on, people!), I pick up some new artists from that--Brandi Carlile and, more recently, Zee Avi. I also picked up a couple of CDs from the local Irish Fest that are nice.