what beast would turn its life into words?

someday in the not-too-distant future i will make some sort of substantive contribution to this hurr livejournal. today is not that day. in the meantime, you can:

Comment on this entry, and:

❶ I'll respond by asking you five questions to satisfy my curiosity.
❷ Update your journal with the answers to your questions.
❸ Include this explanation and offer to ask other people questions.

cascades, who is an utter nutball, gave me these questions:

1. REMEMBER BLUE-SKIDOO FROM BLUE'S CLUES? when blue could transport into pictures and books? well, if you could blue-skidoo into any book, which would you choose?
NO, ACTUALLY, I DON'T, BUT I'LL FORGIVE YOU YOUR TRESPASSES AND ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION. and it's a very good question at that, i have to say. lovely variation on the usual "with which character would you most like to chill?" deal. aaaand my aaaanswer iiis...tales from outer suburbia, by shaun tan. yes, it is a picture book; it's essentially magical realism for kids. and shit-wow, i wish that description could do it justice. magical realism restores a sense of wonder, so i feel odd applying it to a children's book, because when you're a kid, magic is commonplace anyway. archy_the_roach introduced me to this book a couple of months ago, well past my childhood, and still it moved me on a very visceral level; it curled its way deep underneath my skin, successfully hijacking the place i reserve for favorite songs and uncomfortably revealing dreams.

the following tangent doesn't answer this question, but as this is my livejournal, i shall abuse my memes however i see fit. the book that most successfully translated the world i inhabit into a tangible place is palimpsest, by catherynne m. valente. it feels like my own headspace reflected back to me, in all its ugliness and desperation and incandescence. palimpsest is a part of me, located somewhere just beyond tales from outer suburbia, somewhere within my ribcage, possibly.

i also really pathetically wish i could beam myself into shoebox_project, although that's not a book at all. it feels like home to me, in only the way your very favorite stories do. yes, i know it is a fucking fan fiction, and i lose all lit cred for admitting this. i am okay with that!

2. if you could choose to live in a different century, would you? or would you rather stay in the 21st?
fuck, no. i'm not big on romanticizing the past. humans do a pretty good job of fucking up the planet, but i remain (perhaps stupidly) a firm believer in progress. i want to continue to live just where i am and do whatever i can to bring the world a little closer to the place i believe it can be. we owe the past a lot: everything we have now, in fact. it'd be an insult to want to shave off a few decades. reminds me of holden caulfield on his merry-go-round, caught in a loop and still looking perpetually backwards. to that image, i say: no, thank you. i want to go forward. because do you know what we have now? MOTHERFUCKING JETPACKS. suck on that.

3. have you ever wanted to have any kind of exotic pet? (i always wanted a wolf when i was little.)
i want a tarantula! no, seriously. i do believe that counts as exotic. and i'll be boring and confess that when i was little, i totally wanted a dragon. still do, because i am the muggle incarnation of hagrid. although the former desire is a bit likelier to be fulfilled than the latter.

4. when you retire as an old wrinkly lady, what do you want to do with your free time?
accumulate wrinkles. play bingo; use the panoply of medications i'll undoubtedly be on as markers. laugh at my hideously disfigured tattoos. have many spiders as pets. run amok. naked, preferably. be the nut in the neighborhood all the little kids are terrified of.

5. do you have any sort of ~security blanket~ that you keep around from when you were little? mine is a stuffed animal, a goat named djali. FROM THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, REMEMBER? esmeralda's pet goat. he has an earring! he's pretty bamf.
ONCE AGAIN, NO I DO NOT REMEMBER, BUT THANKS FOR TRYING. security blanket? you mean like a straitjacket? some of my friends would argue that i need one of those these days. i, um. don't have an actual remnant from childhood on hand? because i have no soul. well, okay, i did have this purple stuffed dog (creatively named "peace") that i used as a sort of talisman. i've yet to hand her over to the EVILS OF SUNNYSIDE throw or give her away, so that may say something about the state of my immortal soul (mostly that it's comprised of 100% pure unadulterated LAZINESS).

speaking of the sorry state of my soul, the latest regina spektor song manages to make me weep every. damn. time. and i've listened to it like twenty times at this point. it's slowly becoming tiresome. you should download it and join me in my blubbering! (and i do recognize the irony in my inadvertently prefacing this paean to childhood with an anti-holden caulfield rant. do i have my holden moments? yup. do i want to be holden caulfield? hell, no, bitches.)

( lyrics, for posterity. also because they're fucking gorgeous. )

I am--inexplicably, all-encompassingly fucking giddy right now, and I wish to tell you all about it! Really, today has just been this great long procession of tiny little lovely things that have collectively made me absurdly happy. Also they seem to make me want to blather fulsome adjective abuse into my livejournal. For this I apologize.

Just. I dunno! I didn't actually get out of my pajamas all day. There's going to be a snow day tomorrow, if I can trust the weather reports promising a blizzard of apocalyptic proportions. (Even if I end up having to wake up at 6:00, right now the snow is a pretty fabulous sight to behold.) My best friend called me at, like, the exact moment I was thinking of calling her before I got anywhere near the phone ("THAT'S SO CREEPY. WERE YOU GOING TO CALL TO TALK ABOUT TV ON THE RADIO?" which obviously I was. because we're connected at the brain). We are seeing TV on the Radio in Central Park in June, and I am going to have an excitement-induced coronary. I just realized I'm actually really pleased with my schedule for next year instead of freaking the fuck out over it (probably this will last just until my furlough from school ends on Tuesday and I go back to wanting to go join the fucking circus instead).

Speaking of TV on the Radio, I spent half the day listening to Return to Cookie Mountain. This is pretty pitiful, I think, but dancing around your room like a freak is indisputably awesome.

This is a really boring update! (I thought maybe I could salvage it with some exciting punctuation. Did it work?) I guess it's always really retarded to talk about happiness, isn't it, unless you're Naomi Shihab Nye or some shit. I guess I just want to be able to find this again, in a public post, and go, what the fuck was I thinking? this post is drivel. but I remember being weirdly enthused about it.

( also I totally have to catch up on my memes! AND NOW WE REACH THE CRUX OF THE POST, TRULY. BECAUSE MEMES ARE SRS BSNS. come listen to me ramble some more, about drag kings who happen to be superheroes and mancrushes who happen to be gods and scandalous disavowals oh my )

Just for the record:
1. HOLY SHIT IT'S STILL SNOWING! If I stand outside in it and just look up, I get impossibly dizzy, and if vertigo were that wonderful all the time, everyone would be fucking dying of inner ear disorders.
2. If I do have to wake up in three and a half hours, I'm gonna choke a bitch.
3. If you actually read all that, I AM SO SORRY. I will send you apologetic arrangements of fruit in the mail. OH BUT I CAN RAMBLE :D :D
4. Apologies for being horribly behind on flist. Will rectify tomorrow, amidst SNOOOOW YAYE.