often seen in the street without a hat

I am resurrecting a meme I last did in 2005:

"If you leave a comment, I will draw one [or more] of your interests VERY BADLY in paint. I can't draw even with an actual pencil, and I only have access to a touchpad mouse, so I cannot emphasise the VERY BADLY enough. EXTREMELY APPALLING and almost certainly BARELY RECOGNISEABLE interests, that's what's on offer."

You can go here to see the level of skill I am talking about. (If you did it last time, I will pick different interests.)


(This is part of a Plan to make me do more work. It might seem at first this this is a Plan with somewhat obvious flaws, but the idea is that I will work for a bit, draw some interests, then work a bit more and draw some interests, instead of not really doing any work, then having an hours long break of doing nothing. So do your bit by letting me have at your interests! Probably this meme will be the making of my thesis, and my Paint skillz will form the basis of the front cover design of its eventual publication.)

The letter D

Dictionaries
I just really like them, though I don't have a particularly impressive vocabulary, and I never really remember cool words I find (although, I do if I read them somewhere else, just not outside of books). I also really like the appendices in dictionaries. In my A level French/English dictionary they had neat little pages about French culture.

Dimsie
Mostly here to represent school stories in general. But I think these might have been among the first I read - after Malory Towers. In my primary school in Qatar they had a lot of the Goodchild reprints, which I took out repeatedly, and then moved on to the Drina and Penny books and the school Antonia Forests. I like Dimsie. Mostly I like her around other people, and I think that the Springdale books might be a bit better, but I have a large soft spot for her (along with everyone else in the known universe).

Dustwrappers
They can be really pretty. It's also a value thing, so that when I was cataloguing books for work the presence of a wrapper increased the price fairly significantly. But mostly, I think my shelves look nicer when the books on them have wrappers that decorate the spines. I don't have any blue-spine Chalets because of that. Of course, sometimes the wrappers can be hideous or just plain inappropriate, but even that's interesting, to think about whether the artist knows the book and if that's why they made the choices, or if not, what on earth that can have been given as a brief that created such an inapt picture.

Dye
Not so much at the moment, I have about two or three inches of roots. But my natural hair colour is brownish and the dye has faded to a reddish brown, so I don't think it looks too awful. I like dying my hair. I don't wear make-up (except very occasionally, preferably when someone else does it), so it's my one thing of changing my appearance really. I've been dying my hair since I was fourteen, starting with those little wella mousse things in mahogany. Then I had various shades of red and purple throughout school, and blue in one summer holiday. The blue wasn't terribly successful, and I didn't wash it out properly because then it wouldn't have shown up at all, and so it just bled steadily onto my neck and all my clothes throughout my holiday near Machyllenth. COOL AS FUCK. Mmm. After that they brought out those blue-black and purple-black colours, so I had those a lot through sixth form and first year uni. When I was doing my year abroad I dyed half my hair black and the other half bleached to be Cruella De Vil at halloween. Then I dyed over the bleach with turquoise, which faded to green, and I had absolutely kick-ass hair that year. I perhaps clung onto it a bit longer than the regrowth really allowed. Then back to the normal colours again until my MA year, where I wanted quite desperately to have rainbow hair. I even got as far as buying the individual dyes. Then I roped in a friend to bleach my hair underneath. It was not a success. I had about two inches of very white hair, then a few of bright orange, fading to very dark brown at the ends. She was more tearful than I was. It was fixed by an emergency visit to Toni and Guy, who patched it up nicely, but didn't seem to get that I hadn't actually tried for the tie-dye effect and kept asking me why I'd done it in tones of sorrow. So that wasn't really a great moment in the life of my hair. Mmm. I'd still like to have it, but if I need to get a job then it won't be the greatest, and the bleach would still be a huge hassle.

DVDs
I like buying these. And I love that they are bringing out old things on DVD all the time, and if they would just do ,i>Grace Unver Fire that might almost content me. I like it when they do imaginative things with extras and the casing - like wrappers. And I like that I can watch a DVD on my laptop while doing my work, and it actually makes me get through all the boring parts of copying and pasting and data entry.

Doug Penhall / Peter Deluise
JUMP! Street. Hurrah. Peter Deluise plays Doug Penhall who is wonderful and lovely and beautiful in the right light. Peter Deluise does some commentaries for JUMP! Street and is very lovely on those too, mostly being (justifiably) rude about his acting. He moved into directing (though he also played a bully on Friends, and did a guest thing with his brothers and dad in Third Rock from the Sun) and was involved with the Stargate things and Jeremiah. I have listened to a few Stargate commentaries and he is still adorable but unfortunately rather earnest about things that really don't deserve it.

The Dukes
The Dukes is our local arts cinema and theatre. I love it. I have a student card, so all the films and all of their home-produced plays are a mere £3. And they have a bar, which isn't hideously expensive, and you can take drinks in with you, but you're not allowed ice in the live productions because of the actors. I assume because of the noise, though perhaps they've had some disgruntled patrons and had the need to remove any possible projectiles? It's quite a small place, and they usually show things like Harry Potter and LoTR a few weeks/months after they come out, and then the "critically acclaimed" stuff, and interesting foreign-language films. The last two films I saw there were Jarhead and Breakfast on Pluto. People tend not to talk through the films, which is lovely, though there are often some particularly knowing chuckles, which is amusing. And occasionally some politically-motivated clapping.

Doctorate/degree
I hope to earn one. Unfortunately that will require a lot more work than I'm doing at the moment. Mmmm. I try not to think about the end of the degree too much, as it seems like tempting fate, and the middle is also a bit scary, but I have at least started it, and I have a proposal, which is a good step. Although technically I'm an MPhil student, not a PhD student.

Diaries
Other people's, that is. I do not keep one, other than this journal. Fictional people mostly. I really like well done novels in diary form - Provincial Lady, Adrian Mole, and the Princess Diaries are pretty good fun. And Bridget Jones was really good at the diary entries. It's probably also why I enjoy lj, though not all of you are fictional.

I have always wanted to do an anonymous meme. I love reading other people's. But whenever there's a spate of them I realise too late, so that everyone has fatigue, and their capacity to be secretively bitchy/scandalous/revelatory/deep/shallow etc is ended. But now I have remembered. I have no logging. I also actually proper promise never to turn it on suddenly as I have seen some evil people do. That is bad. So yes.

Secrets! Bitchiness! Revelations! Thoughts! Criticism! All shall be mine. Please. It'll be fun!

P.S. Also, the right answer was sultanas. Reemmber this for next time.

Help take my mind off things.

If you leave a comment, I will draw one of your interests VERY BADLY in paint. I can't draw even with an actual pencil, and I only have access to a touchpad mouse, so I cannot emphasise the VERY BADLY enough. EXTREMELY APPALLING and almost certainly BARELY RECOGNISEABLE interests, that's what's on offer.

Ooh! Lovefilm just sent me Ed Wood.

Hardback or Paperback? For my children’s book, I mostly prefer hardbacks. For general fiction, I prefer paperbacks. But I try really hard not to crack the spines, because I'm anal like that.

Highlight or Underline? Underline, usually, but I only do that on photocopies of things, almost never in books. I've never been keen on making notes anyway, I tended to get through classes by skim reading and posing wuestions that would get us off on a tangent.

Lewis or Tolkien? Tolkien. I think. But then I also believe that more literature has been affected by Lewis.

E.B. White or A.A. Milne? A.A. Milne. Pooh, baby! Piglet and Eeyore and everyone else.

T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings? E.E Cummings, because his poems are generally shorter. I like short poetry.

Stephen King or Dean Koontz? Never read either.

Barnes & Noble or Borders? We only have Borders in this country. I don't remember any differences from when I was in the States.

Waldenbooks or B. Dalton? Don’t have either here.

Fantasy or Science Fiction? Fantasy. I'm a little unclear on the borders here, but Pratchett would be fantasy, right?

Horror or Suspense? Suspense. Dislike horror pretty intensely.

Bookmark or Dogear? BOOKMARK. ALWAYS BOOKMARK.

Hemingway or Faulkner? Not read either.

Fitzgerald or Steinbeck? Disliked all of what I’ve read from both of them.

Homer or Plato? Not read any of either. (Good lord, I’m practically illiterate.)

Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser? Ooh, I’ve read Chaucer. Only the Miller’s Tale though. I quite liked it.

Pen or Pencil? Pen.

Looseleaf or Notepad? Notepad.

Alphabetize: By Author or By Title? By AUTHOR, of course, are you INSANE? (Alphabetical by author in fiction, children’s and lit crit section, alphabetical by subject in biography and will probably be alphabetical by author within subject divisions once I get around to shelving my non-fiction properly. Aren’t you thrilled? And in children’s, within authors, it’s major series first (in series order) then chronological order, with shorter series grouped at the date of the first book in the series.)

Dustjacket: Ooh, yes. I keep them on to read myself, but usually take them off if I lend them to other people.

Novella or Epic? Um, depends on author?

John Grisham or Scott Turow? Never read either. Az wants me to read The Partner at some point, so I guess I will soon. I don’t think I’ve even heard of Scott Turow.

J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket? JK Rowling. I don’t like Lemony Snicket.

John Irving or John Updike? I’ve never read any John Updike. Come to that, I’ve only read half of one John Irving book, but I think I was enjoying it before I mysteriously stopped.

Fiction or Non-fiction? Fiction. I don’t tend to read much non-fiction at all.

Historical Biography or Historical Romance? Biography. I don’t read much romance. (Although I once read a hysterical Mills & Boon called Timber Boss (or something), in which the hero imprisons the heroine in his house (by taking away her shoes), and then tells her not to lock her door, because he can get in anyway. At the end he says ‘jokingly’ that he “should have followed my first instinct when I broke into your room. Or my second…” Ooh, beating or rape, which will it be! There is also a minor character who is in love with the hero because he once gave her a spanking when she was a young teen. It has ruined me for other romance novels.)

A Few Pages per Sitting or Finish at Least a Chapter? I don’t have hard and fast rules – I read whenever I can, for as long as I like. Usually it’s a few chapters at a time, because I read quickly.

Short Story or Creative Non-fiction Essay? Creative non-fiction essay. I don’t really like short stories, if I like something I want it to go on longer.

Buy or Borrow? Buy. I am trying not to do that so much at the moment, but I’ll be back to buying once I get back on budget.

Book Reviews or Word of Mouth? Book reviews, usually.