Arrr! I ain’t got time to do today th’ justice it desarves, but I been meanin’ to post a link to this 'ere post on Mongolia, so I reckon as that’ll have to do. If’n that post grabs yer interest, ye may wish to check out th’ rest o’ Team Alala’s swashbucklin’ jarney ’crost Eurasia.

sparkymonster and several other wonderful people on my Flist have called my attention to International Blog Against Racism Week. From starkeymonster’s post:

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! YAY!

How to participate? oyceter says...
1. Announce the week in your blog.

2. Switch your default icon to either an official IBAR week icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBAR week icon, you may modify one of yours yourself or ask someone to do so. Here's a round up of IBARW icons.

3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn't yours, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc. (Linking back here (ibarw) is highly appreciated!)

For inspiration, here are last year's IBARW posts. You can also check out this post for further resources.
...

PSST: It will help a lot on del.icio.us if you title your entry something topical, as opposed to just "Intl. Blog Against Racism Week."

I’m unlikely to manage to actually manage to post anything appropriate, since I’ve been busy enough lately that I haven’t even found time to post about the important stuff that’s happened to me personally¹, but I think it’s a great idea and I wanted to point people at it.

---

¹ F’rinstance, I twisted my (other) ankle on Saturday and fell down in the middle of the street. Got an awesome bruise on my thigh from the curb. I’m fine, though; the nice drivers stopped and didn’t hit me, and I’m back to walking almost normally now.

So this “ten things you’d tell your 16-year-old self” meme is really interesting, and I’m learning a lot about people from it, but I’m having a hard time putting myself in the right mindset to come up with interesting answers. The point of the thought-exercise would be to change the past, but if I change the past, I would risk losing people who are very very important to me because what led up to my meeting them didn’t happen. For instance, Boston would have been a better place for me to go to school than New Haven (and I say Boston rather than Harvard because I think UMass or Tufts would have gotten me into the same urban setting), but if I hadn’t gone to Yale I wouldn’t have met beetiger, among other people, and I wouldn’t want to give her up. And if I’d found myself in Boston several years earlier, I would have found a different social circle and the community dynamics would have been different when all my actual friends and sweeties showed up in Boston (if I’d even meet them), and I might not have those relationships.

However, for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to ignore all those issues and pretend that shuffling the deck and dealing a new hand is something I’m OK with. Otherwise it would be all “Make absolutely sure you go to this party that your friend invites you to, and be really certain you say yes when this other person asks you if they can bring a friend to your party, and don’t be late to this event, but make sure you’re late for this other one”.

So anyway, here’s some information for my 16-year-old self:( Some things I’d tell myself at sixteen, if I were going to tell myself stuff at sixteen. )

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! Once upon a time there was a similar meme floating around LiveJournal, which let people theoretically say which of their LJ friends they had a crush on (and implied anonymity, although didn’t state it outright, I think), and after a while the person who ran it decided to make some money by selling people’s lists of crushes. Über-creepy. Anyway, the moral is: don’t trust sites like this that collect potentially sensitive data. This one at least lets you register a crush without entering personal data if you choose, but I suppose it could theoretically be collecting IP addresses.

Moreover, I don’t know why anybody who knows me would need this, since you can just tell me if you have a crush on me. But anyway, all the cool kids’re doing it, and the first one’s free, and all my friends are jumping off a building, so here you go:


Crush this person!
Get your own ThisCrush.com CrushTag!

There are many things I should be doing right now instead of posting to LJ, but I’m a sucker for interview memes and I’m feeling slothful. :-)

Put the seven deadly sins in your personal order of preference (your favorite first, most despised last).

I had to look them up to get the list. In order:

1. Lust (but not the original luxuria ‘extravagance’) — I’m all for this one!
2. Gluttony
3. Sloth
4. Envy
5. Avarice
6. Pride
(in the sense of ‘hubris’, not in the sense of pride in a job well done)
7. Wrath

Is there a new skill you hope to acquire this year?

( answer )

How long can you go without checking your email before you get antsy for it?

( answer )

What scares you?

( long answer )

Can you think of any wrong that someone's committed to you or a loved one that you're unable to forgive?

( long answer )

List from the Science Fiction Book Club; meme from hrafn.

( 50 important SF books per the Science Fiction Book Club, and the 22 I’ve read )

Via mzrowan, my OKCupid World Languages Test Results:

( 330 out of 400 )

Unsurprisingly, given that I was a linguistics major in college, I did well on the actual language questions (e.g., “is language X a member of language family Y”), and not so well on the political/geographic questions (“is language X an official language of country Y”).

I’m pretty sure I must have been on the subway in Chicago, but it would have been a long time ago. I’m pretty sure we rode on the subway when I was in Amsterdam, but not 100% sure. I may have been on the subway as a child the summer we lived in Baltimore, but I think the chances are less than 50%, so I didn’t put it on here. Oh, and I’m sure I’ve been on the San Francisco Muni; don’t remember whether I’ve been on the BART as well. [Thanks, sionnagh!]

Here are some odd interview questions from ironrose. (The even ones will be filtered.) ( Interview meme. ) Let me know in a comment if you’d like me to come up with five questions for you. I don’t promise to come up with them in a timely fashion, but I’ll come up with them eventually.