rough wild vanilla

Given that it's been an age since I've posted anything (possibly an age and a half) and that I just re/met a considerable number of nifty people at Muskrat Jamboree, it seems an apposite time to do that ten-things meme I've seen most recently at Chez kassrachel and La Casa de riverlight. Yes, I know there are twenty-five- and fifty- and hundred-things versions of this meme out there. One step at a time on this rejoining-the-land-of-the-online-living, yo.

In no particular order:

1. From 1993 to 2003, I sang for a living - part of one, anyway, ranging from a little to about half depending on the season and how off my ass I'd gotten with regard to finding gigs. Over that time, I acted as a professional section leader and soloist at three churches - All Saints Pontiac (MI), Trinity Church Copley Square (Boston), and Kings Chapel (also Boston, and the best of the three positions by several orders of magnitude) - and had a gig for the High Holy Days at a Reform temple in Needham, a suburb of Boston. I sang early American music with Columbia's Musick and early European music with Schola Cantorum, both in Boston. For two years in there, I had a vocal jazz quartet in Boston called In the Mix. I sang weddings and funerals. I pinch-hit as a ringer in all kinds of choirs. Bottom line: I sang anything anyone would hire me to sing, and I did it happily and with pleasure. Except for a couple of brief stints teaching voice, which I suck at, I loved it all.


2. In late summer 2001, my voice started misbehaving. Things did not improve. In short order, my instrument became unreliable, the kiss of death for a journeyman musician. I had minimal health insurance and a compassionate OB/GYN (yes, you read that right), so I got some professional care for The Voice - at the hospital where Julie Andrews was treated for vocal nodes, IIRC. It wasn't enough. In early summer 2002, after the damage had been done, I quit my job at Trinity (one of my better decisions) and went to work for Kings (ditto). Late that same summer, well before I could admit to myself that my career as a singer was over, I started studying for the LSAT (the US entrance test for law-school admission). I passed it and got into law school at Vanderbilt, where I confounded the bulk of my 200+ classmates by being Old, Liberal, And Weird In So Many Ways but managed to get a JD nonetheless. In October 2006, two hours after I found out I'd passed my first bar, I got an email from my current boss offering me a position as a staff attorney at a legal-aid firm in another state. I'm still there. I want - I really, REALLY want - to move on. That's another several posts in and of itself (themselves?).


3. ...yeah. I don't have the wherewithal right now to say a whole lot more about that. She was so amazing, and I loved her so much, and I miss her every day of my life. Her death knocked my world off true, and it doesn't show any signs of realigning to the old order any time soon. (Mind you, life does go on.)


4. It's all here. Of the few handfuls of stories I've written, most are slash. About two-thirds are due South; the rest are all over the place, from Hamlet to Good Will Hunting to Eleventh Hour (US) to Dick Francis to Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry.


5. I moved to the area for my job. I am grateful for my job. My job makes me nuts. My location makes me nuts. I want out of both. More specifically - because the universe takes mean advantage of vague wishes - I want out (1) for a great job in my field (b) that pays me enough to live on, to travel (especially to my partners - see next item), and to save for retirement (iii) either in a major metro area or close to a major metro airport.


6. I met my partners at the wedding of mutual friends: they were in the groom's party (best man and one of the ushers) and I was the bride's maid (insert scare quotes here) of honor (scare quotes hopefully not needed). I wore a fascinator. They wore tuxedos (and, in one case, a sling). It was ... involvement? at first sight. We're separated geographically by several states and hundreds of miles. Skype, Google Talk, and frequent-flyer points are our friends, as is my office's generous annual-leave policy. I figure we're lucky to have all of those - and incredibly fortunate to have one another, separately and together. They - and we - are also an/other post/s in and of ourselves.


7. Criminal Minds: show of my damaged heart - and why in the HELL there is no significant fandom for it is a question that puzzles me daily. CSI - especially New York, with the late and lamented-by-me Miami a close second and the current CSI bringing up a close third. NCIS - yes, both coasts. Law & Order SVU, UK, and Criminal Intent; the original one has too much court time for me to be comfortable with it (high stakes omg, plus they get shit wrong all the fucking time and it makes me just a wee bit berserk). Person of Interest and Grimm and Haven and Warehouse 13 and so many other warps on the PI trope. And that's just US TV ...


8. Puff (a/k/a Little Grey), my oldest, is a grey domestic shorthair. He will be eight this July. He is wired a little weirdly - he has seizures, he can't tolerate litter (thank you, universe, for inventing puppy pads), and he walks like an arthritic Rockette - but he is my peaceful sleepy love. Qiao (a/k/a Big Kitty), my middle boy, is six or seven (he was a stray) and is also a grey domestic shorthair, but with a good chunk of Abyssinian in him. This is now only visible in his triangular head; the rest of him has become, shall we say, considerably less streamlined since his original parents gave him to me, courtesy of his need to Eat All The Noms. Badger (a/k/a Fluffball), my youngest boy, is ...five? He is a calico-ish domestic medium-hair with a significant streak of Maine Coon running through his veins. He loves everybody, especially everybody who pets him all the time anywhere he wants to be petted. He's the only cat I've ever met who doesn't care about food, including treats. All of them are rescues: Puff from the sistergirl's former roommate's worth-free sibling, Qiao from under a bush in Baltimore, and Badger from the central part of Virginia courtesy of the compassionate slavetotehtink.


9. Curvy. Plus-sized. Jumbo. Big. Bountiful. Zaftig. Fat. Some days I am mostly okay with that. Okay is about as good as it gets. Yet another subject of posts that are not this one.


10. And I do mean raging. If and when my country of origin ever stops manifesting as its popular opinion the misbegotten conviction that poverty is either a crime or a character flaw, I might possibly stop being angry about people and how they treat others of their kind. Until then ... yeah.


11.
(a) I'm bisexual. No, I'm not experimenting. No, I'm not dabbling. No, I'm not afraid to commit to one primary gender or the other (a binary assumption I find particularly interesting in light of some of my chosen family). I am what I am, and that's none of the above. As a family-sized woman, I find it considerably easier to be bisexual than to be sexual, period. I wish I didn't.
(b) I'm bionic. Partly, anyway. I have something called erosive degenerative osteoarthritis (the rough medical equivalent of "dude, your joints are fucked up, but we have no idea why"; a bit more of the why may be forthcoming in the next week when I get the results of recent blood tests). Three of my joints - left knee, right ankle, and right elbow - have joined the Down With Cartilage Party and gotten rid of their store of the substance. The right knee, however, has been deprogrammed and is recovering: in April 2009 I had the knee the universe gave me replaced with one made of metal, plastic, and rubber cement (you think I'm kidding), and since then it's functioned remarkably well. (Its name, by the way, is Clyde. The left knee is Bonnie. The bad knee ankle is the Kid; the bad elbow is Natasha. I know y'all can figure that out.