The 30-Day Meme: Day 01: Introduction
I want to write more. I know the best way to get myself back in the habit is to just write a lot in general. So, to help, I'm enlisting the 30-Day meme (thank you, Gloria!). From now until September 02, I'll be making a post every day on a specific topic. Here's the complete list:
--
Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Your first love, in great detail
Day 03 – Your parents, in great detail
Day 04 – What you ate today, in great detail
Day 05 – Your definition of love, in great detail
Day 06 – Your day, in great detail
Day 07 – Your best friend, in great detail
Day 08 – A moment, in great detail
Day 09 – Your beliefs, in great detail
Day 10 – What you wore today, in great detail
Day 11 – Your siblings, in great detail
Day 12 – What’s in your bag, in great detail
Day 13 – This week, in great detail
Day 14 – What you wore today, in great detail
Day 15 – Your dreams, in great detail
Day 16 – Your first kiss, in great detail
Day 17 – Your favorite memory, in great detail
Day 18 – Your favorite birthday, in great detail
Day 19 – Something you regret, in great detail
Day 20 – This month, in great detail
Day 21 – Another moment, in great detail
Day 22 – Something that upsets you, in great detail
Day 23 – Something that makes you feel better, in great detail
Day 24 – Something that makes you cry, in great detail
Day 25 – A first, in great detail
Day 26 – Your fears, in great detail
Day 27 – Your favorite place, in great detail
Day 28 – Something that you miss, in great detail
Day 29 – Your aspirations, in great detail
Day 30 – One last moment, in great detail --
Great. I've always been awkward at introductions. Commence long-winded rambling.
Well, if you're reading this at all you probably know at least a bit. I go by Pazi, regardless of how we're communicating. My legal name is one I chose, although I only use it for interfacing with the formal parts of my life (which are few) and with blood relatives. "Pazi" doesn't mean anything in particular and wasn't taken from any existing language; it's just a nice set of syllables. An identically-pronounced name exists in both Hebrew and in Ponca Sioux; it purportedly means "golden" in the former and "yellow bird" in the latter. I didn't know about either of these names when I chose to call myself "Pazi."
I'm from the Pacific Northwest, having grown mostly along the I-5 corridor and several other areas west of the Cascade Mountains. My family's economic status jumped rapidly and frequently between "lower middle class" and "poor"; my parents were divorced when I was five and the extended family had peculiar ideas about blood being thicker than water. I've never quite gotten along with most of my blood relatives, although I do try for the sake of those I care about (my parents and sister). I don't think anyone in my consanguinal family save for a single grandparent has identified as anything other than white for a few generations back.
I identify as disabled, transgendered, queer and autistic/aspie. I wasn't given a standard education due to the disabled and autistic bits, although I aced my GED exam as a young adult when I finally decided not to try and make up for lost time. I got into college, but between bad study habits, a perpetual lack of certainty about what I wanted to do with my education, financial problems and suddenly finding myself homeless in the middle of the term one year, I never did manage to finish school and now have some barriers to getting back in or receiving financial aid ever again. All of this adds up to make it very hard for me to get a job, although I'm not completely unemployable given I've been hired a few times in the last several years.
These days I live in Minneapolis with my not-legally-recognized-but-thoroughly-real spouse Tess and a neurotic, rescued cat. We have another partner who's living in Australia at this time and some very long-term plans around getting us all together. I've also got a couple of other partners, the newest of whom lives in the neighborhood and has become a very important part of my life as well. I don't have a job, try not to hold that against myself, and spend time volunteering as a tutor in ESL classrooms here in town. I love teaching and if I ever do get another shot at school, it's going to be part of my plan.
I'm an inveterate nerd. I read a lot of science fiction, love videogames and used to have aspirations of working in the field, and thoroughly immersed myself in science from an early age. As a teenager I developed a passion for linguistics as well, and nowadays I'm interested in just about anything you could imagine someone developing an obsessive passion over (and quite a few things most people can't). I also love it when people share their own obsessive passions, areas of expertise and suchforth with me, so at this stage I'm kind of a meta-geek -- I'm geeky about geeks, nerds and other creative/obsessive/explorative types. I think my primary focus is biology, though -- living things have always interested me more than just about anything else, and between reading voraciously and hands-on experience I've been able to compensate for many of the deficits in my education, though only around this single topic.
I care a lot about social justice a lot, although I'm going through a period of figuring out how to integrate my reasons for that and the stuff I've learned with other areas of my life.
Politically, I don't classify well. I care about civil liberties a lot. I think equality of opportunity in society and the economy are more important than having the possibility of dizzying highs for some (that come at the cost of abyssal lows for others). I think people and society are systems whose output is to a great extent defined by the input; the higher on Maslow's hierarchy you sit at any given time T, the easier it is to contemplate transitioning to a higher step yet, or mitigate how far down you'll drop in an emergency. I think that I live in a country with an uncommonly weak grasp on this, relative to the other countries most like it, but also feel the entire culture-complex from which those countries spring has only a fair-to-middling grasp on this at the best of times.
Also, I have purple hair.
Can I go now?