If you were a colour, what would you be?
Original answer posted on Gaia:
Do I have to pick just one colour?
I keep looking at the paints I have set out before me today--and all the stones in the bracelets I am wearing--and then I have to say well what is my favourite colour (purples) to wear (blues)--and never one shade pops up--it's always several at a time.
I would be the ocean--a vast myriad of changing wavy swirls and swoops, blues and greens and pinks and purples and everything in between at one time or another.
Answering now:
More often than not, I am blue. Not in a sad way. There are no green-eyed blonde-haired blues here. I am the transitional azure skies blue. I am the sweeping indigo to ice blue swirls that surround the beaches. I am the blue glinting at your from the skin of tropical frogs and oceanic fishes. I am deep-sea blue, mixed with teal and turquoise, the underwater ambivalence to the upper drier world. I am not one shade of blue, but every shade of blue, hinted at, dreamed of, and pondered over, dancing on the winds of whispers, waiting for my time to shine.
What did you, or do you, like most about school?
In elementary school I loved everything about school—except the other children. I never could stand other children or their stupidity and/or their ignorance. I had friends and my friends are excluded from this—but overall—I hated the other people. They got in the way and they slowed things down—they held me back from really being able to learn everything I could learn—and I resented that.
In middle school and high school, the only redeeming factor about school was that I didn’t have to be at home. I had moved so much when I was younger that school literally presented me with nothing new to learn. I was so thrilled when I became a freshmen in high school and started to take French. Within two weeks I was learning more and better on my own out of class than I was in class. By the end of the first semester I could keep up with year two students. High school was when I sat down in class and wrote my own stuff and ignored what was going on in the class—and yes, I always got very high marks, even when I tried not to—until we hit the algebraic wall anyway. Then I just needed a decent teacher who did more than stare at the ceiling and say look at your book.
After high school, college classes and technical schools, well, I was just really happy when everything was done. There were some interesting evenings in massage therapy school, but overall it was a wasted experience. I was only almost happy during the first half of the first semester—and then there was really nothing else to learn except rote memorization of anatomy—which I’d been through before in other courses for other reasons.
What I love about my own education process—the whole self-taught self-led education that I have been giving myself since I was twelve years old and tired of the whole American school system thing—is the huge wide world waiting before me, old and new, everything spread out before me like a bountiful buffet. I can take my time. I can pick and choose. I can take my time, learn a little here and a little there. I can delve in deeply and become utterly absorbed and suck the marrow from the bones of any one topic—or many topics. I can skim over the top of things and just pick up what I need to know, leaving the rest for later. I can come back to a topic, after years of leaving it all sitting on a shelf. I can do whatever I want the way I want to do it—and it all sticks in my brain somewhere along the way. I have books that I have been reading for more than twenty years—as in I started reading it twenty years ago and I am still not finished reading the entire thing yet—and it’s ok—I am still aware of the beginning of the book all the way up to where I am in the book, every time I pick it up, even if I have to flip back and speed-read a little here and there to refresh my brain. I love that.
These days I prefer distance learning, things I can do at my own pace, in my own way, if I have to advocate something the rest of the country finds palatable. Personally I don’t care about certifications or associations or anything else, although I am trying hard to swallow the bilious fact that I need to pull all my old records together so that I can say—here’s where I’ve been and how I know how to do this and why—although most of my associations I would prefer to remain clandestine. Gods above, I don’t even want to admit who fathered my children in open public. I’ll widely tout my children—just not the biological donors responsible—not any of them.
How does your mind relate to your body?
This is sort of a weird question for me actually. For years, my heart and brain were disconnected from my body. It has been a slow integration process. Even now my body has reactions that I cannot figure out how to mentally assess or process. Things are more cohesive these days, but there is still a lot trapped in my musculature that I cannot wrap my brain around. Brain and body usually work well together these days, for the most part, but there are still quirks.
Where is your name from?
As far as I know, my dad picked it from the tv show Bewitched.
I do know my dad refused to allow my mom to name me, as was the custom in my mother’s family, Mary Catherine (the first daughter of the first daughter is always named Mary Catherine in my mother’s family).
I do know my middle name is my great-grandmother’s first name. Even though I change the spelling off and on out of sheer spite and force of will—it’s a matter of aesthetics with me.
I do know that there is a Tabitha in the Christian bible: Acts 9:36-42
Aramaic origin means gazelle. Somewhere along the line one of the readings I read, when I was about 10 or 11 said my name means beloved of God.
What is the first thought that crossed your mind this morning?
Same thought that crosses my mind every morning—how much longer can I sleep until I absolutely cannot stay in bed another second………
What motivates you the most?
I would love to say something pithy here—like my children—or society as a whole—or the desire to be a good person—but actually it is sheer stubbornness of will. I simply will not lay down and die—but I am not going to just sit still and wait for Death to approach either. I motivate me—I make me get up and do things—even if it takes awhile for me to really want to do them.
