knock yourself out survey from tumblr

Originally posted 10-27-12.

Knock yourself out:

• 1: What are you wearing?

My real sheepskin woolly slippers hand sewn by a guy up the highway. Misty Mountain Sheepskin Co.

• 2: Ever been in love?

One of the being-a-nerd requirements is a certain innate puniness. I get warm fuzzies when I see I’m not alone in my afflictions, and I guess a lot of other nerds do, too, because at 14 hours Wil Wheaton had over 500 comments on his post on facebook about being puny. We’re here for you, Wil Wheaton. Any puny nerd who can get continual consistent response over simply eating burritos, quaffing homemade brewskies, and racing to get nearly nude middle age beach photos up before the paparazzi can has won the game of thrones. Only 2 people in my life have a clue who you are or what the whole apology thing about pinterest was, but -oh yes- you have won.

• 3: Ever had a terrible breakup?

Don’t I wish. Every year, ladybugs swarm by the thousands out of the woods and find their way into my house. You never see a horror thriller about a ladybug infestation because it’s just so stupid. Spiders and flies actually use a little cunning, calculating their moves, sneaking around, quickly retreating. Ladybugs just suddenly fly up your nose without warning, or dive straight down into your glass of milk, or crawl maddeningly through your clothes and hair, and your hands and fingers slip right over them while their little sticky feet cling like velcro. You don’t even feel the tiny little crunches, you just discover the carnage later on the bottom of your sock. Ladybugs have no sense of self preservation, no red flags going off that a move might possibly be a drastically wrong one to make, no decision making skills based on past experience, no avoidance behaviors. They simply just impulsively do stuff for no rhyme or reason without warning. One lit on the edge of my glasses and started walking along the inside, I automatically put my finger up to wipe it off, once disrupted it flitted right over to my eyelid and just started walking around, I had to take my glasses OFF trying to grab hold of its tiny little round body without smashing it to bits in my EYE… I’ve had to dig them out of my ears, too, which is a special little Disney experience all its own. You almost can’t feel them on you at all, they’re hard to see, so when you go to the bathroom you have to make sure one hasn’t fallen into your underwear before you pull them up, because that’s a little treat you really don’t want in your life. I find them in the laundry, the fridge, cake batter, my keyboard, my dishwater, randomly scattered on the bed. Eventually they’ll all gather in upper corners and light fixtures and dry out to death, collecting dust and crumbling away. Scott likes to be kind to them and scoop them up and carry them outside. Several more follow or ride back in, and he never even sees them. It’s ridiculous.

• 4: How tall are you?

This gets really dumb when a pulmonologist makes you take off your shoes and practically draws a chalk outline on a wall and then a nurse in another office pronounces him wrong by half an inch because she’s holding a stack of stuff in one hand and a pen in the other while she flies through a yearly wellness exam, and suddenly you find that the certifiable 5’4″ you’ve been most of your life gets crossed out and changed to 5’3 1/2″ by a dingleberry. Some people have way too much power.

• 5: How much do you weigh?

This differs by as much as ten pounds from my scale to a doctor’s office to the freight scale at Scott’s work on the same day within 2 hours. I’m not sure there really is such a thing as accuracy. I think one of the post offices around here is stiffing me on packages.

• 6: Any tattoos do you want?

I’m afraid to even use the peel and stick, too many allergic reactions. And my luck I’d be the one to get someone who couldn’t spell properly or see straight. And cosmic irony would dictate that if I were to get one, something about it would get screwed up enough no one would know what it was and I’d have to explain it. And seriously, I’m not sure I could part with that kind of money just to have someone poke my skin up with little needles.

• 7: Any piercings that you want?

I’m constantly piercing myself in the kitchen, I can’t imagine paying someone to do that on purpose. By the way, I’m not a self cutter because I’m terrified of infection. Cutting up raw meat and slipping some of it neatly into parts of your hand that should never know the rotting DNA of another being and then developing a weird dark patch or streak is NOT cool, especially when you’re allergic to most of the antibiotics out there.

• 8: OTP?

My reticence comes from being naturally wary of too-easy technology that, while being our friend, also seeks to monitor and steer us.

• 9: Favorite Show?

Lately it’s Merlin, and I’ll tell you why. No blood. After years of butchering and illness and dealing with hard emotional stuff (like an ‘escorted’ abortion- my psychologist says it was forced) and then going through severe hormone deprivation last spring and wigging out, I am GRATEFUL I can watch a cool tv show that doesn’t make a big deal about being realistic with blood and gore. THANK YOU, Merlin creators, for creating a story I can actually get into without having to wade through all my old traumas. If you’ve been fortunate enough to have never been sprayed liberally with blood from another living being, or be blood soaked up to your shoulders cleaning up or dealing with someone’s birth or death or whatever, bless your innocence, and I thank you for not dissing people who just can’t take it anymore.

• 10: Favorite bands?

I’ve been stuck on Eiffel 65 again lately.

• 11: Something you miss?

I was wondering earlier today if I should maybe crochet another afghan. It’s been a really long time since I’ve done that, and maybe I’d like to make something purply.

• 12: Favorite song?

It’s also been a long time since I listened to some sultry smoky saxophone music. Kind of in a mood.

• 13: How old are you?

I am continually surprised at how much better than my mom I look at this age.

• 14: Zodiac sign?

Scorpio, Ox, and anything else that signifies unrepentant stubbornness.

• 15: Hair Color?

Still the same bland natural mousy brown, but it’s getting longer. Sort of.

• 16: Favorite Quote?

From Mystery Men – Movie Transcript

Bowler: You oughta run, Tony P.
Tony P: You can’t hurt me, Baby Bowler. ‘Cause I’m protected by
the god of hair care. (demonstrates his flaming hairspray) And it’s
time to send you back to your daddy.
Bowler: (pulling Carmine out of his bag) You killed my father.
Tony P: That’s right. ‘Cause I’m a killer. (Carmine flies out of the
room on his own, and around behind the other side of the stairs)
And you’re not. Let’s face it, kid…You don’t have the guts to kill
me.
Bowler: You’re right. I don’t have the guts to kill you. Because I’m
better than you. Yeah, that’s right. A lot better. You know, I may
even find the courage to forgive you someday.
(Carmine flies around, slamming into Tony P and driving him
partway through a wall.)
Bowler: Oh! Carmine, on the other hand, feels differently than I do
about forgiveness.
(Carmine rolls into his bag, and Bowler picks it up.)
Bowler: (into bag) Okay, now I’m going back to graduate school. That
was the agreement.

• 17: Favorite singer?

I always have to come back to Weird Al on this one. Between the food songs and scifi parodies and nuking Christmas and doing everyone from Joan Jett to Lady Gaga, I really don’t think anyone else can hold a candle. Here, enjoy one of my fave fun singalongs.

• 18: Favorite color?

All About the Color BLUE

You can look up your fave color at Color: Meaning, Symbolism and Psychology

• 19: Loud music or soft?

I like silence throughout most of my day the last couple of years. I feel like I’m processing or something, after many years of continual noise and work and music and television and radio and stuff.

• 20: Where do you go when you’re sad?

I have been so deep in my head since I was teeny tiny that I’m not sure I can cope any other way. I have been thrilled to find other people producing things that I thought only existed in my head, so somehow some of us wind up in some of the same places, apparently. I can’t help wondering why a significant number of us seem to create visions of other places (planets), other times, other technologies (cities), other biologies and ecologies. It’s like we were born to do this, either to remember something we’ve forgotten during this life or feel compelled to create something that somehow can’t really exist, which seems illogical unless it really is possible. I feel like living here in this time and place is an exercise of patience and learning, a sort of pit stop for recharging, or a slam through understanding hard things very quickly, depending on what’s happening in our lives. Sadness just doesn’t seem like a natural survival tool, so I think there are other reasons it exists for us.

• 21: How long does it take you to shower?

All the years I’ve been avoiding shower questions… I may as well just be honest, can you handle that? Too late, here it comes. I have anxiety attacks in the shower. Sometimes they get so bad it’s hard to breathe. I shower as quickly as humanly possible without compromising hygiene and get outa there. I’ve been having anxiety attacks around water since I was a little bitty kid, prolly because of the Asperger’s. I was able to swim for a few years and be ok, and I enjoyed hot baths for a few years, but that’s all gone now. There is no joy in getting wet, there’s just way too much sensation over too much area all at once, and I can smell when the water’s been treated and the difference between city waters and well waters (especially between rainy and drought seasons) when it gets steamy. It doesn’t help that I have allergic reactions to soaps and shampoos. On the other hand, I can’t stand feeling grimy or gross, so washing my hair and hands and whatever might get a little compulsive sometimes.

• 22: How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?

I can be out the door from a dead sleep in 5 minutes flat if I have to, but I’d rather snail around with coffee and my computer and whatever for 3 hours first.

• 23: Ever been in a physical fight?

My favorite kind of fight is with a rooster. Those nidiots love it when you egg them on, and they stalk you across the yard and then launch, and all you have to do is swivel a hip and knock them off balance in mid air, and dang if they don’t get up and dust off and come back for more, because that was ~fun~. 

• 24: Turn on?

I have always been stopped dead in my tracks by these kinds of colors. The compulsion to buy whatever is these colors is so strong that I wrestle with myself for several minutes before I can walk away. Could be a shirt, could be something I see in a catalog, could be toys or crayons or stationary. If I were a bower bird, this would be considered an instinct. I wish chickens had feathers in these colors.

• 25: Turn off?

Any kind of screaming and yelling, angry shouting, loud boisterousness, mocking, basically the unpleasant end of the scale in human voices.

• 26: The reason I joined Tumblr?

Colin Morgan fans. They are delightfully entertaining. I think some of them have gone so far overboard that Colin himself has become a caricature, but it’s still cute how joyfully creative they can be. I don’t think most of them realize how utterly rabid they look, a weird sort of innocence in consuming Colin as a product, kind of like someone in a fantasy story not realizing they’re a werewolf or something. If I were an actor I’d be terrified of fans, but my social anxiety is off the wall anyway.

• 27: Fears?

I seriously sometimes wake up very upset that I just remembered I’ve ditched too many classes to pass a college class, and I’m going to have to retake it next semester, and it takes about ten minutes to remember I haven’t been in college for some years, and that I’ve never actually skipped classes to that extent in real life, and I never really feared college like that. I have no idea where that comes from, but every time it happens I feel very upset. (Metaphor for life kind of thing…? May have to bring this one up with my psychologist.)

• 28: Last thing that made you cry?

It’s funny how you can get through 20 years of living a certain way and then it hits you one day that you never really had what you wished for, and when you sift it all down to the root of why, you can see every bit of it came from parents who simply didn’t have a clue how to just enjoy having and loving children and everything you’ve done as an adult revolves around trying to please other people while you set yourself aside as less important. That’s such an empty hole to notice, and it immediately makes me think of all the ways I must have failed my own children, although they’ve insisted I’m pretty cool.

• 29: Last time you cried?

Some day someone’s going to ask me the last time I huzzahed. Those fleeting joyous moments should get a little more credit in our days.

• 30: Meaning behind your url

I suspect this means tumblr url. I swear, I had no idea there was another Pinky Guerrero out there, and a semi-famous one at that, and ironically I got her twitter name before she did and she has to use the underscore with her name, and it’s just too funny when she forgets to do that and tells everyone to reply to *my* twitter name. I bet she hates me. But she got pinterest before I did, so it all balances out. She’s got the dotcom, I’ve got the xanga blog AND the myspace, oh yeah, AND the fanpop. She’s the self purported super woman who does it all, I’m the loser has-been geeky nerd who lurks around under several different names being weird, making Lexx posts and raising chickens and obsessing over surveys, and many other things that I don’t feel the need to resume (I verbed the noun resume, hope that didn’t confuse you) out to the world on a website. I wish other-Pinky much success and a happy life. I’ll pretend that’s another me in a parallel world so my own existence will be validated with the feeling of balance in the nature of the cosmic irony that is my life.

• 31: Last book you read?

I love the library, it saves me untold tens of thousands of dollars that I’d otherwise compulsively spend in book stores. My reading list this year is about 30 books long so far. The last one I worked on was in the Gears of War series, and I’ve recently started Book of the Navajo. I’ve never really kept track of what I read, but when I do start listing, people’s eyes tend to glaze over. My latest amazon book purchase was a 10 pound monstrosity called The History of Food. I could be exaggerating about the ten pounds.

• 32: Last song you listened to?

The whole Lexx tv show soundtrack. Just seemed like the right thing to plug into the car this week.

• 33: Last show you watched?

Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Super fave, big fan, hope it lasts forever. I am especially enamored of Liam McPoyle for some reason. He is one creepy dude.

              

• 34: Last person you talked to?

A complete stranger from a faraway place. I should have hung up *before* it got ugly. I don’t like it when it gets ugly. People being paid to get ugly is a cancer on our planet.

• 35: The relationship between you and the person you last texted?

Daughter once removed…? She came out of my sister, but it feels like she’s sorta mine. My DNA recognizes her and I can’t help it, all the rest is built in.

• 36: Favorite food?

Every favorite food I’ve listed in surveys has wound up on my food allergies list in the last couple of years, so now I feel like I’m jinxing myself to even talk about having a favorite food.

• 37: Place you want to visit?

I think it would be cool to go see the Mockingbird Lane set, new series coming on NBC. I love that house.

• 38: Last place you were?

Isn’t it magical how Walmart can transform overnight into new holidays? And isn’t it magical how when I’m in there I feel more holiday luv and cheer than anywhere else? I think it’s all the bright colors. Warm fuzzies have a lot to do with color, I think. I bet there is a whole marketing science around that. Ok, I know there is because I worked retail for a few years. ~*magical*~

• 39: Do you have a crush?

I always have a crush. Person, place, or thing, if I don’t have some kind of obsession going, something is very wrong with me. Fortunately for the world at large, my obsessions are like lightning storms coming and going, because if I were to focus on one obsession for ten years straight like some people I know can, I would be either very rich or very mental (possibly both), and either way I’d be the most evil genius about it you ever met. At least this way I’m mostly harmless.

• 40: Last time you kissed someone?

Scott has seemed extra huggy and cuddly lately, and it’s the middle of bow season and the Vikings lost recently. I’m perplexed. Maybe it’s because I made his favorite Halloween cookies or something. Halloween brings out that special feeling, I know.

• 41: Last time you were insulted and what was it?

I don’t keep track. Being insulted actually means you’re worth enough to get someone’s attention, and if they’re making the time to come at you, then they’re pretty much admitting they’re jealous and can’t get over something and unable go on with their lives. Next time you insult someone else, stand back and watch all the moments tick through your emotions and thoughts and see if I’m not right. If you are very honest with yourself, you will notice that whatever stopped you and caught your attention really has its root inside yourself somewhere somehow.

• 42: What color underwear are you wearing?

Dang, you caught me on a white day. How boring I am. I’ve always been jealous that guys get the underoos kind of thing, and everything cool that girls get is girlied up guy underwear. Since I worked almost 5 years in an intimates department in a big retail chain, I tend to notice this kind of stuff. I am especially jealous that John Barrowman gets to disrobe all the time because his underwear is so cool. Underwear for women that I would totally buy if it were available would include My Little Pony and anything with any kind of starship on it.

• 43: What color shirt are you wearing?

I’ve got to get me some new t-shirts, it’s getting really old how many times I’ve been wearing my ancient red Homestar Runner tee when this question comes up.

• 44: What color bottoms are you wearing?

Well, you asked.

• 45: Wearing any bracelets?

Only when I leave the house. Someday I’ll take a pic of my allergy bracelets.

• 46: Last sport you played?

I’m in the middle of pastry chef-ing for a Halloween party, kind of a sport to beat the clock when you get down to crunch time. Yeah, the truth comes out, I run back and forth to my laptop doing a question here or there on surveys as a way to destress. Bet you guys thought I had my lazy butt parked just sitting here, didn’t you? I think I’ve mentioned before that surveys can take me days to fill out, something I didn’t make clear in the olden days when I got fussed at for ‘wasting time’.

• 47: Last song you sang?

I tried to do the Horoscope song with Weird Al.

 

• 48: Last prank call you remember doing?

I really need to remember this angle the next time a snotty stranger gets through on the phone.

• 49: Last time you hung out with anyone?

Me and Scott hang out all the time.

• 50: Favorite movie?

I tried answering this once. It turned into a list monstrosity that I couldn’t stop adding to. I finally just put it into my profile. Every time I feel like deleting it I remember how caught up in it I got, so I leave it there to deter me from getting caught in that again. We may never know what my favoritist movie of all time really is.