i goddamn well hate conflict avoidant people.

stolen, from elisem on livejournal...

What's on your bedside table?
no bedside table, bedside bookcase. on the shelves, lots of books. on the top, a lamp, some magazines, a box of toys, and more books!

What is the geekiest part of your music collection?
geeky? who knows! i do have a muppet show album, however.

What do you eat when you raid the fridge late at night?
nothing. we don't keep a lot of food in the fridge. as far as midnight snacks go, probably lemonade and an oatmeal bar.

What is your secret guaranteed weeping movie?
_truly, madly, deeply_. okay, not such a secret.

Do you have a completely irrational fear?
well, i don't think so, but other people do. for example, most other people seem to think that there's no chance in hell that dead animals are just faking it to lure me to come close enough so they can attack. how do they know, i ask you?

What is the little physical habit that gives away your insecure moment?
picking at my fingers. i actually do this whenever i am tense.

Are you a pyromaniac?
not as much as i used to be!

Do you have too many love interests?
well, *i* don't think so.

Do you know anyone famous?
i know lots of authors, some with bigger name recognition than others and some with better books than others.

Describe your bed.
happy!

er, king size, relatively firm mattress. wedged into a room only slightly larger than it is.


Spontaneous or plan?
i desperately need to have a plan, which i can spontaneously modify. but i hate not having a plan.

Who should play you in a movie about your life?
there are not enough fat actresses for me to answer this question. kathy bates is right out, as is camryn manheim. (i'm way too short.)

Do you know how to play poker?
my parents taught us how to play penny ante five card draw. i like it, but i am not good enough at it to play with my serious poker playing friends.

What do you carry with you at all times?
if i'm in the house, not much. if i'm out of the house, my wallet, car keys for our cars, house keys for four different houses only one of which is mine, and usually my cell phone.

How do you drive?
a friend recently remarked that 90% of people think they are above average drivers. well, i'm in that 90%.

What do you miss most about being little?
elisem said being able to fit into very small spaces, and i agree.

Are you happy with your given name?
i like my name. my official name and my use name differ slightly (betsy is a nickname for elizabeth), but i like them both. and it aggravates me when other people's parents obviously forgot to put the e at the end of anne, which is my middle name. (uh, annb, if you're reading this, just remember that i agreed with you about what your kidlet's nickname *shouldn't* be.

How much money would it take to get you to give up the Internet for one year?
i'd go crazy. i would. but i'd do it if i got to consult with my financial advisor about it to find out how much money it would take for me to get what i wanted. the kicker is that i'd have to quit my job; hard to be a techie these days without the internet.

What color is your bedroom?
a nice dark blue.

What was the last song you were listening to?
currently, every breath you take, by the police.

Have you ever been in a play?
yes, but not since junior high.

Who are your best friends?
oh, this is a dumb question.

Have you ever been in love?
oh, once or twice. ;)

Do you talk a lot?
not so much.

Do you like yourself and believe in yourself?
yes.

Have you ever done any illegal drugs?
alcohol before i was twentyone. other than that, no. (hey, none of the dealers at my college could tell me how their drugs would interact with my meds! i'm not dumb!)

Do you think you're cute?
if by cute, you mean attractive, yes, mostly. reinforcement helps.

Do poor, homeless, or starving people sometimes annoy you?
not usually.

Do you consider yourself to be a nice person?
i think i am, although i am working on being more considerate of others when i am scared or hurt.

Do you spend more time with your girlfriend, boyfriend, or your friends?
well, i spend more time with my boyfriend than with my girlfriend, and more with her than with my other friends.

What is your ideal marriage location?
if this question means wedding location, then i thought forepaugh's was quite nice and i would recommend it to people who want small weddings. if it does mean marriage location, then minnesota has been working out well so far.

Which musical instrument do you wish you could play?
electric bass.

Favorite fabric?
satin.

What kind of bedding do you use?
flannel or cotton sheets. just recently discovered the joy of all-cotton sheets. soooo worth it.

What kind of soap do you use?
free at last, by my friends kerry and stephanie.

What's the one language you want to learn?
well, i am on and off working on french at the moment. but i'd love to be fluent in russian. no, wait, nahuatl. almost totally useless for a minnesotan.

How do you eat an apple?
from the outside in.

What do you order at a bar?
used to be a rum and coke until i gave up caffeine last month. currently, i am still looking for a replacement drink.

Have you ever pierced your body parts?
not myself, but i've paid other people money to pierce them for me.

Do you have tattoos?
yup. a two in one biohazard/tribal floral piece on the small of my back.

Would you ever admit to having done plastic surgery of any kind if confronted?
uh, i expect i'd tell people.

What's one of the funniest things you've ever done?
apparently when my dad and i were coming back from russia a few years earlier, there was a very concerned party waiting for someone named ragnar and was walking around the waiting area calling for him. so, when my dad and sister were coming back from russia, i made a sign that said "RAGNAR" and brought it to the airport and held it up to greet them.

Do you drive stick?
yes.

What's one trait you hate in a person?
meanness.

What kind of watch(es) do you wear?
timex, analog, black leather strap.

Most frivolous purchase?
uh, the dogs?

Do you consider yourself materialistic?
yes, although i occasionally get streaks of "i hate all this stuff and i am giving it away!"

What do you cook the best?
i don't cook much.

Favorite writing instrument?
gel pens, with squishy bits to hold on to.

Do you prefer to stand out or blend in?
that depends.

Would you ever go out dressed like the opposite sex?
i wear mens clothes all the time.

What's one car you will never buy?
an suv.

What kind of books do you like to read?
the ones with words in.

If you won the lottery, what would you do first?
call my financial advisor!


Burial or cremation?
cremation. then burial.

How many online journals do you read regularly?
my lj friends list, which is about 150, then a few here and there.

What's one thing you're a sore loser at?
no idea.

If you don't like a person, how do you show it?
i try not to be around them, if i can manage it.

Do you cry in front of friends?
sometimes.

What kind of first impression do you think you give to people?
aloof. this is a cover for horribly horribly shy.

What's one thing you like to do alone?
play computer games.

What's the worst thing you ever said to someone?
no idea. however, when i get ice cold furious, i am capable of saying very well formed very unpleasant yet true things.


When's the last time you cried?
last night.

Favorite communication method?
email!

What's the most painful experience you've ever had?
physical? a tossup between having injections in my knees and the operation a few years ago to remove a cyst during which i am not certain they got the anesthetic level quite right.
emotional? the obvious thing would be when my dad was in the hospital, but i was in shock the whole time, so while it was gruesomely awful and i would not recommend it, i think that it doesn't place at the top. i think what does place at the top is a relationship that i was in in college which mostly consisted of the extended remix version of "are we broken up or aren't we?"


Can you type with your eyes closed?
yes i certainly can.


Can you ski?
when i was in elementary school, i made it a life's goal to be one of the few minnesotans who died of old age never having even worn skis.

Can you speak in sign language?
i know yes, no, whatever, moose party, turtle runs into a wall, and a few obscene signs. oh, and about twenty letters of the alphabet.

Can you do the butterfly stroke?
is that the one with both arms at once? yes, but not well.

Can you say the alphabet backwards effortlessly?
i doubt it. i can start in the middle and get to the end, though.

Can you tie a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue?
never tried. i usually just collect people who can, instead. ;)

Can you run a mile in under ten minutes?
ha! no. the bit where i fall over and hurt myself in the first block of it is sort of a preventative.

Can you stand the sight of blood?
yes. i don't watch when i have blood drawn, though. but i used to work at plasma alliance which demands that you not pass out when the donors are spurting blood on the floor.

Can you read palms or tarot cards?
tarot cards.

Can you admit it when you're wrong?
yes. i hate doing it, though, because i hate being wrong.

Can you ask for help when you need it?
as a matter of fact, that's one of the things that i sell about myself in job interviews.

Can you tie a necktie?
no. my theory is that if i ever need to wear one, i have two sweethearts, both of whom know how.

Can you successfully pierce someone's ear?
define successfully. i am certainly able to make a hole through someone's earlobe!

Can you play soccer?
nope, see above running comment.

Can you sing?
yes. i am not so good at it, but i sing in the car all the time.

Can you name three kinds of clouds?
yes.

Can you make a joke out of anything?
listen, honey, my sister and i were explaining to the nurses in the hospital about how surprised my dad would be if he woke up in drag. damn near anything.

Can you perform CPR on another human?
i have been trained in cpr; i don't feel very confident in it, and i hope i never have to try my skills out.

Do you know what CPR stands for?
yes.

Can you read minds?
nope.

Can you write better poetry than Shakespeare?
nope, and not even schmoopier. shakespeare was good at schmoopy.

Can you speak more than one language?
i speak un petit peu de francais, and that's about it.

Do you know karate?
i took a karate class when i was wee. i liked it. but that was about 25 years ago, now...

Can you freestyle?
uh, what?

Elisian bonus question (feel free to add your own, if you borrow this from me):
What have you done that you are fairly sure none of your friends reading here have done?
i have flown to novosibirsk by myself.

i just turned on an atom feed for this, if any of y'all care. it should be at http://www.cavort.org/atom.xml.

does lj support atom yet? anyone know?

working on being in a better mood. i've been reading the baaaaaaaaabyanimals lj community, which is full of little tiny cuteness. remembering not to scream. remembering to breathe. remembering that if i threw the tivo remote at the buffet mirror, it would break them both and that would suck.

okay, maybe i need more baaaaaaaaabyanimals. i think so.

deeply deeply cranky. deeply.

that's what i get:

that's what i get

why's it come as a surprise
to think that i was so naive
maybe didn't mean that much
but it meant everything to me

part of barack obama's speech, from the democratic convention.

Salon.com | "This country will reclaim its promise":

For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper -- that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. 'E pluribus unum.' Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

remind me again how we've made people's lives better in afghanistan by invading?


New Zealand News - World - Aid workers prepare to flee Afghanistan:

Aid workers who remained in Afghanistan throughout the years of Soviet occupation, tribal anarchy and Taleban rule are preparing to flee the country because US military tactics have made it too dangerous to operate there.

A grim shadow was cast over the future of all aid missions to Afghanistan as the French organisation Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) said independent humanitarian work could no longer be safely carried out.

MSF claimed that the US military had endangered the lives of humanitarian volunteers by blurring the distinction between soldiers and aid workers. Five MSF workers were killed last month.

slow blogging week here, i think.

m. socks and her boy are back from wyoming. m. socks, being the best sister in the world, upped my laundry, brought the clean stuff up from the basement, and took all of the alcohol out of the house that we don't want, promising to give it a fine home in her tummy. (three bottles of woodchuck granny smith; i like the plain woodchuck better than their varietals.) yay, m!

joanna was here to visit for the weekend. this meant that the dogs and i got some bonding time, sleeping upstairs. miss josie firmly believes that her place is in the big bed, sleeping on the head of whoever is top of the pack at the moment, but by sunday night she was used to it and instead of josie and pirate yarp yarp yarping away and keeping everyone up, they just ran around and played zoom doggie and kept me up. ah, well. it was good to see joanna, and she had looked up a really nice yarn store on the internet which we went to. i am repressing the knowledge of where it was, though, because they had fabulously beautiful twenty dollar skeins of yarn. ow.

there's an anthology currently soliciting submissions from women with a chronic illness that i am sadly concluding that i will not submit an abstract to. i just don't have anything to write about. i was diagnosed with arthritis when i was 16. at this point, it's like air to me. i don't know what life would be like without it. that's just a fact, that's not whining. as long as i've been an adult or a reasonable facsimile thereof, i've had this disease. it hasn't changed my sex life, my sexuality, my body image, my career, or anything. it's shaped them. i don't know what my life would be like otherwise, and i kinda like my life the way it is.

it's a beautiful sunday afternoon, and i'm sitting on the couch looking up things about snmp. deeply deeply geeky.

on the other hand, i saw a cable channel advertised today that i would have absolutely no interest for me. the outdoor life channel. outdoors is not my cup o'tea.

as one of my dearest friends expressed to me a while back, a break up is not a democracy. you do not take a vote, it is not done by consensus, you get to break up with someone even if you can't explain why to their satisfaction.

(it seems deeply unlikely that this is about you. just fyi.)

okay, and now for post number 1001.

if you comment on one of my posts and don't have a blogger account, sign your post, please? if you'd rather not have the entire world know who you are, make up a funny name, sign with that, and then email me to tell me what your funny name is. i promise i won't tell anyone.

wooo! this is my 1000th post! i am so excited!

nathan is sitting next to me on the couch mocking me, of course.

also, there is dog wrestling.

at least the dogs appreciate all this nattering on i do.

(well, i can pretend.) 

oh, mope mope mope whine whine whine mope.

no, that particular interpersonal relationship of mine isn't going the way i'd like. nothing to do about it except wait and see.

i have a long long list of good points.

waiting and seeing? not on it.

whine whine whine, that's all i ever do since the dog ate the baby.

there is a short list of things that can make me not care that my knees hurt.

sadly, most of those things make me not care about my knees because they hurt worse.

like cramps.

ow ow ow ow ow.

went out for dinner tonight with nathan and shaun; spent most of the night with my fingers dug into nathan's leg. (what a fine sweetie he is, to let me do that.) didn't talk much because my internal monologue was mostly "ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow".

ah, well. historically, they don't last for long, and i expect i'll live.

if i still feel like this by wednesday, however, i may consult medical advice about that last part.

Test Post

oy.  trying to get publishing to work again. very tricky. apparently. but only because i have the world's biggest blog. well, this makes 987 posts.

this is a page that predicts how the electoral votes will go. it changes as different polls are taken across the country. today, kerry is predicted to have 322 electoral votes.

i would dance, but my knees still hurt. so i'll settle for some whooping.


Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004

why can't i ever get easy horoscopes that tell me that i will win the lottery and cute babes will come over to my house and feed me peeled grapes?

The Village Voice: Horoscope: Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny: "LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Your life has brought you many maddeningly inconclusive adventures. On occasion, you've probably been tempted to invest what was left of your battered faith in the doctrine proclaimed by Gertrude Stein: 'There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.' But now the time has come for you to suspend your belief in Stein's theory and others like it. During the next five months, I predict that you will be given more precise, definitive answers than you've ever had before. "

from stakebait over at lj, some Excerpts from the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

[...]


In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

dear random spammers:

monique is not my type. stop emailing me about her.

love,
betsy.

kos analyzes this better than i ever could. go read.

Daily Kos || Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.:

Did I just hear the White House spokesman say that President George W. Bush cannot guarantee that we will have elections in November?

yes, yes you did.

because it helped so much *last* time when they knew the time, place, and method of attack.


FOXNews.com - Politics - Officials Warn of Summer Terror Threats:

'Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have had intelligence that Al Qaeda (search) intends to launch more attacks against the homeland,' Ridge said during a press conference. 'Credible reporting now indicates that Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry forward a large-scale attack in the United States in order to disrupt our democratic process.'
While officials don't yet have specific information on the time, place and method of attack, Ridge added, 'we are actively working to gain that knowledge.' The FBI has formed a special task force to respond to the convention threat.

there's also a real smooth "the terrorists want the democrats to win" bit in there later in the article. slimy. very slimy.

a quote, stolen via Body and Soul

'I distrust who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.' -- Susan B. Anthony

i am back from convergence. still tired and in the middle of the post convention letdown, but good. a fuller report will come later.