Subscription meme
Mar. 19th, 2014 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistCool idea from nanila!
Feel free to participate or share.
Subscription Meme template:
People in this journal
About my job
Some random facts
Things I like to do
Fandom
Social media usage
Subscriptions, access and commenting
What I’d like to get from my participation here
My responses!
People in this journal
There's Andrew, my husband. I talk about him a lot. And there'smagister, also known as James my boyfriend.
About my job
I'm a...office manager/executive PA/trained facilitator for a little social enterprise that runs a course for health professionals who have ideas about how to make their communities happier and healthier. At a time when a lot of people are really pessimistic about the state of health care in this country, I have lots of reason to be optimistic: people have fantastic ideas that, though they're focused on improving the patient's experience, always save money too.
I only work with three other people, and day-to-day I mostly work on my own, with the occasional bout of traveling to where the course is being delivered, as it's in three-day residential blocks (it's run all over the country, so I think my next trip will be to Cambridge, then Buckinghamshire, then Cardiff, etc.) or occasionally to conferences to promote our work.
Some random facts
I'm American but have lived in the UK for something like ten years. I have pretty strong feelings on immigration and how people who "seem different" are treated once they're here (or wherever 'here' is). I was blind when I was born and am now what's called "partially sighted," in the UK/"legally blind" in the U.S. My brother, Chris, died in a car crash just before I got married and emigrated (this was more than eight years ago now so is mostly an aside these days, but I used to talk about it a lot). I have suffered from depression and anxiety, in some combination, since I was 19, and I've also worked in mental health, so I have a lot of opinions on both using and providing mental health services. I'm bisexual and do a bit of activism around that, including politically for LGBT+ Lib Dems. I'm polyamorous, which is how I have a husband and a boyfriend, and they can have other partners (though Andrew hasn't, for most of the time I've known him; I sometimes tease him that he should, because I could use the help), and we all know about each other and we're all happy with the situation. To my utter bemusement and chagrin, I'm about to join the ranks of homeowners -- for someone who never finished her degree and spent a big chunk of her 20s unemployable with mostly-untreated mental illness, it seems unbelievable that I'm able to buy a house "already" at 32.
Things I like to do
Travel
Basically I don't feel like I can really relax or have a break if I'm at home. There's always something here I should be doing. So I have to get away. And I don't have to get very far away. Andrew is happiest at home, but in the almost-a-year we've been together, James and I have been to Edinburgh, Liverpool and York, and for his birthday all he wanted was a weekend in a hotel in Manchester, so I didn't have to go very far at all! I like trains, I like hotels, I like excuses for eating nice food and visiting museums/cathedrals/castles/art galleries and having time to read and go for walks and all the other things I never seem to do at home because there's always something else that needs doing.
Museums
I feel this deserves special mention because of something that happened recently. As we were leaving the National Railway Museum, James and I were asked by someone standing at the door if we'd do a little survey. So having been asked how long we'd spent at the museum, if we'd eaten there, and things like that, we were shown a list of other places and asked which ones we'd been to. "York Castle Museum, yep, Jorvik, yep, ooh, MOSI, yep! Royal Armouries, yep..." I went on like this for a while, with James occasionally noticing things before I got to them, like the National Media Museum, and saying stuff like "And we went to the Tate in Liverpool." Out of a list of about a dozen, the only ones I can remember not being able to say I'd visited recently were the science museum in London and the children's museum in Halifax. And when she asked us when we'd last visited the museum, James said "thirty years ago" and I said "two weeks ago!" Which is a bit weird, even for me, but circumstances conspired to make it true.
Reading
I'll never regain the giddy heights of reading that I got through when I was younger and had no friends or ability to get into trouble so read all the time, a habit that was killed by majoring in English in college and never really recovered. I got an e-reader a year or so ago, after resisting it because they used to not be very good for my eyes. Now they're brilliant because you can change the fonts, and the fonts that are best for me to read are not what you usually get in paper books. Though I read plenty of those too. My tastes these days are almost entirely non-fiction. At the moment I'm reading a book about seahorses, one about cricket in Pakistan, and one about the first women in the medical profession.
Friends
I get sad and weird if I go too long without the company of nice people. I look forward to having a house I can invite people around to, rather than the tiny, cluttered flats we've lived in, and in the meantime I like few things better than sitting on my friends' couches drinking tea and chatting, or in a coffee shop or pub or whatever (I like my coffee black and my beer not too hoppy, thanks).
Social media usage
You're looking at it, really. I have facebook, for work and activism, though I do also use it to keep up with local friends (and not even all of them!). I consider it sort of a necessary evil. I used to do Twitter but found it just made me angry and sad, and a combination of getting rid of that and severely cutting down on how much news I consume has made me a happier, calmer person. I don't use tumblr or...whatever the other things are. I'm too uncool even to know.
But I've been on LJ since 2002, it's seen pretty much everything important that's happened to me, and I love it (and its little Dreamwidth buddy) to bits. LJ is how I met Andrew, it's gotten me jobs, found me friends when I moved to the UK, lent me money when I would've been deported without it...I just cannot overstate how much of an impact it's made on my life, and all for good.
Subscriptions, access and commenting
I haven't been actively seeking new people for a while, but I always welcome them. Almost all of my entries are public -- the few that aren't tend to be me whinging about work -- so I make friends/grant access pretty readily. At least on LJ, I know I've left a lot more comments than I've received. Some of the people whose writing I like best I still don't comment much on, though I am trying to change that, but equally I don't worry if people want to read and never comment. I think there are already a bunch of people like this reading my LJ particularly, because there was a time when all my real-life friends used LJ, and now a lot of them have stopped writing or commenting much, so I forget they might still be reading until I see them and they say something like "hey, how did that thing turn out?" and I have a moment of being startled that they knew about that before I remember I wrote about it.
What I’d like to get from my participation here
Well,nanila said she'd be sad if nobody joined in, so I'm hoping to keep her from being sad! Seriously, though, new friends/things to read would make me happy too.
And if nothing else, I'm so bad at explaining things in my entries sometimes -- I've had people say stuff like "I'm sorry to hear about your break-up...but I didn't even know you were dating anybody?" -- that it's good to have some of the explanatory information in one place, something people can consult when they're thinking, "what on earth is she talking about?" as I've offhandedly mentioned being a bit blind or having a boyfriend as well as a husband, or whatever.
nanila!
Feel free to participate or share.Subscription Meme template:
People in this journal
About my job
Some random facts
Things I like to do
Fandom
Social media usage
Subscriptions, access and commenting
What I’d like to get from my participation here
My responses!
People in this journal
There's Andrew, my husband. I talk about him a lot. And there's
magister, also known as James my boyfriend. About my job
I'm a...office manager/executive PA/trained facilitator for a little social enterprise that runs a course for health professionals who have ideas about how to make their communities happier and healthier. At a time when a lot of people are really pessimistic about the state of health care in this country, I have lots of reason to be optimistic: people have fantastic ideas that, though they're focused on improving the patient's experience, always save money too.
I only work with three other people, and day-to-day I mostly work on my own, with the occasional bout of traveling to where the course is being delivered, as it's in three-day residential blocks (it's run all over the country, so I think my next trip will be to Cambridge, then Buckinghamshire, then Cardiff, etc.) or occasionally to conferences to promote our work.
Some random facts
I'm American but have lived in the UK for something like ten years. I have pretty strong feelings on immigration and how people who "seem different" are treated once they're here (or wherever 'here' is). I was blind when I was born and am now what's called "partially sighted," in the UK/"legally blind" in the U.S. My brother, Chris, died in a car crash just before I got married and emigrated (this was more than eight years ago now so is mostly an aside these days, but I used to talk about it a lot). I have suffered from depression and anxiety, in some combination, since I was 19, and I've also worked in mental health, so I have a lot of opinions on both using and providing mental health services. I'm bisexual and do a bit of activism around that, including politically for LGBT+ Lib Dems. I'm polyamorous, which is how I have a husband and a boyfriend, and they can have other partners (though Andrew hasn't, for most of the time I've known him; I sometimes tease him that he should, because I could use the help), and we all know about each other and we're all happy with the situation. To my utter bemusement and chagrin, I'm about to join the ranks of homeowners -- for someone who never finished her degree and spent a big chunk of her 20s unemployable with mostly-untreated mental illness, it seems unbelievable that I'm able to buy a house "already" at 32.
Things I like to do
Travel
Basically I don't feel like I can really relax or have a break if I'm at home. There's always something here I should be doing. So I have to get away. And I don't have to get very far away. Andrew is happiest at home, but in the almost-a-year we've been together, James and I have been to Edinburgh, Liverpool and York, and for his birthday all he wanted was a weekend in a hotel in Manchester, so I didn't have to go very far at all! I like trains, I like hotels, I like excuses for eating nice food and visiting museums/cathedrals/castles/art galleries and having time to read and go for walks and all the other things I never seem to do at home because there's always something else that needs doing.
Museums
I feel this deserves special mention because of something that happened recently. As we were leaving the National Railway Museum, James and I were asked by someone standing at the door if we'd do a little survey. So having been asked how long we'd spent at the museum, if we'd eaten there, and things like that, we were shown a list of other places and asked which ones we'd been to. "York Castle Museum, yep, Jorvik, yep, ooh, MOSI, yep! Royal Armouries, yep..." I went on like this for a while, with James occasionally noticing things before I got to them, like the National Media Museum, and saying stuff like "And we went to the Tate in Liverpool." Out of a list of about a dozen, the only ones I can remember not being able to say I'd visited recently were the science museum in London and the children's museum in Halifax. And when she asked us when we'd last visited the museum, James said "thirty years ago" and I said "two weeks ago!" Which is a bit weird, even for me, but circumstances conspired to make it true.
Reading
I'll never regain the giddy heights of reading that I got through when I was younger and had no friends or ability to get into trouble so read all the time, a habit that was killed by majoring in English in college and never really recovered. I got an e-reader a year or so ago, after resisting it because they used to not be very good for my eyes. Now they're brilliant because you can change the fonts, and the fonts that are best for me to read are not what you usually get in paper books. Though I read plenty of those too. My tastes these days are almost entirely non-fiction. At the moment I'm reading a book about seahorses, one about cricket in Pakistan, and one about the first women in the medical profession.
Friends
I get sad and weird if I go too long without the company of nice people. I look forward to having a house I can invite people around to, rather than the tiny, cluttered flats we've lived in, and in the meantime I like few things better than sitting on my friends' couches drinking tea and chatting, or in a coffee shop or pub or whatever (I like my coffee black and my beer not too hoppy, thanks).
Social media usage
You're looking at it, really. I have facebook, for work and activism, though I do also use it to keep up with local friends (and not even all of them!). I consider it sort of a necessary evil. I used to do Twitter but found it just made me angry and sad, and a combination of getting rid of that and severely cutting down on how much news I consume has made me a happier, calmer person. I don't use tumblr or...whatever the other things are. I'm too uncool even to know.
But I've been on LJ since 2002, it's seen pretty much everything important that's happened to me, and I love it (and its little Dreamwidth buddy) to bits. LJ is how I met Andrew, it's gotten me jobs, found me friends when I moved to the UK, lent me money when I would've been deported without it...I just cannot overstate how much of an impact it's made on my life, and all for good.
Subscriptions, access and commenting
I haven't been actively seeking new people for a while, but I always welcome them. Almost all of my entries are public -- the few that aren't tend to be me whinging about work -- so I make friends/grant access pretty readily. At least on LJ, I know I've left a lot more comments than I've received. Some of the people whose writing I like best I still don't comment much on, though I am trying to change that, but equally I don't worry if people want to read and never comment. I think there are already a bunch of people like this reading my LJ particularly, because there was a time when all my real-life friends used LJ, and now a lot of them have stopped writing or commenting much, so I forget they might still be reading until I see them and they say something like "hey, how did that thing turn out?" and I have a moment of being startled that they knew about that before I remember I wrote about it.
What I’d like to get from my participation here
Well,
nanila said she'd be sad if nobody joined in, so I'm hoping to keep her from being sad! Seriously, though, new friends/things to read would make me happy too.And if nothing else, I'm so bad at explaining things in my entries sometimes -- I've had people say stuff like "I'm sorry to hear about your break-up...but I didn't even know you were dating anybody?" -- that it's good to have some of the explanatory information in one place, something people can consult when they're thinking, "what on earth is she talking about?" as I've offhandedly mentioned being a bit blind or having a boyfriend as well as a husband, or whatever.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-19 12:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-19 12:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-20 05:48 am (UTC)Would you mind telling me the title of the book about cricket in Pakistan? :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-20 08:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-20 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-21 08:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-21 02:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-21 07:01 pm (UTC)(Or maybe it's just fun in comparison to packing and moving, which is all I've done since this, besides work and sleep.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-21 07:12 pm (UTC)Glib, I know, but just think of how happy you'll be when you're settled in.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-21 10:37 pm (UTC)I know you'd be great at helping us move. I wish I could buy you pizza. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-22 05:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-22 12:11 pm (UTC)As for talking or thinking about one's circumstances...well, it's not for everybody. Everybody had LJ when LJ's all there was, but there's a reason they've all swarmed off to Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or Pinterest or whatever. It's not always good for people to talk about or think about their circumstances.