swirlsofpurple | LJ Idol season 9 Week 0: Introduction

I remember an introductory conversation I once had with a distant relative when I was a child, during which I was asked why I didn’t want to be a doctor. My mother answered that it was because I couldn’t stand the sight of blood. I recall my horror-tv-watching, Stephen-King-novel-obsessed self being affronted by this lie.
But like many things of childhood as we grow we begin to understand the complexities of situations and why we create the social constructions we do. It was a need to answer the question in a way that wouldn’t rock the boat on my mother’s part and a desire to see all of us well on the part of my relative. The thing is said relative was of a time and place where the only hope for more than mere survival, for living, thriving, providing for family, was to have a job that drags a person out of poverty. It’s a good thing no one tried explaining this to my younger self because I probably would have said something about how we were in England now and if worst came to worst I could go on the dole. Adult me understands that that would have displeased people.

I suspect we all suffered through many introductions as children, not understanding the point or appreciating the merit. Too old to run around playing and yet too young to fully delight in good conversation, or to recognise that it was only through hundreds of exceedingly boring repetitive introductions that something precious, something golden can sometimes be found. There’s a tendency to focus on the banality of the subject matter, on the ‘why do we want to know these things?’ I also suspect it took me a lot longer than most children to figure it out. I wasn’t and am still not, the most social of animals. I often do not know what to say, as may be seen here, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep bumbling along, stumbling together, waiting with baited breath to see if something magical may emerge. Friendship after all can be the most magnificent of creatures.

So in the interests of banality in the search for more, I ask some questions of myself. What job do I do? I’m tutoring at the moment. Where am I from? London. What do I want to do with my life? I have no idea. What films/TV/books do I like? I’m a massive sci-fi fan, particularly Star Trek and Stargate and am also a fan of all things supernatural, including Supernatural. At the moment I’m reading a lot of Terry Pratchett, but I’ll read almost anything.

Learning that introductions are often tailored to the situations we find ourselves in is difficult, often including a mess of insecurities and hesitancies and other human frailties hampering things. But fortunately here we are lucky enough to know we have one point of commonality to jump off from: a desire to write.

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deza.livejournal.com

During one of those childhood introductions, I stated I was planning to be god when I grew up. Asked how one gets the job, I said I would be apprenticing the next year. They stopped asking after that. :)

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LJ Idol season 9 Week 0: Introduction

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