Once in awhile I run into a survey that looks like a confession to all kinds of things, via the kinds of questions the survey creator asks. A couple of my favorites are the one who practically admitted to having interracial sex in church on drugs, and another who I'm pretty sure was part of an accidental murder and hiding the body. This one is the saddest one I've ever run across. If this person hasn't lived this in real life, he or she at least knows someone who has. I don't usually run a disclaimer before a survey, but I just wanna say every answer I give on here is a big hug to all the people out there who can probably answer yes to all these questions. I have been there, too. And I'm glad to say I persevered and survived and actually thrive now in a beautiful way of life, so hang in there all y'alls, it doesn't always suck, and we can recreate ourselves into powerful wondrous creatures. "Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter." -Yoda

Have you ever been yelled at?
I have baditude and way too much ego. People generally don't bother me much.

Has a close friend or family member died?
I love the way really old lady skin feels soft, like rose petals. You can't see me eating chocolate pie while I'm typing. I'm starting meringue experiments. Every time I make a pie this year I'm going to color the meringue differently and try to make cool shapes or patterns. I was struck with the idea a little late into this one. Scott got really excited when he saw that it was yellow.

Have you ever been to jail for something you never did?
Ooh, this one is kinda freaking me out. I'd probably normally ignore something like this, but since a couple grandkids are on the way now, it totally got my attention. Is it weird that she assumes she'll never get to talk to the kid? Like a Logan's Run kind of thing, kill people off young or something? Watch with caution, this song super sticks in your head, I've never seen anything so addicting.

Have you ever been jokes about because of the color of your skin?
Bradley looks like that last video kind of surprised him. Sorry, needed a brain cleanser. When I was a kid I was ticked off that I didn't have blue skin or pretty fur like a cat. The only time I turn truly white is my first day on a big dose of prednisone, kinda scares people.

Have you ever been on drugs and not known why?
I rewatched the Matrix movies a couple weeks ago, and you know how people get all funked out thinking what if and stuff, but I'll go you one better. How much you wanna bet the soul mate thing you feel with someone is because your body is really next to theirs, but you never know it because you're plugged into a simulation. How do you know this world isn't a big experiment and the whole Matrix story was someone having premonitions about there really being a world outside this one? Did you know some physicists are postulating that what we think is real might really be a holographic projection? I've watched others, like The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, Harsh Realm- how do we KNOW this world is a big accident? I feel like gaming is just an inside-out version of ourselves. I'm not entirely sure my brain is self contained and autonomous. I have ~always~ felt like I should be able to plug into an outlet like R2D2 and just know stuff, and I think the concept of the existence of magic is an indicator that what we perceive as limitations and rules (physics) doesn't come naturally to our perceptions of how the world should work, which is pretty odd if you insist that we are merely evolved material by happenstance. I need to stop before I plunge headlong into writing a book right here right now. Very exciting ideas in my head.

Have you ever been scammed by someone you loved?
Actually, I'm blown away by all the cool people I meet on Twitter, like Diddy Wheldon. It all started with one of my major Bradley days on twitter (I use Bradley James pix to cheer myself up on rough days, some of my tweeps love it) , one thing led to another, and anyone who's been around me even a little while knows I bumble around with my brain in 50 different places (aspie, #4 cracks me up ) and then I discover later how cool it was. So this was awesome and perfectly timed for grandkids being born this summer, because she has a Diddy By Design Shop full of the cutest little clothes, and I was browsing the net that very day for baby showers. Next thing you know I'm gaping over the Gems-Stones-studs Gallery full of sparkly high heels and christening shoes and nail gems...  Pix click back to their shops. The big pic is the christening shoes that arrived in my mail today.  

The first couple of dots in my head connected after Diddy yapped with me a little bit on twitter about Bradley being hot, and I'm like, wait... her real name is Margaret and she's on IMDb ... So I checked her site again and dang if she didn't have WAY better info in her own film credits, so I'm all like Hey, your IMDb page sux, ur site is way better, etc., and she yapped back with me, which was fun and cool. A big game on twitter is to get celebs to follow, kind of like collecting #getglue stickers or something.

But of course I'm doing 50 things, right? I eventually got around to showing Scott a couple weeks later how prolific her life is, one of those high energy people doing so much stuff like producing music, I'm clicking around and are you KIDDING ME, she does Spiderman art too??? (I tend to notice Spiderman stuff, there is a LOT of other art there.) Among a million other things that Diddy Wheldon does, like her YouTube channel. And she still talks to me on twitter.

But by far the coolest thing you need to check out is her Serenity Talent agency site (also on Facebook and Myspace) and follow SERENITY TALENT on Twitter plus you can friend her as Margaret Wheldon on facebook. She's got so many ways you can contact her and get hooked up if you are an industry professional looking for work or in between jobs.

I'm doing all this for fun, because I don't mess around with getting paid to link, but I do have to blame this one on Bradley James, I think. He seems to be my best common denominator with people around the world, and retweeting fan pix cheers me up on rough days, so I tend to do it a lot. So the secret word is "Bradley", and if you're nice to me I just might tweet a link for you.

Have you ever been betrayed?
My droid has been auto correcting my tweets behind my back ~after~ I choose the spelling I want, then I respell it when I notice it auto corrected after I chose the spelling I want, choose the spelling *again* I want from a list, and even add the new spelling to the internal dictionary. This recently escalated...

Have you ever been beat up because you wernt cool enough?
There's no such thing as not cool enough anymore. Anyone can be an Idiot Subbont-

Have you ever been brought down by a friend?
I've upped the ante so much in a Follow Friday poker showdown with this guy on Twitter that I now owe him really super big time, and let's see him top THIS, getting immortalized into a survey, HA! >=D Click that banner to get to his cool site. 

I personally give him 5 stars for raising his kids RIGHT.

Have you ever lost a friend because of a crush?
This was my fave Superbowl commercial this year.

Have you ever been told you could never do something?
All my life. And then I did stuff anyway, and I'm glad I did. I didn't used to think like that. I was in my 30's taking a basic chemistry class with a bunch of much younger people, and the teacher asked what I'd been doing up to that point. At the time, I thought I was a loser because I had never stayed in one place long enough to make the kind of money that people always said I was smart enough to make, but as I rattled out a few jobs I'd had, that teacher almost swooned with jealousy and blurted that he wished he'd had the guts to go try other jobs. All he'd ever done was teach chemistry, the same classes, over and over and over, year in and year out. He made more money than me and had a stable job, sure, but that single moment turned my whole perspective around. I really have had a cool life, an interesting life, sometimes pretty scary or ridiculous, but sure as heck anything but boring. They say variety is the spice of life.

I'm lately noticing that the Wormhole Riders don't have a Lexx category in their drop down menu. I might have to look into that.... you know, being's how I have a Lexx blog.

If yes to 11, did you ever show them they were wrong?
Since when were we numbering these??? That made me go back and count.  And whenever something goes wrong, just meme it and get famous. When memes collide... Click the pic to get info on the creators.

Have you ever not had a roof above your head?
I mentioned in another post that I slept in a car at one point in my life, for about a month. I didn't mention that I didn't want to sleep on the floor of a house a woman had died in and no one found her until after her cat had also died and decayed so badly that its skin stuck to the bathtub like it had been glued. I know this because I helped scrape it off. But there were people who did sleep in the house... it's in the book. I'll let you know when it's available.

Have you ever have to not eat because you did not have the money?
Ok, ok, I'll actually answer this. Yes. One week was so bad that all I had was what was left in a jar of peanuts and half a hot dog bun. Stuff like that is a good motivator and clears the cobwebs out so you can get priorities straight. No, it was a different year from the cat skin thing in the last question. Entirely unrelated, while my fave chefs on the food channels have been Two Fat Ladies, Nadia G, and Chef Anne Burrell, I get the biggest kick out of the Israeli Spice Agent and wish he had his own show.

Have you ever been forsed into a relationship?
This was kind of an accident, more like I was showing off when I cross tweeted this Dr. Who fan art over from facebook and made it about a book I'm reading myself which was written by a physicist. Well, guess what. He's on twitter. Click the pic to get to it, and from there you can click to his website and see the cool books he's written.

You know what, it's getting really late, I'm floating on a pain pill, let's get naughty and deal with this question the right way. Close your eyes if you're sensitive to suggestive material.

What was the worst mistake of your life?
I'm refusing to regret my Team Hatter t-shirt, the most expensive t-shirt in my house. I got it from Keychain Productions | LINKS SHOP that supports projects Andrew-Lee Potts is working on. I think the biggest stumper to international fan support either way is probably shipping fees. If I had known shipping on that shirt would triple the total cost I'd never have ordered it. As it is, they sold it only for a very short time, so it's super rare, and I guess that makes up for it. Still going to wear it like all my other t-shirts.

Who is the person who brought you down the most?
There's a new book out I'm really wanting to read called The Universe Wide Web: Getting Started by Simon J. Morley, but it can only be read through devices, I can't get hard copy. I'm one of those unfortunate people that gets nasty headaches if I look at illuminated screens too long, thanx to some nerve damage, plus I can't sit in one position very long at all with a  laptop or device. With a book I can roll around my couch and hold my page at a moment's notice, etc, and I'm sad I can't get this book in hard copy because the idea sounds really awesome. If I ever do cave to Kindle or Smashtowers, it'll be because of this book. Click the pic to go to his website.

Did you ever have to live without seeing one or both of your birth parents?
This is a couple of other things I got for one of the baby showers. The pix click to where I got them.

Have you ever been called Fat?
For being the shortest kid in the second grade and having the smallest feet in my whole extended family, I kind of am. But no one has ever pointed it out for some reason. It's really just a rope... 

Have you ever been made fun of because of your sexuality?
People always want to fix asexuals. It's nobody's business what my sexuality is, and I don't need to be fixed.

What is it really like to be you?
You could never possibly know how truly evil I am until I lure you into a body swap and go skipping off in your body while you lay twisting in contortions on the floor from shock. >=) heh heh The evil villain I most identify with is Elijah Price in Unbreakable. While others work on solving time travel, I will solve the mystery of soul travel. Ok, I'm not as bad off as 'Mr. Glass', but I totally get that nudge over to the dark side, which is probably why I'm so aware of how important surveys like this really are in the long dark night. This video will spoil the ending for you, so don't watch it.

And why is it like that?
In keeping with the theme of these questions, how about an angsty parting vid.

Ok, I can't end on that, must have some joy!

6. I was the 'Bra Nazi' in a large retail chain for nearly 5 years, and also covered jewelry and accessories. I once caught a $25,000 inventory mistake in Maidenform tagging. I got so good at my merch that I could look at a one inch square of someone's old bra and tell you the company and style number and whether I still had it in stock and what colors were discontinued. I also regularly helped cover housewares and domestics during the holiday season, got stuck on registers all the time, and knew the kids' and men's departments like the back of my hand because I was so available being in the middle of the store. And I unloaded merch out of the boxes when it came off the trucks! I really did love that job, even though they put me on customer service every holiday during Christmas returns. I really don't care if people treat me badly, I just figure they're brain damaged or something.

Monday, April 09, 2007 (this link probably won't work since it's in protected posting)

This is getting pulled over here from Thodin.  I'm in the middle of deleting a whole bunch of stuff over there.

Yours truly, modeling for a photographer's studio in a newspaper ad.  Nowadays this is no big deal, you see pictures like this everywhere.

It was really freaky scanning and loading this old photo and seeing my brother making faces through the window for the first time on the computer, because he didn't show up on the photo.  It still weirds me out to look at it.  I was in high school here.  Yes, I have a coat on in my bedroom.  We had no heat at all in that house excepting for a wood stove in the livingroom.

I drew a lot of horses in school.  My best friend was much better at horses than I was, and I can't do people at all.  Unless they are stick people.

While I was in high school we lived on several hundred acres by a national forest, and I seem to be the only person in the family who has pictures.  I've always been a camera bug, even if all I had was a cheap little box with a hole.  That cow standing in the creek is one of about 200 head of registered Herefords.  Part of my job during round up was to run the length of two miles of pastures while my sister edged one side on a pony and my brother edged the other side on a dirt bike.  Three children rounding up 200 head of cattle, imagine that.  We did it for three years so Dad could put them through a chute and give them shots and tag them.

I was in love with the place.  Before we moved to this farm I had grown up in a desert 16 miles from a reservation and knew nothing but sand and bluffs and twisted junipers and sagebrush.  And sheep.  Everybody grew up with sheep out there.  I had traveled and knew about mountains and trees and stuff, but this was really different-- chert and clay overlayed with tangled forests, and underneath it all a network of caves that ran underground for miles.  This creek came out from a spring in a neighbor's cave, and after it left our place it got bigger and bigger to the point where people used it for float trips, and it eventually fed into a great big lake.  I had never seen so much water in my life.  And for ~free~.  Where I grew up before we'd had to pay for water rights, and we all took turns using water from a tiny ditch network that ran from farm to farm from a river up in the mountains.

It was so unbelievably quiet out there.  I lived on that place only three years, but that is where my soul stayed.  We actually had mink and foxes and so many kinds of birds and bugs that some of them weren't even in the book.  Dad would go pick wild herbs like sheepshire and lamb's quarters to put in our salads.  I imagine you'd pay a pretty penny to find that in any salad in the world today.

This old loading chute was on the farm when we bought it.  We never used it, you can see it's very old.  A few years after we moved it fell down.

This was very early spring.  I would go out and walk for miles, up and down the hills and all over. 

It was cool catching this on film.  This goat actually walked around and played peekaboo with her kids.  I've seen animals do the neatest things, most people have no idea just how imaginative they are with all the free time they've got.

We had a lot of stuff going on that place.  Besides the cattle we also milked goats and sheared sheep and logged out some of the woods.  We had a mean old donkey named Jack and a stubborn little pony, and I couldn't ride either one of them.  I grew up riding a horse, but I never could do anything with those two.  I have no idea how my sister made the pony go for roundup.

I also grew up with dogs and can handle just about any kind of dog.  This one was really different, part collie, part coyote.  He would never tame to a leash or collar, but he was the best guard dog we ever had.  He even attacked me once after he got old and lost his hearing.  I got home from work about 1 a.m. and made it clear across the yard before he startled awake and leapt up in my face, and bore me to the ground.  Luckily, I was the one who had always played attack with him, so I shoved my arm in his mouth (I had a leather coat on, he ripped right through it) to get his attention and laid there looking at him like 'Duh, you idiot' while he got all embarrassed and stepped back off me.  I laughed so hard.  That poor dog wouldn't come near me for two days.  He was also one of the fastest dogs I ever met, and could run and run without stopping, and wasn't afraid to take anything down.  Not even a skunk if you told him to.  That only happened once, though.  I take the blame for that one.  I just wanted to see if he'd do it.

This is the house we lived in the whole time we ran that farm.  Dad invested everything into the land and livestock, so we had very little to actually live on, but I didn't mind at all.  See that screened in porch?  My brother slept out there on a cot, and in the winter the dog slept with him to keep him warm.  When it got too terribly cold, all us kids piled onto the pull out sofa by the woodstove.  I remember Dad bringing in newborn lambs and calves to warm up while blizzards raged in the dark, and we'd get out of bed to help get them warm and sometimes bottle feed them before they had to go back outside. 

I think living on this farm is the reason why my brother and two sisters and I have always gotten along well as adults, because we were all we had back then, and we worked together like a team.  Not that we didn't fight ~then ~... my brother once tore out a screen door between us coming after me with a buggy whip after I threw a chair at him and just missed his head.  Sorry, didn't get any pictures. 

I never really thought about it, but the other kids at school must have thought we were dirt poor, and I guess we were, but it just wasn't something that bothered me.  My clothes were clean and we ate well.  Dad had to sell a goat so I could get new glasses, but that's just the way things were.  Looking back I now understand that we owned half a million dollars or more on paper at several points, and what I got out of it in personal experience was worth every penny to me.  I grew up eating the finest steak and lamb and got a first hand education in resource planning.  I was very healthy, with all the activity going on, and very strong.  I know how to live very well on very little, thanx to that part of my life, and if I could afford it, I'd go find another place like that and never leave it.