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Christina of christyotwisty sdf-handle fame has invited denizens of the internet's basement to engage online, by posting a set of five questions for us to answer. Sounds like a good idea to me :)
Here are my answers to:
Christina's July 2020 questions.
I love cooking in general, and enjoy making all sorts of dishes. When I have the time, usually for special occasions, I am well known amongst friends and familiu for cooking German-style stuffed capsicums. These are stuffed with ground beef, spices and rice, and slow cooked in a tomato sauce that is mixed with sour cream for serving, usually on a bed of rice... Other favourites include chicken stir-fry, a self developed pasta bolognese variant extended with vegetables, corned beef and butter chicken. I also like a good BBQ in summer.
Other than any computer I owner post 1984 (as they provided the majority of my indoors entertainment after that point), I used to have a toy spaceship approximately 20 inches long, and maybe a foot wide at its widest point (at the back, across the "wings"). It kind of looked a bit like a cross-between the 1970s Battlestar Galactica and a Klingon Bird of Prey from Star Trek, taking the skeletal frame from the Bird of prey, and paneling and aesthetic from the Battlestar.
It had a cabin section up-front, and a narrow "neck" section that connected to the wider body section that housed the rear "drives" and angular wings that spread out either side of the rocket outlets. You would hold it by the "neck" and when you "flew" it around, angling the nose up to rise, or down to de-orbit (etc) it would make appropriately rising and falling space-drive sounds. There was a button on the cabin top that allowed you to fire its phasers, that caused it to emit the requisite zingy-zappy sounds, and lighth up flashing lights in the nose. I loved that thing for many years.
Driving somewhere in the US, maybe Big Sur, or through the Mojave, to White Sands, or probably to somewhere I haven't yet been. I'm in a Camaro with the top down, it is sunny. Or maybe I've sprung for a Corvette this time. I might be alone, or I might have a close friend with me. There's good music playing, the road is open, and we are mid-adventure, new discoveries waiting for us to cross their paths.
Why do I see this? Like many people, travel opens up my sense of freedom, of possibility and wonder at the world. I love a good adventure, and discovering new places, people, and the minute details that make me go "wow" at this amazing information space we inhabit. I feel most unencumbered and free when I am driving, and the freest I have ever felt was driving the open roads of the USA. I love America and its people; I find the diversity and contradictions in America's culture fascinating, and the empire that has been nurtured there is probably the most unexpectedly wonderous and fascinating subject of scrutiny I have ever embraced in travel. Sometimes it is the uncanny small differences between the familiar and the almost-familiar that grab you most, rather than the gulf you feel between yourself and a foreign culture when visiting somewhere truly alien.
I'm the travel bug's bitch, and this is an addiction that I never want to, and never will, shake off. Oh, and I'm a closet petrol-head with a weakness for American muscle cars. For some reason the Camaro is my favourite, mind you Chrysler make nice wheel-spinners too. Oh, and the current Corvettes are gorgeous. Yes, I know that this contradicts my projected environmental stance, and makes me a hypocrite. Being human is wonderful, isn't it :)
Bloody hell - I used to change my look frequently. Probably one of the more memorable series of events was when I had my hair bleached "white", and through circumstances had to then dye it back to something that looked vaguely respectable in quite a rush. I had recently come out (to friends, not to family), and as many a queer lad did in the early 1990s, I got my centre-parted undercut boy-bowl bleached to within an atom of its Keratin depolymerising.
That in itself was a story - my hair "threw a lot of copper", and was left a bright yellow colour. As I had alreasdy sustained painful burns to the scalp, and refused to allow the hair dresseer to push it any further, I was stuck with a bright yellow mop instead of the golden locks I had envisaged. (My first lesson in hair adventures - you get what you pay for. $50 really did not go far with colour, even in 1994). Now this neon advertisement may have been 'edgy but not unusual' for Melbourne, and I may have managed to both make a statement and gain impressed compliments from friends, including my boyfriend at the time, but there was danger lurking. It was Christmas holdidays (my first-year University summer break), and I was going to visit my grandparents at their new home in country Queensland. This would be my first trip to Queensland as an "adult", and I didn't really anticipate what I was in for.
My Grandparents' new home may have been modern, their dream Mc Mansion in a nice-enough new estate that was quite reminiscent of suburban Melbourne (save for the fact that it was 100ºC at 250% relative humidity in the shade), but Melbourne this was not. Queensland had all the mod cons (my house-brick sized mobile phone even worked there, shock-horror), but this was a country area and was only just starting to awaken from a slumber that had frozen the locals' attitudes somewhere between 1945 and 1955. The neon sign on my head could not be hidden, and it was apparently shaped like a bulls-eye. I fool-hardily decided that my balls were the size that every 18-year old boy thinks his balls are, and bravely marched into the sea of dissent, leers and sneers to the tune of "I'm here, I'm queer, get used to it". I think I even wore eye-liner on a couple of occasions (it was 1994. Did I mention that i was a queer baby only months out of the closet?). I managed to rattle around the Sunshine Coast, and the greater-Brisbane rail network in this state, most certainly narrowly avoiding a number of close calls, and even getting a bit of clubbing in on my first weekend. (Actually, I was probably safest there - I found a flock of ravers and hung out at their clubs, so no-one there found my hair at all challenging, and had I been as confident as the bravado I was wearing suggested, I probably could have gotten laid if I wanted to. Which I didn't; I was very serious about monogamy back then. My boyfriend wasn't, but you know - the naiivity of youth and all that).
Anyway, long story short, it eventually dawned on me that I wasn't likely to exit Queensland unscathed if my hair continued to look like the decorations from the rave clubs I had been visiting. Besides, by Grandmother was nagging me about it about 260 times a day, and that wasn't making for a particularly relaxing vacation. (Why she lent me her eye liner to wear, but had problems with neon yellow hair, is anyone's guess, but again, being human is complicated). So, off to the hair dresser again. And something like 4 hours and 250 grandma dollars later, my hair looked passably natural, so long as you didn't touch it and realise that it wasn't vaguely a product of nature. Not my original colour, but something that looked plausible. (Lesson number 2 - with hairdressers, you get what you pay for, rinse and repeat.)
Bronzie94 and his grandmother not long after the second hairdresser visit
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