The Proust Questionnaire

Found this while poking around on the Internet. From the source:

The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The idea behind the questionnaire is that the answers are supposed to reveal the respondent's "true" personality.

I'm going to try doing this now, then again in a few years so I can see what changed. It should be fun!

_________________________________

What is your dream of happiness?
Exploring places - all kinds of places, all by myself. Getting a job at a graphic design studio and making posters and prints for musicians and concert venues, or running a magazine that makes interesting things available to as many people as possible. Falling in love. Walking on perfect spring and fall Technicolor afternoons.

What is your idea of misery?
Accounting.

Where would you like to live?
Someplace with lots of people and energy. A city preferably? Chicago is nice, but I haven't been to nearly enough places to be able to answer this properly. Right now, Chicago, or maybe London.

What qualities do you admire most in a man?
Manual dexterity; that sounds stupid, but I really admire people that can do things with their hands. Intelligence. Charm. Good manners. Convictions. Empathy. Curiosity. Competence. Mystery. A peculiar sort of energy and magnetism that is difficult to describe in words but which seems to result in part from a combination of the aforementioned qualities plus a little something extra.

What qualities do you admire most in a woman?
Same as above.

What is your chief characteristic?
People usualy say intelligence, so I suppose we'll go with that, though I don't think I'm nearly as smart as people make me out to be.

What is your principal fault?
Arrogance. Laziness. Procrastination. A tendency to shoot off my mouth when I should know better. Being too retiring. Swearing too much. Also, I overshare.

What is your greatest extravagance?
Late-night trips to Walmart.

What faults in others are you most tolerant of?
Being an asshole. Being a smartass. Promiscuity. Alcoholism and drug use. Flirting too much.

What do you value most about your friends?
They're smart and funny and sexy and interesting. Duh.

What characteristic do you dislike most in others?
Stupidity.

What characteristic do you dislike most in yourself?
I'm kind of a bitch and sometimes I don't know when to rein it in.

What is your favourite virtue?
Kindness, as long as it isn't saccharine.

What is your favourite occupation?
I'm gonna go with journalism, but I mean real journalism, not that school-concert-review bullshit.

What would you like to be?
A spy in the 1940s French Resistance. Failing that? Someone who uses her talents and accepts her limits.

What is your favourite colour?
Green, closely followed by everything except yellow.

What is your favourite flower?
Marigolds. Croci. Narcissi. Daffodils.

What is your favourite bird?
Sparrows.

What historical figure do you admire the most?
FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. Kurt Vonnegut, though I'm not convinced he's historical quite yet. Anybody who did something noble and didn't pretend to be something he or she wasn't.

What character in history do you most dislike?
James Watson, closely followed by Frances Crick. Also anybody held up as a paragon who is revealed, upon closer examination, to be kind of a douchebag.

Who are your favourite prose authors?
Dorothy Sayers, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Heller, Neil Gaiman, Shakespeare of course though I'm not convinced the plays couldn't fall under poetry as well, and a number of others. And I'm throwing Roger Ebert in as well.

Who are your favourite poets?
Robert Pinsky, Bob Dylan, Seamus Heaney. I haven't read enough poetry to be able to answer this properly, though. I'm really much more of a prose girl.

Who are your favourite heroes in fiction?
The Doctor. John Constantine. Spike. Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Elizabeth Bennet. Yossarian. Jonathan Creek. Jake and Elwood Blues. Beatrice and Benedick.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My mom. Jane Goodall. Clea Koff. Anybody who sees a difficult or challenging task and runs into it head-on, knowing the consequences and acting anyway.

Who is your favourite painter?
Edward Hopper. Rembrandt. Anybody that can capture emotion.

Who is your favourite musician?
I absolutely cannot choose one, or even a few. It depends on too many factors.

What is your favourite food?
My mom's lentil soup.

What is your favourite drink?
Non-alcoholic...tea, limeade, orange juice or water.
Alcoholic...I'm still figuring that out, but I like screwdrivers and rum and rum-containing mixed drinks. Mojitos are good. I like some beer, but not cheap beer or really strong stuff.

What are your favourite names?
Some Greek, some Irish, some Welsh, some English. They are many and varied and are frequently associated with people I am or were fond of.

What is it you most dislike?
Stupidity, closely followed by wilful ignorance, closely followed by ignorance.

What natural talent would you most like to possess?
Remember that magnetism I mentioned earlier? It's more of a quality than a talent, but I really wish I had it. Failing that, some sort of musical talent.

How do you want to die?
Quickly and quietly.

What is your current state of mind?
At the moment? Calm and impatient and distracted all at once.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Still working on this one.

What is your motto?
Love all, trust few, do harm to none.
(I sort of ripped it off.)

New feature: Things I learned today

So I have a confession to make: It's easy to forget that you're a student when you work fulltime, particularly at a newspaper.

I'm not talking about the nuts-and-bolts parts. I do readings and go to class and study for exams; however, in the last couple of weeks I've found myself neglecting other parts of being a student - things like simply exercising my mind or working to learn something beyond the books and beyond the practical, day-to-day things I need to know in order to do my job properly. The job tends to take over quickly and my mind tends to fill up very rapidly with things that are necessary to do that job - things like how to file a public information request or fill out a reimbursement form, both of which are major thorns in my side that I have to deal with all the time. Even more abstract things, like what kinds of coverage to push for on the sports page, end up taking precedent over non-essential information-gathering.

Is it really non-essential, though? I've always been a fan of knowledge for knowledge's sake. I wouldn't be a social science major if I didn't believe that aggregating and processing information are as important as implementing that information practically, and of late I've shamefully neglected my aggregation of non-job-related information. It's ridiculous. I can't (and shouldn't) let my job rule my mental life to that extent.

To that end, I'm using this blog in part as the journal it's designed for. Every day, I will post a new entry of things or people I learned of or about that day. It doesn't have to be in-depth or essential knowledge, just something I didn't have to look up or learn about as part of being a semi-competent editor. The goal? A minimum of two things per day. It shouldn't be hard to meet and I may increase it, but it's a starting point.

So. Here goes entry No. 1. Things I learned about today:

1. I learned about red-green colorblindness, which I've always been curious about because colors are such a major part of how I perceive the world. I couldn't even imagine what the world looked like to a colorblind person; even the simulated images made no sense at all and I was frankly pretty incredulous about them. It came up today when I was talking to the managing editor - who happens to be red-green colorblind - because I was writing on a wipe-off board with a red marker. We ended up looking up all kinds of simulations and comparing photos. It turns out that red and green both look this sort of hideous olive-y green-yellow to people with red-green colorblindness, which isn't news to those of you who ARE colorblind but which still completely blows my mind. Also, some people with colorblindness can still apparently distinguish between red and green when they're separate, just not when they're together. The whole perception thing continues to blow my mind, especially since I can't imagine never seeing the color red or experiencing it the same way the majority of other people do. The whole thing is fascinating and has me thinking about all kinds of sensory perceptions that are governed entirely or almost entirely by brain wiring. Neuroscience is insane!

2. I learned that Dr. Paul Farmer is a complete badass. We talked a lot about his work in Haiti today and although this doesn't technically count since we covered it in class, I'd really, really like to learn more about his work. Paul Farmer, for those of you who don't know, is a doctor and medical anthropologist who co-founded a group called Partners in Health that works to improve health in developing nations by helping people obtain drugs and improve their living conditions. He's done a ton of social and ethnographic work in different places but has done a lot in Haiti. He's also received a MacArthur Genius grant, is a continuing lecturer at Harvard, graduated from the top of his class at Harvard while still doing social work in Haiti and returning home only for lab practicals and exams, and has a list of other accomplishments as long as a very long-armed person's arm. I imagine it would be difficult to live with him, because he is an extremely driven, intelligent and charming person who has accomplished a great deal and clearly expects a great deal of himself and others. He's a fascinating person who has done a great deal to further the cause of human health, though.

3. I learned that my classmates apparently do not understand the irony of handing out Haitian-style cake and hot chocolate during a video about how much it sucks to be in Haiti right now.

And that's all. It wasn't a terribly learning-packed day, but hopefully this assignment will help me focus on things other than getting through class and getting through work. We'll see how it goes.

People are CRAZY

How anybody can consider going anywhere the day after Thanksgiving is something I really cannot comprehend. I can barely move; the only reason I'm leaving the house is because my elderly and arthritic cat has claw problems and has to go to the vet.

The aforementioned cat, Princess Amanda; she is some five years my junior and far more crotchety.

I'm not sure why I like the Thanksgiving holiday. I reject pretty much every bit of its mythology; it has a disturbing and shameful history, which I've been aware of for a pretty long time because I never went to a public elementary school and thus got out of the annual lie-fest. My family tends to have one conversation every year about how disturbing the friendly-Pilgrim-Indian myth is and then just not discuss it for the rest of the day.

We also tend to largely ignore the whole thanksgiving aspect, which sounds a bit stupid since the day is called Thanksgiving. However, it just isn't something I buy into. I dislike being forced to thank anyone for anything, and I happen to think that gratitude is a bit pointless without a target. I try to be thankful every day to the people who matter for the things that matter. The rest is circumstance, skill, or luck, and thankfulness seems awfully disingenuous in connection with those things.

I suppose I am thankful for these things: That my family has more than sufficient food, that we are all healthy and close enough together to gather and eat together several times a year, and that we have someplace to go. Not every family this year has those things or opportunities. My uncle told us at dinner about his neighbor's experience; this year, she went out to do some last-minute shopping and ran into a homeless woman and her two children. They had noplace to go; all the shelters are full. My uncle's friend took them home with her and made them dinner. If anything, I'm grateful that there are people in the world that are still trusting and generous enough to do that; it gives me more hope than anything else for this country. Most people are still fundamentally pretty decent; we all want essentially the same things and when we stop to think about it, we realize that and try to be decent to each other. It's what makes life worth living. The nice thing about Thanksgiving is that it is one of those times of year when people feel compelled to stop and think about it, realize what they have, realize that everyone really wants the same things, and stop acting like dicks long enough to be kind to each other.

Maybe if these culturally mandated expressions of generosity didn't exist, we'd be forced to behave ourselves more often on our own. That's one of the nice things about atheism - it frees you up to do just that without a religious calendar telling you when to be a decent human being. In the meantime, I suppose I'll take what I can get, but I have to say I love it when my family doesn't say grace. When you've spent an entire day preparing food, it's a bit infuriating to wait two minutes while everybody folds their hands and pretends that some higher power, as opposed to you, is responsible for it.

Intellectual debate

So basically, I'm trying to hash out a pretty basic question: Should a professor - any professor - be allowed to express personal opinions in a very public forum, regardless of what those views may be?

The reason I'm questioning it is a blog post by a professor at Purdue which purports to present economic reasons why homosexuality is bad. The full post is here, but the shortened version goes something like this: Biblical values, AIDS, prison rape, domestic partner benefits don't reward straight people enough, it's too expensive for the companies. Personally, I think he loses all credibility when he refers to "sodomite degeneracy," but whatever.

The real question is, should he be allowed to express these blatantly anti-gay (and homophobic) views on a blog? It's a pretty public forum.

He doesn't publicly identify himself as a Purdue professor, and I tend to believe that affiliating oneself with an institution does not require you to give up personal opinions. For example, I work for a newspaper, and I still have this blog. We're required by a code of conduct not to affiliate ourselves with student advocating bodies (Purdue Student Government, for example), not to appear as an affiliate at events (for example, one of the "tea party" protests), and not to appear in photos or promotional materials for campus organizations. Basically, we can't make it look in any way as if the paper takes a stance on a certain issue, and as employees, if our presence can be construed as support, we are required not to be present. However, I can still have this blog and I can still express personal opinions, mostly because the things I have opinions on have little or nothing to do with the issues we're covering at the moment. Also, let's face it: Nobody really cares enough about what I think to go "Does that reporter have a blog" and then go try to find it. And the first result for a Google search using the information on the blog does not link back to my job.

This is not the case for Mr. Chapman, the professor in question. It's really easy to find out that he's a Purdue affiliate. A Google search for "Bert Chapman" returns his Purdue profile and a Purdue government documents staff page as the first two results. His blog is named "Conservative Librarian," meaning that those first two Google results, for a professor of library science, can easily be tied to him. If I was a gay student in one of his classes, I would be feeling pretty threatened right now. He uses some hateful language on that blog; "encroaching threat of homosexuality and other aberrant forms of sexual expression," "sodomite degeneracy," and "morally aberrant sexual behavior" all make appearances in the first two paragraphs of the post linked above. None of those statements have anything to do with the economic arguments he claims to be focusing on. Additionally, his misinformation about AIDS - detailed in a comment by an IU student - is disturbing evidence of poor scholarship on his part. If I were a Purdue administrator, I'd be kind of worried about this guy's ability to do his job as a social scientist. Objectivity is clearly not in his nature.

I think the best test is this: Would you express those opinions in a classroom? Is publishing something equivalent to appearing at an event protesting for or against that issue? I admit that the standards for affiliation have been somewhat relaxed for professors, who are notoriously opinionated. I'm starting to understand what conservative students feel when a professor says in class that he or she is a Democrat, or pro-Barack Obama, or even in favor of universal health care. For that reason, I think that professors with personal blogs must make an effort to either tone down views that might 'other' students - for example, they shouldn't refer to homosexuality as "sodomite degeneracy" - or they should go to great lengths to hide their university affiliation unless it somehow bolsters credibility.

This particular example is a toughie, and I admit that I'm having trouble balancing my personal distaste for the man's position and my love of free speech. On the whole, I think the free speech has to win out. However, the fact that the man has power over the academic careers of the people he's bashing in this post - and who he clearly has a very personal distaste for - has to affect the issue too. If he rewrote the post, removing some of the more religion-oriented language, focusing on the aspects of the issue that he claims to be focusing on and adding a disclaimer that his views do not represent those of the university, I wouldn't find it especially controversial - on that front, at any rate. Believing that AIDS is "the gay plague" is still pretty misguided.

Chimpanzees Aren't Pets, People!

Sure, they look cute. You hear that humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genetic material and think, "wow, that would be a unique and awesome pet, right?"

Wrong, wrong, wrong. As proved in a number of recent news stories - such as this one about a chimpanzee hurling rocks at zoo visitors because it was tired of being stared at, this one about a caged chimp escaping and attacking a friend of the owner's, and this one about an abused chimp killing its owner with a well-aimed coconut - chimps don't make good pets.

This is due in very large part to the fact that chimps are mean as hell, especially male chimps. In the wild, they fight all the damn time. When groups meet, they attack and sometimes kill each other, and groups of male chimps will go on hunts for smaller monkeys. Now, granted, all the animals in the incidents listed above were somehow provoked, but chimpanzees are naturally testy. In The Last Great Ape, a Nova episode about bonobos - a far rarer and more peaceful species of chimp, pan paniscus - one researcher talks about the difference between the species in human terms, and chimpanzees are described represent humanity's violent side. (Bonobos, incidentally, are very rare and endangered and should not be kept as pets. I'm also fairly sure it's illegal to do so.)

This is not to say that chimpanzees are any more violent than any other animal that might be kept as a pet. But they are more intelligent, stronger, and more capable of planning ahead by far than most of those other species. Leaving aside the fact that nobody should be keeping these already endangered animals as pets to begin with, very few people are equipped to give them the space and facilities to keep them healthy and happy. It's the cardinal rule of pet ownership - don't keep an animal you aren't prepared to take good care of.

Travis, the chimp that attacked a woman's face, didn't deserve to be shot. He was one victim among many of a society that fails to recognize that great apes, while like us in many ways, are still wild animals and are not appropriate pets.

Awesome Things: The Hyperaware Consciousness

You should all go do this now. I happen to know the guy that founded it - peripherally, but we have met IRL - and he, and it, are pretty much awesome. It's basically a sort of list of questions that you can journal. I'm starting and you should too.

But not online, 'cause some of it's sort of personal and the Internet is forever.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Worst spelling and puns ever? Check. Kenyans? Check. Four hundred babies? Check.

This is pretty much the ultimate ad.