Questions and Answers

The lovely and eloquent Hope posted a Q&A meme and invited her readers to be interviewed as she was, and of course... how could I refuse! Here's her questions and my answers.

If you would like to take part, here are the rules.

1. Leave me a comment saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I’ll email you five questions, of my determination not yours!
3. You update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Here are my answers.

1. Which line or section from President Obama's speech resonated with you?

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

I still am not sure I have words to explain the feelings behind the tears that those lines brought to my eyes. Those lines form the ideal that I believe that is/should be in the heart of the American Soul. I'm so overcome by such a varied feeling of emotions my vocabulary is woefully inadequate to explain what I mean. I will work to rectify this...

2. What do you think is the biggest or most important difference between men and women?

I think the most important difference is that men and women don't mature at the same time or at the same rate. Maybe I just see it more with the developmentally delayed students that I work with, but a girl at 15 or 18 can do much more than a (diagnostically) similarly delayed boy of the same age. Maybe it's why I've been noticing women 10+ years older than myself in a way I hadn't previously noticed them.

3. If you could have the job of any character from a TV show which would it be?

I'd want the job of Admiral William Adama from Battlestar Galactica. Not just to be out in space or to command a fleet of ships, but because there was never any question about his role in life. The Cylons, their enemies, destroyed their world, chased them from their solar system, and his only task in life is to find Earth; to find a home for those humans who are left. He doesn't have the luxuary to decide if he really wanted to be a gardner, or who to go on a date with. Circumstances never allowed him to throw in the towel and quit. He has to dig deep inside of himself to find the strength to do whatever it is that he needs to do to because there's no one else to do it; there's nowhere else for him to go. That responsibility and that inevitibility of purpose entice me to no end.

4. Choose one single man made object that represents your personality. What would it be and why does represent you?

I think I'd have to say that I'm a Swiss Army Knife. But, not the ones you can hook on your keychain or give a Boy Scout when he turns 13, but the huge, unwieldy 80 tool in 1. There are so many different things that it can do and is useful for, but there's nothing that it's entirely sufficient for. It doesn't really specialize in one thing or have a singular purpose that it can complete to excellence. It has to rely on doing a lot of things well enough in order to have any value to anyone at all...

5. If you could discover that something you thought was true was actually false, what would you wish it to be? And why?

Maybe this is just a bit of a cop out because it's wildly unrealistic but I'd probably most wish that it turned out that my grandparents were all still alive and just vacationing together somewhere on some resort beach with no telephone access. I want/love a big family, extended family, cousins, grandparents, even crazy aunt's... and I have none of it. Having my grandparents back would fill that void quite a bit and being older as I am now (10 days shy of 25) I'd love nothing more than to sit and talk with them. Ironic, in the Alanis Morrisette definition of the word, since now I have the time and desire to sit, listen, and learn... there's no one left to listen to.