Journal tag again.

Tagged by ntvr2. Haven't done one of these in a while, and my journal rarely gets used for anything else anyway.

1. You must post these rules.
2. Each tagged person must post 10 things about themselves on their journal.
3. You have to choose and tag 10 people and post their icons on the same journal.
4. Go to their pages and tell them you tagged them.
5. No tag backs.
6. No crap in the tagging section about "you are tagged if you read this." You legitimately have to tag ten people.

I tag



1. I have little to no formal training in art. Art classes have never done anything but frustrate me ever since I left high school, and attempting to draw from life makes me cry. The only college-level art course I ever took had no success in teaching me anything I didn't already know. It tried, but I failed to learn it.

2. I hate drawing things that people request. If I didn't think of an idea myself, I can't usually get enough of a mental picture to even get a few lines onto the page. This is a large part of the reason I don't do commissions: too much pressure, no enjoyment whatsoever.

3. For reasons I've never been able to fathom, I have extreme difficulty in drawing real people who are part of my life other than myself. "Close" fictional characters (that is, my friends' and my OCs) and celebrities are fine, but close real people just don't translate onto paper somehow.

4. I have loved cats since I was a small child and the neighbor's cats visited my house a lot. I desperately wanted one but my mom refused on grounds that she was allergic, but "maybe [I] could have have a cat when [I'm] eight." In April when I was eight years old, a homeless female tabby showed up on my back porch, starving and cold in the snow. We couldn't find where she came from and she lived with us until just a few years ago, when she passed away.

5. Fiction, mostly of the written variety, is a large part of what taught me to interact with people. I've been in therapy for my Asperger's syndrome all my life, and it is my belief that reading about "theoretical people" (my definition of fictional characters), and being able to go back and examine their interactions over and over, has been instrumental in allowing me to interact with real people socially. Knowing the difference between good and bad writing, and recognizing deep and realistic characters, is as easy as reading reviews, which is a thing not available concerning reality - but characters written and developed by a good enough author are a very effective analog. Video games that include dialogue trees and choices are especially good, since it allows me to load a save and see how a theoretical person will react differently if I pick a different dialogue choice in a conversation. With games and their safety-net load/save buttons, I can experiment socially without fear of alienating myself.

6. My backyard is a swamp. This has granted me a very high tolerance of bugs and dirt, more so than anyone I know who isn't a scientist. Sunsets, weather phenomena, night skies, waterfalls, the ocean, and mountains are certainly impressive, but in my opinion the most beautiful parts of nature are the smallest ones.

7. Though I was born in December of 1986, I never fully experienced the best parts of the nineties' pop culture: no Power Rangers, no Captain Planet, no Ninja Turtles, no Transformers, no Duck Tales, no Thundercats for me, because I didn't have cable television and mistakenly believed that all Saturday-morning cartoons existed only on channels I did not get. Until I was at least twelve, the only television I regularly watched was Reading Rainbow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Wishbone, and Kratt's Creatures, all on PBS. Eventually I decided to explore what channels I could actually receive and discovered we did, in fact, receive the Saturday-morning cartoons that I thought I could only watch at friends' houses. I don't regret all the PBS shows I was raised on, but I do feel a little deprived for not having the same nostalgia as everyone else my age. At least I made it in time for Pokemon and Jackie Chan Adventures.

8. I've always been an adventurous eater. At four, I polished off half a plate of sushi and voluntarily ate oysters on the half shell. The only types of food I generally avoid are spicy things, which confuse me as to why anyone would voluntarily eat them at all, given how the only evolutionary purpose of capsaicin is to inflict pain.

9. I'm awful at any video game more complicated than Tetris, but I play them anyway. I try to avoid doing it in public, though, because the speed at which I die in any kind of PVP is flatly embarrassing. In single-player and co-op games, I subsist largely on guides.

10. In any Pokemon game currently existing, I have yet to catch 'em all.