2003-07-09 - 6:45 a.m.
Five servings of questions a day for good health.
Kimmie's five questions (really 14 if you break them down, but what the heck.) :) 1a. "I do not know the circumstances of what brought you here from England. When did you move to the States and why?" I moved here with my mother when I was 12. She is a journalist, and works for "The Economist". From 1982-1989 she was the American correspondent for them, so most of the leaders (articles with the main title) for the American section during that time were written by her. My sister and I came here, and my brother (who's six years older than me) stayed in England to go to University. I went to high school, and my sister went to a special school (she's developmentally disabled). My mother pulled some strings to get me straight into HS so that I didn't have to spend a year in junior high first, so I was a very young freshman (but not the youngest!). I started school two weeks after we arrived here, so as you might imagine, it was a bit of a culture shock. 1b. "Were you terribly homesick early on?" Very at first. I went back to England every summer to spend time with my father, and for the first couple of years, I was miserable at coming back. The people I saw in England said I sounded American (which horrified me at the time, and is probably the root cause of me still having a distinct accent after all these years), and I dreaded going back to school. But after about three years, I found myself reluctant to go to England, and looking forward to coming back here at the end of the summer. I had more friends here than I ever had back there, and I liked it better. The fact that I was starting to have a more strained relationship with my father at that time had nothing to do with my change of heart, I swear. :P 1c. "What aspect of the US was the most difficult to adjust to?" Hmm. That's tough. I came over here pretty young, so adapting wasn't that hard. I guess the extreme temperature changes were the hardest - the temperature in England rarely changes by more than 50 degrees over the course of a year, and here it can fluctuate by more than 100 degrees. The US is also filled with all sorts of unpleasant poisonous things - the scariest plant in England is a nettle, which leaves a welt which disappears in half an hour, and the scariest animal is a snake called an adder, which has a bite that's slightly less poisonous than a tarantula. The US has poison ivy/sumac/oak, black widows, brown recluses, copperheads, rattlesnakes, and that's just around here. I have to pay a lot more attention wandering through the woods here than I ever did in England. I also enjoy maintaining my "outsider" status; there's a comfort in straddling two continents, but it means I preserve my reserve and reluctance to spill my life story to just anyone, which has been misinterpreted by SCA people at times. 2a. "You lost a significant amount of weight. What finally triggered the will power to do what was necessary to lose it?" Heh. I was standing over the fax machine at the place I used to work, I looked down, and there was this enormous stomach looking back at me. I was so disgusted with myself that at lunchtime, I went out and signed up at Jenny Craig. The feeling of being fat and ugly wasn't helped by the truly awful perm I had gotten two weeks previously - they left the developer on too long, and my dream of romantic ringlets was replaced by the reality of a really repulsive poodle perm. I got my money back, but I couldn't look in a mirror without crying. To make it worse, my hair was waist length and beautiful before I got the perm. In the end I had to cut most of it off, and I'm only just starting to get it close to the length it once was. Until I fried my hair, I could tell myself that even though I wasn't slim, at least I looked nice because of my beautiful hair. After the perm, I had no safety net, so I jumped. Now, of course, I'm insufferable. 2b. "Did you do it by eating and exercise alone or did you follow a program?"
I did Jenny Craig, as I said, and I followed it with the fanaticism of a religious zealot. I honestly didn't believe I could lose weight, since I'd been on one diet or another since I was 11 years old. However, having someone else not only tell me what I could eat, but having to buy it (and I paid for all of it myself while working a $6.75/hr job and paying off the credit card debt my ex saddled me with) made me take it seriously. I spent over $1000, but it was worth every penny, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. 2c. "Do you struggle at all with it anymore?" All the time. My weight always wants to creep up - I may have lost fat, but I still have the empty fat cells floating around. I've tried to lose more weight because I still have a really poochy belly, but it's not going to happen. The one time I got so stressed I stopped eating, even my mother thought I looked too thin. And I still had a poochy belly. My weight fluctuates by about 5 pounds from week to week, but I've never gotten close to gaining it all back. I fear going back to that life too much. 3a. "What distractions do you use to cope with your chronic pain?" Heavy-duty painkillers. It's that simple. I just refuse to let my body dictate my day. I feel pain, but I don't pay attention to it most of the time. It can make me even more distant than I usually am, because I'm putting myself outside my body, but my friends have learned to deal with my weirdnesses. 3b. "When you are simply unable to do the things you want to do, what do you do instead?" Well, the only thing I stopped completely was fighting. I still sew, and draw (though painting's hard so I haven't done much of that lately), and other stuff. The accommodations I make for my temporary disability tend more to not lifting heavy things and keeping a pillow to rest my hands on for car trips. I wait for someone else to open doors for me. Stuff like that. I miss fighting, but I haven't really replaced it with anything else, because I don't *want* to find a substitute. I am patient - I will fight again, just not yet. 3c. "What has been the biggest comfort to you when you are in terrible pain?" The knowledge that it's not as bad as it could be. I need comfort not to get me through pain, but to help me deal with the fear of losing part of myself. Bob's been a big help. 4a. "What is the best part of being a Baroness?" Most people expect me to say the giving out awards thing, but while that's nice, the best thing is that it's given me a chance to wrench the Barony's focus around to the Kingdom again. For a while they were seriously in danger of becoming completely insular, and that's a *bad* thing. It hasn't been easy, but acting as an ambassador for the Barony to the Kingdom at large has helped put Lochmere back on the map, at least a little. 4b. "What do you do at events when you have to be �on�, but really just don�t want to deal with people?" Suck it up and deal. I have a vast reserve of "polite" that will make me behave properly even if I want to die. Sometimes it gets to be too much and I crawl away to be quiet for a little, but I will smile through excruciating pain if needed, and only my good friends will know anything's wrong. As far as I'm concerned, you don't get to indulge yourself. When you need to be on, you're on, no matter if your dog died, your husband told you he was leaving you for a 16 year old (kidding, Hon), or someone just dropped a brick on your foot. People need you to be something, so you are that something. It builds character. :) 4c. "What has been the hardest part of being Baroness?" Dealing with a Barony that seems to have no respect for the office. I've never had an attendant, people have to be reminded to stand with us in Court, no-one takes any care of us, and basically sometimes I feel like I'm only there to act as a focus for all the bitchy complaining people do. The Barony people don't even ask us to sit with them when we're at events. I've gotten moved from my seat at feast, asked to give up my chair at a business meeting so that someone else could sit (and God forbid anyone should offer me *their* chair), and basically been made to feel like no-one wants me around. It hurts, sometimes, it really does. 5a. "What was the most difficult scroll you ever worked on?" They're all complicated in their own way, but probably Countess Brigit's Pelican scroll. It required seven layers of wash to achieve the right look on the border. 5b. "Do you have a favorite scroll that you made?" I like them all, really. I keep a colour Xerox record of a lot of them, and a notebook that lists them all (85 to date, I think). Bob's favourite is the White Scarf scroll I did for Gregor MacGregor - it's the frontspiece from a fencing manual, and looks like an etching. I went through about four expensive pens to get exactly the look of ink "biting" into the page. The text is merely a wraparound the center portrait of Gregor. Thanks for the questions!
Dorsal - Ventral
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