14 April 2014

"Answer Me This" linkup, week 1!

Kendra at Catholic All Year is starting a regular Sunday linkup. She says: 

As I was saying, here's how it will work. Today, I will give you six questions, and tag a couple of bloggers. Next Sunday at 10am Pacific, I will answer the questions and open up a link up for everyone who would like to post. The link-up will be open through Tuesday in case you can't get to it on Sunday.
Just answer the questions and link back to Catholic All Year in your post! We'll do it for at least a couple of weeks and see if it's any fun.
Here are the questions to answer 
and link up
on Sunday, April 13th (Kendra's answers, next week questions, and the linkup can be found here).

1. What time do you prefer to go to Mass?
I'm in the choir at my church, and the choir sings at the 10:45 Sunday Mass (plus, you know, the major holy days and the whole Holy Thursday-through-Easter Sunday shebang). I also do some cantoring at non-choir Masses, so some Sundays I do the 10:45 with the choir and then the 12:30 solo. I get to compare homilies that way.

2. Would you rather be too hot or too cold?
That is nigh impossible to choose. I am a delicate flower. If I have to pick one, I guess it's hot? But when I think about being too hot I think of Clomid hot flashes, and let me tell you: if you've never had a hot flash, buckle up for menopause. It is HORRIBLE.

3. How many brothers and/or sisters do you have?
I have one brother and five sisters (plus assorted brothers- and sisters-in-law). Before you go feeling too sorry for the lone brother, I'll assure you that he was the oldest and as such he got away with murder. He was allowed to do things we weren't because he was a boy, he had distinctly fewer chores, AND he always got everyone's sympathy since he had no brothers.

4. If you were faced with a boggart, what would it turn into?
I'm a Ron Weasley, because that boggart would immediately turn into the biggest, hairiest spider in the whole entire world. I literally just shuddered while typing that.

5. Barbie: thumbs up or thumbs down?
Thumbs up, because my sister and I had an entire Barbie Village as children. We had houses, cars (all handed down from older cousins), and more Barbie clothes than you could shake a stick at. I really enjoyed dressing her up and staging elaborate trips to the beach (or, you know, the sandbox in the back yard) with my sister. My worst Barbie-related memories include my brother snapping the legs off of our only Ken doll by trying to make him breakdance, and the time my teething little sister chewed all of our Barbies' hands until they were three inches long.

Before I actually started to answer this question, I hadn't thought that I was much influenced by liberal feminism, but I seriously had to shake off my knee-jerk impulse to say "thumbs down" -- because of negative body image and the fact that Barbie didn't have many non-traditionally-female career options -- but honestly, I think that this, like most liberal feminism, is a load of crap. I played with Barbies nonstop as a kid, and because I was raised well I haven't spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars having plastic surgery to look like her. I went to engineering school even though Barbie never did. We have a bad habit of blaming innocuous things for societal problems that are mostly attributable to poor family lives. Barbie is just a doll, albeit one with silly body proportions.

6. If someone asked you to give them a random piece of advice, what would you say?

I would tell them that the advice that they were given on their wedding day: "Never go to bed angry," is not necessarily good for them. I must get testy around bedtime, because it is often that my husband says something that sets me off. Now... We could fight about it, but I know myself well enough to know that I'm probably overreacting, and he probably didn't mean it the way I heard it. And it is 99.999% likely that I will wake up laughing at myself. So we could have an argument when I'm already testy, or I could give myself the overnight to get over it. 

You have to know yourself, is the point. If you're going to wake up still angry, then fight it out now and make up before you go to sleep. If you're going to wake up with a new lease on life and not even a smidgen of residual anger, like I do, then maybe insist on being given some time. I guess I'd just change it to: never go to bed irreconcilably angry. Piqued or annoyed? Sleep it off.

5 comments:

  1. I love your five.

    And your six is SPOT ON for me. I always wake up over it.

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    1. It took me YEARS to convince my husband that it was okay! I think he thought it was a trap. ;)

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  2. I love your reflections for #6... :) Thanks for that!

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    1. I hope it helps! It's not necessarily good advice for everyone but then neither is its counterpart. And I think we all need to work on forgiveness and not holding grudges, of course.

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    2. I think we should be friends too! :) Welcome to the blogging world. Loving your writing. Keep it up!

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