fahye | interview meme

Questions from

the_grynne:

1. Describe the best meal you've ever had.

My favourite meals have all been yum cha, I think, and yum cha is pretty much the same wherever you go. But I'll describe a gorgeous meal I had recently at Anise, one of the fanciest restaurants in the city:

(Gin & tonic, my drink of choice under any circumstance.)
- Gruyere souffle with just enough black pepper cracked over the top - gooey, soft, but not in the least bit bland.
- A tartlet of very buttery pastry filled with roasted red capsicum and semi-melted goat's feta, covered in rocket and lashed with reduced balsamic, which is pretty much the best thing EVER when combined with feta and capsicum: dark, syrupy and just sweet enough.
(With the tartlet I had a glass of a South Australian sangiovese, which is what one gets when there is no Chianti on the wine list because it's the same type of grape. skjasgfskugas. no words. WINE SO GOOD.)
- Chocolate espresso mousse. More gluggy than frothy, as mousse goes, and absolutely sublime.

2. Who are three fictional persons you relate to and why?

1) I am not sure if I've even seen enough episodes of SPN to make this claim, but Dean Winchester. I get the impression that most people come down with a preference for one brother or the other*, and I was extremely surprised to find that I was coming down VERY HARD on Dean's side despite the fact that I do not find Jensen Ackles attractive (which is a whole other bizarre thing on its own - I can look at him and SEE that his features are arranged in a pretty way, but I just. can't. FEEL it. though I like the way he smiles with half of his mouth. and the way he shrugs.) um this sentence was going somewhere before the parentheses. Right. I connect with Dean not because I want to shag him, or even because I objectively admire his character, but because I do identify with him. He knows that it's perfectly all right to have feelings, but he's just fine with Not Talking about them, or expressing them via bought foodstuffs and/or punching. He's undemonstrative in a way that is comfortable and far from cold. His urges can swing between reckless sacrifice and being, frankly, a knowingly selfish bastard. He feels that once you have a chance to lead an extraordinary life, you should seize it; he sees the serious/responsible side to what they're doing, but at the same time he refuses to relinquish his sense of levity and adventure. He likes shiny cars and weapons and being in control and freedom.

2) Hmm. Martha Jones. Mostly because her surface features match mine to a tee: medical student, bossy, refuses to take crap from people, talks back given half a chance, loves her family even though they're a bit nuts sometimes. And she knows when to cut her losses and never look back.

3) Painfully and immediately, the character of Charlotte Gabel from the short story 'An Experiment on the Constancy of Love'. This story - and this character - manages to perfectly and mercilessly capture one aspect of my personality (which I think is all you can hope for when identifying with fictional characters - it would be a great and unlikely shock to come across oneself in full). It's a story about trying to live and love according to one's reason rather than one's heart, and applying science because you are unwilling (and afraid) of giving any of yourself away to anyone else; about being afraid of letting emotions rule, because they have no rules.

(Runners-up: Chandler Bing (SHUSH) & in their own ways: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay AND Elizabeth Weir, which is one reason why I sometimes find watching SG:A to be kind of confusing. It's like the city is my psyche and all of these little subelements of myself are running around blowing stuff up! Um.)

3. Favourite mythological or fictional underworld.

I don't know any one mythology in intimate detail, but I do love the Greeks for the image of a great dark river. The first time I came across the idea of the Styx it resonated with me beautifully, as though I'd always thought about death as a river and was only now having it confirmed by an outside source. I like Charon and his boat, and laying coins on a person's eyes as toll for the ferryman, and Hades ruling with light-handed disinterest until the brightening seasons of the underworld when Persephone crosses over from the world of the living. Death's summer occurring when the world is in winter; death as the flipside of life. All this, I think, explains why the death-mythos of Dead Man's Chest - with the flipping of the ship, the souls in their own tiny boats, and all those shots of stars reflected in black expanses of water - hit such a strong chord with me. See also: Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead - 'Do you think death could possibly be a boat?' Yes, yes, I'm the sum of my influences, and in this particular case my influences seem to have conspired to give me death in rivers and boats. See also: my fascination with Leoben. Multiple deaths, rivers and streams. (Huh. This isn't actually a pattern that I'd managed to identify before, but now that I know what to look for...it's amazingly pervasive. I'm thinking about The Vintner's Luck as well. The great dark river.)

4. What emotional reactions (if any) do you have towards astrophysics - novas, black holes, the death of the universe? Comforted? Awed? Exhilarated? Terrified?

Door number three! I have little-to-no religious convictions, and I don't feel any sort of despair at the relative tininess of human beings in the grand scheme of things. I love vast, distant, breathtaking things. I like being given the perspective of mindbogglingly large numbers, I like to imagine the death of stars and hear about the ways in which the universe could end or begin again. I used to want to go into astronomy until I worked out that it was pretty much all maths, and then I decided to just be content with an active interest and much pilfering of scientific information for my literary metaphors.

5. What would you like to have happened in that second season of Firefly that never was?

- Right, well, I have been watching Candleburn way too much lately and I am reminded of the great potential for enigma and awesome that was contained in Mal & Inara's situation. I would have liked to see an intricate interweaving of Inara's mysterious past and Mal's professional inferiority complex and more snark and more really really gorgeous dresses and more of Inara's calm being shattered and (obviously) some form of outmaking, preferably linked to a fight.
- I would have liked to see Simon's character development continue and for him to get some more criminal masterminding plots; anything that developed him as a person in his own right, separate from his sister.
- Okay, more hilarious and complex heist plots in general.
- I would have liked MORE BADGER.
- And pretty much anything that added to the worldbuilding. Things about the Browncoats and the Academy and the in-between times from Earth That Was to the 'verse that is the series' context.

~

Okay, here's the deal: I dislike memes that are all YOU ARE NOW COMPELLED TO ASK EVERYONE YOU KNOW QUESTIONS HAHAHAHA so I am declaring this open season as far as interviews as concerned. Ask me anything you want, as many questions as you want. And I'll reply, and ask you as many questions as I want, which could be seventeen or two.

*Bonus impromptu poll! SPN-watchers: Dean or Sam? Don't think, just answer.

interview meme

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