![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikQ by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mimichan
Post a reply if you want to be interviewed by me.
1. What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten?
That's a really hard one. I take my philosophical omnivorism pretty seriously, and I'm generally willing to try anything at least once. Tongue? Uni? I mean, those seem like such conventional weird things. Deep friend shrimp heads? (I swear, sushi just shouldn't count.) Herbal tea with bugs in it? Raw beef? Lavendar ice cream?
In some senses, lobster, actually. At least, it's one of the few things that I know tastes good that sometimes just doesn't seem like food at all to me. (Of course, having Craig sitting next to me saying things like "cockroaches of the sea!" really doesn't help.) Sometimes lobster tastes really good... and sometimes it tastes vaguely poisonous.
Or maybe lobster mushrooms, for that matter. It's a kind of fungus, that's parasitic on another fungus -- how weird is that? And the host fungus is pretty insipid by itself, but pretty darn good when infected.
2. Would you ever want to move away from Seattle (or greater Seattle) and why/where?
I love this area, my roots are in it, and its roots are in me. That having been said... I can easily see moving somewhere else because I wanted to study with someone, or do research, or something of that nature. Perhaps even to be with people I cared about.
I'd like to spend some time in a warmer climate, mostly because I've always been a cool weather gardener, but I love a lot of warm weather vegetables. It would be nice to be somewhere where eggplants and peppers and figs were really happy.
3. Regarding your mushroom-collecting hobby, is it because of magic mushrooms or do you just like mushrooms in general?
It was originally an outgrowth of my interest in wild edible and medicinal plants. And my interest in cooking -- I mean, if you like morels, an awful lot of the time they're $30 a pound at the grocery... or you can wander around in the woods (which I like doing anyway) and get them for free.
But the more I got into it, I just like mycology as a field. I don't think most people have any idea how many kind of fungi there are, or how important they are to ecosystems in general... and a lot of them are just weird. And very largely not understood.
Regarding "magic" mushrooms... I have tried psilocybes, and in fact, of the fairly small selection of illegal drugs I have tried, they're really the only one I'd be that interested in doing again. Though I definately tried psilocybes because I was interested in mycology, not the other way around. *shrug* And while I know where to find them, and can recognize them quite well, I still haven't bothered to take any in... a decade? So I must not be that interested in taking them again.
4. Does the idea of recognizing plant families or genera interest you, and would you fancy taking a botany course at UW to learn more about plants native to the Pacific NW?
Very much so. I've actually been working with native plants for a lot longer than I have mushrooms, though in some ways my background is less systemitized. (When you starting learning plant ID when you're eight, formal taxonomy isn't always your biggest concern... or at least, it wasn't mine.) So while I am familiar with the vast majority of native plants in this area, my knowledge of the families is less firm. I was hoping to take Ammirati's plant ID course this last year, but it didn't fit into my schedule.
5. How would you rate your level of fluency in Chinese? In Reading/writing/speaking?
Gah. I really don't know -- it seems to change day by day.
Ten years ago I was marginally fluent, speaking, as long as the subject matter wasn't particularly arcane. And then I didn't speak at all for several years. Now... At the least, I'm rusty. Most of the time, if there isn't a lot of specialized vocabulary, and it's not too fast I can follow what people are saying pretty well, though I'm often thrown by accents.
I also get flustered really easily, sometimes, and will forget how to say the silliest things. But then, at other times, if I've been around people who are speaking Chinese, or I've been doing a lot of reading in Chinese, I'll end up speaking and not even realizing it, and I usually do pretty well then. I think I'm my own worst enemy. I *really* need to practice more, but I tend to be a bit shy about speaking. I've been thinking of putting up a notice on the MedChem department BB asking if anyone is intersted in a conversation partner... (though everyone's English is probably a lot better than my Chinese, so I feel a little silly.)
I thought I had lost most of my reading and writing, too, but that has been coming back, especially with all the classical. I've gotten back into the habit of taking a lot of my notes in Chinese, which is useful. And reading in general is getting easier, though again, specialized terminology can throw me.
So on the whole, probably bad, but occaisionally decent. And I'm really afraid that if I don't find a way to keep it up I'm going to lose most of it again.
mimichanPost a reply if you want to be interviewed by me.
1. What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten?
That's a really hard one. I take my philosophical omnivorism pretty seriously, and I'm generally willing to try anything at least once. Tongue? Uni? I mean, those seem like such conventional weird things. Deep friend shrimp heads? (I swear, sushi just shouldn't count.) Herbal tea with bugs in it? Raw beef? Lavendar ice cream?
In some senses, lobster, actually. At least, it's one of the few things that I know tastes good that sometimes just doesn't seem like food at all to me. (Of course, having Craig sitting next to me saying things like "cockroaches of the sea!" really doesn't help.) Sometimes lobster tastes really good... and sometimes it tastes vaguely poisonous.
Or maybe lobster mushrooms, for that matter. It's a kind of fungus, that's parasitic on another fungus -- how weird is that? And the host fungus is pretty insipid by itself, but pretty darn good when infected.
2. Would you ever want to move away from Seattle (or greater Seattle) and why/where?
I love this area, my roots are in it, and its roots are in me. That having been said... I can easily see moving somewhere else because I wanted to study with someone, or do research, or something of that nature. Perhaps even to be with people I cared about.
I'd like to spend some time in a warmer climate, mostly because I've always been a cool weather gardener, but I love a lot of warm weather vegetables. It would be nice to be somewhere where eggplants and peppers and figs were really happy.
3. Regarding your mushroom-collecting hobby, is it because of magic mushrooms or do you just like mushrooms in general?
It was originally an outgrowth of my interest in wild edible and medicinal plants. And my interest in cooking -- I mean, if you like morels, an awful lot of the time they're $30 a pound at the grocery... or you can wander around in the woods (which I like doing anyway) and get them for free.
But the more I got into it, I just like mycology as a field. I don't think most people have any idea how many kind of fungi there are, or how important they are to ecosystems in general... and a lot of them are just weird. And very largely not understood.
Regarding "magic" mushrooms... I have tried psilocybes, and in fact, of the fairly small selection of illegal drugs I have tried, they're really the only one I'd be that interested in doing again. Though I definately tried psilocybes because I was interested in mycology, not the other way around. *shrug* And while I know where to find them, and can recognize them quite well, I still haven't bothered to take any in... a decade? So I must not be that interested in taking them again.
4. Does the idea of recognizing plant families or genera interest you, and would you fancy taking a botany course at UW to learn more about plants native to the Pacific NW?
Very much so. I've actually been working with native plants for a lot longer than I have mushrooms, though in some ways my background is less systemitized. (When you starting learning plant ID when you're eight, formal taxonomy isn't always your biggest concern... or at least, it wasn't mine.) So while I am familiar with the vast majority of native plants in this area, my knowledge of the families is less firm. I was hoping to take Ammirati's plant ID course this last year, but it didn't fit into my schedule.
5. How would you rate your level of fluency in Chinese? In Reading/writing/speaking?
Gah. I really don't know -- it seems to change day by day.
Ten years ago I was marginally fluent, speaking, as long as the subject matter wasn't particularly arcane. And then I didn't speak at all for several years. Now... At the least, I'm rusty. Most of the time, if there isn't a lot of specialized vocabulary, and it's not too fast I can follow what people are saying pretty well, though I'm often thrown by accents.
I also get flustered really easily, sometimes, and will forget how to say the silliest things. But then, at other times, if I've been around people who are speaking Chinese, or I've been doing a lot of reading in Chinese, I'll end up speaking and not even realizing it, and I usually do pretty well then. I think I'm my own worst enemy. I *really* need to practice more, but I tend to be a bit shy about speaking. I've been thinking of putting up a notice on the MedChem department BB asking if anyone is intersted in a conversation partner... (though everyone's English is probably a lot better than my Chinese, so I feel a little silly.)
I thought I had lost most of my reading and writing, too, but that has been coming back, especially with all the classical. I've gotten back into the habit of taking a lot of my notes in Chinese, which is useful. And reading in general is getting easier, though again, specialized terminology can throw me.
So on the whole, probably bad, but occaisionally decent. And I'm really afraid that if I don't find a way to keep it up I'm going to lose most of it again.
