the sunshine blogger award

I’ve been tagged for a ridiculous number of tags lately, and so I decided to mix things up and do one on this blog rather than my other. Thank you, Mia, for making this possible.

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if you had to talk for fifteen minutes about something, what would it be?

“Had to”? Oh, you poor naive soul, I think you mean “were forced to stop after fifteen minutes,” in which case, a conversation about cars or math is something I would certainly shut off at that time (if not sooner).

I can easily ramble about pretty much anything I’m passionate about for at least fifteen minutes. That includes…

• objective beauty
• Plato’s cave
• avocados
• infant baptism
• choreography
• college
• the smell of spring and/or fall
• Rand al’Thor
• Shallan Davar
• fanart in general

source

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are you more of a girly girl or a tomboy?

*is uncertain*

I’m somewhere in the middle. I went though a no-pink, no-dresses stage in late elementary and early middle school. Nowadays I wear (select) pink articles of clothing, and I don a dress at least once a week, but I’m still not very into makeup or hair (the results are nice, but not usually worth the time and effort).

But I do still (occasionally) randomly climb trees and balance on the edges of retaining walls.

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what are your favorite girl or and boy names?

Boy: Edmund, Gabriel, Kalmar, Ian, Rhys.

Girl: Astoria, Auralia, Glory, Rosemary, Jane, Sophie.

I’m also partial to Eugenides (boy) and Nynaeve and Hermione (girl), but I’ve been told that these are a bit much…

Suffice to say that all of my children will be named after book characters.

source

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do you have any hidden talents?

Uh. Well, I have a brown stripe belt in tae kwon do, so I could probably beat up most of you (not that I want to).

I also have an unusually high belt (which is when you sing in your full/chest voice, with very little air) (so basically shouting) — it goes up to a B4 or sometimes a C5. Not a D5 (though I dream about that sometimes), so I can’t belt the last note of “In My Dreams” from Anastasia without sounding like a dying cow or something.

(Disclaimer: when I say “unusually high,” I mean “unusually high for the average person.” In comparison to most Broadway stars, my belt is simply… ordinary. Idina Menzel belts at least an E♭5 in “Let it Go” and “Into the Unknown,” and an F5 in “Defying Gravity.”)

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what are your thoughts on social media?

I think it generally has a bad effect on people, and it’s easy to get obsessed with it and forget to live your real life (and forget that your real life matters much more than what you see online). But it can also be an amazing way to connect with friends and discover amazing creators.

That’s all coming from somebody who doesn’t have any social media, through, unless WordPress counts. 😀

source | I stalk Nadine Brandes’ Instagram on my mom’s account all the time; she’s the literal sweetest and kindest person on the Internet, I think

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do you prefer real books, e-books, or audiobooks?

Real books! 100%! E-books are so annoying to read (it took me weeks to read a 100-page e-ARC recently, because I kept not wanting to read on my phone, where the text is so tiny and the light gives me a headache and you can’t turn back to see what happened several pages ago), and audiobooks take way too long (I can read a book in one hour that would take four or six to listen to).

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what is one unpopular opinion you have?

“Clean” is a bad word to describe fiction.

(Is that unpopular? I don’t even know.)

source

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what is your love language?

I don’t actually know much about the five love languages (there are five? right?).

I took a quiz, and apparently it’s acts of service. Which does make sense to me, since I have a tendency to be lazy (I’m working on this) and love it when other people offer to help me with chores/jobs. And when people (mainly my dad) help me with difficult homework.

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do you put water on your toothbrush before or after the toothpaste?

After.

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do you imagine shapes, numbers, days of the week to have colors or personalities?

No…? I do tend to associate colors with certain books/movies, and I associate even/odd numbers with the days of the week (M/W/F are odd, T/Th/Sat are even, and Sun is neither even nor odd, like zero), though.

source | Harry and Ginny for no reason other than that I love them

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what is the view outside your nearest window?

Half of the window is a view of our pine tree forest, our reading rock (which really isn’t that comfortable to read on at all — but I romanticize it), our gravel patio, and lots of new green grass that needs to be mowed. (Our mower is broken, yay.) The other half is our camper, which temporarily resides on said gravel patio.

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If you want to do this tag, go ahead! (Good luck figuring out the rules, ha. Also, I’m not asking any new questions, so you can steal Mia’s or something.)

How are you all this lovely spring day? Been reading any good books lately?