stolen from maidengurl

[arliss]

1. Scan my interest list and pick out the one that seems the most odd to you.

2. I’ll explain it.

3. Then you post this in your journal so other people can ask you about your interests.

Comments

[amy37.livejournal.com]

I'll take "animal behavior" for five hundred, Alex...

[fufaraw]

I grew up with a mother who had a gentling touch with animals, especially frightened baby animals. But she anthropomorphised them, treating them like children and expecting them to behave like humans. I knew that couldn't be right. In my preteens I was dog-mad and horse-mad, and read all the usual fiction, which led to training and behavioral observation books. Through my teens, Jane Goodall was a role model of sorts, and through her books I discovered Iain Douglass-Hamilton and the man who studied orangutans in their native habitat, and the books Goodall did with then-husband Hugo Van Lawick about African wild dogs, hyenas and jackals.

When I married in my early 20s we could only have a cat as a pet, and I began to read up on domestic and wild cat behavior. When we had four cats, watching the interactions between them, and trying diligently to keep from attributing "human" motives to their behaviors was fascinating to me.

Jacques Cousteau's tv work was at its height, and I joined the Cousteau society and the Nature Conservancy, and every penny I could spare went to support ecological and environmental causes. Still does.

Raised a strict Southern Baptist, from the age of 14 on, I never felt a conflict between the biblical story of creation and evolution. Watching animal behaviors, whether personally, or through reading or film, it was so apparent that humans have a very thin veneer of language skill and "civilization" overlying what remain very primal animal behaviors.

You may have noticed what I call the "herd bull" behavior if your eldest son is a teenager, and old enough for your DH to percieve on a pheremonal and primal level as a "rival." I certainly did. The air was thick for quite a few years, there. It brought the whole thing home to me rather forcefully. My study of animal behavior paid off in helping to understand human behavior, and in managing a family of human animals.

I think we were good rescuers for our feral (not an abandoned stray) cat. He only approached humans because he was traumatically injured (foot missing), desperately needed food and was unable to hunt. H became a reliable non-threatening food source, and he managed to establish a level of trust. Because we knew what to do and what to avoid, we've managed to socialize him to be an affectionate, mostly happy pet with a snarky, jokey sense of humor. He tolerates strangers not at all, but we're not excessively social people, so that's not a problem.

It's a minor use of the knowledge, but I'm glad I have it. I still rely on body language at least as much as conversation to tell me about people. I've freaked friends out, and friends of friends, being all "intuitive," but it's really just observation and past study.

Eek. I should have used the short form. Sorry.

[jenlp.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you found the joy in it once it was something you didn't have to do. I love reading about, well, how your garden grows. Heh.

My best friend growing up spent much time in their garden and even out of it, doing garden-related chores; she did not love it. She was also a heck of a lot more disciplined about, well, pretty much everything than I was. Probably a connection there somewhere. Mmmm hmmm.

[jenlp.livejournal.com]

Oops. I posted that in the wrong place. Ah, well. I do what I can.

[maidengurl.livejournal.com]

Yo, you need to list more interests...this is hard when you only have a couple things there *grin*

So, explain tarot to me.

[cindywrites.livejournal.com]

She said what I was going to say (on both accounts), so I'm just going to be a spectator.

[fufaraw]

I'm really only a beginner at tarot, and I don't read for others. Basically, I consider it a meditation tool. As often as I do a "formal" one or three card reading for myself, I simply take a card at random and hold it in my hand, then in my mind's eye, and let what comes to me, prompted by the picture, come. Or I page through the deck while keeping the cacophony of mundane daily thoughts at bay. Occasionally, something on one of the cards will leap out at me and demand my attention. It's usually to do with something going on, either in my life, or the life of someone close to me. Although I admit that lots of times it makes no sense, until later.

I'm also a magpie when it comes to decks, and at last count I had more than 80 tarot decks, not counting I Ching, Ogham and oracle decks. The art intrigues me--each deck is a collection of miniature paintings, and examining the traditional meanings of each card as interpreted by different artists is sometimes relevatory, but always interesting.

I find myself drawn, for the most part, to colorful decks rather than black and white ones, to wider interpretational art, rather than the more traditional, and to the lighter, rather than the darker decks in spirit. My very favorite tarot deck (that I only meditate with) is the Osho Zen. My favorites for reading are the Fey Tarot and the Gill Tarot (click on the "boutique" link, and then the "more samples" button in that last window).

I do buy used, often from ebay, and I research a prospective aquisition as thoroughly as I can, reading reviews, and studying the artwork on as many sites as I can find cards scanned. I have a few decks that, while not other than represented, have left me cold. I've also put decks away for months or years, and when I took them out again they'd gained appeal.

But basically? Me = magpie + the art is the whole appeal of tarot for me. Incidentally, this icon is the Sun card from the Roots of Asia tarot, another I meditate, rather than read with.

[jenlp.livejournal.com]

Containter gardening?

I have a short list, too, and it's all about fandom. Ha! OK, except for yoga and writing, but those aren't too odd.

[fufaraw]

When I was growing up we had a half-acre vegetable garden, which I was forced to work in every summer, weeding, carrying water, picking beans and peas and tomatoes and squash and cucumbers and corn. Given that my mother never met a vegetable she couldn't cook to mush, I also hated vegetables, and saw no good reason why I shouldn't be lying on a quilt in the shade, reading or writing, or riding my bike and daydreaming, rather than bent over endless rows of stoopid stinky tomatoes plants that made your skin itch and burn, in the hot sun, and every once in awhile being buzzed by wasps or bumblebees, turning up a leaf full of beanbug eggs, ew! Hated it. And then in the cool evenings it was sit on the porch and shuck, shell or snap boatloads of the stuff I'd weeded, watered, and picked, and then it was wash endless pans of glass quart and pint jars, being extra super careful not to break any or chip the rims. I didn't have to help with the canning, thank heaven, but I did have to stand by in case Mom or Dad needed a hand with something while they couldn't turn loose of what they were doing. All that time, all that effort, all that attention and work--and at the end of it, what did you have? Stupid vegetables. Yuck. The only fun thing I ever got to pick was strawberries, and I got hollered at if I ate any. And then Mom cut them all up and cooked them and made strawberry pies--we never had just strawberries with cream, or plain washed and capped berries, or even shortcake. Just doughy runny soupy cobbler sort of strawberry pies, which, okay, good. But still, cooked to death and mostly sugar and flour, so the connection to having actually grown was sort of dim.

I never wanted a garden. But when I moved out, my world expanded, and I discovered flower gardens. Formal gardens of estates, informal gardens at the homes of friends, and I was charmed. Not enough to acutally want to do the work, but enough to ease my hatred of dirt and growing things.

It was sideways, through reading about gardens in novels, historicals of all eras and modern ones, that the flower garden began to appeal. And then I visited some historical site and walked through the herb garden on a warm late spring day while the plants still glistened from watering, and I fell in love. We had--and still have--no real place to plant a real garden, but we have a second floor deck, and I began to read on how to grow things in containers, so we could have a garden of pretty flowers and wonderful smelly herbs. And there you go. The more I read, the more I tried, the more I tried, the better my success, and the more I read...etc.