Intro Post: A Lot About Me

[rsadelle]

Basics!
Ruth Sadelle Alderson is my real name. I use it on the internet both because it is who I am and because I could never come up with anything better. You can only call me Ruthie if you've known me since I was a small child.

I mentioned recently that I'm thankful for my boring life, and it really is boring. Right now, it mostly consists of work, writing, and yoga. There used to be more stuff in it. I took belly dance for almost five years, but left it a couple of months ago because as valuable an experience as it was, it's just not me right now. I took ballet for two years - only stopping for financial reasons - but I'm still deciding if I want to go back. I belonged to a writing group for two and a half years, and while that was also a valuable experience, it just doesn't fit my needs right now. I'm thinking of leaving my writing group and belly dance as making room for something else in my life, but I don't know yet what that is.

I have an identity statement kind of thing in my LJ/Facebook/MySpace userinfo, but if I had to boil it down to no more than ten words, it would be: Fangirl first, writer second, everything else after that.

Demographics!
I'm 30. I'm white. I'm a generally non-practicing Reconstructionist Jew with Buddhist leanings and a daily yoga and meditation practice. (My dad's side of the family is Christian, and we celebrate Christmas and Easter with them.) I'm a lesbian.

I'm five-two and last time I was on a scale (at the doctor's office two years ago), I weighed 165. I used to be fat. I started eating healthier and exercising regularly because I didn't like the way my body felt when I didn't, and I was surprised and disconcerted when that meant I lost weight too. (You can read more about that through my weight tag.) I felt like the fat girl for a long time even after I technically wasn't. It's been enough years now that I'm used to my body being what it is now.

Location!
I was born in Susanville, where my mom taught in the prison while she was pregnant with me and where I was the first baby of the decade in Lassen County. We then moved to Tule Lake for what my mother describes as the longest three years of her life. (It was slightly less than three years.)

Twenty-seven years ago this month, we moved to Chico, into the house my parents still live in. I went away for college, but came back afterwards and ended up staying.

Education!
I was always one of the smart kids. I was in the GATE program in elementary school, honors classes in junior high and high school, and eventually the AP and IB programs in high school.

I went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which, yes, is very far away from home. I have a BA in Math and Spanish, and I was only one class short of a minor in Greek. (They would only put two things on your diploma anyway.)

As you might have guessed from the honors/AP/IB thing, I was always good at school. I think a lot of people - including, at times, myself - thought I was going to go on to do something very academic with my life, but by the time I graduated college, I was extremely burnt out on being a student. I also didn't love anything enough to want to study it in grad school.

If I ever went back to school, I would get a BA in Classics. Since the local university doesn't have a Classics department and I'm not inclined to move, I don't really foresee this happening, although you never know what life will hold.

Work!
I have a day job. While there's a lot more to it than just this, I do actually google professionally. I think the best way to talk about my job is through Unclutterer's lens of uncluttered jobs. They suggest there are two kinds of jobs that aren't clutter: the job that is absolutely who you are, and the clock-in, clock-out job. My old job was in between - I cared enough that it wasn't clock-in, clock-out, but not enough that it was who I was - and that did cause it to clutter up my life in some ways. My current job is a clock-in, clock-out job, and the thing I like best about it is that when I'm not there, I'm not there: I don't think about it except in passing, and there's never that free-floating anxiety I used to sometimes have thinking about my old job.

I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't sound vaguely pretentious, so I'll just say it straight out: my true work/calling/vocation is that I'm a writer. When I say I have a day job, this is what that day job is supporting. If you're reading my LJ, you've seen me talk about writing a lot, and I'm not sure what else to say about it here. This is who I am.

I'm also an editor, and in terms of someday having the other kind of uncluttered job, editing is it. I read something, possibly in Steven Pressfield's The War of Art (since God knows we can't escape that book), that said a lot of writers get into editing or publishing as a way to be near writing without actually writing, but that's not why I want to be an editor. I am absolutely passionate about narrative, about storytelling. There are books out there that are deeply flawed in concept, and then there are the books out there that could move from okay to good or even great if they only had a good editor to fix a few things. I'm that kind of editor, and I love to see those things and know how to fix them. My specific areas of interest/expertise are point of view and endings. I would really like to work in the erotica industry because that's where I'm most knowledgeable and comfortable about the forms - and because most of the erotic novels I've read could have been so much better with just a little bit of tweaking.

Family!
My parents have been happily married for forty-one years. As I said a couple of days ago, I am truly lucky to have the parents I do. When I worked in social services, I would read or hear things in trainings about parenting, and so many of the most recommended things were things my parents did. I told this to my mom once, and she said, "Oh, yeah, we were very into being good parents." Although I've pretty much resolved it now, in the past the contradictions of my parents - my mom is a poet and sometimes photographer who loves a well-constructed spreadsheet and my dad is an engineer who takes amazing photos and builds incredibly beautiful/functional things - used to tug at me: art or science?

I have a brother who's six-foot-four and two years younger than me. He also lives in town. We see each other on holidays. I actually really like my brother, and I'm sorry we don't have more of a relationship. I tried for a while, but gave up when he never wanted to hang out with me.

My dad has two brothers and a sister. His sister lives in town, as do both of her daughters and their partners. My aunt does family dinner night twice a month as well as Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter for her kids and our family, so I see this part of the extended family fairly frequently. I see the rest of it at weddings, which means we actually may not see each other for quite a while. (The unmarried four of us are two who don't believe in marriage, one who isn't in a relationship, and me. None of us are likely to get married any time soon.)

My mom's mom died when I was twelve and my grandpa remarried Adrienne not long after. My grandparents and Adrienne and her husband were friends for a long time, and the two families spent holidays together while my mom was growing up. Adrienne has three sons, all of whom have children. I'm enough older than all of my cousins that I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who remembers their grandfather. (He died when I was five or six.) I actually joined Facebook and MySpace a couple of years ago when Adrienne was having some health problems. I'm not super close to my cousins, but I don't want to lose them altogether when she dies. Grandpa and Adrienne moved up to Sacramento, where one of her sons lives, a couple of years ago, so now we see them and the Sacramento branch of the family more often.

Friends!
My friends basically fall into two categories: people I went to school with (allegram, Brad, archivecats) and fangirls/the occasional fanboy (the rest of you), with a few others who I met through those people or don't fit in either of those categories.

My friends are amazing. A short sampling: Brad and I have lunch every week. lakeeffectgirl and schuyler, who I met through fandom, are my two favorite people in the whole world. The two of them, eleanor_lavish, siryn99, and I have a multitude of awesome email threads on every possible topic, fannish and life.

Fandom!
Fandom is my home. If I could, I would spend all my time reading and writing fan fiction.

I've been in fandom in one way or another since I was fifteen when I was reading X-Men newsgroups on the family computer in the dining room. I'm one of those fangirls who had a fannish mindset and wrote fan fic before I even knew what fandom and fan fic were.

I've been in a lot of fandoms over the years. A lot. X-Men was my original gateway fandom, and although the first slash I ever read was dueSouth (I was looking for a specific het pairing but indiscriminately clicking on NC-17 fic), the first fandom where I was actually into the slash was X-Files.

I've been serially fandom monogamous (with occasional bouts to reread favorite fic in older fandoms) for a couple of years now. In case you hadn't noticed, my current fandom is bandom.

TV!
TV should really be a part of fandom, but I think it deserves its own heading. I used to watch a lot more TV. When I got this job, though, I cut out most of it in favor of time to read and write.

At the moment, I'm keeping up with Friday Night Lights and Nikita and slowly watching Hellcats. When they come back, I'll also be keeping up with Make It Or Break It, In Plain Sight, and Greek.

I pretty much only watch TV on my computer now, which means that I don't watch while I do computery things anymore, only when I lift weights or cook, which is also keeping my TV watching down.

Books!
If TV gets its own heading, books should too. I've been trying to get back in the habit of reading regularly this year, which is sort of working. I've decided it's time to admit that I really only like books with some kind of romantic relationship. Other things just don't do it for me. I read a lot of YA because, like fan fic, it gets straight to the emotional heart of the story without any annoying blahblahblah or feeling like it has to be the best and most unique writing ever. I make it a point to avoid books with pull quotes that describe the writing as "lyrical." I also like good sci fi and fantasy, generally written by and about women. A few years ago, I started to get over being burnt out on school and wanted to learn things again, so I now also read the occasional nonfiction book.

Random Facts!
I don't drink or do other recreational pharmaceuticals. I don't like the taste of alcohol. I'm also a bit of a control freak, and while I've really let go of trying to control other people, I still need to be in control of myself. (Things that have, in the past, freaked me out on this measure: running downhill, taking Vicodin, having my eyes dilated.)

You may think I lead a technologically advanced life, what with all of my internetting, but I don't own a cell phone, a camera, or an iPod.

Via my mom's dad, I'm only the second generation to be born in the U.S. Via my dad's dad, I'm the fifth generation to be born in California. Incidentally, this is not true of my brother; we lived in Tule Lake when he was born, and the nearest hospital was over the border in Oregon.

Questions From the Audience!
eleanor_lavish asked: Do you consider yourself a Writer, or a writer, or something else? What are those lines for you?

As I said above, I definitely consider myself a writer. I'm not sure that I would make a distinction between a Writer and a writer - I don't even know what that distinction would be!

I don't really have some big philosophical underpinning about why I consider myself a writer; I just am. If I had to give a reason, it would probably be the Rilke quote I only know because Whoopi Goldberg says it to Lauryn Hill in Sister Act 2: "If when you wake up in the morning you can think of nothing but writing, then you’re a writer." Pretty much any time I don't have to actively concentrate on something else is spent telling myself stories.

She also asked: How on EARTH do you stay so on top of your weekly task lists?! I can't even REMEMBER mine from week to week!

For those of you who don't know, El is on the email thread where I email my weekly goals and then check in on how I've done with them. In addition to the responsibility to other people factor, this is why that's a good thing for me: every week, I do my check-in and look at how many things I didn't do, and here's someone else reminding me that I do actually do accomplish a lot of the things on my list.

Part of what makes it easier to stay on top of them is that I have basically the same goals every week, so not only do I remember what they are, but they become part of my routine. The responsibility to other people helps because I don't want to have to tell people I've failed at them. I also try not to set myself up for failure; some weeks, I would like to have more stuff on my goals list, but I'd rather accomplish fewer things than put things on there I know I'm just not going to do and will feel bad about not doing later.

My big three things that help me live the life I want:

1. I do as much as possible ahead of time. I read a lot of productivity blogs in my last year at my old job, and this was the most useful thing I took away from them. When I put my clothes away after doing laundry on Sundays, I hang them up in the order I'm going to wear them so I just have to pull the next thing off the hanger. I cook on the weekends so I can just assemble/heat things up during the week. In the evenings, I pull my socks and underwear for the next day out of the drawer, put the nonrefrigerated elements of my breakfast on the counter, and put my snack for work in my bag so I just have to get dressed, eat, and leave. If I'm not worried about doing all of this kind of stuff at the last minute, I can focus on the really important things.

2. I figured out my priorities and rearranged my life around them. This has been a fairly long process - we did a lot of this kind of thing at my old job and I've continued the process on my own - but once I decided what was important, I gave up a lot of the less important things to make space for the important ones. It can be hard to give things up, but in the big picture, I would rather write than watch TV I don't absolutely love. My top three priorities are writing, staying healthy, and maintaining my relationships with my friends, and those are the things that are usually reflected in my weekly goals.

3. I set my schedule so that I get enough sleep. This is actually one of my weekly goals, but it bears repeating as a thing that helps me with my other goals. As counterintuitive as it seems, I can actually do more if I take the time to get enough sleep. Everything is harder and takes more time when I'm tired, but easier and takes less time when I've gotten enough sleep.

Anything Else?
Feel free to ask questions if there's something I didn't cover or if you want to know more about anything!

Comments

[lakeeffectgirl.livejournal.com]

LOL, WAR OF ART. There's just no escaping.

(But really, ♥)

[rsadelle]

No escape!

(♥ forever.)