life without a plot

Also...


Meme, picked up from everywhere.

If you would be so kind, ask me the seven questions below. Just copy and paste them into a comment, replace the blanks with anything you want--personal, silly, surreal (e.g. 3. Donkeys or sandcastles and why?), or deep--and I'll answer honestly as I can! Then post this in your own LJ and see what kind of things people want to ask you!

1. What do you think of _____________?

2. When did you last ____________?

3. __________ or ___________ and why?

4. What did you ______________?

5. What's your favorite ______________?

6. How would you ______________?

7. Who would you most like to ________ ?

Seven updates in 40 hours? Who are you and what have you done with solitary_summer?


Meme, from sakirmo:


( Q&A )

And speaking of iTunes...

Meme, because when it's past 1:30 and I should be sleeping so as not to be a total zombie at work tomorrow, of course I'm not tired.


RULES:

Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle.
For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.


( very, very pointless meme )

Drained, dull and tired and I haven't seen the sun in I don't even remember how long. Christmas was an uneventful and drama-free family thing not really worth talking about.


Finished SV S5 which despite everything seemed a little less... better seems a rather inappropriate choice of word considering the general lack of quality, but at least a bit less far-fetched and absurd than Lana-the-teenage-witch S4. Just how much will I regret buying the next season? Damn you, cliffhanger-ending. And Michael Rosenbaum. And maybe not quite in that order.



And because I'm procrastinating and a bit tired and should really be sleeping, the first-sentence-of-the-first-post-of-each-month 2007 review meme:

January: (6th) ::sigh:: I might start doing a-day-in-the-life picture posts next, because my ability and inclination to write are next to non-existent at the moment. [Quickly to become this year's leitmotif.]

[also:] Had a lovely New Year with soavezefiretto [...] [ :) ]

February: (1st) When I walked from the shop to the bank at 5 pm, the sky was still light. [And, god, am I looking forward to that again already. Sun. Light. Sunlight instead of fog & clouds and early darkness.]

March: (5th) There's some kind of mental block that keeps me from writing, I swear. [And again with the leitmotif.]

April: (1st) First day of really getting acquainted with the new camera, feeling very, very dumb, although I probably looked a lot cooler than with the Powershot regardless. [I can't believe it's only been nine months. I really feel I've learned a lot in this time, even if I'm still fumbling around in many ways, but photography has definitely become much more important and I like to kid myself that I've actually got better, too.]

May: (1st) Meh. Not in a happy place. Work yesterday was predictably depressing after a free week and really reminded me that I ought to make some effort to find a job that's a little more challenging [Right. Riiiight. ::sarcastic laughter with a slight desperate edge::]

June: (3rd) I don't know what I'd do if I had a job that was actually taxing and stressful. [Whine. Rinse, repeat. Ad bloody nauseam.]

July: (4th) Meh. pixelwhores (which I'm absolutely pimping here to all the photographers on my f-list, btw) is taking over my livejournal. [For a couple of weeks. So much for attention-span and dedication. No wonder my life is what it is.]

August: (4th) urlaubsreif.... [holiday going-away picturepost]

September: (1st) Aunt's birthday cake finished, albeit a minimalist, done-a-hundred-times version. [Moderately significant, since I'm really glad that my aunt and I are on speaking terms again.]

October: (1st) Er. Still alive... [another picturepost] [That's H. in the picture, btw. so, again, not entirely random.]

November: (17th) The complete writer's block has a lot to do, I think, with the newly discovered fact that I really don't like myself. I don't like to look at myself (metaphorically more than literally), I don't want to think too hard about myself, probably afraid of what I'll find there. [From a lengthy private post. The sentiment is still true.]

December: (2nd) We had the first day of baking Christmas cookies today, which turned out to be more agreeable than I'd thought when I got up in the morning, fairly groaning at the prospect of roughly a million Vanillekipferln (My sister's boyfriend loves them. Very much.) and unable to find a good reason for going through with this year after year, especially when the sky was blue, the sun shining, and I'd maybe have preferred to go out for a walk with my camera. [I'm not happy with the last quarter of 2007 especially. Or, more precisely, with myself during that time.]

It's been a while since I've done this meme...


1. My username is _____ because ____.
2. My journal is titled ____ because ____.
3. My subtitle is ____ because ____.
4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.
5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.


1. My username - solitary_summer - is taken from Elizabeth von Arnims's novel The Solitary Summer. I have a rather distinct memory of going through my bookshelves in search of an inspiration for a username years ago (I suspect it was for a NIN message board, not even livejournal), and this somehow stuck. It fits me because I like solitude, it has connotations of melancholy as well as relaxed contentment, it's obscure and vague enough not to immediately signal fanish or other allegiances and therefore isn't likely to date... I've used it for five years now and haven't felt the urge to change it yet.

2. My journal is titled :: from the road : to the sea : to the sky ::, a line from the RHCP's Snow, picked when Stadium Arcadium was constantly running on my computer and car CD-player last year and I was feeling positive and ready for a change in my life, for being more open to possibilities and the world generally. The journal-title is what gets changed most frequently (comparatively speaking; about once a year, or every other year), as I try to reflect the mood of the journal and my mental state there, and somehow I always seems to end up with lyrics from an artist or album I'm particularly fond of at the time. When I first did this meme, it was :: and all the might have : could have beens :: from NIN's The Wretched, after that I think I had :: learn to swim :: from tool's Ænima...

3. I still don't have a subtitle. I never felt the need for one, and with every layout I've used it's just more aesthetically pleasing to have only the title on top.

4. My friends page is called :: bilder am wege :: (which roughly translates as 'pictures by the way-side'), a phrase I've taken from Thomas Mann's journals when I read them a few years ago. For a while (in the American years, if I remember correctly) he uses it for attractive young men he noticed on his daily walks. I like having a German element in my journal, and it's a bit of a private joke, because, unless told, no one who hasn't read the journals pretty attentively will know what it means. It also fits with my voyeuristic way of reading livejournals, but most of the time feeling too shy, awkward or distant to interact or comment.

5. My default userpic - and the only one I've actually used for a long while - is a painting by Adolfo Schlosser; I saw an exhibition of his work in the Reina Sophia museum when I was visiting soavezefiretto last year, liked it quite a bit and was surprised - since I hadn't even heard of him before - to discover that he was in fact Austrian. The icon is the result of a google picture search, it doesn't have any specific significance or meaning, but it's pretty and relaxing to look at, and it happened to fit nicely with my last layout that had a photo of a reflecting water-surface as a background, and with the current green one. Again, it's rather neutral, which is important since I've become just too lazy to pick out a suitable icon for each entry or comment, and more fandom- or otherwise specific ones tend to bore me after a while.

::hopping on the next meme bandwagon::

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