r.a.q.
This is a page about me.
There. That is me. Well, that is one version of me that existed in a given time (March 8, 2007, a few minutes before I went out to see friends and a live band at a local bar) and from a given view (this is a self-portrait, capturing what a part of me looked liked from the outside, but there is no voice or thought here).
What do we know about ourselves? What do others know about us?
Anthony Giddens said:
Each of us not only ‘has’, but lives a biography reflexively organised in terms of flows of social and psychological information about possible ways of life…the question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat - and many other things - as well as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity.
Posing questions and answering them is the only way of knowing something, or maybe, knowing that you know something. Back to the page. I’ve named it the Rarely Asked Questions page. This is because I rarely ask myself questions and am rarely asked questions about me, my beliefs and the way I should live my life.
But I’m about to start asking myself questions [look for these below].
Should you have a question that you would like answered, please ask it by using the contact form below. Thank you for saving this page from redundancy.
R.A.Q
1. What is your earliest writing memory?
I remember back to first or second class. My teacher, she asked us to write a story. I selected my narrator, she was a little Australian girl, a real Australian, with a real broad Aussie accent. In the story she was happy about going to school. My story went something like this: Hi. Me name is Tracy and I’m five years old. I live with me father and me mother. We have a house and a dog. Each morning I go to school. I pack me bag with me books and me lunch. I love school. Me teacher is pretty. I was very proud as I delivered this story to my teacher. I had thought well and hard about the character and believed I captured her accent accurately by using ‘me’ for ‘my’. But when the story came back after the teacher had corrected it, I was horrified. The teacher had drawn large red crosses over each “me” and in the margin written “my”. Didn’t she understand that I was using ‘me’ for ‘my’ because the little Aussie with the broad accent pronounced ‘my’ as ‘me’ with a short ‘e’? I remember feeling ashamed. My writing had failed. I hadn’t communicated properly. Worst of all, I said nothing. I pretended that I had indeed made a spelling error. But I was mortified.
I don’t think I ever took a risk in my writing, well not for a long time.
2. What is your earliest memory of unhappiness?
This is a very hard question to answer. I’m thinking that unhappiness in early childhood may exist more as a state of fear than anything else. Fear, I guess, results in uncertainty vulnerability, and I guess they are also attributes of unhappiness. I can’t think of any specific examples, apart from arguments in the home, my strict ballet teacher, my shadow, dark rooms. I was very scared of the dark and always had to sleep with the light on.
3. Where was your first piece of writing published?
My very first little poem was published in a teen mag. I didn’t think it still existed, but I googled and found that it has a website and a Wikipedia entry. It’s called Dolly. I discovered it from the girl who sat next to me. In one of the first issues I saw (I must have been 13) Nicole Kidman was modelling some clothing line. Anyway, my poem was called something like “Evil Laugh.” I remember the last line - “I laughed and laughed and laughed.” It was published around ‘86, I think, or maybe ‘87. I was 16. It goes without saying that it was a very bad poem.
