Interview questions from springheel_jack:

To what does your username refer?

It's from a Wallace Stevens poem, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." If you go to my journal or friends page and look at the navigation bar on the right, you'll see the section of the poem in which "major weather" appears.

East Coast/West Coast, California/New York? Thoughts?

West Coast, definitely. For one thing, I've spent very little time on the East Coast—a total of maybe four weeks over my lifetime. Most of that time, I was in Marblehead, Massachusetts to visit my paternal grandmother, who died in 1997. I've never been to New York. Actually, I think that's not quite true; I believe I went there with my mom when I was very young and she was on the road with the Doobie Brothers. Still, I was too young to remember that trip, so it doesn't count. My first real visit was scheduled for the third week of September, 2001 12:00:00, but that didn't end up being such a good time to go play tourist in Manhattan.

I once posted an entry that, among other things, included some blathering about physical space and furnishings. lexophile commented jokingly that I was a "latent New Englander." If we're just talking about aesthetic sensibilities, she's right: the sprawling strip mall that is Orange County does nothing for me visually. Then again, I can get in my car and, without too much trouble, end up at the ocean or the desert, Disneyland or Mexico, wine country or Las Vegas. And I never, ever have to scrape ice off my windshield.

What is Truth?

Christ, I don't know. I should probably mention that I'm just not temperamentally set up for questions like this. Ask me "what is Truth?" or "what is Justice?", and my inner eyes start rolling almost immediately—not because I don't think people should ask such questions, but because I simply don't ever start a line of inquiry with a question so abstract. It's not how I work. I could spend years formulating an answer, and I'd still think whatever I came up with was full of shit. It would be like trying to define "God": God is obviously an important concept, but I'm not really interested in the concept as as a concept. What does interest me are the effects of that concept, the uses of that concept, the aspects of the human mind that make such a concept so appealing to so many.

And similarly with Truth: if indeed it exists as anything other than a militant sort of optimism, I rather suspect that thinking harder would be one of the worst ways to get at its fundamental core. Why worry about deciding what Truth is when it's hard enough to figure out what's true?

I haven't answered your question, of course. However, on the off chance that you ever wondered why I'm not a philosopher, this was probably as good an answer as any.

Do you worry about earthquakes or other natural disasters?

You know, I really don't. The only earthquake-related worry I've ever had consistently was actually when I lived in Seattle, not in Southern California. On part of I-5 in Seattle, you end up under a portion of the downtown area for a bit—Seattle people, do you know where I'm talking about?—and I read some article about how the whole shebang would likely collapse during a major earthquake. Every time I drove that route, I thought at least briefly about being crushed under a bunch of concrete and steel.

Would you ever own a gun?

I'm not categorically opposed to the idea, though I can't imagine why I'd want one.

That answer would be different if I had kids.

What do you bench?

You mean a max? I really don't know; I haven't tested my limits in that way for years. Right now, I lift light weights and do tons of reps, not because I'm afraid of bulking up, but because I go to a weightlifting class, and that's how the class works. We typically do somewhere around 8 sets of 8 for each exercise with no breaks between sets. I like the class because I'm lazy and do better with structure. Also, there's just no way I'd do that many lunges on my own.

When I was actually going for maxes, I never benched all that much; the most I ever lifted was 135 pounds. I build strength in my legs more easily than most women do, but not in my arms or chest.

Ever have a paranormal experience?

When I was a kid, I thought I saw a ghost in our neighbor's back yard. I later learned that the neighbor had died.

That about covers it.