#cjhface

1. What names did you like growing up that you wish you could have changed yours to?

Ahah, well. As a child I didn't covet other people's names so much as furtively dislike my own. Still, when I was very little my mother found me out and decided the best course of action was to rechristen me "Stinky Mud" and only call me that until I admitted that my birth name wasn't so bad after all... Anyway, once I was twelve and could brave the possibility of it  happening again (it didn't) I've been going by Jack.

2. What’s your favourite shirt look like?

Mind if I give you the top two? I'm torn between them. (It feels like there's some kind of awful fabric pun in there somewhere, but I'll spare us - this time.)

3. How do you take your hot beverage of choice?

Coffee. That's my choice hot beverage, and I take it with sweetened condensed milk and a touch of vanilla. That, or with two sugar cubes and a splash of cream. 4. Any scars with cool stories you’d care to share?

Oh, there are a few - I'm prone to minor accidents. Lately my favorites are these, though:

That's what happens when you carelessly scrape chopped vegetables from your cutting board into a skillet full of overheated oil. In uprolled sleeves. 

5. What’s the best bad decision you’ve ever made?

This one's been boggling my mind since I first read it through, and I think it's because I ultimately can't regard a decision as having been a bad one if it produced a good result. But I've got it now:

One morning on the bus to my high school I was pressed against the window listening to Joy Division on my CD player, when I heard a voice I didn't recognize cutting through the music. Worse, no matter how high I turned the volume, or how hard I crushed the earphones up against my ears, I couldn't come close to drowning her out. Usually, this early, everyone on the bus was half-asleep - but I could hear every word out of this girl's mouth with infuriating clarity. By the time we hit the schoolyard I was livid. So when I noticed my friend Ringo kicking his heels outside around the back of the bus I marched myself right up to the toes of his boots and launched into a tirade, complete with a mocking imitation of what I considered to be one of the more ridiculous parts of her overheard conversation - something to do with her boyfriend incorrectly registering on her caller ID as "Robert Smith", and it being fate because she was such a fan of The Cure. I think I was positively snorting with derision at this point. (As you might have gathered by now, sophomore carletoncolton was a bit of an ass.) And that's when Ringo cut in, "That's my girlfriend".

Haha... honestly, I don't remember how I didn't faint after that what with all the blood draining out of my face. The upshot of it all is, that when Ringo told the girlfriend in question what I'd said she only laughed. We're BFFLs now. 6. Do you remember most of your dreams when you wake up?

For the most part, no, I don't - unless they're either so mundane that I worry for the health of my imagination, or so strange that I'm convinced someone else must've dreamed them.

Example of the former: I have a recurring dream where all that happens is that I wake up in my S.O.'s house, don a pair of my politer, more presentable pajamas, and sit down to a meal at the counter bar or the dining room table. I eat it alone, in silence, with an especially small fork, and then pack my dishes away in the dishwasher when I've finished. That's it, really. I have noticed, though, that if it's after dark in the dream then everyone else is asleep, the cat included, the windows closed and all the blinds shuttered, with only the light over the kitchen sink on. And if it's light out, then all the windows and doors are open, the sun is scorching and almost too bright, and the house is empty. Excepting me and the cat, of course.

Example of the latter: About a week ago I had an unsettlingly detailed dream in which my seventeen-year-old brother, a very technical person with an eye for coding and computer hardware assembly, helped me into a full military-grade black stealth camouflage suit complete with mask and night-vision goggles. Think Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, that sort of thing. He handled all the closures and straps on the back of the suit and I the ones in front. It was dark outside, and we were standing in my old bedroom at my great-grandfather's house as it looked before I moved in - unfurnished, with pastel pink and blue wallpaper. We were crowded near the small open widow; the neighbor's security spotlight, bolted over their garage door, filtered through the chain link fence and gave the whole scene a harsh yellow quality. My brother and I didn't speak, but stared unblinkingly at each other, faces neutral. Our entire family has nearly identical dark brown eyes and I remember being uncomfortably aware of the similarity just then. The whole thing had a hushed, anticipatory quality about it... but the oddest part was that we both knew we were doing this so I could sneak through the window and pick blackberries from the field across the street before the sun came up. In the (real) morning I rolled out of bed bewildered and craving them. 7. What are you hoping happens this week for you?

It'd be everything if I got a response out of any, really any, of the job applications I've sent out recently. Or ever. 8. What’s the biggest, most exciting travel destination of your dreams?

My family has never been more than a lost paycheck or two away from eviction, between evictions, so we haven't ever traveled other than to visit relatives - and that was with help. I've been resigned to things remaining the same way for me all my life for years now. So... I haven't got one. Still, I would like to go back to southern Georgia someday. To visit. I can't say that I enjoyed living there; as a mixed-race asexual atheist it could be distinctly unpleasant, even if only the first and last of those descriptors were obvious to the people around me. The place itself, though... sometimes I have dreams about kneeling outside in the knee-high grass at night, curling my fingers into the red soil, or lying on my roof in the summer until the searing heat of the sun overhead permeates my body to the bone and I see the veins illuminated in my closed eyelids. I'm always cold on some level, in Michigan. 9. How many songs are on your MP3 player of choice? Do you listen to them all?

I could tell you exactly if I hadn't lost it like the bumbler I am, haha. My YouTube favorites playlist, though, has one hundred and sixty-five songs on it, all of which I do listen to. Add my other, artist-specific lists (Lana Del Rey, Blur, Gorillaz, Damon Albarn, Massive Attack, etc.), and that number goes up to three hundred and nine. Less than I'd have thought, actually. 10. Any tattoos? Any plans for more/your first one?

No, and no. Well. There aren't any concrete plans.