lin·gua·phile

nabokovian asked: 15, 25, 28, 32. :)

15. What’s one of the most difficult things you’ve ever had to do?

Make a promise to someone knowing that I would turn right around and break it for their own good, because it was the only way to help them.

25. How do you think you will fare when the Zombie Apocalypse arrives?

I won’t be the screaming idiot girl who gets killed in the first half hour of the movie, but I also won’t be the diabolical mastermind who’s been planning for this for a while or the brilliant scientist who finds a cure for zombification. Probably I will hole myself up somewhere with lots of books and good strong doors and walls and no ground floor windows and just wait it out?

28. Describe one of the most awkward experiences of your life.

This one time there was a guy I liked and on our second date-ish thing I enthusiastically but totally unintentionally implied that he was doing nothing with his life…and then his bus showed up because this conversation had been going on at the bus stop at the end of the date-ish thing, and he got on before I could more than stammer an apologetic “Oh god I didn’t mean for that to come out like that!”

32. What’s the weirdest item you’ve ever mourned?

I have a very bad habit of losing umbrellas. Summer after high school my family was traveling through the UK, we had five umbrellas for four people, and by Week 2 we were in Edinburgh and I had lost two of them. Scotland is rainy, I needed an umbrella, so I bought a blue-and-green tartan one from a random tourist shop for about £5 thinking that I would probably lose it before the trip was up so no need to spend real money on it.

That umbrella then proceeded to last me for three and a half years. I took it with me to London when I studied there, and I took it with on all the side-trips I took from there. I accidentally left it behind at a family friend’s apartment in Vienna, along with my apartment keys, and although I told her she didn’t have to send me back anything but the keys, imagine my joy when I discovered that the umbrella was in the package as well!

Its death was actually rather sudden and unexpected; I was back in Berkeley, it was November-ish, and when I opened it up in my living room to let it dry, one of the metal thingies just broke and fell off! I was quite sad about this, because never had I owned an umbrella for this long or treated one this lovingly.

(In case you are curious, the replacement for this umbrella has already been lost, after slightly over a year.)

RIP, fabulous and trustworthy umbrella.