Liebster Award

Thanks so much to rimonim for nominating me for a Liebster Award.

The Liebster Award is a friendly promotion designed to give visibility to up-and-coming blogs through a chain of blogposts.

The rules of the award are as follows:

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.
2. Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)
3. Answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.
4. Provide 11 random facts about yourself.
5. Nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, which have a less than 1000 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)
6. Create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.
7. List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:
8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it.

 

11 Questions from rimonim:

 

1. Why do you blog? I first began blogging as a sanity project for myself, but very quickly I found that (after 21 years of ruminating on God and gender) I actually have a lot to say about gender theology, philosophy, theory, and all that stuff.
2. If you could travel anywhere, where would you go? Why? I would probably go to Ethiopia because I love its culture and history. I would also strongly consider India. Either way, I’d spend some quality time with the Missionaries of Charity either in Kolkata or Addis Ababa.
3. What work (book, film, music) has most influenced your worldview? Pick a few if you can’t narrow it to one. Oh man, I’m going to have to pick a few because there are a lot of them. BOOKS: Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy, The Republic and Symposium by Plato, and Interior Castle by Teresa of Jesus. MOVIES: Lord of the Rings, Inception, The Tree of Life, Children of Men.
4. What is your favorite food? I eat a lot of quinoa. I die for blueberries, fresh mozarella, and banana cream pie.
5. What was your first job? Working as a runner/clerk/paralegal at my dad’s law firm. Yay, nepotism!
6. What was the first concert you attended (of your own volition)? Small concert: Scythian. Big concert: Florence + the Machine.
7. Besides blogging, how do you spend your free time? I hang with friends, research gender stuff, watch tv shows and movies (Game of Thrones!), get coffee with people, sing in a choir, draw, edit film… But I haven’t had free time in a while, so I’m speaking hypothetically. 😛
8. What chore or errand do you dislike the most? I hate changing my sheets with a passion. I’m not sure why.
9. Where are you while writing this post? I’m in my friend’s house for the night. I just moved out of my dorm room (I just graduated college), and I’m sticking around for a few days before heading back home.
10. Describe one of the strangest experiences you’ve ever had. I think my whole life is sort of surreal just by dint of being transgender. Sometimes I walk into a guy’s bathroom and pee standing up and just laugh at the ridiculousness of feeling so completely like a girl and moving in this weird male-only world.
11. What is the secret of life? According to you, of course. I really think that the secret to happiness is authenticity. No matter what shit goes on externally, nothing can touch a peaceful heart. And I think the only way to approach life is with humility – to be open to life’s experience, always ready learn, accepting everything with awe.

 

And 11 random facts about me:

1. I have a dual citizenship in the U.S. and Italy.
2. My only major scar is conveniently right underneath my eyebrow, so it doesn’t show.
3. My eyes recently turned from brown to hazel.
4. I’m a charismatic Catholic. That means I believe in crazy weird thinks like speaking in tongues and prophecy.
5. My ideal pet is a Goberian (golden retriever and siberian husky mix)
6. I make a mean pasta puttanesca.
7. I’m bisexual.
8. I was a vegetarian for the first time since January, but after Easter I’ve been taking a bacon break. I plan on restarting my veggie diet if I can afford to actually buy fresh food this summer.
9. My favorite colors are purple and dark green – often in combination.
10. I’ve been making movies since middle school, I just graduated with a BA in Film, and I’m planning to pursue a career in cinema.
11. I took one of those two-axis political spectrum quizzes, and despite the fact that some people would consider me conservative, I landed exactly on the same part of the spectrum as the Green Party. Since then I’ve legitimately thought about becoming a card-carrying member.

 

Liebster Nominations:

1. Eliana Rubashkyn
2. Mudblood Catholic
3. A Queer Calling
4. Ali Finds Herself
5. TransTribulations
6. Transiteration

 

Nominees, here are my queries for you:

1. Why do you blog?
2. Who is your historical role model (anyone who’s already dead)?
3. Why should people be friends with you?
4. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
5. What are your top 5-10 movies?
6. Top 5-10 music artists/composers/performers?
7. Which disney character best represents you?
8. If you were to join a religion (other than your own), which would it be?
9. Which Hollywood actor would you most want to casually hang out with?
10. What is your spirit animal?
11. If you had the option of living in a world in which everyone was completely androgynous with no sexual differentiation, would you do it? How would such a world make you feel? Would you prefer it to our world? Or is gender expression too important to you, even if it causes you pain?