2: White, milk, or dark chocolate mocha?

I like all chocolates more or less equally, though if I’m not expecting dark chocolate it can be a shock. Actually, I guess I’m a little bit over white chocolate (it can have a chalky texture), and my default favorite when work has a candy jar is the Midnight Milky Ways, so that’s an argument in favor of dark, but honestly you put all three in front of me and ask me to choose, I’ll try to have one of each.

5: Your favorite adult as a child? (and not your parents, if they were your favorite)

I didn’t know very many adults, and we moved around a lot, so even the ones we knew always changed. I remember liking a friend of my dad’s from the Ag program at U of A named Curt, because he was a big goofy guy who went out of his way to make kids laugh. Once when camping, he took one of those fur slipcovers for steering wheels (those aren’t a thing anymore, are they? I’m dating myself) and stashed it in the woods and pretended  that Bigfoot had been shedding near our campsite. We laughed and laughed.

15: What’s your most favorite part of your personality?

The part where I don’t always say the first thing that comes into my head. Being reserved has also gotten me in trouble, but I prefer it to the alternative.

16: Madonna or Lady Gaga? Neither? Both? Who cares?

They feel different enough for me that they push different buttons; sadly, Madonna pushes mostly historical ones at this point, whereas I’m still actively interested in Lady Gaga’s next move.

19: What’s the most delicious food you’ve ever eaten in your life?

Whatever I’ve eaten after not having eaten for twelve hours.

39: Do you eat enough vegetables?

Probably not! I have no excuse, as I like most vegetables (although I can be picky about preparation; I mostly like them raw), even stuff like radishes that no one I know likes. But my body has bought into American consumer culture hard, and insists that it never feels full unless I stuff it full of meats, cheeses, and breads.

47: City or nature person?

Both, very firmly. They are not opposites (opposites would be city and countryside, or nature and artificiality), and the sensuous experience of green spaces, earth underfoot, and running water are nourishing to the soul in ways that are complementary to the bracing sensations that immense buildings, vast planning, and the inevitable reminders of human history inspire. I’ll be writing more about New York soon, I hope — but I think a balanced human view of life should be both Wordsworthian and Johnsonian.

50: Post 5 awesome things about yourself. BRAG AWAY!

1. I dress really well.

2. I write really well.

3. I know a lot about music.

4. I know a lot about literature.

5. I know my limitations.

5: do i listen to mp3s/cds/cassettes/vinyls.

“Vinyls!” Oh, Tumblr teens who write quizzes, you’re adorable.

I listen almost entirely to mp3s. When I buy a CD, the first thing I do with it is to put it in my laptop and copy the music onto an external drive. I even record vinyl records to digital files before listening to them seriously. I still have an ipod, but I now mostly listen to music on my phone or my tablet, with headphones for thoughtful listening and through speakers for ambient going-to-sleep listening. (Or if I’m in the car, through a device that transmits my phone’s audio signal to the radio.)

The vast majority of my music listening is headphone listening, a habit I got into when I lived with my family and was reluctant to bother them (or, perhaps, alert them to my presence) by playing music aloud; and since I’m slightly deaf and fairly antisocial, I’d rather use headphones than crank up speakers to the point where I can hear comfortably, which would mean others could hear it too.

9: the first band i really liked.

That would  be Glad, a harmony-heavy Christian soft-rock band active since the 70s, but who broke through (as far as there was such a thing as breaking through in the Christian market) in the late 80s with their a capella albums. They were the first band I was interested in enough to seek out their earlier albums, and for a time (I would have been nine or ten) my favorite song was “Variations on a Hymn (That Hymn Thing),” which ran through an old Wesleyan hymn in various popular-music styles; you can see them do it here. (And a Lutheran hymn typical of their a capella style is here.) I don’t have much to say about why I liked them (if you’re interested, I went in-depth about the Christian music of my youth here), other than that the complexity of their vocal arrangements was entirely unlike any other kind of music I knew about. I still like stuff that sounds completely different from the norm.

10: the first album i bought with my own money.

That would be Strong Hand of Love: A Tribute to Mark Heard, an album where a bunch of Christian alt-rock performers (as far as there was such a thing as “alt” in the Christian market) paid tribute to Mark Heard, a very good and casually complex songwriter who died young.

It’s a good album which I still listen to occasionally for pleasure, the highlights being Michael Been’s agonized “We Know Too Much,” Tonio K’s desert-new-wave “Another Day in Limbo,” and Chagall Guevara’s storming rave-up/funeral march “Treasure of the Broken Land,” and the sole lowlight being Bruce Carroll’s AC-country version of “Castaway,” from one of Heard’s earlier, more explicitly Christian, records.

I’d read about the tribute album somewhere — there was always someone at the missionary-kids’ school where I went who had a magazine that was up on the newest Christian music, and I remember poring over a full-page ad — and saved up the allowance I got for mowing the lawn, and one weekend I cajoled my parents into driving me to a new Christian-music shop that had opened somewhere in the northern part of Guatemala City, and when I went in it was still so new that it was right there on the first display I saw. I handed over the money with a trembling hand, I was so excited.

It was also the first CD I ever owned; my family didn’t even have a CD player yet, but later in the week I borrowed one from a friend and had my mind minorly blown. You could be Christian and literate and poetic and weird and still rock out; after this I would learn to be embarrassed of Glad and their safe suburban souls.

11: what bands my parents got me into.

Quite literally everything I listened to up to the age of about twelve. (So for a full answer, read the link I shared above.) We never listened to the radio, unless it was Christian talk radio; we only turned on the TV to watch The Cosby Show and Family Ties (and sometimes Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island reruns); when we rented movies (and a VCR) we got old Hollywood musicals which were guaranteed not to be sexual or violent or profane. It wasn’t until we returned from Guatemala in the mid-90s that my parents felt comfortable about having culture in the house that wasn’t either scrupulously Christian or a classic of the Western canon, est. ca. 1920. My own musical investigations actually preceded my dad’s getting back into all the old guitar bands he had loved before his mid-70s conversion; one of the few things we have in common anymore is a love for the Allman Brothers. And I can happily talk musicals with my mom; but as far as what got play around the house when I was a child, all I ever return to is a handful of old Christmas albums.

Not sure it is. I’m trying to come up with anything I listen to that I would be embarrassed to tell people about, and I can’t think of anything. Not since I grew out of my erotic-audiobook phase, anyway.