11 Questions Tag

I was recently tagged for 11 Questions by Melissa of Swatch Me Now! Thanks Melissa! Get ready, everyone, because this is gonna be a loonnggg post!

Rules for this tag:

• You must post these rules.
• Each person must post 11 things about themselves on their blog.
• Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post and create 11 new questions for the people you tag to answer.
• You have to choose 11 people to tag and link them on the post.
• Go to their page and tell them you have linked him or her.
• No tag backs.
• No stuff in the tagging section about 'you are tagged if you are reading this'. You legitimately have to tag 11 people.

11 THINGS ABOUT ME

1. I'm a Gemini and I'd say it fits my personality fairly well. There are some pretty cool famous Geminis too: Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Queen Victoria, Marilyn Monroe, Liam Neeson, Stevie Nicks, JFK, etc.

2. I have four things hanging on my bedroom wall in my apartment: a canvas print of Gustav Klimt's "Water Serpents II," a Corgi calendar, a portrait of Tsarskoe Selo in St. Petersburg that's done entirely in thread and a Russian icon of Tsar Nicholas II which hangs in the corner.

3. Incidentally, my favorite Russian word is "ugol," which means corner.

4. My very first OPI was Don't Socra-tease Me from the Greek Collection.


5. As a little kid, I used to get carsick a lot. On two separate occasions, I threw up in the car while my dad was listening to "On The Wings of a Nightingale" by the Everly Brothers. Naturally five-year old me assumed that the song, not the motion of the car, was what made me vomit and I subsequently became terrified of it. Yeah, I was a weird kid.


6. The last movie I watched was "A Dangerous Method." It was pretty good but kind of an odd film.


7. For some reason I have this weird pet peeve about when an artist covers a song and changes the gender of the original lyrics. To give just one of many potential examples, it's like when Joss Stone covered The White Stripes' "Fell In Love With A Girl" as "Fell In Love With A Boy." That's always annoyed me, I dunno why.


8. I'm doing this tag right now to help me procrastinate on my current assignment for college, a paper I'm doing on baseball at the turn of the century. Yeah...your guess about how that paper will turn out is as good as mine haha. I don't know much about baseball but I think I can pull it off--to an extent.


9. My first car was a red 2003 Mini Cooper. Although it has since passed on to the auto garage in the sky, it's still my baby. I currently drive a grey 2011 Ford Fiesta, my second car. I miss the Mini but I like the Fiesta a lot too.


10. I tend to get more upset when dogs die in movies than when people die in movies.


11. I am not a morning person at all. If it's before 10 AM, I more or less behave like I'm in a coma.

MELISSA's QUESTIONS:

1. What is the best dream you've ever had? And the worst?
Not sure about best but I can easily pick my worst. I've mentioned on here before that I'm really afraid of Great White sharks. I have recurring nightmares about them where I'm on a ship that sinks and then they swarm the water and try to eat me. Not fun.

2. If you could live with only three nail polish colors for the rest of you life, what three would you pick?
Chanel Peridot, a-england Lady of the Lake and OPI Crown Me Already. However, this would still be a very sad existence for me. :(

3. What is your favorite song and why? If you can't choose, what is your favorite song at the moment?
I don't have an all-time favorite song (If you haven't noticed in my past tags/awards, I'm a media junkie who has trouble sticking to just one favorite thing), so let's compromise by me listing the song I'm listening to as I type this. (This is okay, right Melissa? Hahaha.) I am currently listening to "Telephone Line" by ELO. I have random taste, I know.

4. If you could live in any place in the world, where would you live?
I'd really love to go back to St. Petersburg or Moscow someday and living in either city would be amazing. I enjoyed my time there on study abroad immensely. I'd have to brush up on my Russian again though first!

5. What is your biggest pet peeve?
Arrogance/condescension.

6. Without a doubt, what is your favorite movie and your least?
I watch a lot of movies but one of my favorites is 1976's "Network." I guess it's just the journalism major in me haha. It's an exceptionally well-written and well-acted film that still has a lot of relevance to modern media. Also, fun fact, Peter Finch is one of only two people (the other being Heath Ledger) to win an Oscar posthumously, which he got for his performance in this film as a suicidal news anchor who becomes a self-styled media prophet.

As for least favorite movie... Do you remember the Pat skits from SNL back in the 90s about an annoying, androgynous character where the whole running joke is that no one can figure out if Pat is male or female? Well they made a movie version of those called "It's Pat." (If you don't recall this movie, it's probably for good reason--it only made $60,000 at the box office, had such dismal ticket sales that it was pulled from theaters one week after its release and currently holds a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.) One of my close friends loves this movie and I was forced to sit through it at one point. Although it's only 77 minutes long, I seriously lost my will to live about halfway through "It's Pat." What an insufferable movie.


7. If you were an animal, what would you be?
Probably a dog. Dogs are my favorite animals and therefore the ones I feel most connected to. Plus my two dogs live pretty cushy lifestyles so I think a dog's life would be the way to go haha.

8. What is your dream job?
Reporter for The New York Times.

9. What is one fashion and/or beauty trend that you regret trying?
When I was first learning how to put on make-up in middle school, I wore blue eyeshadow with frosty pink lipstick. Thankfully I realized the error of my ways, but there was a period of time where I probably looked like a rouged-up streetwalker. Middle school is the worst.

10. What is your most embarrassing moment?
Ready for an excruciatingly true, novel-length story? Okay, so one day in seventh grade--this was after the aforementioned blue eyeshadow period--we were doing pull-ups for the Presidential Fitness Test. (If you're not familiar with this program, it's essentially methodized child torture where kids have to compete to meet two levels of fitness standards, National and Presidential, in various activities like a mile run, sit-ups, sit and reach, etc.) Every girl before me was allowed to stand on a chair to help them reach the bar but once it was my turn, the gym teacher, a delightful ex-Marine who thought gym class was the most important thing in the world and sometimes even made girls cry, pulled away the chair and told me to jump for the bar.

At the time, I was the tallest girl in my gym class so he said I should be able to reach it on my own. I tried and couldn't reach it, so I asked for the chair. He insisted that I could reach it but after multiple attempts I told him I just wasn't tall enough and if he wouldn't let me have the chair, I'd just have to take a zero for this portion of the fitness test. He then informed me if I took a zero on the pull-up test, I'd fail the entire fitness test and therefore fail the whole class. I told him I didn't know what he wanted me to do, because I clearly couldn't reach the bar on my own and he apparently wouldn't let me use the chair.

"So you're saying you need help to reach the bar?" he asked. I told him yes and then he replied that he was sure somebody in the class would be willing to help me. He called up this boy who I had the biggest crush on back in middle school and asked him to get down on the floor on all fours so I could use him as a stepping stool to reach the bar. Obviously I was extremely embarrassed and couldn't understand why I could just use the damn chair, but the gym teacher was so insistent and said unless I wanted to take summer gym with him (a fate worse than death for seventh grade me), I had no choice but to use this kid, who I not only had a crush on but who was also quite popular, as a freaking stepping stool in front of the entire class. Sad but true. To add insult to injury, I, like every other girl in my class, couldn't even do pull-ups! So after that whole ordeal, I just kind of dangled there and then let go. Good times.

As a sidenote, in the class we also had to do two-week units in this class that centered around a specific sport each unit and that you played with the same team or partner for the entire unit. This same teacher put me and this kid together for literally every doubles pairing and four-person team, so whether he was trying to continually humiliate me or make a demented attempt at getting this kid to bond with me and notice my pathetic crush on him, I will never know. Either way, it obviously never led to a star-crossed romance or anything like that haha.

11. What is your favorite book?
I usually answer this question by saying it's a three-way tie between To Kill A Mockingbird, In Cold Blood and Crime and Punishment.


MY 11 QUESTIONS

1. Was there a particular polish that got you really into nail polish?
2. What do you see right now if you turn directly to your left?
3. What is the most difficult class you ever took in school?
4. If you could meet any historical figure, who would it be?
5. Have you ever seen a movie in the theater more than once? If so, what film(s)?
6. What is your favorite TV show?
7. What is your earliest memory?
8. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
9. What is your least favorite polish you've ever tried? Why didn't you like it?
10. What was the last great book you read?
11. Did you ever have a completely random or illogical childhood fear? (See random thing about me #5 for mine haha.)


I TAG...

My apologies if any of you ladies have been tagged already!

1. Amanda of Amandalandish
2. Nory of Fierce Makeup and Nails
3. Rach of stuff i (s)watched
4. Anne of grape fizz nails
5. Meredith of Polish and Charms
6. Kirsten of 909 Cherry
7. Sheba of The Lovely Nail
8. Elizabeth of Nail Polish Queen
9. Hannah of Polished Prisms
10. ladyboss of My Vanity Case
11. Amber of Nails Like Lace


If you made it this far and read this entire post, then you truly deserve some type of medal! :) Congrats, you now know more than you ever wanted to know about me haha.