Five questions from Lyonesse

[avram]

Still that five-questions meme, this time from lyonesse:

1. how did you meet mamishka?

It was at a Star Trek convention in 1984. I’d just graduated from high school and was due to leave for college in, um, probably a few days. DeForest Kelly was the guest of honor. Across a crowded room I saw a group of girls, among them a blonde drawing something (a robed figure conjuring a dragon in front of a stone wall, done in pen and ink with much stippling, but I couldn’t see that till I got closer). I just felt like I had to go talk to her. We chatted for a bit, and swapped addresses, and sent each other letters regularly for the next few years.

2. what's your favorite thing about nyc?

The transit system. You can go just about anyplace interesting, read a book on the way, and not have to worry about parking when you get there. Now that I’m in Jersey City it’s no longer cost-effective for me to buy unlimited MetroCards (all the transit you can eat for 30 days, used to by $63, now $70), and I really miss being able to just pop off to Chinatown on a whim and not have to worry about the extra cost.

3. which do you think has been more influential upon our society, women's suffrage or cellular telephones, and why?

Women’s suffrage has been around much longer, so that effects have had time to become part of our societal background noise. Cellphones are still making their effects known. Hmm.

Hey, doing a bit of research, I’ve just discovered that women in New Jersey could vote as early as 1790:

Women in New Jersey could vote initially because a loophole in the state's constitution of 1790 gave the vote to "all inhabitants" who satisfied certain property and residence requirements. Property-holding women took advantage of the constitution's vague wording. A state legislator who had almost been defeated by women voters helped to pass a bill to disenfranchise the state's women and black men in 1807.

Anyway, doubling the potential electorate in a non-random fashion can’t have helped but have an effect. Would abortion be a major hot-button political issue if not for large numbers of women voters?

I lived for a couple of decades in a country without cellphones; I can’t imagine the modern US with women not allowed to vote. Imagine all the women I know, just seething with resentment and frustration (even more so than the left-leaning ones, and men too, are anyway nowadays) because they can’t have a direct effect on politics.

4. ever hiked up a mountain? if so, tell me about the best time.

Yeah, but wow, sure not recently. Probably not for, um, twenty-five years or more. The details are so hazy. I can vaguely remember hiking with my family and some friends up some (small) mountain in the Adirondaks, taking several hours, and then a bunch of us running to the bottom in fifteen minutes or so. That can’t be right, can it?

5. when it rains, do you use umbrellas, raincoats, hats? or do you prefer to just get wet?

Umbrellas. I probably wouldn’t mind getting rained on if I didn’t wear glasses. And if I didn’t carry a PDA and a sketchpad and other things that are rain-ruinable.