Profile

My name's Clare, though online I tend to go by Umi. Why Umi of all things is a loooong story involving a deep love for Fushigi Yuugi's Hotohori and an RP chat room I used to frequent until it died horribly one day in 2002. I am of the average college age and a student. For those of you who care about this kind of stuff, I'm a Cancer in western astrology and a Rabbit in eastern. This means I'm supposed to be so timid I can't breathe. Sure, I'm shy, and I'm awkward as all hell, but the funny thing is everyone who knows me tends to forget it because I'm also rather... loud, I guess would be the word for it.

I have a deep, deep, horribly nerdy love for books. It's in my genetic code or something, seeing as I'm surrounded by teachers on both sides of the family. English teachers. People who don't read for fun utterly baffle me. Take a wild guess as to what my major is, I dare you. My favorite genre always was and always will be fantasy. I started with fairy tales as a child and I can't quite shake them off. My favorite author of several years now is Storm Constantine and I love her trilogy The Magravandias Chronicles somethin' fierce. I also enjoy historical fiction and mysteries; in any case I usually prefer that books not take place in the present time. But I can be persuaded. I also collect picture books. Some for the pictures, some for the memories.

Despite all this, I'm really not a fan of poetry. I enjoy the occasional poem here and there, but I'm never going to go "YAY, a poetry collection!" Epic poetry is another story, because epic heroes make me giggle.

So far this year I've read these books.

When I was very little, before I had music of my own, I was subjected to a lot of rock and country from my mother and 80s pop and New Age music from my father. When they consider MY music, they sometimes wonder where they went wrong.

Most of the time when I tell people what I'm listening to, their response is "What [the hell/fuck] is that?" Sigh! I'm really bad at categorizing music, subgenres kind of go over my head since people claim the same bands to be different things. But I do know that I love, love, LOVE cello rock. I also tend to listen to a lot of choirs of the classical and pop persuasion. Neo-medieval music makes me very happy. And thanks to some of my friends who are all over the Renaissance Faire scene, I listen to a little of that music, too. English is completely optional. Knowing what people are saying is cool and all, but I can be swayed easily by a beautiful sound. Sometimes there's nothing sexier than basses chanting in Latin. Not too big on instrumental music, though. To me, nothing is more amazing than the human voice.

But regardless of allegiances to bands and genres, my favorite song ever is "Bedlam Boys."

Granted that my muse and I are on speaking terms, I like creative writing and drawing. Not great at either, but I like what I churn out well enough. Chorus is an essential part of my life. I've been singing since forever, singing with Disney movies, singing in school programs, and it's kind of been programmed into me that I should continue singing as long as I have the chance to. Alto power, bitches. As I said before, I do a lot of reading. I'm a gamer of little dedication and extremely unimpressive skill; I play mostly racing and fighting games and not very well at that. Most any game and any player could kick my ass, unless we're talking Mario Party, the ultimate in "no skill needed" games. Fellow nerds have threatened to ostracize me due to the fact that I have never beaten a Zelda game. I also take delight in online text RP and messing with HTML. There's a deck of Tarot cards I have but never really put myself to learning.

I was raised to love things that are awesomely bad, to steal a term from VH1. You know, so bad it's hilarious. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is one of modern man's greatest ideas. Mocking cheesy movies is a wonderful group activity and I'll do it anytime, any place. I love digging through the random junk at places like TJMaxx to see what horrifying things I can find. I really get a kick out of truly awful gifts such as Oscar the HIV microbe (I named him myself. Isn't he cute?) This of course doesn't mean that I'm completely lacking in things like sympathy and taste. I just have a dark and evil sense of humor.

I make all my own icons, and I would appreciate if people didn't take them without asking or crediting me. I can't really do anything if you take them anyway, but asking makes you cool. The pictures they were made from, except for one, are not mine by a long shot. Shoot me an LJ comment or something if you'd like to use one. As for my layout, the header comes from Botany Photo of the Day, and the tile background from Squidfingers. The obsession with purple would be mine. This is my little purple corner of the World Wide Webiverse.