A Questionnaire – My Answers

Here are my answers to that questionnaire mash-up which I posted yesterday. If you’re wondering why I split the questions and my answers into two separate posts…

You’re not wondering that, are you?

Cool…

Let’s go…

1 – What is your favorite word?

At the moment it’s “jinjja” – pronounced a bit like “chincha”. It means “really” in Korean.

Some of the sounds of the Korean language are similar to the sounds of the Italian language, and there’s something very satisfying to my mind about those sounds, especially when there’s a repeated “ch” in it.

I tend to like the sounds of words more than the meaning.

I used to like the word “misled” when I thought it was pronounced “mizzled” – I’ve been mizzled – is so much more descriptive of the feeling when you realise you’ve been misled. I like the “zz” sound too.

2 – What is your favorite curse word?

“Cazzo” – sort of pronounced like “cats-oh” in an angry hissing cat manner.

When my partner hears “cazzo di merda” echoing through the house, he knows something has gone awry with my latest DIY project and a tool is about to be blamed for a bad worker’s incompetence.

“Cazzo” is a very flexible curse word and anything can be added afterwards.

It means “dick”.

3 – What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

A puzzle.

Figuratively or literally.

It’s a creative challenge.

It’s a “zz” with a “ch”.

4 – What sound or noise do you love?

Water running from a tap into the bathtub.

It’s one of my favourite sensory memories from childhood. Sitting by the tub listening to the soothing of the running water. The hairs on the back of my neck would rise and the skin would tingle. It was one of the sounds which made me feel loved as a child. I was usually alone when I listened to it. The solitude made me feel loved too.

Did I just make you feel sad for little me. She’s okay. She knew how to be okay without anyone else’s help. Her not needing anyone else for her to feel okay used to make others not want for her to be okay on her own. What a weird challenging puzzle that was.

5 – What natural gift would you most like to possess?

To be green-fingered but not from gangrene or dipping them in green paint. I have a tendency to kill plants when I try to care for them, grow them, etc. I’d like to be more proficient as a gardener.

6 – What is your principal defect? List the pros of having this defect and give it a positive spin (imagine that you’re selling it to someone else)?

Intellectualism.

Did you think I was going to say having dyslexia. That’s not a defect.

Being intellectual, on the other hand…

The pros and selling it – I developed intellectualism to deal with the narcissists in my life. It worked rather well. But it also caused me to become a bit of a cazzo. It’s very useful as a weapon to protect yourself and others against those suffering from the defect of intellectualism.

Has your favourite subject been ruined by someone calling it “pseudo” and thinking they’re the smartest person in the room for using “pseudo”… ugh! I know right, they’ve just sucked the air out of the room and everyone is dying from boredom suffocation.

Don’t get caught up being all emotional – that’s gonna lose you the battle against a non-emotional type and you’ll end up stewing in your emotionalism.

Instead engage – TV/Film sociopath mode – also known as intellectualism.

Don’t worry, it’s not that hard to do thanks to the internet. Just use Google (any other search engine will do), find a pop-science or pop-psychology or pop-news article relevant to your search, copy paste the sound bite into your mind for a brief amount of time, and let it spew out of your mouth/fingers and voila! You’re a pseudo-intellectual! Able to bore another intellectual to death so they’ll stop suffocating you and your friends with the heavy weather of their minds.

7 – What is your motto? Why is it your motto? Where or who did it come from originally?

Hmmm… <– that’s the motto

It presses pause on proceedings, and buys me time to think, ponder, process, let things sink in and let things rise to the surface.

It came from having the fuses blown in my mind regularly by being around people who pepper you with questions, information, contradictions which cause mental conflicts, pressure you to answer immediately, make a decision now, pick a side, accept their version of reality, and talk non-stop, scream, shout, pick holes in everything and then accuse you of being the one causing chaos for them.

At first I thought Hmmm… was a problem, then I realised it was a solution.

Hmmm… = give yourself time to think, think things through, and think for yourself.

It’s my version of:

8 – What was the last gift you gave someone?

One of the ways I save money is by not buying people gifts. I also save energy by not making gifts for people either. I don’t expect people to give or make me gifts and anyone who knows me is aware that I’m a gift-free zone, and most of them quite like the arrangement as it saves them money and energy too which is better spent on themselves.

I do however like giving invisible gifts, as in doing and saying things which make someone feel good about themselves, helping them get something done, etc, and I like receiving those kinds of gifts too.

9 – You’re a new addition to the crayon box. What color would you be and why? Describe the color to somebody who is blind.

I’m orange. My hair is orange. My skin is orange. My eyes are orange in certain lighting, and when they’re closed I tend to see the colour orange more than any other in the dark. When I had one of those aura photographs taken it was predominantly orange. I don’t rhyme with anything and irritate people because of it.

Before describing orange, I’d ask the person who is blind about their blindness. They might not always have been blind and may know what orange looks like. If they do not know what orange looks like, they may have a system of seeing colour in their mind’s eye. I’d get them to explain their system to me and work with it to locate orange.

Orange to me feels a bit uncomfortable. It’s that thing you’re trying to remember but just can’t quite recall yet can’t forget it either.

It’s a pokey something in your clothes which is scratching you but you can’t locate it to remove it.

It’s holding your hand over a flame to warm it up and then holding it there a little too long but not long enough to burn it and it leaves a tingling. Pins and needles. A slight rash.

It’s a sound which you can’t quite hear but you can’t not hear and it’s driving you nuts as you don’t know what it is. A piece of music which promises to take you somewhere but never quite gets you there and yet you listen to it over and over because there’s just something about it.

Do Jae’s Serenade from The Beauty Inside K drama

10 – What are you known for?

Thinking outside of the box… and being thought-provoking with it.

Outside the Box by Cart

11 – What’s the most interesting thing about you that we wouldn’t learn from your resume (or online bio/profile) alone?

Hmmm…

What I tend to find most interesting about myself isn’t usually what others tend to find most interesting about me.

I can’t think of anything at the moment.

12 – What’s the last thing you watched on TV and why did you choose to watch it?

Skin Wars – a body-painting competition

It seemed like it might be interesting and it has been interesting.

13 – How would you convince someone to do something they didn’t want to do?

I’d ask them why they didn’t want to do it. Listen carefully to their reasoning to understand their point of view.

Then I’d either agree that they should not do it, or I’d offer them optional approaches to the action which they do not want to do to make the action more appealing to them.

It very much depends on what it is that they are required to do and why they do not want to do it.

This question reminds me of that great piece of advice:

it’s a quote which has been attributed to several different people so I went with the anon version.

14 – You’ve been given an elephant. You can’t give it away or sell it. What would you do with the elephant?

Is it a real live elephant or a representation of an elephant?

If it’s a real live elephant and I decide to accept the gift, the rules of the giver no longer apply because that elephant becomes mine and therefore my rules supplant their rules.

It is a free being who was momentarily given to a human, and thus I’d make a concerted effort to find the appropriate place for it to live which would suit it and its requirements.

I might consider doing something rather dark to the person giving away live elephants and making up rules about what those gifted with it couldn’t and could do once they’d received the gift.

If it’s a representation of an elephant, then I’d keep it and put it somewhere which suited it.

15 – We finish the interview and you step outside the office and find a lottery ticket that ends up winning $10 million. What would you do?

Long before I found out that it was a winning ticket (which I wouldn’t find out anyway since I don’t follow the lottery news), I’d have picked it up and handed it to the person who dropped it.

If I didn’t know who’d dropped it, I’d have given it to the receptionist outside the office or the interviewer, since it was most likely dropped by someone they were interviewing or someone who worked there.

I might leave it exactly where it was since whoever dropped it may have noticed they’d done that and would be retracing their steps.

I wouldn’t pocket it if it’s not mine… that tactic never ends well.

If the ticket was mine and I’d dropped it going into the interview, then I’d be relieved that it was still there, especially once I found out it had won. That amount is too much for one person to keep all for themselves, so I’d probably fund projects and people which I personally would like to fund.

16 – Teach me something I don’t know in the next five minutes (in your reply to this question).

You already know everything you need to know – and you know that too.

But you may have taught yourself not to know what you know. There are various reasons why all of us do that.

People like me tend to provoke you to remember your own knowledge, and that’s why people like me may be rejected by others as a persona non grata.

If you feel like a persona non grata because of who you are naturally, cut those who reject you a lot of slack and cut yourself slack too by not taking it personally when others can’t deal with the effect that you have on them.

We can all be orange, and we can all feel the discomfort of other oranges.

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

― Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being

Questions sourced from the following links:

Interesting Thing of the Day: The Questionnaires of James Lipton, Bernard Pivot, and Marcel Proust

Fast Company: 36 Interview Questions That Are Actually Fun To Answer

Additional challenge questions from me:

1 – Which of these questions was your favourite and why?

#16. It’s the one which challenges and puzzles me the most as a concept.

2 – What did you learn about yourself while reading the questions?

That I’m getting better at hearing what is being asked without feeling attacked by it and taking a defensive position. That old feeling habit is one of the reasons that I’m an out of the boxer who may tip into intellectualism and be a cazzo with it.

3 – What did you discover about yourself while answering the questions?

That I don’t know what is most interesting about me.

4 – If you checked out the original questionnaires, which of the questions that I left out would you have liked to have answered and why?

Since I made this mash-up questionnaire post, you’d probably think that I included the questions I wanted to answer and didn’t include the ones I didn’t want to answer.

But that’s not how my mind works.

One of the judges on Skin Wars keeps talking about making things “pop”. I chose the questions which “popped” when I browsed the lists. The Proust ones didn’t “pop” as much because I’ve done the Proust Questionnaire before on my blog, and while my answers might be different I wanted to do things I hadn’t done before (or couldn’t recall doing before).

I had originally included this question from the interview questionnaire – What’s your favorite ’90s jam? – but then I removed it.

Here’s another orange…

Blur – Song 2