keri

Okay so I should probably share a little more about me, since I am building a circle (Hello!)

I am in my mid-30s and live in Florida. I work in fundraising back-office for a university, which has an art museum, which is where I previously worked for a long time. (My favorite art is color field, I love abstract stuff that explores color and material.) I briefly went to library school, because archives and museums are my passion, but I sort of fell into fundraising database work and got promoted to the central university office. I'm lucky it worked out that I can still have my pink hair. I have it done in a balyage/dip-dye style, and I would be really sad to have to cut the pink off - I've been dyeing it like this since 2011!

I live about 5 miles from a national park/eco preserve, and when my mental health is good and the weather isn't too disgustingly humid, I love riding my bike up there to picnic and read. But I've done so less over the last year because I've picked up a new hobby: quilting! I've always loved the idea of quilting, and when my sister got pregnant a while back, I finally had an excuse to do it. I love crafting and doing art, but I dislike leaving half-finished paintings around, and i'm too slow at knitting. Quilts are a perfect artistic outlet.

My other interests are in old movies and books. I was pretty active in the VintageAds community on LJ, I'm a fan of Collectors Weekly, and basically really enjoy seeing how other people live. So old movies and books are tops. I tend to avoid anything too suspenseful or scary, and I really like B-list movies or young people's fiction. I like new books, too, and books that experiment with narrative structure. You can find me at Librarything (not Goodreads!) if you'd like to know more about my reading. I'll probably cross-post my post-book brain dumps here, as I did with Howl's Moving Castle the other day.

My all-time favorite movie is We're Rich Again from 1934. It's pretty ordinary, nothing special, but it really works for me. It's an early screwball, a comedy of money during the Depression - rich family is broke, tries to get rich again. It's got Edna May Oliver as a polo-playing aunt (she's carried around by a bevy of rugged polo players) and Billie Burke in one of her earlier ditzy-mom roles and whatshisface the actor who was formerly an Olympic swimmer, and he spends 99% of the movie in his swimsuit. So it's entertaining, but I love that older daughter character's happy ending is to go to New York to be an author, not to get married. It's special and fun. I also love that Marian Marsh's character is a backwoods Texas hick named Arabella, but in truth she's the cleverest person in the family, and she turns stereotypes and misogyny on their heads. It's got problems - it's a little racist, the family has a Japanese servant who is studying to be a lawyer, and that is played for laughs at parts (but I don't know that it's any more than the other characters are made jokes of) - and it really isn't particularly special filmography or sets or anything. But I love it so much! I recommend it for a lark, it's not very long and Edna May Oliver and Billie Burke are always worth your time.

I'm not sure what else is worth sharing about me for a quick who am I, but I was somewhat active in The Toast's comment section, and I played Kingdom of Loathing for years (I still would, but life has got busy).

I do not have Facebook but I am on Twitter. I started on LiveJournal in...2002? 2003? but had been online in various ways since 1997, when I joined Harper's Tale MOO (a Pern-theme rpg).

I was starting to think about coming back to dreamwidth a few months ago - the mass exodus 2011 and 2016 has been weighing on me, and I miss all the friends and community I used to have. Twitter just isn't the same, and I never used Tumblr as a blog. I used to love vintage_ads on LJ, but it seems dead, and I'm not really sure if I want to be heavily into any specific fandom again (I miss The Toast dreadfully - it was my main community as LJ went into its death throes in 2015 but it wasn't the same as an LJ/DW-style place, and I never really found the same community once Nicole shut it down, though some friends transferred to twitter).

So anyway, if anyone is okay recommending bookish or history-related communities to lurk in? I've been managing hollywoodhandwriting.tumblr.com for a few years (I love old movies), and I'm still actively cataloguing my books/reading on Librarything, which should be linked from my profile.

I'd like to make friends. I'm not sure I'll ever be an active journaler again, but I like really miss the neighborhood feeling of a journal site.

I posted this in the DW-news post but I figured I should put something public here since I made my 15 years' archives private out of embarrassment! I mean, I'm different at 34 than I was at 18, though I guess not too different. Just more mellow?