Blog Hop: Four Facts Survey

I like this four facts survey that L. at Viva Carlos and several others completed last week. While I’m gathering my thoughts from my horse-shopping trip this weekend, I thought I’d indulge my latent narcissism, herewith:

Four names that people call me or have called me in the past other than my real name:

1. Luly (my family calls me this, I don’t really know why)
2. Genius Cougar (before the days of the iPhone we had walkie-talkies for communicating on the horse show grounds. This was my call sign)
3. Lies (like Liz, but for when I’m feeling devious)
4. Lizo

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Border Services Officer (i.e. passport and immigration control and the person who searches your luggage to determine whether or not you’re trying to sneak twelve bottles of rum into the country undeclared on your way back from the Dominican Republic)
2. Page in the House of Commons: every year forty first-year university students are selected from across Canada to work in the House of Commons (like Congress), supporting our Members of Parliament in their daily work. I was one of them – very cool except for our hideous polyester uniforms.
3. Assistant to a Director General (i.e. powerful person) at the ministry of Foreign Affairs: like in The Devil Wears Prada, only with fewer cool clothes and more Excel spreadsheets
4. Sales assistant at Liz Claiborne (now-defunct frumpy store for moms [no offense to moms, you know what I mean]): luckily, my one and only retail job. I picked up this job for eight miserable weeks ‘cause I needed some extra cash to go to an A show. Quit right after the show, but not before being named Employee of the Week!

Four movies I’ve watched more than once:

1.  Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one, obviously)
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
3. Zero Dark Thirty (and The Hurt Locker – love me some Kathryn Bigelow)
4. The Place Beyond the Pines

Four books/series I’d recommend: (OH GOD ONLY FOUR WELL OBVIOUSLY HARRY POTTER AND THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MARGARET ATWOOD ARE IMPLICIT RIGHT?)

1. Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
2. Submergence by J.M. Ledgard
3. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
4. The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper (this is a YA series and you can ignore the first of the five books. The second, also called The Dark is Rising, is my go-to book for when I have nothing else to read or just need to be outside my own head. It’s like a talisman – just holding it in my hands makes me feel better.)

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Montreal, QC: born and raised. Forever my idea of what a city should be (OK, minus the crazy corruption and infrastructure deficit and toxic identity politics…)
2. Ottawa, ON: currently, and during my undergrad. It’s not bad.
3. Egham, UK: I did an exchange at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2009 in this teeny town down the road from Windsor Great Park.
   

   And this, Founders Hall, was the building I lived in!

4. Oxford, UK: I lived here from 2011-12 for grad school. Loved Oxford to pieces.

Four places I’ve visited:

1. Barcelona: my favourite city to visit. Gaudi architecture everywhere, Catalan food, crazy nightlife, naps encouraged. Win.
2. Belfast, Northern Ireland and surrounding area: spent a few days here in grad school and didn’t realize how raw the history would still feel. Highly recommended.
3. San Francisco: visited with my family in 2009, a city I would love to revisit at my own pace
4. Frisco, TX (an exurb of Dallas): We have family friends who moved here from Montreal about fifteen years ago and I spent a couple of weeks there one summer as a teenager. It’s the only time I’ve ever been immersed in that suburban ‘American-dream’ kind of life and it was…eye-opening.

Four places I’d rather be right now:

1. Back at Oxford doing another degree, reunited with all my MSc friends (…but minus all the hours in the library?)
   

   Basically, I’d just like to relive the copious amounts of partying

2. Being a working student for a big name trainer at a horse show (basically I’d like to be 16 and working for Missy Clark)
3. On the beach in the Maldives
4. At our family cottage with my girlfriends

Four things I prefer not to eat:

1. Strawberries
2. Feta cheese
3. Rich creamy things
4. DURIAN FRUIT (oh my god my colleague from China gave me some to try last week. Go read the Wikipedia article about them right now, then spend the rest of your life trying to avoid ever smelling or tasting them.)

Four of my favourite foods:

1. Chocolate (dark, especially mint)
2. Thai food, especially pad thai, pad see ew, and chicken red curry
3. My mother’s ‘special macaroni’ casserole (pasta, béchamel, cheddar, parsley, ground beef, YUM)
4. Fettucine alla gigi

Four TV shows I watch: [none currently but these are some I Netflix]

1. The West Wing
2. Friday Night Lights
3. The Good Wife
4. Mad Men

Four things I’m looking forward to in the next 365 days:

1. Buying a horse
2. Christmas with my family
3. My best friend moving to Ottawa
4. Travel of some kind with the BF next summer

Four things I’m always saying:

1. Bitch! (…sorry, bad feminist, it’s not directed towards a person, it’s just my epithet of choice)
2. Suboptimal (as in “Schmoodle, your constant spooking is suboptimal”)
3. Booboo, fatty, bud, silly (my nicknames for all animals)
4. “Up to you!” [person suggests something] “Sure! Or maybe x?” (Because I’m that person who is initially indecisive then judges your choices hard.)