All about YOU

[birdsofshore]

I love talking with you all here each week / day / hour / insert own level of addiction, but I often think I don't even know basic stuff about your LJ , like what your username means, what your icons are, etc etc. Come and tell me everything.

Why did you pick your username, and what does it mean? What's your default icon, and does it have any significance? If it's a famous person, please don't assume I will know who it is - I never know who anyone is unless I have the hots for them. What about those other things we can personalise on LJ - the quotes or messages at the top of your journal, and that odd little thing I've never worked out how to change, for instance who_la_hoop's says "I can see your house from here", which always makes me laugh. Do you have special art or graphics on your header? What are they all about?

I will start you off. My username is from a poster that I have in my living room, which says "Birds of shore & sea", with, er, drawings of different birds. Of shore, and, indeed, of sea. "Birdsofshoreandsea" is more characters than LJ allows, and besides, the shorebirds are the ones I like the best.

My picture is probably self-evident, but it's a curlew, which is my absolute favourite bird. I live quite near to plenty of these glorious creatures and they make me very thrilled and happy whenever I see one. They're just so ludicrous and beaky. They look like they shouldn't exist, and they seem to have really fabulous personalities. I can watch them for hours, just mooching about and digging for worms. They also have subtly beautiful plumage and the most wonderful song. I'm not actually OBSESSED with birds in real life, but I can verge on HIGHLY ENTHUSIASTIC about birds on any given occasion, so apologies if you just glazed over there.

The quotes on my journal are from one of my favourite books, The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. "You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed" and "Keep passing the open windows" are pieces of advice from the book on how to survive whatever life throws at you. If you haven't read it, it's a big, insane, sexy, sweet, funny, tragic romp of a book and please don't tell me if you don't like it, because I have adored it since I was about 15 and bought it to impress a boy I fancied who worked in a bookshop (my rec for Frequent Patronage will be along any day now, by the way). Fandom is definitely part of my plan to remain sane and to 'keep passing the open windows' (in other words, to avoid falling into depression and self-harm), so both quotes seemed apt when I was picking my layout.

I have only got a standard LJ header thing - it was the one that seemed least offensive when I looked through. I'd love fancy graphics or some beautiful art up there, but OMG, how hard to choose, plus, if I'm being honest, I don't have a clue how to do such things DD:

Please come and do all the sharing. I really, really want to know.

p.s. A very big thank you to whoever nominated me at HPfanficpoll thingy, if you are on my flist. I was very flattered indeed that you liked my fics, and touched that you took the time ♥

Comments

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Supposedly I banned myself from LJ until I hit certain word counts on Erised. Clearly, I am a bad, bad girl. ;) But this is just too fun to ignore.

ICMezzo is an old username I adopted back in undergrad. The internet was just starting to really take off at that time, and I needed a username for all sorts of random websites. IC has to do with the college I attended and Mezzo was my voice type. I was studying classical vocal performance at the time. A lot of people misspell or mispronounce it as Icy-Mezzo or Ice-Mezzo. But when I pronounce it, I say the initials so it reads like "Eye sea Mezzo." Anyway, I never dreamed I would ever write anything, so way back when I signed up for FFn.net, I just used the same old username. If I had ever dreamed I would start writing or take any sort of an active role in fandom, I'd have put a lot more thought into it. Many times I've thought of changing it, but I fear it is too late now...

My default userpic is... I actually have no idea. I think it is my two octopuses. I sort of adore them. It started as a joke...someone on twitter tweeted the original B/W image to someone else and was jokingly wondering if they were male or female. I quickly pulled up photoshop and said that if they looked closely, it was possible to tell, and responded with the following manip:

Later we decided those little octopuses must be properly slashed, so we dressed them up for a proper date. And the following photo resulted:


So that's my default userpic. Because it's fun and funny. And fandom just appreciates tentacles. *ahem*

Let's see. What else. Oh, my LJ banner is just me being silly...putting my fic titles on books. I like that I can update the titles at times as I write new pieces and have new favorite stories. And the lovely, lovely capitu did all of the code to make it all look so gorgeous together.

My title, "Yet the sea is not full," has roots in my graduate study of ancient Israel. The text comes from Qoheleth 1:7 (Ecclesiastes for the Christians): כל הנחלים הלכים אל הים והים איננו מלא אל מקום שהנחלים הלכים שם הם שבים ללכת

(Forgive me if that Hebrew becomes messed up when I post the comment. I have no idea how LJ will handle the right to left reading font, much less the characters themselves.)

While obviously not the original intent (that's a discussion for another day, and one I'm happy to have--Qoheleth is pissy and a pessimist and I love that his voice is so unique but managed to survive for us to read today), part of the line has become an encapsulation of how I view fanfiction, and thus, it has a place atop my journal. It is: "All the rivers flow into the sea, Yet the sea is not full."

I imagine the water to be words. So many, many words pouring out of so many different minds and cultures and times and places, and it all ends up in this vast pool of stories. But there is always room for more. There may be nothing new under the sun (that also comes from Qoheleth, a few lines away; he's all about the cyclical nature of life), but we can keep interpreting and rearranging and producing more. There will always be room. That sea won't get full, so keep the stories flowing.

[eidheann_writes]

Yay!
I called you "Mezzo" and "I C Mezzo" ( I seeee yooou) in my head- I am doing it right!

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Haha. Sometimes people will call me "Icy" and I'm all...who???

LOL. You're totally doing it right!

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. My octopuses are quite large. Er. Sorry, folks.

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

Not being a Biblical scholar, I had no idea that 'Ecclesiastes' was a person's name.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Ahh, it isn't, actually. Let's see. This may be too much detail, but let me try. Qoheleth is a proper name. Ecclesiastes, though, is generally translated as teacher or preacher though that's slightly generous.

You can see the ekklesia (Greek: ἐκκλησία, roughly "(civil) assembly") in the word Ecclesiastes. Meanwhile the original Qoheleth, while a proper name, is based on the Hebrew root QHL (Hebrew: קהל (qahal)), which means to gather (as an assembly).

So that's the connection. It was originally the Hebrew name Qoheleth. But later the Greeks took the meaning of the name Qoheleth, which had to do with a gathering of an assembly, and used the Greek term for assembly instead, resulting in Ecclesiastes.

It's a little more complicated than that...but that's the basic idea of how and why the text has two different names depending on who you ask.

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

I love too much detail. When I Googled 'Who was Ecclesiastes?' most of the sites said the Book of Ecclesiastes was generally assumed to have been written by King Solomon. Are the two books (Qoheleth and Ecclesiastes) essentially the same? And if they are, is Qoheleth the same person as Solomon?

And, birdsofshore, if you'd rather we move this discussion to private emails, say the word.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

Oh boy. Translating terms is one thing but authorship of any of these sorts of ancient texts gets sticky and the answer will often depend on who you ask. This is also the sort of debate that can also start to offend some people because it begins to tie into religious beliefs. On a very basic level, some believe that the text was from King Solomon while others might think there is just no way to know who originally said or wrote these words down. That's not something I should probably go into in this forum, but if you want to connect, we can certainly move to email, understanding, of course, that my response will come with my own biases.

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

No, it's cool. I'm not particularly invested, one way or the other, just curious. Thanks for explaining. :D

[notearchiver.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting! I love learning random things like this.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

:D

[birdsofshore]

ahahaha re: erised. yeah, this was just a quick post to amuse me before I got down to erised. Right...

Your octopi are so awesome and I have missed them so much, even though I like your other icons too. It's hilarious that you added the hats yourself, and the story behind them. They are really in my top 10 favourite user icons, so clever and funny.

I say your name Eye See Mezzo, but I now worry might be pronouncing Mezzo wrong... I think it's "Met-so", please tell me that's right....? When Omi and I talk (nice) gossip about you, we usually call you ICM, pronounced in my head as Eye See Em. :D

The explanation of "Yet the sea is not full" is really moving and fabulous. You are a star. Hoorah!

I love your header and am WILDLY JEALOUS of it. Gnash.

[icmezzo.livejournal.com]

*preens* If I were an octopus, I'd use at least half of my arms to squeeze you. ;)

I say "Metzo" too and call myself ICM on a regular basis (esp on Twitter when characters are at a premium), so you're good there. Though now I'm awfully curious what you and Omi are saying! :P

If you ever want help with a banner, let me know. I'm not so great with the coding (I can do it, I'm just lazy and it would take me 570 hours and much trial and error, when others are better at it and more efficient) but if you can rope capitu into coding for you, I'm always happy to play with banners!

Huzzah to Erised! I somehow fell so far behind that I sort of want to cry, but the borderline panic is doing wonders for my self-discipline at least.

Oh! Oh! And congrats on the Fanfic noms. I'm honored to have my own fic listed in the same category as yours. I wish I knew who did it so I could thank them properly... *\o/*