Sunshine Challenge 2: Who Are You?
Jul. 5th, 2019 06:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelseagirl
Chelseagirl.
If you read my into on my main page, you can see it's a reference to the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, where I used to live, for a long, long while. I'm old enough that "girl" is perhaps misleading, but I was referencing Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls, FWIW.
Years ago, I sublet my apartment, in the aforementioned Chelsea, and moved in with my parents for six months, in order to make more progress on my dissertation, without all the work I was doing to pay the bills. Because I knew it would be emotionally difficult (I was already well into my 30s and hadn't lived at home for more than a few months at a time since going away to college, except for one interval where my first post-college foray to NYC hadn't worked out too well, due to depression), and because at the time my university email was still on dial-up, which was going to be a long distance call, I created a box on my dad's AOL account and I called it Chelseagirl, to remind myself I had a home I'd be returning to.
Well, I didn't finish my dissertation at that point; it dragged on awhile longer. I did have a nice retreat, spent some quality time with my parents, and then happily moved back home to my real life, and not too long after met M. and got married and eventually DID finish my dissertation. But Chelseagirl stuck. I had to be Chelseagirl47 on LJ, as the name had already been claimed before I got there -- the 47 was a reference to my old university email address, cas47@. I still use it on DW (my LJ is long gone), AO3, and anywhere else I need a screen name, even though we moved across town to the East Village six years ago last month.
Who am I otherwise? A middle-aged professor with a Ph.D. in Victorian literature but a job running the Writing Center and teaching first year writing and speculative fiction at a STEM university. (The Martian? Not a great book, but an amazing book to get engineering students really talking about ideas!) A new author of historical fiction, with my first novel (a romance) coming out later this month, and my second (a mystery) in progress. A cis-het woman married to a trans woman -- it took M many years after we married to admit that they weren't just a cross-dresser, and in practice they're still more genderqueer than fully transitioned, but it's a work in progress, and they're still my person.
I love cats, history, walking, architecture, David Bowie, fandom, vintage & historical fashion (although my own sewing has held steady at the "I make my own pajama pants" level for some years now).
For years and years, I used the Alice icon here as my default. Captain Marvel has filled me with such great joy that Carol is my primary icon for the moment, though.
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Date: 2019-07-08 03:47 pm (UTC)Sunshine Challenge ☼ 2019
Date: 2019-07-08 04:56 pm (UTC)I don't know why, but that makes me so happy that you found a book to engage engineering students in fiction.
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