Questions! Answered!

Answering questions from whitemage.

1. How the heck do you find so much music in such a variety?

I watch several music blogs in a variety of categories (punk, hip-hop, angry girl music) as well as pick up a lot of stuff from movies/TV shows that I watch. The iPhone apps Shazam and SoundHound help me catch a lot of songs I hear through there. I also download a lot of FSTs and watch lj_mixtape.

Mostly, I'm a digital packrat with an ear open nearly all the time. And you remind me I have a mix to post soon.

2. You're new in town and looking for a restaurant to eat at tonight: how do you go about it?

I use my Where app to get a sense of what's around, and then do individual websearches on the places, looking for reviews.

Either that or I pick a direction and go to the first place that looks interesting.

3. How does one get the damn kids off their lawn?

Booby traps.

4. What first got you into fashion?

I was actually really into ballet as a kid, but not in the sense that I wanted to be a ballerina, just ballets themselves. The theatrics of them. So my sister and I would write out plays/ballets and design the sets, the costumes, and have various dolls (or horses or LEGOS or whatever else we had on hand) be the actors. I ended up tending more towards costume design (which I rarely made, because we were dealing with dolls and toys that didn't always get dressed up easily due to their shape and you know SOME OF THEM BEING MY SISTER'S HORSE TOYS).

What this has to do with fashion: fashion is costumery. One of the things that Lady Gaga has right is her whole fashion+performance thing she's got going on. I do that too, but on a much less aggressive level. I don't dress up in the morning thinking about what I want to wear, I dress up thinking what do I want to be today.

So, essentially I got into fashion because my life feels like a performance art piece that only I know the meaning of. XD

5. What is the single most imperative overhaul needed in public education?

Stop punishing teachers for failing kids in a class. You know what, sometimes a repeat helps. And it's much better for a student to fail while they are still in public school, before they are paying for classes in college and putting themselves into debt. The way a lot of public schools operate makes the teacher fear to fail anyone, so they keep lowering the bar to pass everyone, lest they get knocked on their performance reviews.

There's a lot of other things, but I think that would be something that would help teachers a lot and produce better students.