I know you best by what you are not

[gurdonark]

I like that idea that one can best define God by what God is not. But I'm not sure I have to limit myself to God in my thinking. I love to learn from your journals just who each of you really are. But could you help tell me what you are not?

[Poll #124988]

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

The blend of two people I'd be would be H.L. Mencken and George Sand. (Although I've never read any George Sand, I must admit.)

The place I've never been I wouldn't fit in would be Bangkok.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Sand and Mencken would be impressive.

Re:

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'll have to read something by her.

Mencken is one of my favorite (and still one of the best, living or dead) critics of America. Yeah!

[ex-sinnie785.livejournal.com]

i oopsed. the inability to feel excited would screw me up -- the inability to not have children wouldn't bother me at all. :)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I always think later that my answers could have been different :).
I'm glad that the polls aren't graded for credit.

:)

[nancyjane.livejournal.com]

thanks Robert, fun poll, and very fun to see the results as well. :)

Re: :)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I love seeing what people vote and wrote.

[amatrixangel.livejournal.com]

ROTFL!

-> auntiesiannan -- I wanted to be a chemist and blow up the world like in Harriet the Spy

hehee. I think Bush has beaten her to it ;)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

not yet, but if the North Koreans can resolve the propulsion problems, then we can have a Godzilla movie in Japan

[laruth.livejournal.com]

That was a fun poll. Thanks for doing that.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

thank you for participating!

[chevrefeuilles.livejournal.com]

Imagine that you are the perfect blend of two people, living or dead, whom you admire from afar, but who are not like you at all. Which two people would those two people be?

(whines) Ro-bert, this is too hard.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

oh, but you are so imaginative...piece of cake, really :)

[chevrefeuilles.livejournal.com]

I think some people I know (ahem, marstokyo)cheated on that question. I tried hard for heroes who are not like me at all. Ah well...I have advertised this poll in my journal. The premise is quite right and is something I've often thought, that to know someone perhaps you have to know what they'd like to be but are not (or don't consider themselves to be).

Skipping off now to go on a hunger strike and write a plague mass,

Laurie

[deriasys.livejournal.com]

Those were some of the best questions... Esp. the one about two people you'd love to be. Way to go. And thanks.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for playing! Fun to have such good participation.

[chiffonade.livejournal.com]

what a great poll! and i really will think about the two people.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks! and pick two really "cool" ones, and supplement your poll :)

hardest. poll. ever.

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

Oh, my! Was that tricky. I feel the need to explicate on one or two answers. I think I wish I was not like my mother in many ways, but I know that I am like her in many ways (even those ways that I'd rather not admit...). So, that first question really threw me because I think I'm very much like each of those people. So maybe a more accurate answer would be "my favorite uncle" since he's dead. But I sincerely believe I am distinct from both my mother and my father in very fundamental ways. Ahem.

#2--all of those things worry me to no end! But the most superficial one seemed the owning the house, so I went with it. But I think I don't really know which worries me the most or the least.

Re: blend of two people. I have no idea! But I must have cinema on the brain. It's interesting (to me) I picked two men. Hmmmm.

Needlessly negative...I think maybe I didn't understand that question. I honestly believe being needlessly optimistic is what really gets me in trouble...and triggers negativity.

Okay. Enough. But that was really, really hard.

Re: hardest. poll. ever.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I think that one of the wonderful things about approaching one's 30th year is that one finally begins to lose the need to separate oneself from one's parent's flaws, or to relate to one's parents' virtues, but instead can see the "whole bag" as one gestalt, less about good and bad than about what was and is and shall be.

I was going to put "owing a house", because on paper I'm down with anti-materialism. But then I realized my idealism was clay, because in our lives we insisted we had to own a home, but did not have children.

Your two people are cool! But I assumed, incorrectly, that most people would take the analogy as parental, and pick a man and a women. I'm glad people did not. I like my friend who picked the Dalai Lama and Audrey Hepburn. that would be a spiritual person, and that's before you even get to the Dalai.

Of course, I don't want that Audrey of unhappy marriages and deeply conflicted actress v. mother issues and sometimes messy affairs.
I want Sabrina or the princess. On the other hand, I can pretty much take the Dalai in the bottle, or on tap without admixture.

On the "needlessly negative" thing, my own bias is that we all should be needlessly positive, all the time. But that's just me.

Oh...

[sandstar.livejournal.com]

...I know now that I typed Dalai as Dalia. I really do know how to spell :)

I don't like it when I do that, and can't change it ;)

Re: Oh...

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I think you can edit a poll, by going back to "fill out poll", but I may be confused :)