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1. What subject did you most enjoy in school which is the least applicable to your current/future career?
I liked most academic subjects (but not physical ones, that is, gym and penmanship). Least applicable of the ones I liked a lot? That's a tough call, but I think I'm going to have to say English.
"But wait!", I hear people say, "you're a technical writer! How could English not be applicable?" Well, it's like this. Grammar is grammar; I don't really remember learning it explicitly, though I must have somewhere along the line. (I'm better at it than most people I know, so it's probably not genetic. :-) ) I have dim memories of diagramming sentences, a skill that never served me beyond that final exam. But mostly, English class was about literature in various forms -- reading, not writing, and creative subjects, not technical ones. And while there was some analytical thinking along the way, mostly it wasn't the sort of thing that a good technical writer does every day. We did have essays and papers as assignments, of course, but a ten-page paper is very different, in planning and execution, from a 300-page manual or a 50-MB online doc set. I'm pretty sure my longest high-school writing assignment was under 20 pages.
I don't actually know how much writing I learned in college-level tech-writing classes, for that matter. I think this may be an area where I was blessed with some genuine talent. I also have skill, but I think I mostly learned it by doing, not by sitting in classes -- even though many of the other aspects of the job, like everything under the "technical" label and general analytic skills, did come from the classroom. This is part of the reason that I cannot fathom going to graduate school for technical writing, though there was a time when I considered grad school for computer science even though I had no intention of going back to programming. (These days, my academic daydreams are not related to my current career.)
2. If you were a musical instrument, which one would you
be and why?
Argh. I'm not sufficiently left-brained for this style of question. :-)
Ok, um, I hope it would be something with some complexity to it, and that produces a sound that's engaging enough that people will spend some time and effort. Maybe a 'cello or viola? These are instruments I see as very expressive and varied. (I don't actually play either.)
3. If you could have dinner with three famous people,
living or dead, fictional or "real", who would they be
and why?
Hmm. Tough one. I'm going to assume that it's three separate dinners, so I don't have to worry about interactions among them. And I'm going to assume that translation services will be provided, so as not to limit myself to speakers of modern English.
One would be Rabbi Akiva. I'd like to hear him talk about his transition from illiterate 40-year-old to Torah sage. I'd also like to pick his brain about what Judaism was like during his time. What isn't in the written records captured in the mishna and talmud? What was day-to-day life like, particularly for women? How much of what is now attributed to the sages is actually correct?
Second would be Palestrina; I'd like to pick his brain about music composition, and show him the influences his music had 500 years later.
And on the lighter side, since you did include fictional characters, Dogbert. We can talk about anything he wants, but I'm not signing anything. :-)
(Without the limitation of "famous" I would have included some of my ancestors, particularly my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, both of whom died way too young.)
4. What is your favourite literary work, and conversely,
what is your favourite non-literary vice? (i.e. We own the
Harvard Classics, but I also own a ton of V.C. Andrews novels)
I don't tend toward singleton favorites, whether books, music, TV, food, or whatever. Depending on mood, for literary works I could turn to any of: Mark Twain's short stories (always preferred them to his novels); assorted Norse sagas; The Little Prince; Neil Gaiman's Sandman; most of Shakespeare's comedies; The Hobbit (but not Lord of the Rings, which I struggled through on paper); Steinberg's As a Driven Leaf; or at least a dozen others. This is off the top of my head, and the list would probably be different next week.
My guilty pleasures run more toward comics and TV than books, especially recently. While not e "trekkie" I did watch Voyager all the way to the end; please don't ask me to explain this. And I have a goofy fondness for a fairly new comic book called The Crossovers, wacky premise and all. I guess past guilty pleasures in book form would include Terry Pratchet's Discworld books and the first several books written by Mercedes Lackey, but I eventually stopped reading both. I'm a fairly slow reader, so I guess over time I have tended to select for things that I think will be worth my while. For example, I'd rather dedicate three hours per Harry Potter movie than ten or more hours per book.
5. Do you collect anything, what, and why?
I don't think it's called "collecting" when books ambush me and demand to be taken home. So no, not really. :-)
More seriously, I don't tend to collect stuff for the sake of collecting stuff, though I have large collections of some things that I want for their own sakes (like books, recorded music, complete runs of certain TV shows on video or DVD, etc). I suppose the mark of a collector might be that you keep even the substandard specimens for the sake of completeness, and I will admit to not erasing the bad Star Trek episodes from the videotapes.
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