meme from el_staplador

- Post a list of 15 fandoms
-- Have your friends list guess your favourite character from each one.
-- When guessed, bold the line, include the character name, and write a sentence about why you like that character.

I just have too many fandoms, so it seemed a pity not to go for it. A certain theme may be detectable in the final answers....

1. Fullmetal Alchemist

2. Death Note

3. Northern Lights (NOT Tony Makarios...)

4. Naruto

5. Lord of The Rings

6. Battle Royale

7. Wolf's Rain

8. Harry Potter

9. The Sandman

10. The Matrix

11. Noir

12. Madlax

13. To kill a Mockingbird

14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

15. The Bible

mood: creative tags: meme

1st Baccano! fanfiction. Just one bushwhacking idea, and I have to go to all this trouble...but I felt like completing something for once.





Title: Boy meets Girl
Words: 2000+
Rating: PG
Genre: Humour (be afraid)
Summary: The secret superhero origins of Isaac and Maria, as narrated by Firo.

You're Cat's Cradle!

by Kurt Vonnegut

You believe quite firmly that free will deserted you long ago and far
away. As a result, it's hard to take responsibility for anything. Even though you show
great potential as a leader of a small 3rd world country, the choices are all made ahead
of time. You're rather fond of games involving string. Your fear of nuclear weaponry is
trumped only by your fear of ice.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Where to begin? I've learned that Africa is a very bad place to agree with everybody you talk to. I feel like I drifted through the whole thing, but that could be just because it was only 8 weeks. I'm glad I've been; I'd have to hate life not to be. Skip as much of what follows as you like....



I was actually staying on a heavily forested plateau, dotted with villages, over which a rotating group of a dozen volunteers were spread. Activities, on a find-yourself-a-project basis, included 3 weeks Junior school teaching, 5 days fun summer school teaching, playing with orphans, painting and cleaning a henhouse, and a 3 week survey of HIV awareness organisations (The old guy below is also a volunteer, which means no excuses).



 The surveyshould make up a website on the HIV situation in the Eastern Reigion. There are plenty of organisations raising awareness, but not often very well; villagers living a dozen miles apart can know the whole story or nothing. A support meeting for PLWHAs (guess the politically correct acronym) was spent discussing how to prevent any members misusing money they'd been given, and organising classes in making soap and skin cream for trading. I might have been foolish to expect something a bit more emotional.



The family I lived with, along with Rhiannon (18, really no excuse). They were a pleasant bunch, hip-hop fans and pretty well off. A TV, a fridge, an absent father working in the Accra Forestry Commission, and two small girls who washed and cleaned (I tried to wash my own clothes by hand, but did so badly they wouldn't let me continue). The boy, Jeff, said that he'll miss recording songs on my minidisk player. I recorded 'Talking Turkeys' and 'Albert and the Lion', and he would reel off lines with an enormous grin every five minutes.



 2nd life lesson; schoolchildren given the choice between painting and fiddling with a digital camera will normally chose quickly. But, of course, football beats both, especially if the teacher does badly. Cricket was practically unheard of, but I tried that, along with rounders; no photos could be risked. When they'd stopped whacking each other and asking you to buy them football boots and jerseys, they were quite lovely. 'Yedin' is Twi (Eastern reigion Ghanaian) for 'BE QUIET!' 



The orphanage, misleadingly inhabited mainly by children with poor or incapable families was spartan and dirty, but well-run, like a tiny commune. The manager, in the photo of volunteers at the bottom, was a 100-ideas-a-day man (hence the henhouse, to earn money from eggs), who attributed the orphanage's problems to both witchcraft and a lack of funding.

 

Our house. Ghana has got mud hut hamlets (much nicer than the cities), a tribal chief (in the red shorts) for every village with his own court, and a church on what felt like every corner, but not a single horse, though more taxis and minibuses than visible mosquitoes. Until the second Akosombo dam gets finished, the power goes off, 6pm-6am, on days listed in weekly newspapers.





I got to travel a bit, to Cape Coast, Lake Volta, the general area, and the old Ashanti empire's capital, Kumasi. The door was in Cape Coast castle, at the end of the tunnel between the slave dungeons and the beach.





  
I honestly got on better with the volunteers than anyone else I've known for less than three years. A number, but not all, seemed to be in a troubling relationship, or out of a troubling job, and all of them enjoyed themselves. At the time I left, a lot of them were raising money to build a school. 

 

mood: lazy tags: ghana, hiv, volunteering

  Woosh, that was university, mate...I can't help but suspect that I won't able to spend so much of the Masters bumming around (I ended up applying for the PhD, and the interview board shared my original opinion).
  
 Mainly, I hope I can keep touch with guys, and learn how to fill out a taxform and get through an interview sometime. And I actually need to write some stuff before I head off to Ghana for six weeks.

  I'm 'helping out', somewhere 'two hours from the capital, wherever we've got a place', for half the usual volunteer organisation fee. Maybe not such a good time to watch the 'Hostel 2' trailer...but, hey, when anything can be faked, what's the point in paranoia?

  Seriously, my job seems to be combined teacher/playgroup attendent, with optional HIV education I will certainly do. And whatever other functions I can think of, implying I should sit up and think of them now. I'd probably be more nervous if I was getting training, but it should be easier than American Summer Camp.

Love to everyone from uni, will try to put up something fun next time.   

mood: sleepy tags: hiv, hostel, university, volunteering

Well, the last week has honestly been worse than any point in finals. My parents suddenly got the idea I should apply straight off for a PhD, and won't accept that there's any chance I could fail or gain nothing from it. The worst thing is I told them at some points I would do as much as apply because I was sick of discussing it, and now they've just taken it as a given.

I just can't bring myself apply with the intention of being rejected. Really understanding about a rock and a hard place.

Here I am. Hello, sky. Hello, keyboard. Hello, LJ posting world.

Finals ended on Saturday; ending a time when the only thing I had energy to do after work was, uh, mess about on the internet. So now I'm going to do things on the internet. Start writing stuff. And a kind person suggested years ago I get a Livejournal, hopeful not suspecting what I might end up chuntering on about in it.

Even sooner than Saturday I finished watching the anime Noir. An eternal debt of gratitude and biscuits to anyone who wants to tell me what they think about the two final gunshots.

I'm a pretty brief person. What do people think about their exams? How old were you when you started livejournal? Happiness to everybody.

mood: nostalgic tags: exams, finals, livejournal, noir