- What is your name?
Tracy.
On paper, especially legal documents, it's often something much
longer and more redolent with tradition and family history, but my birth
announcement says "We call her Tracy" in two languages (English &
Dutch), and that's still the only part of my name that really matters.
- Tell us something about you, your background, and what you've been up to lately?
Started growing up in suburban New Jersey, escaped to Southern
California for undergrad (math + linguistics). There I met Jongleur
(the mostly-fled noder now sometimes known to me as Spouse-y
McHusbandPants); after So. Cal and travels in Europe, we spent six years
in Oregon with J's graduate school, two cats named Iggy Pop and Otis,
plus a vegetable garden with no name but lots of love. Today we all
live in New York City, where I came to work on an M.A. in food studies
(finished May 2011!) after fooding professionally for most of those
years in Oregon (some credit is due to the instigation of E2's sneff).
Recently I've been looking for food policy research/analysis gigs and
trying not to cry when people ask me how that's going. I used to end
resumés with the line "Smarter than a box of rocks, can cook my way out
of a paper bag, and thank you for reading this far" until someone
actually did read that far and told me it was unprofessional (sigh). I
don’t know if I want to grow up, let alone what I want to be (except
myself), but I plan to keep writing in some form pretty much no matter
what.
- How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?
I discovered E2 indirectly through ideath, whose brother was
Jongleur's college roommate back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the
Earth, but I'm pretty sure it was Jongleur who told me to check out
this website thing his friend's cool sister had found and gotten crazy
into, it seemed like something I might dig. He was right.
- What are your favorite writeups -- both your own and from other noders?
Hoo monkeys, I have been gone for awhile and am a little scared to
find out how many links on my homenode no longer point
anywhere.
For now... Butterfly soup and Give everything you can to everyone
you know have made it into my personal ideolect; I'm sure I'll
(re)discover others as I spend more time in the nodegel (does anybody
still use that term? stand/alone/bitch basically won that whole
discussion with Ask a fish what water is. Better yet, ask a wave.)
dannye's writeup of Mark Helprin stuck with me until I finally read Winter's Tale
at which point I came back to E2 for the first time in years to give
The Custodian's review the C! it so richly deserved. While drafting
this interview response, I added that Helprin bio to a growing list of
stuff I can't believe I hadn't C'd yet. Since getting back on E2 in
earnest last month I have Chinged I realize that just because I like
something a lot, it doesn't mean it is of high quality, America if I
only had the money. Here are your new commercials:, Caregiver
Syndrome, A temporary goodbye, and been completely blown away by An
apology, a love note and a remembrance, lack of Oxford comma and all.
Stuff of mine I'm proud enough to nodevertise includes everything I
volunteered to read at the nodeslam (mentioned elsewhere in these
interview responses), plus Hamell on Trial, Good Pirate/Bad Pirate,
Moleskine, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Oh, and My
Friends, because I thought I'd never node again but also
durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
- What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?
Most favorite: The
nodeslam! Even or perhaps especially after somebody passed me the
bottle of Jack. Also getting editor
powers was pretty flippin' sweet.
Least favorite: Simultaneously burning out and fading away.
- What keeps you coming back?
Ironically (in the real sense of the word, none of that Alanis
Morissette crap), I came back to E2 for the first time in years to
remember someone who isn't here anymore. Then, to my
surprise, I stuck around. From the Catbox I got to reading
my Message Inbox, which led me to revisit writeups that Cool Man
Eddie and others brought to my attention, in some cases even revise
them... I like to think grundy would be amused by this turn of events.
- What do you hope for E2's future?
I hope I can find a way to play along again! Like, contribute in a
more lasting way than talking schmack in the Catbox (not that there's
anything wrong with that). This interview is a start, anyway.
- What does E2 mean to you?
E2 helped me learn internet friendship, for lack of a better term
(I'd like to buy a a verb, please). For better or worse, this was where
I first really learned online social interaction (socialization?) and I
am SO INEXPRESSIBLY GLAD to have done so with people I knew
mostly/firstly from online as opposed to the later "social media" of
mostly people I knew firstly from meatspace (do people still use that
term? I don't even know if I meant it ironically but "real life" just
wasn't cutting it.) Also I think writing on/for/at E2 really helped me
develop a more informal, less academic style and tone (register?)
- Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?
/me misses grundoon first and foremost these days. I'm happy to be
keeping in touch with wertperch via Catbox. Evil
Catullus can turn a phrase that wraps me right around his
megalomaniacal little finger... for the rest, I don't know if I've been
around long enough to figure out who's here and gone to really answer
this. Back in the day I eagerly read and often cooled Igloowhite,
riverrun, and Halspal, eventually getting a copy of the latter's
book which I blame for all the writeups of Hal's I haven't yet upvoted
or C'd. I think of ideath as my E2 mama and liminal, meson,
grae, and dutchess as my babies (to varying degrees). It's safe to
say that everyone namechecked in this interview is some kind of favorite
of mine.
- Who would play you in the Everything2 movie?
I will flatter myself and say Kate Winslet, who is so incredibly
fabulous that I would watch her brush her teeth (although that might
well be more interesting than watching her play me going all Typo Death
Squad on misplaced apostrophes).
- Please fill in the blank: "E2 is to the Internet as ___ is to the world."
Primordial ooze? Collective unconscious? Mystery meat smothered in secret sauce?
- Any questions that I didn't ask that I should've?
Hey, what's that over there? I mean, are you gonna eat that?