My Twist on the "Ask Me Anything" Meme

[hrj]

As I think I've mentioned before, I tend to be hyper-cautious about memes that seem to have as their hidden purpose: 1) demonstrating how much feedback you can induce people to give you; or 2) going into TMI-overload with a sort of truth-or-darish "I promise to answer any question!" And as for the whole "working outside my comfort zone" thing, these days that's a life program, not an occasional LJ amusement. But here's an offer inspired by the current "ask me to blog outside my comfort zone" meme that's going around.

Is there any question -- whether idle or deeply profound -- that you've ever wanted to ask me but never felt you had a good opening for? I'm inviting you to ask it here ... with the following conditions.

* I will not be screening comments (either questions or answers). If there's something you want to ask that you don't want the rest of the world to know about, you'll have to do it face to face some time.

* If I think a question is too personal, I'll decline to answer it. (This isn't "hrj bares her soul", just "hrj answers questions".) I probably won't be offended (and I might even answer the same question face-to-face), I just won't post any answers that I'm not willing to have on permanent public record.

* This offer isn't confined to, or necessarily specifically aimed at, my f-list. Casual readers are explicitly included.

And I promise that if nobody has any questions, I won't conclude you-all don't love me! (Or even conclude that my life is an open book with no mysteries.)

Comments

[loup_noir]

Are you happy with the current career, or do you still hold out hope for academia?

Also: when do you think you'll be done with my DVDs? I don't mean to nag, but we had a guest over recently who hadn't see "Rome," and we wanted to cure that problem. The next guest was a "Deadwood" fan and, well, you know....

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'm ecstatic with my current career. I get to do research and crunch numbers and analyze data and teach people how to do things and solve problems ... and then for dessert, I get to write long technical reports! Of course, if I had ended up as a linguistics professor, I'd also be ecstatic about my career. But the current state of academic employment isn't very promising for someone doing a mid-life career change (especially someone with a mortgage). I make a heckuva lot more money at the Big B than I would as an entry-level college professor ... and the job security is better, too. And since I still get to do research, publishing, and teaching to any extent that I want to, I'm not missing out much on that end.

Sorry about the delay on the DVDs -- I'll pack them up this weekend. I kept thinking I'd work my way further through Deadwood, but it never really grabbed me. Rome was great, especially in that way of "enough things I disagree with that it could make a fun review".