avatarLucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她)

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ding sound through other elements, or to skip the question altogether — whichever is most comfortable to you.</p><h2 id="86a7">[4] How has your culture or context shaped your beliefs about relationships and what they “should” look like? How much do you subscribe to those expectations?</h2><h2 id="f2d5">[5] What is one food that reminds you of childhood?</h2><h1 id="a144">Top fives!</h1><ul><li>Who are 5 of your favourite musicians/ bands?</li><li>What are your top 5 favourite fruits?</li><li>What are your top 5 least favourite vegetables?</li><li>What are 5 times in your life where you wish you took more time to celebrate?</li><li>What are 5 reasons that get you out of bed each morning?</li></ul><h1 id="fbe2">Articles to share</h1><ul><li>A piece that deserves more love</li><li>A creative piece</li><li>A piece shorter than 2 mins</li><li>An article from your favourite publication</li><li>A self-published piece</li></ul><h1 id="ffcf">My responses!</h1><h2 id="ffa1">[1] As a writer, how do you come up with new ideas? How do you capture them so that they are ready when you sit down to write?</h2><p id="9fcf">My mind is almost always running so I have a system of having my phone on me and emailing myself a thought, however scattered, to myself so I can later elaborate on it.</p><p id="af68">When I check email at the end of the day, I either add it to my medium workflow list (in a google sheet) or discard it if it’s too incoherent. (Some thoughts were just never meant to be, and that’s okay).</p><p id="d188">Sometimes, tweets that were thoughts that randomly came into my head gain traction as others interact with it, share their perspectives. If the conversation is something I want to think more deeply about at a later time, I bookmark it on Twitter and make a plan to write about it.</p><h2 id="b060">[2] On the spectrum of introvert — ambivert — extrovert, where would you place yourself? What are some reason(s) you think you might place in that position? Does it change depending on context?</h2><p id="e2da">I really want to hear the response to this question because I added the “context” aspect for a reason! I always thought of myself as an ambivert (or somewhere between introvert and ambivert). Even in new situations I can be talkative with new people. I considered myself an ambivert because while all of my friends were definitely introverts, I was the most extroverted of them all. I was usually the one to speak up, check-in; if there were awkward silences, I did the social maneuvering to try and make others more comfortable in sharing their thoughts.</p><p id="8500">This all changed when I got to grad school, where suddenly, against a backdrop of extroverts, I suddenly become the shyest, most quiet woman in the room. I’m used to shared space in conversation, where there were adequate spaces for each to share their thoughts. There was a rhythm to that kind of conversation. Here, it was a lot of people talking and <b><i>talking over</i></b> others, and the only way to score participation marks in class was to interrupt others before they could finish their sentences. Your thoughts would inevitably be interrupted before you were done.</p><p id="3fc4">My only explanation for this all is that I’m an ambivert, somewhere in the middle, and in contrast with who I am, despite never really changing how I interacted with others, I was labelled differently based on the “dominant” context.</p><p id="2c6b">Interesting? I think so.</p><p id="ebfb">Save for the interrupting. Not a huge fan of that.</p><h2 id="eb18">[3] What is your relationship with sound? Whether you interpret this word to encompass awkward silences in interactions to the connection found through music, take us on a journey on how you relate to the external world through this sense.</h2><p id="afe9">*For Deaf or hard of hearing folks, feel free to adapt the question to another sense, share your perspectives on understanding sound through other elements, or to skip the question altogether — whichever is most comfortable to you.</p><p id="fd11"><b>Awkward silences</b>: I used to be fairly comfortable with awkward silences because I usually had them with people I knew, and the awkward silence signified that they were having trouble saying something they wanted, or expressing something difficult, but it was not a rejection of me.</p><p id="8f62">Now, it’s more of a mixed experiences, with awkward silences being a tangible rejection and moving on from anything I’ve suggested, icing me out of conversations that I’ve tried really hard to accommodate others on.</p><p id="c6f7">Which is why it’s so interesting that an <b>awkward silence</b>, something sometimes used to disconnect from others or to communicate discomfort, is sometimes otherwise art. John Cage’s 4'33 is a musical piece of pure silence for 4'33. Before mindfulness and meditation became a part of the zeitgeist, this was my first encounter of needing to sit with silence.</p><p id="08b8">Yet music, from the soft <i>pianissimos</i> to the brazen <i>fortes</i> communicate connection and acceptance.</p><h2 id="fb11">[4] How has your culture or context shaped your beliefs about relationships and what they “should” look like? How much do you subscribe to those expectations?</h2><p id="8d51"><b>Timeline</b> — All the cultures I’m exposed to still have a strong narrative of date, get married, have kids, (some other stuff), die. Academic culture has really interrupted that, coming straight from the other side with the expectation that if you were <i>truly</i> dedicated to your research, you would not have kids.</p><p id="3373">This comes in the form of assuming that parents who choose to have kids who don’t have the same kind of publication output in the year that they birth out a human being is a self-inflicted consequence that means that the person carrying the child isn’t as rigorous a researcher as their non-child- carrying/rearing counterparts. Academics who choose to have kids are shamed in academia; academics who don’t choose to have kids are shamed outside of academia for choosing to wait until graduate school is complete, etc.</p><p id="0742">剩女 was also a term that was thrown around a while back. This term literally means “leftover women”, referring to women who are nearly thirty or thirty and above who are unmarried. Needless to say, I fought back hard on that even in my teens, my

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early twenties. As I now realize that I officially fall into this category, 27, I am fighting back against pressure from elders to get married.</p><p id="8107">Relative to another generation who had gotten married by default (which sometimes works out, sometimes not!), I find that my generation is thinking hard before signing up for marriage and/or kids. Each involve financial and emotional responsibilities that we’re now thinking deeply about and evaluating before committing. In my opinion, rather than being irresponsible and not following this pre-determined timeline of popping out a new generation, we’re a healing generation trying to ensure that wounds perpetuated by parents who rushed too quickly into marriage and parenting do not perpetuate for another cycle.</p><h2 id="5f9c">[5] What is one food that reminds you of childhood?</h2><p id="76ae"><b>Hot dog buns (cheung jai bao)</b>. Hong Kong-style bakeries carry a variety of portable buns and pastries, and my favourite had to either be the famous <a href="https://medium.com/the-brain-is-a-noodle/bolobao-%E8%8F%A0%E8%98%BF%E5%8C%85-6dc8aa183870"><b><i>bolobao</i></b></a><b><i> </i></b>(“pineapple bun”) or hot dog buns.</p><p id="7b3f">The bread portion of the cheung jai bao is sweeter than the average bread, wrapped around a sausage. It’s basically a clumsy-proof hot dog where the sausage is securely snug inside the bread (not innuendo y’all this is my <i>childhood</i>) such that I cannot <i>yeet</i> (I mean squeeze out) the sausage on to the floor.</p><p id="9ab7">This is really key. I have lost many hot dog sausages in the American-style open-bun hot dogs. My friend shares that once, a pigeon stole the whole sausage from her mom’s hot dog in a single swoop. That is all to say, we need better sausage protection on American-style street hot dogs and we <b><i>need them now </i>😅😂</b></p><h1 id="21a1">Top fives!</h1><ul><li>Who are 5 of your favourite musicians/ bands?</li></ul><p id="4268">IU (Lee Ji Eun) Janice Vidal Kina Grannis Blackpink Itzy</p><ul><li>What are your top 5 favourite fruits?</li></ul><p id="da4b">Avocados Mangoes Blueberries Tangerines Durian</p><ul><li>What are your top 5 least favourite vegetables?</li></ul><p id="b275">Tomatoes (uncooked, eaten like an apple) Corn (on the cob) (I actually really like vegetables??? Can’t think of anymore)</p><ul><li>What are 5 times in your life where you wish you took more time to celebrate?</li></ul><p id="f05e"><b>Getting my MSc </b>→ I didn’t celebrate it because there was so much going on and I wish I’d gone back and properly honoured that moment.</p><p id="4da0"><b>Every time I did well on a test</b> → While humility is important (and I really hated the people who went around being like, <i>what did you get on this test, oh? that’s too bad because I got an A</i> and wanted to be as conceptually different from them as possible), I wish I took the time to privately, or with close friends, celebrate smaller successes.</p><p id="93de"><b>Getting out of an abusive relationship</b> → It’s reasonable I didn’t get the time to celebrate because honestly a lot of the first months were just about safety planning and making sure there wasn’t any retaliation; and then the next year and a half was about healing from 20 years of trauma and trying to find the right therapist. I think now is the time to really honour that milestone now that I’m far enough out to not constantly be in fight or flight mode!</p><p id="31c6"><b>Cooking a good meal</b> → Cooking is such an adventure and so rewarding in itself, but sometimes I cook up a storm and then sit in front of TV to enjoy the meal. While that’s fun in a different way, I want to start having separate experiences where I also make the time to cook up a storm, (once it’s safe again), share it with friends and just chat over amazing food.</p><p id="0420"><b>PUTTING TOGETHER MY IKEA TROLLEYS </b>→ I’ve finally received my Ikea trolleys. It was such a hectic week that I didn’t really get to document or journal the process! Both were <b><i>so fun</i></b> to put together and every time I step into my main living space my heart beats in joy because the BOOKS are on SHELVES and not ON THE FLOOR</p><ul><li>What are 5 reasons that get you out of bed each morning?</li></ul><p id="71fd">Breakfast Fear of disappointing others Have to put food on the table for breakfast Getting to see my partner’s face Because I need to write about the 42 things I dreamt about last night</p><h1 id="b8d0">Articles to share</h1><ul><li>A piece that deserves more love: <a href="https://readmedium.com/beyond-dont-compare-yourself-to-others-9d07e137f5f6">Beyond Don’t Compare Yourself To Others</a></li><li>A creative piece: <a href="https://readmedium.com/genuine-connection-cute-squirrels-linear-illusions-peanut-butter-squid-tentacles-and-good-sleep-29149f554581">Genuine Connection, Cute Squirrels, Linear Illusions, Peanut Butter Squid Tentacles and Good Sleep</a></li><li>A piece shorter than 2 mins: <a href="https://readmedium.com/crucial-for-level-ups-6d31fc02b8c">Crucial for Level-Ups</a></li><li>An article from your favourite publication: <a href="https://readmedium.com/could-the-slowing-down-of-the-human-species-indicate-a-psychological-evolution-bff42265814a">Could the Slowing Down of the Human Species Indicate a Psychological Evolution?</a> with Age of Empathy & EIC <a href="undefined">Aimée Gramblin</a></li><li>A self-published piece: <a href="https://readmedium.com/stories-of-fighting-with-the-algorithm-and-confusions-over-the-new-updates-c73832e91195">Stories of fighting with the algorithm and confusions over the new updates</a></li></ul><p id="5230">Hi, I’m <a href="undefined">Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她)</a> and I can’t wait to see everyone’s responses!</p><p id="01c1"><b><i>Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳</i></b></p><div id="753e" class="link-block"> <a href="https://readmedium.com/alone-on-this-island-302f89666f35"> <div> <div> <h2>Alone On This Island</h2> <div><h3>one-line poem</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/1*GqSbXxnNVMtrEO6birxOCQ.jpeg)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div></article></body>

#June2021TBINInterview!

June Interview Questions with The Brain is a Noodle

Egg-cited to get to know you better!

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

A collaborative way to know fellow writers better!

A HUGE THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO TOOK THE TIME TO RESPOND TO THE MAY 2021 TBIN INTERVIEW QUESTIONS!

For those of you still interested, the questions are available here! I’ll be accepting submissions in The Brain is a Noodle until the last day of May 11:59pm (any timezone).

If you caught this too late but still want to respond, feel free to hop on this month’s interview questions, or to submit your responses to May 2020’s responses elsewhere and tag me! I’ll be happy to add it to my evergreen writer’s lift:

June interview questions will have a slightly different format, swapping out “this or that” questions to a “list your top 5” — I’m finding that writers are trapped by the all-or-nothing of two options (classic???) so I’m broadening up the questions to allow for more elaboration if you’d like!

  • 5 “full” questions
  • 5 “top 5 of [category]” lists
  • 5 “prompts” for articles to share

All responses will be tweeted under the #June2021TBINInterview tag on Twitter!

June Interview Questions

If you publish these somewhere other than TBIN, please do tag me so I can make sure I read through them! As always, would love to house them in TBIN. Also, for ease of access for others who might want to fill out this interview, feel free to include a direct link so that they can copy and paste the questions right over!

[1] As a writer, how do you come up with new ideas? How do you capture them so that they are ready when you sit down to write?

[2] On the spectrum of introvert — ambivert — extrovert, where would you place yourself? What are some reason(s) you think you might place in that position? Does it change depending on context?

[3] What is your relationship with sound? Whether you interpret this word to encompass awkward silences in interactions to the connection found through music, take us on a journey on how you relate to the external world through this sense.

*For Deaf or hard of hearing folks, feel free to adapt the question to another sense, share your perspectives on understanding sound through other elements, or to skip the question altogether — whichever is most comfortable to you.

[4] How has your culture or context shaped your beliefs about relationships and what they “should” look like? How much do you subscribe to those expectations?

[5] What is one food that reminds you of childhood?

Top fives!

  • Who are 5 of your favourite musicians/ bands?
  • What are your top 5 favourite fruits?
  • What are your top 5 least favourite vegetables?
  • What are 5 times in your life where you wish you took more time to celebrate?
  • What are 5 reasons that get you out of bed each morning?

Articles to share

  • A piece that deserves more love
  • A creative piece
  • A piece shorter than 2 mins
  • An article from your favourite publication
  • A self-published piece

My responses!

[1] As a writer, how do you come up with new ideas? How do you capture them so that they are ready when you sit down to write?

My mind is almost always running so I have a system of having my phone on me and emailing myself a thought, however scattered, to myself so I can later elaborate on it.

When I check email at the end of the day, I either add it to my medium workflow list (in a google sheet) or discard it if it’s too incoherent. (Some thoughts were just never meant to be, and that’s okay).

Sometimes, tweets that were thoughts that randomly came into my head gain traction as others interact with it, share their perspectives. If the conversation is something I want to think more deeply about at a later time, I bookmark it on Twitter and make a plan to write about it.

[2] On the spectrum of introvert — ambivert — extrovert, where would you place yourself? What are some reason(s) you think you might place in that position? Does it change depending on context?

I really want to hear the response to this question because I added the “context” aspect for a reason! I always thought of myself as an ambivert (or somewhere between introvert and ambivert). Even in new situations I can be talkative with new people. I considered myself an ambivert because while all of my friends were definitely introverts, I was the most extroverted of them all. I was usually the one to speak up, check-in; if there were awkward silences, I did the social maneuvering to try and make others more comfortable in sharing their thoughts.

This all changed when I got to grad school, where suddenly, against a backdrop of extroverts, I suddenly become the shyest, most quiet woman in the room. I’m used to shared space in conversation, where there were adequate spaces for each to share their thoughts. There was a rhythm to that kind of conversation. Here, it was a lot of people talking and talking over others, and the only way to score participation marks in class was to interrupt others before they could finish their sentences. Your thoughts would inevitably be interrupted before you were done.

My only explanation for this all is that I’m an ambivert, somewhere in the middle, and in contrast with who I am, despite never really changing how I interacted with others, I was labelled differently based on the “dominant” context.

Interesting? I think so.

Save for the interrupting. Not a huge fan of that.

[3] What is your relationship with sound? Whether you interpret this word to encompass awkward silences in interactions to the connection found through music, take us on a journey on how you relate to the external world through this sense.

*For Deaf or hard of hearing folks, feel free to adapt the question to another sense, share your perspectives on understanding sound through other elements, or to skip the question altogether — whichever is most comfortable to you.

Awkward silences: I used to be fairly comfortable with awkward silences because I usually had them with people I knew, and the awkward silence signified that they were having trouble saying something they wanted, or expressing something difficult, but it was not a rejection of me.

Now, it’s more of a mixed experiences, with awkward silences being a tangible rejection and moving on from anything I’ve suggested, icing me out of conversations that I’ve tried really hard to accommodate others on.

Which is why it’s so interesting that an awkward silence, something sometimes used to disconnect from others or to communicate discomfort, is sometimes otherwise art. John Cage’s 4'33 is a musical piece of pure silence for 4'33. Before mindfulness and meditation became a part of the zeitgeist, this was my first encounter of needing to sit with silence.

Yet music, from the soft pianissimos to the brazen fortes communicate connection and acceptance.

[4] How has your culture or context shaped your beliefs about relationships and what they “should” look like? How much do you subscribe to those expectations?

Timeline — All the cultures I’m exposed to still have a strong narrative of date, get married, have kids, (some other stuff), die. Academic culture has really interrupted that, coming straight from the other side with the expectation that if you were truly dedicated to your research, you would not have kids.

This comes in the form of assuming that parents who choose to have kids who don’t have the same kind of publication output in the year that they birth out a human being is a self-inflicted consequence that means that the person carrying the child isn’t as rigorous a researcher as their non-child- carrying/rearing counterparts. Academics who choose to have kids are shamed in academia; academics who don’t choose to have kids are shamed outside of academia for choosing to wait until graduate school is complete, etc.

剩女 was also a term that was thrown around a while back. This term literally means “leftover women”, referring to women who are nearly thirty or thirty and above who are unmarried. Needless to say, I fought back hard on that even in my teens, my early twenties. As I now realize that I officially fall into this category, 27, I am fighting back against pressure from elders to get married.

Relative to another generation who had gotten married by default (which sometimes works out, sometimes not!), I find that my generation is thinking hard before signing up for marriage and/or kids. Each involve financial and emotional responsibilities that we’re now thinking deeply about and evaluating before committing. In my opinion, rather than being irresponsible and not following this pre-determined timeline of popping out a new generation, we’re a healing generation trying to ensure that wounds perpetuated by parents who rushed too quickly into marriage and parenting do not perpetuate for another cycle.

[5] What is one food that reminds you of childhood?

Hot dog buns (cheung jai bao). Hong Kong-style bakeries carry a variety of portable buns and pastries, and my favourite had to either be the famous bolobao (“pineapple bun”) or hot dog buns.

The bread portion of the cheung jai bao is sweeter than the average bread, wrapped around a sausage. It’s basically a clumsy-proof hot dog where the sausage is securely snug inside the bread (not innuendo y’all this is my childhood) such that I cannot yeet (I mean squeeze out) the sausage on to the floor.

This is really key. I have lost many hot dog sausages in the American-style open-bun hot dogs. My friend shares that once, a pigeon stole the whole sausage from her mom’s hot dog in a single swoop. That is all to say, we need better sausage protection on American-style street hot dogs and we need them now 😅😂

Top fives!

  • Who are 5 of your favourite musicians/ bands?

IU (Lee Ji Eun) Janice Vidal Kina Grannis Blackpink Itzy

  • What are your top 5 favourite fruits?

Avocados Mangoes Blueberries Tangerines Durian

  • What are your top 5 least favourite vegetables?

Tomatoes (uncooked, eaten like an apple) Corn (on the cob) (I actually really like vegetables??? Can’t think of anymore)

  • What are 5 times in your life where you wish you took more time to celebrate?

Getting my MSc → I didn’t celebrate it because there was so much going on and I wish I’d gone back and properly honoured that moment.

Every time I did well on a test → While humility is important (and I really hated the people who went around being like, what did you get on this test, oh? that’s too bad because I got an A and wanted to be as conceptually different from them as possible), I wish I took the time to privately, or with close friends, celebrate smaller successes.

Getting out of an abusive relationship → It’s reasonable I didn’t get the time to celebrate because honestly a lot of the first months were just about safety planning and making sure there wasn’t any retaliation; and then the next year and a half was about healing from 20 years of trauma and trying to find the right therapist. I think now is the time to really honour that milestone now that I’m far enough out to not constantly be in fight or flight mode!

Cooking a good meal → Cooking is such an adventure and so rewarding in itself, but sometimes I cook up a storm and then sit in front of TV to enjoy the meal. While that’s fun in a different way, I want to start having separate experiences where I also make the time to cook up a storm, (once it’s safe again), share it with friends and just chat over amazing food.

PUTTING TOGETHER MY IKEA TROLLEYS → I’ve finally received my Ikea trolleys. It was such a hectic week that I didn’t really get to document or journal the process! Both were so fun to put together and every time I step into my main living space my heart beats in joy because the BOOKS are on SHELVES and not ON THE FLOOR

  • What are 5 reasons that get you out of bed each morning?

Breakfast Fear of disappointing others Have to put food on the table for breakfast Getting to see my partner’s face Because I need to write about the 42 things I dreamt about last night

Articles to share

Hi, I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I can’t wait to see everyone’s responses!

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

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