thesearethemeasures

Hello! I'm a young and silly girl from Canada currently studying English and trying to find a suitable creative outlet in my life. My interests include photography, hiking, cooking/baking, reading, religion and feminism (and lots of other things too). I've been writing letters and postcards for several years now and, although I love it, I've had trouble connecting with the people I've written to. I would love to make some pen pal friends so if anything I write sounds interesting, don't be afraid to send me a message and I will gladly provide my address (and gladly write back too!). Happy swapping! :)

People often ask about my favourite books because they assume that English majors are the definitive voice on what constitutes good or bad literature. The truth is that I love lots of different kinds of books, regardless of whether they could be considered as "good" or "bad". One of my most loved books is "Memoirs of a Geisha", of which I own two copies- one in English and one in French. Books like "The English Patient", "Middlesex", "The House of the Spirits" and "The Road" are all big favourites of mine; I tend to gravitate more towards recent fiction because I feel like it speaks more to me as a (post?)modern reader. I love poetry also- if you have a moment (or two), sit down and read Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning". Poems like that one really get me excited. :)

I'm absolutely a Romantic- I love the vastness and wild beauty of nature. I don't know if you've ever found yourself standing on the top of a mountain and looking out over everything and drinking the whole world in, but it really is the most sublime thing I feel like I could ever experience. There's something about this concept of vastness in nature- be it the mountains or the ocean or the prairies or whatever- that is incredibly compelling to me. So I love nature. It really is incredible to me. Beyond all that gushy nonsense, I also love music, especially old-time big band jazz music and theatre and old photographs and warm knitted clothing (I just finished my first knitted scarf recently and I am inordinately proud of it), chocolate, recipes for basically anything, veganism (I'm not vegan right now but sometimes I get the urge), dinosaurs, postcards, long skirts, pretty dresses, tea (ohmygoodness, how I love tea!), portraiture, zumba, learning about cultures and social practices, photography of any kind, oatmeal, peanut butter, letters, and mail art. If any of these things excite you then we should be friends! :)

Oops! I think I've done this out of order. Oh well. My musical tastes are kind of all over the place. For a long time I wasn't listening to anything except for podcasts (which are fabulous, by the way). Recently, however, I've started to listen to music again, and mostly female artists. Florence + the Machine has been most often played on my iPod of late, as has Joni Mitchell and some Indigo Girls/k.d. Langish stuff. Also on my iPod is: Arcade Fire, Rural Alberta Advantage, Charlie Winston, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah McLauchlan, Radiohead, etc. The list could go on forever, honestly.