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Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers. Okay. I was born on July 4, 1979, American Independence Day, in Homestead AFB, Florida. My dad was in the army for 24 years before he got out when I was 17. We didn't move around as much as other military families, and I spent about 8 years in Hawaii, which is where I say I'm from, it's also where my mom is from and her side of the family. I have a 15 year old brother and a 7 year old sister. When she's 15, I'll be 30! I'm half Puerto Rican (Dad) and half Korean (Mom). I have a lot of cultural pride. I graduated from LSU in May with a useless BA in English Lit and an equally useless minor in Theater. I'm bipolar and overweight. And I complain quite a bit, and my mom says I'm an intellectual snob, but I say that I have standards. I currently live in Louisiana, in Leesville the town that I went to high school in, and I'm quite eager to get out, as no one here has standards it seems. I'm positively itching to get away from here and from my family. Oh and my favorite color is purple, my favorite ice cream is Ben and Jerry's Phish Food, my favorite tv shows are the Law and Orders, and I have 4 tattoos on my lower legs. Why did you choose this username? It comes from the last 2 words of my favorite quote from the book Lolita by Nabokov. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin my soul. . . . She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning . . . but in my arms she was always Lolita." Voila, instant username. It was my AIM name first then I chose it when I started my diary. It gets me all kinds of disgusting google hits, let me tell you. Why do you keep a diary online? I started keeping a diary online when a friend suggested it to me, knowing that I like to write. It started for me as a place that my friends could go to see what I've been up to. I used to write obscenely long mass emails to let people know what i was feeling, doing, thinking. It was getting ridiculous, and I have the sinking feeling that people would just delete them. So I figured people could just go to the diary if they were interested. Then the diary morphed into a way for me to express myself and learn about myself. It is a place of introspection for me. Then it sort of shifted again into a way for me to meet new people, and I also used it as a spring board for my pet project The Closet. How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours? It's moderately important. When I read a really good diary with a crappy layout it just makes me want to help them get a good layout. I think that the diary should be as beautiful to look at as it is to read. It doesn't take away from the quality of the writing, it's just like a bonus, a little extra for being so wonderful. A really great layout can't make up for poor writing, you look at it once, it's great, then you move on cause nothing keeps you there. My own layout is pretty old. I've never changed it. I got rid of the template, then I switched the colors, it used to be a purple background with gray letters. The tarot cards at the top are from The Mythic Tarot Deck. The only deck that I own. I'm very fond of them and I think that they represent me perfectly. The High Priestess represents me, she's both dark and light, and she is the yin yang of the deck. Plus they're so pretty. The layout has become linking in my mind to the essence of my diary, and I couldn't imagine changing it. Describe what inspired you to invite other diarylanders to "come out of the mental illness closet". What kind of response did your invitation generate? I was roaming around the diaries and i was struck by the sheer amount of mentally ill people. A great deal of them would talk about how no one understood them and how terribly lonely they were. And I thought about how I had never even met another bipolar person until diaryland. It was interesting to read about other people's experiences. And I thought about how much easier it would be to be able to go to one place instead of hunting around looking for someone like me. So I started The Closet. It was my "no stigma" effort. I was quite surprised at the turn out. I didn't think so many people read me in the first place. But it was like one person who read me saw my Call to Arms, wrote about it in their diary, someone who read them saw their entry and then submitted one of their own and so on. I started the Mental Illness diary ring, and I have a huge list of members. It's startling. Then I was getting so many submissions I decided to take advantage of the public diary option and i had a friend design it for me, and now people can go to The Closet and submit as often as they like, read other people's submissions, and take advantage of some of the links I've provided. It's my pet project. I love it, and I'm glad everytime someone submits. Though it is heartening to see the people who suffer, it's great to know that they feel comfortable coming out of the closet, and perhaps helping someone else with their expressions. How did you become an English major? I was a psych major first, but I didn't want to take the statistics classes. Then I became an English major with a Writing and Culture concentration. Then I saw all the rhetoric classes that I would have to take and switched to Literature. I couldn't imagine not learning about literature. Poetry, short stories, novels, plays, writing in general. It's so rich. It also has many of the aspects of psychology, my first major. Literature encompasses so many ideas and theories. I didn't want to spend 4 years of my life struggling in something that only minorly interested me. And my parents didn't want me to be a theater major (I minored instead) cause i wouldn't have anything to "fall back on." I just wanted to be happy, and now I'm unemployed. Go figure. But I still feel that no matter what I choose to do my literature background will give me grounding and perspective. Which archetype would best describe you? Ooh, this is a good question. I am the Scholarly Warrior. Not exactly a textbook archetype, but I think it's fitting. I'm constantly trying to learn from things and from experiences, but I also have to fight and be strong in order to survive. You get to pick one person to invite you in for cocoa, and this time, it'll actually happen! Who would it be? I could say Angelina Jolie and then listen to everyone groan about my predictable answer, but I won't. I would want a perfect stranger to invite me in for cocoa (this is with the understanding that this person is not a serial killer rapist cannibal). Someone with different experiences from me so that we could talk all day and learn from each other. Interviewed by GingerBug
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