Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers.

I was born on a really cold Sunday afternoon in January 1981, one day later than expected. When Mom and I left the hospital, Dad forgot to bring clothes for me - both of us were out of sorts, I think; he's usually more preparedthan a Boy Scout and I'm usually early for everything. I was always very quiet; I learned to read at age three and was addicted to books even before that, so with no other kids my age in the neighborhood and no siblings, I spent most of my time with adults or alone. That made reading the perfect hobby and the library my second home. If I had friends at any given point, they were all just as ostracized as I was. But then, living in a dorm years later, I electively became a hermit because I couldn't stand the "normal" people.

After attending a local public school through fifth grade, my parents forced me to "agree" to try Catholic school. It was slightly more rigorous but really not that much of an improvement in the end. My all-girl Catholic high school lacked in math and science. They told us we could be anything we wanted, but those subjects were too hard. I fought with the guidance counselors and then (at the suggestion of a mentor from outside school) finally enrolled in community college classes to learn C++. I also wound up being one of only two people to take the Advanced Placement test in calculus, even though it wasn't until very recently that I began truly appreciating math.

The summer after I graduated, I got a summer job at my present employer. I was a computer repair technician. It was fun, but the best part was that my dad - who worked in another department in the same building - was finally treating me like an equal...at least after the morning carpool together and before the afternoon carpool. I went on to work in a chemical engineering team the next year, which I hated mostly because of a very rigid and intolerant supervisor, and then was picked up by a simulation team where I am now as a full co-op. I love my team and I love my work. Often this summer there hasn't been much to do, but I'd never want to transfer before graduation. After graduation, I'm thinking someplace warmer.

College was at the same time both wonderful and intimidating. My grades took a nosedive, but were still good enough to win me admission into two engineering honors societies, Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. Dad still tells me that I will never graduate as an engineer, but I think those credentials speak more loudly than the fact that I failed differential equations the first time around. I am currently a senior in computer engineering and expect to graduate following Fall Semester 2003.

My fellow students generally don't "get" me, or I them, but I've met a lot of people online. That included my ex-fiance, Jake, who gets mentioned a lot in my older entries, and his successor. Back in April I finally decided it was better to be alone than in a dead relationship and simply fearing being alone, and it was remarkably liberating. I was hoping to find a girlfriend,but the prospects were slim. An embarrassingly short time later, a malefriend of mine finally got me to realize that the two of us would make a good couple and now I'm engaged again. This time, though, I'm far happier.

Another series of big changes during college came with respect to religion. For a number of reasons I no longer considered myself Roman Catholic; after finding more information on Wicca I converted to that, but it didn't last long. I then started researching the religions of my ancestors and found a great deal to like in a religion I had initially rejected some time before, Asatru. My fiance is also Asatruar, having converted after some lengthy (and occasionally fairly pointed) discussions about religion and the nature of the universe. Ironically, when we met he was studying to become a missionary priest to Japan!

Right now I'm back at work for the summer and overeagerly waiting my return to campus, when I will have a new apartment I can occupy year- round...not to mention an Internet connection free from the intrusions of a nosy parent who thinks instant messenging is a great way to pick up stalkers. I had five roommates in the course of three years, most of them nightmares, and the last one - who was actually very nice - is moving in with some friends so now I get to try my luck with roommate #6.

Why did you choose this username?

My user name, ShaninOMS, is a composite of two references to my sci-fi addiction. Shanin (pronounced SHAY-nihn) Betandi is an old character from some fanfiction whom I adapted for an original sci-fi saga I'm trying to write, Shadowknight. Unfortunately I haven't gotten very far with it, even though I know most of the storyline already. The OverMind System, or OMS, is a piece of technology from the original Bubblegum Crisis anime series. Not too long before I started keeping a diary online, my friend Sanna referred to herself as Over Dramatic Sanna and abbreviated it ODS. I with my control freak habits replied back to her as OverMind Shanin, and it stuck in the user name even though the only other place I wound up using it was an old EzBoard user name, ShadowOMS (with the Shadow being for Shadowknight).

Why do you keep a diary online?

A high school friend of a friend got a diary here and e-mailed the link to me. I checked it out, said cool, and signed up. I really didn't think about it much back then, except I think a marginal aside that it would be a nice way to keep my old friends updated even though we never see each other. It's become a lot more; aside from venting and the compulsive desire to catalog everything I did on a given day, it's allowed me to reflect on things more than I otherwise would. The character of Gordon Way in Douglas Adams's novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency reminds me of myself a lot. He would call people to go over ideas because he thought better when he was talking, to the point where he'd often leave half hour long answering machine messages...and then send his secretary over the next day to collect the tape so that he could remember the ideas he had. That's me with anything text-based: the diary, e- mail, IM's, or whatever else I can use without someone telling me to just shut up.

How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours? I am especially curious about the tarot cards chosen for the layout. Why these two particular cards?

I usually don't judge a great deal by a layout unless it's a template. I tend not to read template diaries unless they belong to people I actuallyknow; it's a bit of a turnoff. I've wrestled with several layouts for my own diary and usually fallen short of what I really wanted, so I do have respect for diarists whose layouts look like they took a lot of time and tweaking (custom scrollbar colors just right, everything very coordinated, fits on the page neatly and intuitively) but I won't hold everyone to that standard. :) I really wanted to do something in the 3D graphics programs I play with in my spare time, but that never panned out so I decided to replace my prior layout (which had poor color contrast that made things hard to read, and apparently looked awful in Netscape due to HTML tags only supported in IE) with scans of one of my Tarot decks.

The Norse Tarot is an out-of-print deck from Great Britain, and I managed to snag a copy on EBay last winter. I've never used it; I typically use the runes rather than Tarot, and before I learned the runes well enough I was used to the Faery Wicca deck. (My copy of that one is much...erm, loved. Yes, that's the word. Not "abused." I'm afraid to love my out-of-print deck...) The cards on my archive page are my patron, Odin, and the goddess Freyja. I thought Freyja was also a patron for a long time, and I still do have a close relationship with her. Historically she's also been the goddess I identify with most within my pantheon, although I've finally started to appreciate Frigga as well.

One of the cards on the main page portrays the Norns, who are similar to the Greek Fates (but with more implication of free will - they simply deal out the consequences of one's actions). They've also been fairly important to me, especially in my experimentation with shamanistic magic. The other card, the Princess of Cups, I chose on the basis of its meaning in the actual Tarot. Unfortunately I don't have my book on that deck in an easily reachable spot - most of my nonessential belongings are still packed up and will be until I return to campus in the fall - and I've mostly forgotten what little I learned about Tarot before moving on to a different system.

In this entry, you mention that you didn't know what gay was until your grandmother explained it to you. What brought about this conversation and how did it change things for you?

I don't remember what it was we were talking about, probably something in the news about gay rights, and she just asked if I knew what it meant. When I said no, she explained in the most simple and "clean" terms possible, and my first gut reaction was a lot like that of a younger child regarding kissing or other means of cootie transmission. That was the end of the conversation. Unfortunately the word "bisexual" didn't enter my personal dictionary until a long time even after that, and I spent a lot of time denying I was. After I got to college I felt a bit freer to express myself though, if only in words, and gave up trying to lie to myself. I "have" to lie to enough people to finish my degree without bloodshed.

You're an engineering student, which gives you a huge background in math and science, yet you are also a very spiritual person, basing some of your beliefs in literature and mythology. Do you ever find conflict between these two facets of your life or do you see them working together?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the intersection of science, applied science (engineering), and religion, so that's one question I'm well equipped to answer. One good book on the particular subject of evolution and religion is Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God. He makes some Judeo-Christian assumptions I don't share, but mentally removing those makes his arguments even stronger.

Evolution is the part of science that tends to generate the most furor with respect to any sort of belief, but a figurative reading of the closest thing my religion has to sacred texts, the Eddas, would support the implication of evolution; I don't see that as contradictory to my beliefs. I have to agree with Douglas Adams (in his last book, The Salmon of Doubt), who said that the idea of a god who made the universe just to fit us is kind of like a puddle of water being amazed at the fact that the ground around it fits it perfectly, and therefore concluding that the hole in the ground must have been made specifically for it. Science has pointed out to us, rather bluntly, that we are not the center of the universe and shedding beliefs that assume we are has been a difficult process for me. But it doesn't have to be that humanity was deliberately made and intended to be the end product of the universe, in order for life to have meaning and to believe that the gods, or a god, likes the way we turned out.

As far as taking applied science, in the form of engineering, and mixing it with religious practices that include offering drinks to the gods by pouring the liquid out near the base of a tree, it's a lot less contradictory in spirit than it might look. My patron is Odin, who is a god of consciousness and knowledge as well as a warrior and wanderer. Squeezing every drop of usefulness out of modern technology and trying to advance it even further has become yet another act of devotion for me: if attempting to know pure science is, as Stephen Hawking put it, attempting to know "the mind of God" then using science is bringing the gods into one's life just as surely as knowing and living by the Eddas is. (I believe that a great deal can be inferred about what is expected of us by the structure of our universe, including free will and the fact that the universe keeps going in a mostly predictable fashion while eluding total understanding.) The idea of a unified (but necessarily incomplete) world-concept including physics, biology, psychology, and the metaphysical is something that excites me terribly and that I'm hoping to work toward as I continue both academic and religious studies.

I know it's all connected somehow. Otherwise, why would the symbol for a dependent current source look like a combination of two runes (Teiwaz inside Inguz)? ;) As I mentioned in a couple of entries, that amusing coincedence cost me some time and attention in an electrical engineering class last year... And I still swear anything on the EE level is magic as far as I'm concerned.

You talk quite a bit about role play. What first drew you to role play and why do you continue? Do you base characters on yourself or do you create entirely new personas each time? Which of your characters (either current or past) is your favorite and why?

As I mentioned in my bio, I did some live action stuff in grade school without knowing it, typical children's play. But I got introduced to serious roleplay by my friend Joe "Shatterclaw" Markese. We were both members of an ElfQuest/Mirror Trek crossover, which was more of a fanfiction club, when I mentioned having bought the first tape of the new Bubblegum Crisis anime. (Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040, a reworking of the original 1980's BGC series.) He'd suggested it to me, and when he heard that he proposed starting a new RPG based on an old game he'd done using the original BGC. I, not knowing what I was getting into, accepted. That was my first "real" roleplaying experience. The game started in January 2000, and the game's still going. It's also where I met my fiance, Shaun.

I love both writing and roleplaying for the same reasons, although I rarely get to put as much time into writing. Getting into the minds of the characters and feeling the way they do is highly addictive. Partly it's the freedom, but mostly it's the ability to become whatever I like for a brief while and then put it away. After being denied acceptance of who I really am by so many, being liberal with those masks lets me have a little more of the approval I never got before. With the BGC campaign there's also a lot of healthy competition between the gamemasters (including myself), who are always out to surprise and annoy each other. That can be a lot of fun, especially when I own the two most hated characters in the game.

Most of my characters have a little bit of me in them but aren't really me...and the funny thing is, the one who's "me from the inside out" as I usually say (Steve Shang, a cyborg hacker with two pet robotic kittens named Pixel and Niamh) is one of those two universally hated characters. I'm trying to indulge more in being like him, letting my inside show, but ironically enough my fellow players actually seem to approve of it when the real me is the one acting that way.

No matter who I pick as my favorite, I'm going to get beaten up by at least one of the voices in my head. I guess I'll go for one I really miss, Shanin Betandi. She is an android (usually) who was raised in a warrior society but typically leaves and becomes a mercenary or joins another empire's military. I've used her in various forms in several RPG's, including two Star Trek ones that are still running but going at a very slow pace, and my huge uncompleted sci-fi saga revolves mostly around the exploits of her and a small handful of others whom she meets after leaving her homeland. She was the first original character I created and in her pure form is what I then wanted to be. My ambitions have changed a bit but I still dearly wish that I could spend more time on her.

As you know, at Interview, we always finish with one fun question. If you could be any comic character (either from comic strips or comic books), which one would you be? Why?

I read a lot of webcomics and as much manga as I can afford, so there are a lot of tempting choices here as well. It might be fun to become Jordan from Exploitation Now, but I don't want to lose my arm and have government agents chasing me. ;) Using the excuse that there actually was some Bubblegum Crisis manga, even though it was primarily anime, I think I'm going to have to choose Sylia Stingray. To be honest, I'm literally in love with both versions of her, although I think I'd rather be the original one. She is the leader of a high-tech vigilante team, but pretends to be a store owner as her cover. (I wouldn't mind having the store either. *giggle*) After her father was killed by the company he worked for, she received a copy of his research and made powered armor suits to combat the robotic technology his company was exploiting. In addition to her technical skills she's highly intelligent and a strong, businesslike leader. (The last point isn't really true in the newer version; she's prettier but has mood swings and is a bit unreliable.)

Interviewed by Piper

most recently:

12:46 p.m.
2002-11-11
shaninoms

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