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helenorvanaI don't remember if I ever did a who-I-am post back when I first got this thing, but since I'm going to try and use this a little more often (my journalling on-off phases last years sometimes), I figured it's probably due for a revamped post in any case. There's a condensed version of this in my profile, jsyk.
About RL Me
I'm in my mid-twenties, about to graduate from university with baby's first bachelor degree! (My sister has two now, I felt the clarification was necessary.) My major is political science, though I never actually want to work in politics, and I'm minoring in Spanish despite the fact that I lose pretty much all of it every summer. I also have an associate's in commercial photography and completed the training for massage therapy, though I never got certified or licensed (very expensive). Despite this, I don't really want to work as either a therapist or a photographer? My favorite kind of photography is studio portraiture, but equipment and studio space is also expensive, and also I really don't like people very much. I'm incredibly shy and super socially anxious, so jobs that require lots of interactions with strangers is Not Conducive To A Happy Life for me. Ideally, I'd work in a cubicle where the people I most interact with on a daily basis are my co-workers.
As far as non-professional things, I've started to really get into crafting things as a form of stress-relief? I've been crocheting for about a year now (taught myself via Youtube tutorials), and I've inherited the lion's share of my recently-passed grandmother's yarn stash (after my oldest sister went through and raided all of the really soft yarns), so I've been crocheting up a storm this summer. It started initially as something to do with my hands while I listened to podcasts (also as something to justify the presence of a recliner in my dorm room, ngl), and since then I've made at least 12 baby blankets (and a beanie), with three other projects in progress ^^;; One of these days I'll pick up knitting, I'm sure, and I'm also eager to reteach myself cross-stitch. I don't have a sewing machine right now, but eventually I'll probably start quilting (or at least making clothes that actually fit me properly!) - basically I'm going to turn into my grandmother at the tender age of before-thirty, oh well.
I also love to draw, though it's sometimes hard to be motivated for that, and I write original fic occasionally. My favorite part of writing is the world-building that goes into it, in particular map-making and naming conventions :)
About Fandom Me
My biggest fandom introductions were via anime/manga, and from there I bounced around through the Big Fandoms (Harry Potter, SGA, Supernatural, Avengers, etc) until I ended up here, not really watching any scripted TV anymore but apparently super sucked into this hockey thing? I have written fic before, and done art, and recorded podfic, but I'm not great on time commitments or writing stories that use other people's characters (I'm Bad at maintaining established characterization, yo), so the majority of my fandom participation is via tumblr reblogs and twitter flailing. I will beta occasionally, but again, not great with time commitments and quick turn-around, and also I'll tend to either do straight SPAG or full-on revision suggestions, the latter of which are rarely appreciated when it's within a week or two of posting for a challenge ^^;;
This journal will be largely non-fannish, mostly because the format isn't all that conducive to the sort of fandom I do (quick-burst flailing, usually). I'll post completed works (or at least links to them) here, and the rare longer meta, but if you want to interact with me fannishly, your best bets are on tumblr (where it will mostly be in the form of reblogs) or twitter (where you can actually talk to me and I'll talk back!).
Hockey fandom-wise, my biggest ship is Sid/Geno, though (until the recent news about Patrick Kane came to light) I was glad I was also able to ship Kane/Toews, since if nothing else, it meant there would almost always be new quality fic for a pairing I was interested in every day on AO3 or tumblr, even if it wasn't the pairing I was most interested in. I'll also read just about any pairing featuring Beau Bennett, Literal Hockey Sunshine of My Heart, although I could weirdly never really ship him with Robert Bortuzzo, which was his main ship. And both of the two people I was mostly likely to con other people to ship him with just got traded/left via free agency this summer :(((
The two most popular ships for the Jackets are Cam Atkinson/Ryan Johansen, which is a little unfortunate as Cam's face is just very hard to ship for me (purely for aesthetic reasons!) and Nick Foligno/Sergei Bobrovsky, (both of whom are firmly in the Too Married to Ship category in my brain), which makes me a little sad, but at least more people are starting to write fic for them? The Jackets ship of my heart is Boone Jenner/Ryan Murray, but I don't think any fic for them exists beyond what a friend's written for me a handful of times :(((((((((
About Sports Me
I'm not - or at least I used to think I'm not - the biggest sports person, honestly. I played basketball and soccer growing up, and I refereed and even coached the latter (assistant coach for a rec league team, but it technically counts!), but I've never really like watching sports unless it was the Olympics? Or diving, I'm always a sucker for diving except for the part where their heads are clearing the platform *shudder*. But I read an amazing J2 football fic that made football suddenly make sense, and I started watching it religiously the next season. Consequently, my two favorite teams are the Seahawks (closest I get to a hometown team, since I've never actually lived somewhere that had a professional major league sports team) and the New Orleans Saints, since they were the reigning Superbowl champions at the time and I'm such a sucker for an underdog story.
The problem(s) with football is that they have a very short season, their teams are enormous to the point of you can really only know a couple players on your team without becoming (for me, at least) unhealthily obsessed, and also have all the free time to dedicate to figuring out who the fuck these people are, and their off-season is Very Long. The last part's the kicker for me, since my attention span is notoriously short, and it was just too long for me to stick with it that first off-season. I'll still catch the occasional game, and I can at least follow what's going on even with it muted (which is more than I can say for tennis), but I'm really not invested in it anymore.
The same cannot be said for hockey, however. I largely discovered it via some favorite authors suddenly posting all of these hockey rpf stories, and then /report had a couple episodes that talked about it, and finally I said "enough - if we're doing this, we're doing it proper-like." I watched my first game (that I cared about - I'd seen some Olympics games before, but really only cared about them because Patriotism) in early-to-mid-March of 2013, during my penultimate and busiest semester for my associate's degree. That was the semester I had three of the most-strenuous, most-work-intensive photography classes in the entire program, and also spent nearly three weeks basically bed-ridden because my immune system sucks and common colds knock me on my ass, and really the only thing that kept me sane through all that misery was watching hockey. I'll always have a special place in my heart for the Blackhawks, who won the Cup that year and the fandom for whom were one of the biggest things that drew me into the sport.
That being said, I am both a contrary creature and also a sucker for underdogs, so the bigger the Blackhawks online fandom became, the less I cared about them on principle, and I also had started hearing all these things about the Columbus Blue Jackets during that shortened season, and I'd started really pulling for them by the end. When the next season came around and I found myself still very invested in their success, I realized I'd Found The One - my One True Sports Team. That being said, I'm apparently capable of rooting for multiple sports teams at the same time, which is a problem, because my three (of a rather long list of) favorite teams are Not Only in the same conference, they are in the same division: the Blue Jackets, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the Washington Capitals. *despairs*
I'm also increasingly invested in the women's side of the sport. My CWHL affiliation is with the Calgary Inferno, both because of geography - they're the only team even remotely close to me - and also because Badass Shadow FireLady. I was fully prepared to wait and see how the Founding Four of the NWHL performed the first season before picking a team to root for, since I don't even have geography to fall back on for rooting purposes, but the NY Riveters bought me heart and soul when they signed Goalie of My Heart Nana Fujimoto, and I'm not even sorry :)))
Well! That's a lot more than I've written about myself in a long time! The t;dr version: I'm soon to graduate college, I crochet when I'm bored (which is basically all the time), most of my fandom stuff is on twitter or tumblr, and I'm super into the hockey thing right now :)
Find me places!
![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
helenorvana - best place to actually interact with me
![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
helenorvana - mostly photos of crochet projects and clouds
![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
helenorvana - most of my fandom flailing, mostly via reblogs
About RL Me
I'm in my mid-twenties, about to graduate from university with baby's first bachelor degree! (My sister has two now, I felt the clarification was necessary.) My major is political science, though I never actually want to work in politics, and I'm minoring in Spanish despite the fact that I lose pretty much all of it every summer. I also have an associate's in commercial photography and completed the training for massage therapy, though I never got certified or licensed (very expensive). Despite this, I don't really want to work as either a therapist or a photographer? My favorite kind of photography is studio portraiture, but equipment and studio space is also expensive, and also I really don't like people very much. I'm incredibly shy and super socially anxious, so jobs that require lots of interactions with strangers is Not Conducive To A Happy Life for me. Ideally, I'd work in a cubicle where the people I most interact with on a daily basis are my co-workers.
As far as non-professional things, I've started to really get into crafting things as a form of stress-relief? I've been crocheting for about a year now (taught myself via Youtube tutorials), and I've inherited the lion's share of my recently-passed grandmother's yarn stash (after my oldest sister went through and raided all of the really soft yarns), so I've been crocheting up a storm this summer. It started initially as something to do with my hands while I listened to podcasts (also as something to justify the presence of a recliner in my dorm room, ngl), and since then I've made at least 12 baby blankets (and a beanie), with three other projects in progress ^^;; One of these days I'll pick up knitting, I'm sure, and I'm also eager to reteach myself cross-stitch. I don't have a sewing machine right now, but eventually I'll probably start quilting (or at least making clothes that actually fit me properly!) - basically I'm going to turn into my grandmother at the tender age of before-thirty, oh well.
I also love to draw, though it's sometimes hard to be motivated for that, and I write original fic occasionally. My favorite part of writing is the world-building that goes into it, in particular map-making and naming conventions :)
About Fandom Me
My biggest fandom introductions were via anime/manga, and from there I bounced around through the Big Fandoms (Harry Potter, SGA, Supernatural, Avengers, etc) until I ended up here, not really watching any scripted TV anymore but apparently super sucked into this hockey thing? I have written fic before, and done art, and recorded podfic, but I'm not great on time commitments or writing stories that use other people's characters (I'm Bad at maintaining established characterization, yo), so the majority of my fandom participation is via tumblr reblogs and twitter flailing. I will beta occasionally, but again, not great with time commitments and quick turn-around, and also I'll tend to either do straight SPAG or full-on revision suggestions, the latter of which are rarely appreciated when it's within a week or two of posting for a challenge ^^;;
This journal will be largely non-fannish, mostly because the format isn't all that conducive to the sort of fandom I do (quick-burst flailing, usually). I'll post completed works (or at least links to them) here, and the rare longer meta, but if you want to interact with me fannishly, your best bets are on tumblr (where it will mostly be in the form of reblogs) or twitter (where you can actually talk to me and I'll talk back!).
Hockey fandom-wise, my biggest ship is Sid/Geno, though (until the recent news about Patrick Kane came to light) I was glad I was also able to ship Kane/Toews, since if nothing else, it meant there would almost always be new quality fic for a pairing I was interested in every day on AO3 or tumblr, even if it wasn't the pairing I was most interested in. I'll also read just about any pairing featuring Beau Bennett, Literal Hockey Sunshine of My Heart, although I could weirdly never really ship him with Robert Bortuzzo, which was his main ship. And both of the two people I was mostly likely to con other people to ship him with just got traded/left via free agency this summer :(((
The two most popular ships for the Jackets are Cam Atkinson/Ryan Johansen, which is a little unfortunate as Cam's face is just very hard to ship for me (purely for aesthetic reasons!) and Nick Foligno/Sergei Bobrovsky, (both of whom are firmly in the Too Married to Ship category in my brain), which makes me a little sad, but at least more people are starting to write fic for them? The Jackets ship of my heart is Boone Jenner/Ryan Murray, but I don't think any fic for them exists beyond what a friend's written for me a handful of times :(((((((((
About Sports Me
I'm not - or at least I used to think I'm not - the biggest sports person, honestly. I played basketball and soccer growing up, and I refereed and even coached the latter (assistant coach for a rec league team, but it technically counts!), but I've never really like watching sports unless it was the Olympics? Or diving, I'm always a sucker for diving except for the part where their heads are clearing the platform *shudder*. But I read an amazing J2 football fic that made football suddenly make sense, and I started watching it religiously the next season. Consequently, my two favorite teams are the Seahawks (closest I get to a hometown team, since I've never actually lived somewhere that had a professional major league sports team) and the New Orleans Saints, since they were the reigning Superbowl champions at the time and I'm such a sucker for an underdog story.
The problem(s) with football is that they have a very short season, their teams are enormous to the point of you can really only know a couple players on your team without becoming (for me, at least) unhealthily obsessed, and also have all the free time to dedicate to figuring out who the fuck these people are, and their off-season is Very Long. The last part's the kicker for me, since my attention span is notoriously short, and it was just too long for me to stick with it that first off-season. I'll still catch the occasional game, and I can at least follow what's going on even with it muted (which is more than I can say for tennis), but I'm really not invested in it anymore.
The same cannot be said for hockey, however. I largely discovered it via some favorite authors suddenly posting all of these hockey rpf stories, and then /report had a couple episodes that talked about it, and finally I said "enough - if we're doing this, we're doing it proper-like." I watched my first game (that I cared about - I'd seen some Olympics games before, but really only cared about them because Patriotism) in early-to-mid-March of 2013, during my penultimate and busiest semester for my associate's degree. That was the semester I had three of the most-strenuous, most-work-intensive photography classes in the entire program, and also spent nearly three weeks basically bed-ridden because my immune system sucks and common colds knock me on my ass, and really the only thing that kept me sane through all that misery was watching hockey. I'll always have a special place in my heart for the Blackhawks, who won the Cup that year and the fandom for whom were one of the biggest things that drew me into the sport.
That being said, I am both a contrary creature and also a sucker for underdogs, so the bigger the Blackhawks online fandom became, the less I cared about them on principle, and I also had started hearing all these things about the Columbus Blue Jackets during that shortened season, and I'd started really pulling for them by the end. When the next season came around and I found myself still very invested in their success, I realized I'd Found The One - my One True Sports Team. That being said, I'm apparently capable of rooting for multiple sports teams at the same time, which is a problem, because my three (of a rather long list of) favorite teams are Not Only in the same conference, they are in the same division: the Blue Jackets, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the Washington Capitals. *despairs*
I'm also increasingly invested in the women's side of the sport. My CWHL affiliation is with the Calgary Inferno, both because of geography - they're the only team even remotely close to me - and also because Badass Shadow FireLady. I was fully prepared to wait and see how the Founding Four of the NWHL performed the first season before picking a team to root for, since I don't even have geography to fall back on for rooting purposes, but the NY Riveters bought me heart and soul when they signed Goalie of My Heart Nana Fujimoto, and I'm not even sorry :)))
Well! That's a lot more than I've written about myself in a long time! The t;dr version: I'm soon to graduate college, I crochet when I'm bored (which is basically all the time), most of my fandom stuff is on twitter or tumblr, and I'm super into the hockey thing right now :)
Find me places!
helenorvana - mostly photos of crochet projects and clouds
