Category: Personal

Nick Nicholas. You wouldn’t think it’d be that popular a name, right? And yet, I’m the SIXTH Nick Nicholas here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you the first to have registered with your name or did a homonym or namealike register before you? The Nick Nicholas’s that do show up change; there was a jazz […]

You know, I don’t exactly know why my uncle George migrated from a village in Cyprus to Sale, Victoria in 1947, to work as a carpenter in the post-war boom. I can pretty much guess though: family with seven kids, of which he was the eldest; in economic hardship; limited opportunities for work; and the […]

Three answers. When I left for the States in ’99, I did a farewell tour of my friends in Melbourne. One of the last was Russian Maria. (That’s what I called her behind her back, to differentiate her from my friend Croatian Marija, or my sister’s friend Greek Maria.) (Maria was in fact from Kharkov, […]

My Russian is rudimentary. I was a PhD student. There was another PhD student, from Moscow. She was a single mum. She did not want any unwelcome attention, so she went with the cover story that she was married, and the fella was back in Moscow. I did IT oddjobs in the department. In fact, […]

Permit me, Quorans, to introduce an Antipodean personality into this thread of woe. Permit me also to try and comprehend why we have this annoyance for no (or least no rational) reason. I mean, if you’re not from Australia, this chap looks unexceptional, doesn’t he? Raffishly unkempt, perhaps. Glasses; he could be studious! A computer […]

Originally Answered: Have you ever caught someone talking about you in another language? A2A. How many gajillion squintillion answers are there here already? No, not reading the thread. OK, answering to be neighbourly, Sofia Mouratidis. I was in Crete. I was not on my nice, cosy familiar native easternmost neck of the island, where the […]

We will never find out. My father conducted a scientific experiment at 19, to determine his answer to this question. He vaguely remembers passing out. My control issues are much too deeply embedded for me to recapitulate my father’s empiricism. Once I realise that I am affected by imbibing booze, I get annoyed enough at […]

Others on this thread have spoken to their impostor syndrome. I won’t answer with that: we are all, as Michael Masiello once put it to me, broken toys here, which correlates with us falling into our knowledge rather than training for it. I’ve never formally studied Ancient Greek, for example. I don’t say anything online […]

I wrote a poem about this scenario. In my teens, which is the right time to be pondering such a scenario. The final verse of said poem is: Ni iris — laborejen. Malkontraŭ la malbeno. We went — to the office. Un-against the un-blessing. I’d like to think that’s still my answer. But it’s not. […]