I just met CMOT Dibbler for coffee yesterday over on Granville Island here in Vancouver, and I enjoyed it so much it occurred to me that we haven't had a thread for a while where babblers had a few words to say about themselves. I thought we might have a thread where babblers get a chance to round out their anonymous handles a bit so we have more to go on than the usual entrenched ideologies, political impermeablities and hackneyed shibboleths (okay that's just me).
Here are some older threads we had along these lines:
I'll go first:
I'm a PhD candidate in English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I study and teach early twentieth-century literature. For the last two years I have been volunteerin/teaching humanities as part of a non-credit program offered by UBC to students in compromised social and economic situations, many of whom are residents in Vancouver Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
I was born in London, Ontario and moved to Montreal when I was twenty, where I lived for almost ten years. Before going back to school in my mid twenties, I worked as a short-order cook and in the lumber industry. I lived in Edinburgh for two years before moving to Vancouver a couple of years ago. I'm in my early-middle thirties, I've been married for a few years and I'm expecting my first child in less than a month. Politically and professionally I consider myself a socialist and a Marxist. I was born to a silver miner's daughter from Timmins and a Kitchener orphan, both of whom became high school teachers and eventually principals. I make beer, I garden, I play bad chess and passable soccer and I am an extraordinary dancer. Both my sisters are professional musicians, which means they are quite poor.
I found babble through Audra's (the first moderator of babble), now-defunct personal website and discussion board, marigoldzine.com. Although I never met her, I used to hang with some of her old friends who introduced me to her website. I joined to ask a question about proportional representation (which I'm sure Wilf Day promptly answered) and never looked back.
Your turn!