April 2nd, a proper introduction?

So what the heck is BEDA, you might be asking yourselves (especially if you're my Twitter peeps or real-life friends who don't self-identify as nerdfighters).

BEDA is Blog Every Day April, a ... ummm... an .... I don't know what to call it... a movement created by young-adult author Maureen Johnson for people to blog every day in April. She's blogging daily herself. You can visit her blog by clicking right here. Maureen's latest book, Suite Scarlett is being released in paperback on May 1st. (Click the title to order it now.) So yeah, hundreds of people from the internet and YouTube have jumped on the bandwagon and are blogging daily. I think it's a cool thing she's doing, encouraging people to write daily, to express themselves, to be creative, and so on. So I'm happy to jump on board. Of course, it's only the 2nd. Ask me on the 17th. Or the 22nd.

So who am I? If you're not one of my real-life friends, you probably don't know. So I shall use this blog post to introduce myself.

In no particular order, I am.....

...a splicegrrl?
My username on YouTube is splicegrrl, which confuses people who know me by martha_s on Twitter, BlogTV, KPCS, and DailyBooth. My name is splicegrrl on YouTube because in my earlier career, before returning to school, I worked to preserve and restore old movies. I still do the work from time to time. I'll write about it more in a future post, because I'm passionate about film preservation and proud of the work I did in that field for a decade, even though I don't want to do it anymore. So my YouTube username is 'splice' (as in edit) 'grrl' (as in girl). It mortifies me when people misread it and think I'm a fan of the Spice Girls. It happens more than you might think.

...a YouTube addict
Yep, for reals. I'm one of those YouTube users where if I want to watch one video of someone, I feel like I have to go back and watch them all. A purist, I guess. Just in the last few months, I have finally done marathons of Toddly00 (and Toddiy00 and other associated Toddly channels), fiveawesomegirls, songsfromahat, and more that I can't remember. I appreciate that YouTube has become way more than a procrastination place for me. I'm really pleased to have found such talented musicians, artists, writers, and so on there. I'm sure I'll be plugging my favorite YouTubers here from time to time, which actually leads beautifully into my next paragraph...

...a nerdfighter
If you don't know what this means, click here and start from the beginning. You'll be better for it, and I mean it.

...a ridiculous fangirl
It starts out with me just enjoying someone's videos or enjoying someone's work, and then eventually, I pass some fangirl threshold, some invisible line, where I realize that I have become a ridiculous fangirl. I can't help myself, and by the time I realize it, it's always too late. I wish I play it cool and detached and all blase, but it's nearly impossible for me. Instead, I'm enthusiastic, glowing, even gushing. I think that kind of freaks people out. (Or at least it's my hang-up that it freaks people out.) When Gene Siskel died (how many of you remember him?), I swore to myself that I would from then on express my appreciation to people whose work I admire, if the opportunity presented itself. And in this day of YouTube comments, blogs, and Twitter, the opportunity is right there, so who I am I not to seize it? Maybe I just seize it a little too hard. I have fangirled over many, but right now, I'm fangirling fairly ridiculously over Wheezy Waiter and Cute With Chris, who are both so talented, it actually makes me sick. You will hear about them both a lot here, I'm sure, so please indulge me.

...a budding anthropologist
I'm a graduate student. I'm getting my Ph.D in Medical Anthropology. I study the anthropology of genocide. More specifically, I'm studying a wave of mass killings that took place in Indonesia in 1965, during which half a million to a million people were killed over the course of just a few months in a purge of suspected Communists. After the killings, which were organized by the government but carried out by civilians against their neighbors and family members, any talk of the bloodbath was suppressed by the government. So people returned to their everyday lives, their normal routines, after their worlds had been transformed into total chaos. Many Indonesians lived side by side with neighbors who had murdered their family members. They weren't allowed to publicly discuss this period of their history until 1998, when Suharto fell. In my research, I'm exploring how the violence of that time emerges in daily life now, looking at the cultural effects of this genocide, looking at what "normal" resembled in the wake of these killings. I am finishing my third year of grad school now and plan to begin my dissertation research in Indonesia at some point during the next six months. And I'll be there for a long time for my research. It's all scary and exciting and anxiety-making, but also incredibly important work to me.

I'll do ...a tv junkie and ...a movie nut in future posts, because this has gotten quite long already, and I know many of you have many more blogs to read before you sleep. I know I do.