(no subject)

[heidi]

Spent midday at PoA with sff_corgi, like_bunnies and Jenna Who Has No LJ And Also Wore Pink (We Didn't Plan It). I think when tabithajones and I go next week, I will bring a magrarita.

Gacked, variously:


There's a huge chunk of you out there whose LJs I read every day - but in a lot of cases, I don't know how old a lot of you are, or where you live, or basic, normal things.

This is the problem with LJ - we all think we are so close, and while we know about the day-to-day, there's still a lot we don't know about each other. So let's rectify it.

I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. I promise, I will not make fun of you, or say who asked what; I won't divulge any social security numbers and stuff, but I'll try to answer everything - personal, fandom - whatever.

I then invite you to do the same. Remember, seriously basic stupid questions, don't be embarrassed, you would be really shocked what I don't know about you.

---

Also, do you like my new default icon? It's all thanks to friede! Look! I'm pink!

Comments

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

It'll be eight years in October - I was only 25 when we got married, and only 23 when we met. Man, I was insanely young.

And the sidekick is really what helps, more than time management...

[aome.livejournal.com]

What is your middle name?
What prompted you to move (back?) to Miami when you were done with school?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

It's Ileana. Pronounced eye-lean-ah

And I didn't move back to Miami until I'd spent about three years in NYC after finishing law school. I loved the city, but Aaron and I were ready to start a family, and we didn't want to raise kids in NYC, in part because his parents were moving out west and we didn't want to have *no* family in the area. So we looked at DC (where we have a lot of aunts, uncles & cousins) and Miami, and Miami just made more sense. So we moved!

[1anonymous1.livejournal.com]

ummm, was there ever a set amount of kids you wanted to have?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

We've always planned to have two, and now that we have two, we're happy stopping with two.

[ninegal.livejournal.com]

Hmm. What's one of the most embarassing things that ever happened to you?
(I won't go for the most embarassing thing since those should better stay unrevealed, usually)

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Getting a small hole ripped in the backside of my swimsuit when I was at a water park. I think I was 12 or 13. Oy.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

How old is your oldest (Harry, isn't it?)? What made you begin to read the HP books way back when (reviews, reccommendations, or did you just see the books and think they looked interesting)?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

These answers are actually interconnected.

Harry will be five this summer; I went into labour initially on July 31, but then it stopped and started again the next night.

There was actually only one HP book out in the US when I started reading them - I saw an article in the NY Times in the fall of 1998 about the series and how it was a suprise hit in the UK; since I've always read British kids books and British boarding school books (A Little Princess, Mallory Towers, Streatfeild's SHOES series), I immediately picked it up. My first US copy of SS is a third printing. I read it the first week of November, 1998, and about 24 hours after I finished reading it, I'd become pregnant with Harry. That'll be six years ago in November.

[scarfie.livejournal.com]

Is your name really Heidi?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Yes! And if you google for Heidi and "Neil Finn" and Orlando, you'll see a concert review I did back in '98!

[angelamermaid.livejournal.com]

I like the new icon!

Are you working outside of the home and fandom and FA these days?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Yes - I'm in a law office about 20 hours a week. It works well for me.

[no-remorse.livejournal.com]

Did you ever had any concerns about fandom causing you problems in real life with all the wankage going around in this fandom and your fairly visible position in it?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Well, when I started, there was no wankage. There were a few hundred people on HpfGU, and maybe a thousand fics on FFN's HP section (and back then, each chapter was a separate thing) and it was all very ickle and personal. I'd used my real name on the internet for years by that point, and I didn't see any reason not to.

But yes, I have had some problems. Back during CassieGate, Michela of Writers University emailed my law firm and asked (paraphrasing) whether it was improper and unethical for a lawyer to post things like the definition of plagiarism and the text of the copyright law on the internet. Of course, the answer is that yes, it's perfectly appropriate, and all it did was induce the head of our firm's PR department to proofread some of my FA announcements.

And later that same year, Jeff of Cassie-Stalking fame and his wife, who was then no longer a mod at GT, called Rich, who had been my boss until about a month before, when I left the law firm I'd been at to switch to a part time schedule elsewhere (there was a month where I was between firms, because I didn't want to start at the new place until the new year, and that's when the stalking happened). They told him a bunch of lies, and a few truthful things, and he told them that I hadn't done anything unethical and I believe he also said he couldn't imagine me doing anything unethical.

But they said they were going to file a bar complaint against me; the statute of limitations on such a thing has passed, and nothing has ever been filed, so I can only assume that in their posts on Writers University's boards (which are no longer up), they were lying.

[eibbil-libbie.livejournal.com]

Why did you decide to become a lawyer?

I know...Zzzzz...but that's something I'd really like to know.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Short answer?

When my then-best-friend got run over & dragged by a van across the street from my apartment in Philly while I watched and when, in the aftermath, I had reporters from the school paper, who I thought were my friends, bother me for interviews and quote me in the paper even when doing so put me at risk for disqualification from the race for class historian (which I was disqualified from anyway because of a dirty trick by a rival candidate).

Some more details - when this happened, I was a junior in college, and I had been working in TV and radio for about six years, since I was in college. I was the first intern hired by CNBC, before it even went live. After that, the guilt I'd never felt when asking friends of the injured or dying or dead "How do you feel" and "what happened?" all hit me like a tonne of bricks, and I knew I could never do that sort of thing again. In college, I briefly worked for Court TV, but once I moved away from Supreme Court coverage to actual trial-related stuff, I again felt all that guilt, and I didn't want to do that sort of thing again.

So I became an intellectual property lawyer (after briefly working for Leslie Abramson & her cocounsels, again, while I was in law school) which rarely, if ever, actually impacts real lives.

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

How do you like being a BNF in the HP-verse, and what would you change about that if you could?

[cat-mom.livejournal.com]

Um, is your icon Jason Carter? /random

[sugarjet03.livejournal.com]

What events shaped your political consciousness? Were you brought up in a liberal family, or did you come to your beliefs on your own? It was mostly due to my godmother's stong views when I was young that made me decide to be a Democrat. I was just wondering if you had a similar situation.

~Erin

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

My parents are both longtime democrats, although my mother went through this really weird Oliver North Is Great phase, but it only lasted a month or so. My mother's grandma, who I am very close to, is also very liberal, although she'd been a registered republican since voting for Eisenhower. She changed during the Clinton impeachment, because she was so revolted by the whole thing.

But it was probably watching the 1984 and 1988 debates and conventions, which I saw in their entirities because of debate class (1984) and working for the local NBC affiliate (1988) that caused me to register Democratic when I was old enough, in 1989. I fell in love with Bill Clinton during that impossibly, incomprehensibly long speech he gave at the 1988 convention, and I wrote his name in red and blue on my keds. I wish I still had them...

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

I feel like a dork to not know this, but is Harry some kind of family name? Or did you name him to honor the esteemed Mr. Potter? Or is there another story there?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Harry is named after his great grandfather Henry on Aaron's dad's dad's side. We wanted a book name, and we had to use the "H", and there's only two options for that. And we thought Holden might be a little too issue-laden, but given OotP's CAPSOCK!Harry, we're not sure there's many fewer, overall.

[tabithajones.livejournal.com]

Totally all about smuggled margaritas.

Now ... hmm ... I know how old you are, and I know where you live, so I guess I want to know if you're happy being a lawyer or if you secretly wished you did something else. Inquiring minds want to know ...

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

When the time came to choose law, it was the only reasonable thing to choose. But I do sorta wish I'd put it off for a year and worked for the Clinton campaign...

[musikologie.livejournal.com]

Where have you lived in the past, or have you always been a Floridian?

(I love this meme, I'm learning so much about everybody!)

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

In order:
Miami from 1971 - 1988
Philly from 1988-1992, with a summer in NYC, London and DC
Traveled in the summer of 1992 and then moved to...
DC, where I lived from 1992 to 1995, at which point I moved to...
New York City, where Aaron and I got a co-op and lived until 1998. Then we moved to...
Miami.

[tropes.livejournal.com]

When you were a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Journalist. But see here for why that became unrealistic when I was in college.

[likebunnies.livejournal.com]

I almost wore pink today but instead, I showed up wearing the color of a margarita. Well, sort of. Thanks for the offer of the movie and for giving me the chance to get out of this crazy place for a day! *hugs*

A question now...

Do you like living in Florida or is there someplace else you'd rather be?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Oh, I miss NYC. But I couldn't live there with kids, so I'm perfectly happy in Miami. I would love to live in DC, too, but I think I'd've been too freaked after 9.11 to continue to do so.

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

I love that picture, and I'm glad you got to icon it! It's beautifully pink.

You're a big presence in HP fandom, and it suggests that you've done this fandom-sortof-thing before. Did you? Or is it just a combination of other skills coming together here?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

When I was in law school, in 1993, I moderated the AOL Legal Folders - there were maybe two dozen posts per day.

I did other gigs for other nascient sites and projects while I was in law school, including writing a prototype ToU for a consortium of PBS stations in the summer of 1994. Then, when I graduated, I worked for the New York Times Electronic Media Company for the three months before and three months after the site launched. Just after that, I worked for Michael Wolff's media company as a semi-occasional consultant, and then was the initial Chat Mod coordinator and trainer for TheKnot.com. I also have modded a mailing list for Frenz.com (split enz & crowded house & finn bros fanclub's list), done legal work for CyberCafe, Webgrrls and Cybergrrls, and advised Conde Nast on domain name and internet issues, among other things.

So yeah, I did a lot of RL stuff, which is all useful for FA. But I still didn't know the difference between Java and Javascript until Sabs told me yesterday.

[longtimegone]

You're very "out" about your fandom activities, and, in my opinion, are fortunate to have a lot of credibility as far as that goes. Do you ever face ridicule in your personal or professional life because of this? How do you handle it?

[lnevans.livejournal.com]

I'm rather a lurker here, but I love the hard work you put into our fandom.

What has been your favorite experiance since you joined the HP fandom? Is there an experiance you'd rather forget?

[sinisteral.livejournal.com]

What brought you and others to the start of FA and what do you think of it's expanded progress through these years?

[debellatrix.livejournal.com]

If you feel comfortable making it public, what would you next like to achieve in/for the HP fandom?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

An essay archive! Coming to FA later this summer! Wheee!

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

This is probably a silly question, but, oh well. What kind of law do you practice?

- Erin, formerly shakespearessis, who also adds - Your law firm's holiday card this year was ADORABLE.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Actually - that was the family card ;)

And I do about 1/2 intellectual property & internet law, and 1/2 real estate.

[ladylaw7.livejournal.com]

what kind of law do you practice and what led you to it?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Great icon!

I do about 1/2 intellectual property & internet law, and 1/2 real estate. And the real estate law is because it's what my dad does, and he wants to retire, but I need to learn how to do the stuff first. IP and internet law are because I'd always worked in journalism-related things in high school & college, and when I started law school in 1992, I wanted to do something related to that. In 1992/1993, I realised that I really was a computer geek, which led to becoming involved in some growing & developing websites and internet communities and other things that needed Terms of Use, so I started writing them, which led to doing internet law.

[quidditchgrrl.livejournal.com]

It might seem an obvious kind of question, but how do you respond to all of the wankage that FA (and various other enterprises you're involved with)? Does it get to you personally or do you deal with it on a business level?

[mad-madrasi.livejournal.com]

How extensively have you travelled? Are there any places you'd *really* like to see but haven't had a chance to yet?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

I've been to Hawaii but not Australia. California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas (but only the airports), Illinois, Minneapolis, West Virginia and every state from Maine to Florida.

I've been to Canada, the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, West Germany (1989), Germany (1992), The Soviet Union (1989, Lenningrad, which is no longer Leningrad), Russia & Ukraine (Yalta & Odessa), Greece, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria, Swizerland, Czecheslovakia (Prague), The Bahamas, and on a boat just off St Maartin's, but we never docked.

Weirdly enough, I've never been to Mexico or Jamaica or Hispanola, but I've been a few miles from each of them.

I'd love to see Asia, but I don't think I ever will, because Aaron is too allergic to cigarette smoke to take that kind of risk. So I suppose eventually I will see Alaska and Australia and New Zealand, but I don't know if Beijing or Tokyo or Singapore will be places I can ever visit; I don't think I want to go without him.