VP Team Bios - psycheknot

[jocelina.livejournal.com]

My Dearest Vulva-Loving Superstars,

As several of you have requested, your friendly neighborhood VP Team members are taking this opportunity to let you get to know us a little better. We will take turns posting our bios for your reading pleasure. :) Check out the tag for this entry to view them all.

Of course, we want to get to know you, too, so if you haven't already and you'd like to, feel free to introduce yourself here, as indicated on the profile page. (Note that you can also now add yourself to the VP Frappr map from the intro page.) If you made your introduction a while ago and your life has changed dramatically since then, reply to your old comment and update us!

So here is my bio!

Hello! I'm Jocey, aka psycheknot.

I'm twenty-six, and, to borrow a line from one of my favorite Atmosphere songs,* "Like damn, I'm from Minnesota, land of the cold air."

Specifically I live in Minneapolis, and I'm lucky enough to have most of my family and many of my friends live within a 25-mile radius of my apartment; the latter are mostly within easy walking distance, as are a nice array of bars, museums, restaurants, parks, and shops (like The Smitten Kitten), which is good because I don't have a car.

I grew up in the western suburbs of Minneapolis (Long Lake/Orono/Maple Plain, for my fellow Minnesotans), in a big, noisy family. I'm the oldest of four. I attribute my love of children, books and dogs, and my high tolerance for complete and utter chaos, to my upbringing. My best friend, whom I've known since I was ten years old, often describes the household I grew up in as "a circus" and she's not far wrong. There were always at least four kids present, plus a hyperactive Australian shepherd and a varied assortment of friends and neighbors, all racketing around under the benevolent (if sometimes harried) supervision of one or both of my amazing parents.

When I was eighteen I went off to school at Drake University, in Des Moines. My college experiment was kind of a wash from an academic standpoint, but I met lots of people and had lots of fun. After a year and a half I came back to Minnesota. Since then I've attended several schools here in Minneapolis on a part-time basis while holding down a variety of jobs. Currently I work as a lab technician for a local company that manufactures cosmetic and drug products.

When I'm not working, I enjoy reading, sleeping, writing, working out, gettin' it on, vegging out on the internet, cooking, dining out, knitting, drinking beer and various combinations thereof (let me tell you, knitting + beer = awesome). I also enjoy doing all of the preceding in order to avoid doing housework.

I love books, as mentioned before. I grew up reading my parents' college books, and by the time I hit my teens I had read some very odd things indeed. (I remember paging through Sexual Politics long before I was old enough to fathom what it was about, and I read several Bertolt Brecht plays at the tender age of twelve without understanding them in the slightest.) My favorite authors are Willa Cather, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, David Sedaris, Hunter S. Thompson, China Mieville, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

One of my lifelong regrets is my total inability to create music. I can't make it, but like most people, I like it. I especially like The Pixies, Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Low, Lucinda Williams, Neko Case, Wilco, Atmosphere, K's Choice, Weezer, Beck, Yo La Tengo, Modest Mouse, the Weakerthans, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan.

I've been a member of VP for at least two years now (I'm embarrassed to say that I can't remember exactly when I joined), and every day I am struck anew by how many people come to VP for information about their sexual health that hasn't been made easily available to them anywhere else. That's one of the reasons I'm so excited to be a part of the VP experience -- I feel that it's a natural extension of the ongoing effort to expand women's access to healthcare and correct, factual information about the issues that affect them.

And now here are some pictures of me, if you are curious about what I look like.






From left to right: Me as a pirate, me (on the left) and my best friend (on the right), and me not dressed as a pirate.

* "Shhh," from Seven's Travels