cahn

Hmm. Looking back on my young crushes, I'm embarrassed to say that by far the longest running was Cmdr. Riker on ST:TNG. I don't know why... maybe it was the smugness, the inability to sit down like a normal person, the total sense of conviction. Also Hubert Hawkins in "The Court Jester" (the Danny Kaye character, in the movie) stole my heart with his sheer goofiness. Those are the only ones I remember deeply from my childhood that were coded as "romantic". I was also really fascinated by Catherine in "Father Goose", but that was in a way that my brain didn't code as romantic or sexual for another... fifteen years? Nobody told me any different. Nowadays, I think my biggest crush would probably be Bel Thorne from the Vorkosigan saga, in terms of pure deep character love. Fanfic has twisted my fictional crushes lately. I think I'm rounding more characters up to what I wish they would be, instead of working strictly from what I see on the page or the screen (cough, Sherlock, cough).

You had an entire language to yourself that your parents didn't read? (Or, sounds like they could have read, but didn't really exercise it.) WOW, my life would have been really different if that had been the case. I always self-censored, or located ridiculous hiding places, or wrote in code in order to avoid my parents. I loved the Sherlock Holmes story about the Dancing Men; I thought if I could re-create the whole alphabet I could write whatever I wanted in privacy. I never quite pulled it off, though.

Ooooooo, I am going to go lurk on your sister's page for a while! She seems like good people, from a literary point of view.