Ahoy! My name be Auriel Grey, aka Sweet Ginger Snap. I'm an English major turned Linguistics major at Pierce College, hoping to transfer to UCSB or Oxford. (Some place super Englishy/ Anthro-oriented and great, anyway.) I want to teach English overseas. I realize that I need not get a degree to do so, but if I want to join the Peace Corps (or just become an intelligent, well-informed, learned individual) a degree is necessary. Je voudrais ameliorer ma francais, aussi. Je pense que je vais aller a la France, bientot. Mais, tu sais! I also wanna learn Chinese or Korean, and also maybe Russian. Ya? My passion is words and their origins, the ideas reflected in them that reveal the thought processes and dreams of peoples both current and ancient, young and old. I love the little intricacies of English, its history and malleability. Given this, I have a new respect for the lolcatz generation (naht too menshun, iz sooper fun too rite). However, I still love, respect, and cherish my lovely Oxford commas. I have a love-hate relationship with essay-writing. Nevertheless, I cherish literature and reading, analyzing, and discussing it.

My hobbies include writing (stories, poems, lyrics), creating and listening to music (love to experiment with styles and such), singing, playing guitar and violin, drawing and painting (not only on paper), reading (studies of people/language/the mind, and lots and tons of fiction), hiking/biking/volleyball, and so on. I am a devout follower of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and his friendly sea-ravaging ways, RAmen. I volunteer at an Elementary school, mostly with first graders- and it is awesomely fun and educational.

Nerdiness below (and maybe above as well):
My pop culture fandom claims are as follows: Lord of the Rings (books and movie), Star Trek (TOS and TNG), Merlin (BBC!), Abarat (Barker), American Gods (Gaiman), any Arthurian Legend books (like Mallory, Tennyson, etc), Harry Potter (Rowling), Beowulf (OE epics!), Abhorsen Trilogy (Nix), most of Tamora Pierce's books, Futurama, John Stewart and Stephan Colbert, etc, forever and ever.

"Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you."
-Bob Dylan