Unsolicited Advice

I'm qualified to give people advice because they keep asking me for it. I have a reputation for being able to figure people out, so I get a lot of friends and acquaintances asking me for my opinion of someone they're starting to date, or whether some coworker is really being unreasonable or they're just too irritated to see straight. Other times people recognize that there's some sort of recurring problem in their lives and they can't unpack it by themselves. I make it a point to say the things that most people just think, and sometimes I'll make an observation about someone that shines a light on something totally unrelated. It happens pretty constantly. Some weeks I am just the goddamn Epiphany Fairy. Very rarely, I'll pop up on Omegle and just give advice to completely random people. Last time I did that, I apparently brought enlightenment to a bisexual girl who wanted to be told to go for her crush, some guy who was having issues with having to see t...

My life, in general. I have had depression problems about as long as I can remember. I do believe that this is part hereditary --every relative I've ever met and had more than a five minute conversation with is kind of insane in one way or another. Unfortunately, they're all also kind of genius, which means that they are more than smart enough to cover (mostly) or compensate (rarely) and therefore even the ones that have had the advantage of modern medicine have no diagnosis. The only one I'm aware of is my mother; she has a diagnosis, but she also took great pride in lying to the psychiatrist in order to get the medication she wanted, so it's probably not the right one. I strongly suspect she's got borderline personality disorder or histrionic personality disorder or something in the general category of 'acting like a goddamn self-centered child at the most puzzling of times'. What she actually told the shrink she had was clinical depression. She may have...

Basically none! My official qualifications consist of a diploma proving I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from Northern Arizona University. It was the closest I could get to earning a degree in Everything with a emphasis in Stuff. My focus was in sociology and communication theory, and I earned a minor in Japanese more or less by accident. If you were to examine my transcripts, you would find that I took what appears to be a load of almost completely random classes, and got grades ranging from A+++ to D. The reason for this is not apparent until you also get a load of my semester schedules as an undergraduate, and realize that I got all my best grades in classes that didn't give a lot of take-home work and met between 11 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. I do quite brilliantly at school until I run into something that quite literally bores me stupid, and I'm not a functional human being before 10:30am at the earliest. I also have an aborted attempt at gett...

Not so's you'd really notice. I work as a tutor (paid and volunteer) and as a research consultant, mostly in IT. I also do freelance copywriting, technical writing, editing, and translation. I do take commissions for a variety of written work, and if you would like something written for you, please feel free to contact me at miss.arabella.flynn@gmail.com . Likewise modeling; I haven't really done any since I moved to Boston, but if anyone wants to hire me I'll still take bookings. I am also working, very slowly, on a book, which I eventually plan to e-publish to Kindle and Nook. Every so often, someone takes me to task for  not  giving them a way to send me money or random objects. This always weirds me out no end. I'm not used to anyone actually caring what I think to the point where they want to pay me to keep typing this stuff on a regular basis. I do run ads on the blog; I expect most of you don't know that, because most of the serious internet people ha...

Absolutely nothing at all, aside from the ability to dress myself well enough that perfect strangers stop me on the street to tell me I look great. Truth. I don't actually think I'm a greater authority on fashion/makeup/style than anyone else. I'm rather terrible at telling people how to follow the latest trends, in fact. I'm better at telling people what elements they need to apply to themselves to look however they want to look, but that only works if the person asking knows what they want to look like in the first place. What I think I bring to the discussion that is lacking in many other viewpoints is the ability to explain how to dress yourself in terms of social messages and artistic design. I'm not the only one who can do either of those, but in my experience, the combination is rare. It works particularly well when explaining this stuff to people who have never been interested in the immediate social payoff of playing the 'matching trends' game w...

I  have been the smart kid from day one. Nobody talked to me in elementary school, only the other smart kids talked to me in high school. I missed the last few weeks of one grade and the first semester of the next because the other kids had escalated to shoving me into things, and it took months of my parents fighting tooth and nail to force the district to transfer me to a different school, since they knew it would be impossible to effectively discipline or transfer every single one of the people who were giving me such a hard time. I think that's really all I need to say about that.

I am one. Always have been. I have a really, really bad case of 'mad genius' going, and have pretty much since I was born. My birthday's in early September, so the school district wanted to have a look at me before they let me start kindergarten at the low end of the age range. The psychologist whom they brought in to have a chat with me suggested that they throw me into the gifted program when she caught me, a couple of weeks shy of five, reading her cursive case notes upside down. Somewhere around there I took my first and last official Stanford-Binet type IQ test; the result was a thoroughly ridiculous number, well over two standard deviations out, based almost entirely on the fact that there is no such thing as a set of questions that are age-appropriate for a kindergartener reading at a high school level. I basically made their test go TILT!. These days I only take informal internet IQ tests when other people get the bright idea to judge how smart I am when I'm...