This is one of those it's fun to do at periodic intervals, as the flist shifts.

1. Reply to this post, and I will pick four of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee!

Snurched this time from batdina, who inquired about the following:



bounce: I was nicknamed Tigger as a high school cheerleader, and have a modest collection of Tigger items as a result. Every once in a while my mom in particular still buys me a random Tigger item, and I also occasionally pick them up for myself. I hope I'm not as brash or thoughtless as he is, but I still like the attitude. The day I made this, I scoured Google Images for a good picture of him bouncing on his tail, which has always been my favorite -- never failed to make me laugh as a child. It's just an added bonus that he has his arms crossed in that sort of know-it-all mode he gets into while pontificating on a topic he actually knows nothing about. I had my know-it-all streak as a kid too, so it keeps me honest. :-)

Bouncing is, of course, what Tiggers do best. It's also, as those of you from the heyday of FK fandom know, what NatPackers do best. Since I don't have an FK icon at the moment, Tigger here tends to get sprinkled into FK-related discussions for that reason.



dance: The image is the album cover of Kate Bush's The Red Shoes; the text is quoted from the title track. It's also the key to the quest in the short film, The Line, The Cross, and the Curve, which is a sort of long-form video for most of the album. It's a very Jungian concoction springboarding from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and the Moira Shearer film, both of which I love.

It's been years since I set foot in a ballet studio, and I don't even discuss dance as often as I might like, but I use this icon when I do. Also as a reminder of the drive to create and how we have to make sure not to lose our center in it, or it won't be worth doing.



unvarnished: Elizabeth Siddal's self-portrait, one of the catalysts for the one-woman piece I've been attempting to write about her for close to ten years now. I'll never forget turning the page of Jan Marsh's Pre-Raphaelite Women in a bookstore in college, and being hit with a shock almost of recognition at being confronted with this image. That this was the same girl who modeled for Millais' Ophelia (and many other paintings, of course, but that was the one I knew at the time) was tantalizingly dissonant, and I set out to find out who she really was. By the time I encountered this dryly hilarious letter recounting her experience picking up some money she had been mailed while on holiday in France, I was hooked.

I attached the word "unvarnished" to it, both as a sort of pun referencing the fact that Lizzie never submitted work to the Royal Academy (which had a "Varnishing Day" prior to the opening of the annual exhibit, allowing artists to do last minute touchups on work already hung), and to the unflinching forthrightness of the portrait. I had been using it for a couple years before I realized "Hey, that would make a great title." I still think that, so it's the working title I've had in my head for some time even as I continue referring to it simply as the "Lizzie project."



sacredspace: The only one one this list made by someone else, raebird. It was part of a batch of Firefly icons posted for public consumption. I used it originally as the basis of a fall-themed layout, and then kept it on after because it so beautifully expresses the setting aside of a space for a spiritual purpose.

The series always made it clear that Inara viewed her work as not merely "respectable" but sacred, and the tension between that and some others' contempt for Companions and "common" whores alike was one of the more interesting threads woven into that world. But in this moment, the preparation of a tea ceremony to welcome a young man for a rite of passage, there is only peace and reflection.