about girl
Hi, I’m Amy-Jean, nice to meet you.
I grew up on a little island called Cape Breton. Now I live in Canada’s second-largest city.
I’m a twentysomething British-Canadian chick living in Montréal with my boyfriend, Andrew, and our cat, Mister Spock. We share our apartment with seven other people, a chinchilla, another cat called Stella, and one bathroom. It’s fun!
I’m studying Linguistics at Concordia University. I also dabble in languages. So far, I can speak English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and German (in order from most to least fluent). Before that, I took some international development courses at Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario before deciding they would get me nowhere. Sometimes I wish I were in culinary school, or that I were smart enough to be a real scientist.
After many attempts to narrow down my blogging to a genre and failing, it’s safe to say I blog about what interests me. Which includes vegetarianism of the environmental variety, atheism and religion/philosophy in general, video games and books and films and music and reviews of them, gender and sexuality, feminism, mental illness, and a lot of gushing about Doctor Who, so hopefully you’re cool with that. Oh, and cooking. But I’m (someday) going to have a separate blog for that.
I’m also reading the Twilight Saga and blogging about it. Come, help keep me sane.
I work in a gaming store. I’m pretty nerdy. I like dresses and lipstick, too, though. I wish I could spend all of my time acting. I think Lady Gaga is the best thing to come out of pop culture since the Beatles. Well, okay, since David Bowie. My favourite tea is earl grey and my favourite Pokemon is Haunter. And I’ll probably re-write this About Me section fifty times.
You can send me love letters/hate mail at amyjean (at) gmail (dot) com.
This is what my face looks like:
Dear Amy Jean,
My name is Leora Trub and I am a student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). I am conducting a study of the reasons that people blog and what benefits it brings, which at this point are still largely unexplored in research studies. I am therefore reaching out to you as a blogger who can help deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. I believe that your voice is an important one to be heard and hope you will enjoy participating in the study. I have developed an online questionnaire that asks about specific aspects of blogging as well as asking about feelings about yourself and others. The survey is a mix of numerical scales and opportunities to reflect in an open-ended format about the role of blogging in your life, and how it has changed over time.
You are eligible to participate if you are at least 21 years of age and have been maintaining an English-language personal blog for at least six months that you update or visit at least twice a week (on average). Your participation involves completing a confidential online questionnaire. The data will be downloaded onto a secure server to which only I have access. No identifying information, such as your names or address, will be collected, and you will be given the opportunity to be identified by a code name in research reports and to have your blog description changed slightly so it cannot be identified if you wish.
The survey takes approximately 45 minutes to complete and participation is completely voluntary. Three participants who complete the survey will be randomly selected by a lottery to receive a $75 cash prize.
There are no foreseeable risks to participation in the study. Although some of the questions are personal in nature, participation in the study provides an opportunity to think about the role that your blog plays in your life.
If you have any questions about this research, you can contact me at (732) 407-7928 or ltrub@gc.cuny.edu, or my advisors Dr. Arietta Slade at (212) 650-5658 or asladephd@earthlink.net and Dr. Tracey Revenson at (212) 817-8709 or trevenson@gc.cuny.edu.
The study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Graduate School of the City University of New York and meets of their guidelines as well as all state and federal guidelines for research with human participants. If you have any concerns about the project at any time, you can contact Ms. Kay Powell, Institutional Review Board at the Graduate School of the City University of New York (212) 817-7525 or kpowell@gc.cuny.edu.
In order to participate in this study, I need to send you an invitation through survey monkey. If you are interested, please send an email to ltrub@gc.cuny.edu from the email address to which you would like the invitation sent. I hope that you will decide to participate and also that you will share it with others if you decide you would like to. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Sincerely,
Leora Trub, M.A.
Doctoral student in Clinical Psychology
Graduate School of the City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309
ltrub@gc.cuny.edu
Your face looks rather lovely as does your blog… tho’ is that your last post in July? Hope you plan to continue as it’s all rather good!