B&N Cam Team Bios: Sia by Tom

Note: We're proceeding as normally as we can until we get our equipment hooked up again, so I'm posting a new mini-biography of Being & Nothingness Cam Team Member Sia. If Sia stops smoking I'll work on gathering a gallery of art through the centuries depicting people smoking. I'll try to make the collection as dreary as possible and maybe find some sculpture centering around the subject of butts in interesting trays. It must be out there somewhere. gh

Sia is a thin woman in her mid-thirties with “dishwater blond” hair, normal-sized lips, and small hands. She wears gray or black t-shirts and puts on dark nail polish. She has a slight accent and says she was raised in “Europe,” and that her parents were French-Algerians and traveled with her around various countries where she got an uneven early education. Her name is a west-central African one that means “first girl.” She hasn’t said if she has siblings.

She came to United States when she was a teenager, and studied philosophy at Cornell. She says that she should have thought about being employable. It doesn’t take much to get her arguing. She’s a fast thinker and usually cites 17th and 18th century philosophers to back her opinions. What's annoying, though, is that she'll veer into political philosophy or try to jam multiple God-theory citations into debates just because she knows a lot about it. She has had “many jobs,” but the one she has mentioned is Information Technology at high-end audio equipment manufacturer.

She is single, but quite a few mens' names get into her conversations. She lives alone in a “mother-in-law” unit built recently over a garage. The big deal around here is that she smokes, although she’s gone from regular cigarettes to a clove/cigarette mix, and now it’s almost always clove. We have to have someone smoking so we keep up that great philosopher feel. You can smell old smoke everywhere, even though she always smokes outside. We're a little worried that she'll start on gum or a patch and that we'll loose part of our image.