“I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.”
- Vita Sackville-West
19
May
2009
J. was out and about today, so I asked him to pick up a copy of Norse Code on the way home:
I’m already clipping through this one pretty quickly. I get the sense that it’ll be inevitably (and favorably) compared to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
Don’t let the cover fool you. It’s real urban fantasy, not vampire porn at all! Huzzah!!
19
May
2009
Last night, I was telling J. about the leftovers in the fridge:
“There’s chicken rollups and spicy coleslaw,” I said, and opened my mouth to add, “Watch out for the cabbage, tho. There’s more carbs in that than you think. Calculate at least 30 carbs for that.”
I closed my mouth, amused at my own default.
At a certain point carb, insulin, and exercise math just becomes the norm. You do it in your head all the time. Every time I choose to eat something, I start doing the cost/benefit analysis in my head. Sometimes I’ll even count out stuff on my fingers at the table.
I realized last night that it’s become so normed over the last three years to budget my carbs/insulin/expected activity level that my subconscious assumes, at some level, that that’s just a concern that *everybody* has.
It was an interesting example of how we unconsciously assume that our defaults must be the “norm.” Doesn’t everyone live like this? Doesn’t everyone want what I want? Doesn’t everyone hold the same values I hold? If they don’t HOW CAN THEY LIVE!?
After all, I couldn’t live without developing this disordered mode of living.
18
May
2009
Gods, why am I watching this show?
17
May
2009
These will have proper homes on my web page, but here’s what we’re looking at now:
The Women of Our Occupation (with sound effects)
If Women Do Fall They Lie
Wonder Maul Doll (will post after it comes out in this form in EscapePod)
First chapter of GW is taking some time to get right. Lots of voices in that one.
17
May
2009
Must be Sunday.
Also, sugar is wonky, but that’s what I get for going to Denny’s. Mmmm caffeinated coffeeeeee!
16
May
2009
“We are not a game, Nicholas.”
I am sad we had to have a white male protag to follow around in order to tell a black guy’s story. The Ugandan doctor who saves his ass would have made a much better protagonist.
Forest Whitaker is amazing in this movie. It’s worth every blessed penny to see him completely nail this performance of a man living on the edge of madness.
Women characters were marginal to the men’s stories, and end up in refrigerators 50% of the time (I should say, story: it’s still the white guy’s story, and he’s a really, really awful character), and as said, apparently white audiences aren’t expected to show interest in stories about Ugandans unless a white person’s involved, but it was a powerful film nonetheless. I’d put off watching it for a long time because I knew it was going to be a downer – what I didn’t expect was how incredibly intense it was. Again, watching Whitaker zoom back and forth was phenomenal.
Highly recommended.
16
May
2009
Yesterday marked the anniversary of my arrival in the ER in Chicago for what we’d later find out was severe DKA. My blood sugar was riding at about 860 (normal is 80). I don’t remember must of this, as I was unconscious for the first 12 hours or so. A few things bleed through (someone asking me what day it was, discovering I had a catheter in was allowed to just pee in bed [this took some convincing on Jenn's part], being moved from one bed to another and wheeled into an elevator).
Oddly enough, this month also mark’s J’s one year cancer-free anniversary. So last night we went out to Pasha Grill, where we’re quickly becoming regulars. We also stopped in and had a proper ring fitting at the jewelry store across the way. Due to the wackiness that is the publishing industry, I’ll be getting a reasonable infusion of cash later this year. We’d only been putting off the inevitable for monetary reasons, and it looks like those are going to go away here pretty soon.
I feel immeasurably proud that book money has let me do things I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, particularly because I was in such seriously bad shape the year before I sold the book. You don’t always get everything you wanted – who doesn’t want a six figure book contract and the ability to publish before they’re 30? It would have been nice.
But I got *enough.* I got what I needed, and hopefully things will turn around pretty quickly and I can start building a future with short bursts of book money. That would be pretty sweet.
In any case, there is this thing that happens to you when you stare death in the face. Or, at least, it happened to me – and to J to some extent, tho he was always a far nicer person than me.
I wanted to start building toward things instead of running away from them. I ran all around the world. I ran away and away and away. But, you know, I can’t run away from myself. At some point I had to turn around and go, “I’m a selfish asshole and a coward and I want to change that.” I wasn’t a great person. I hated what I’d become when the shit hit the fan. I didn’t want to be that person anymore.
And it’s been a long journey, trying to get better. Trying to get my priorities straight now that I get all these extra years of life. I’ve been ready for adult things for awhile now. Ready to build some wealth, buy a house, build a career. I’ve been doing all those things. But what I realized along the way was that my desire for a partner hadn’t really gone away. I still wanted a best friend, a buddy, to have adventures with. I just wasn’t adult enough to take care of myself – let alone somebody else. You’re never going to find the right person if you’re the one who’s not right.
90% of everything is timing.
J. and I met a few months after he’d finished radiation therapy. I’d been single for about a year and had stopped seriously looking. We met for dinner because I thought he was terribly funny… and I wanted to talk to somebody else who’d stared death in the face.
Cancer had changed him, just like t1 changed me. He’d become less of a doormat, and I’d become less of a cruel-hearted harpy. We both still lean toward our defaults, which means that when we’re together, we balance out pretty well. Love is all very well and good when it comes to relationships. I’ve loved people. I’ve had people love me. But… what’s the quote? I read a quote from someone that said “real” love is when two people who’ve been heartbroken and know what they’re getting into… get into it anyway. It’s the courage love, not necessarily the screaming teenager love, where it’s the first time you’ve ever felt this way and OMG if we aren’t together we’ll DIE!!
It’s the same love, really, just made even more polished by the heat of heartache. I don’t think I could have even walked into a jewelry shop and sized rings with *anybody* before having my heart broken. I’m surprised it took so many years to really, truly, get my heartbroken. But then, I’d spent years avoiding real attachment. It wasn’t until after I got sick and went through the Jenn craziness that I realized all my walls – though vital to not getting hurt – weren’t getting me what I wanted.
I needed some serious heartbreak.
Now I know what I’m getting into. And I’m jumping anyway. I like this future we’re building. I like my life this way.
Will there be more heart ache? Probably. The other thing you realize when you’re somebody with a chronic illness fixing to marry a cancer survivor is that the chances of death, disfigurement, and further disability are disproportionately high for the two of you.
I’m allowing myself to love somebody who could leave me – whether through death or something more mundane, like waning passion – and I’m terribly happy about it. I know all the risks involved in it. I know it could all end badly, horrifically, spectacularly, but I also know that the years we do get together will be pretty cool and fun. We’re a team. We have each others’ backs. And for the first time, I trust this, however naive it may appear.
I want a big, bold life.
It just so happens that I now have a buddy to live it with.
12
May
2009
I think this movie was supposed to be funny.
I found it absolutely terrifying. I felt uncomfortably nauseous the whole way through. I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie that so… effectively portrays women as a slave class. No, I’m serious.
This one hit me personally hard. As somebody from a small town who dated somebody for three years who was a lot like the heroine’s husband, it really hit home. And the fact that she has to rely on men to pull her out of it the whole way through. The idea that you have to be nice to assholes, to put up with abuse and bullshit just to survive… you have to smile and be nice and maybe when they die they’ll leave you money!
Because in the end, what’s the difference between running off with the doctor she’s having an affair with and getting a check from some rich guy who treated people like crap? You’re still getting ahead by serving (literally serving!) men. And not just decent guys, but fucking assholes. If I felt for one minute that anybody in this movie wasn’t a total jerk, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but here she is, faking her way through life, this perfect “yes sir,” slave robot constantly judging her self worth by what men thought of her – and her pie.
God, it made me sick. It made me sicker still because I have this even more disturbing feeling that I was supposed to find this show absolutely hilarious.
The fucking pie contest was just a fucking afterthought montage shot, a given. Leaving her husband, in the end, was “easy.” Winning the contest was “easy.” There were all these hand wave easy outs for her in the end, after all this bullshit. It’s like the end of Kill Bill 2 where she just sees her kid and it’s all over. All is magically right with the world.
And it doesn’t work that way. You have to trudge through a lot of bullshit. You’re not standing up for yourself once. You do it again and again and again, every day, for the rest of your life. You have to change your entire life. Yes, kids can change your life. I get it. But having kids doesn’t mean the rest of the world goes away. Far better would have been an ending where she *doesn’t* like the kid, she *doesn’t* get anybody’s money, and she has to fight her way to the life she wants, tooth and nail, with the support of her friends.
That’s real life. That’s how people do it when they decide not to be slaves anymore. You don’t just say to the guy once, “Hey, I’m not a slave!” It takes years of undoing.
Bah.
09
May
2009
Oh Star Trek, I will forgive you these things, because you move so damn fast and your characters are so damn good.
This is a Star Trek remix, and it’s wonderful. That said, here’s what actively annnoyed me (noet these aren’t plot points. I could give a crap about handwavey Star Trek plots. This is a soap opera in space):
1) Uhura should have totally decked one of the guys in the bar. With how awesomely they re-did her, I was actually surprised this didn’t happen. Uhura is pretty awesome. It made me teary eyed to see how far she’s come. That said:
2) She is one of three female characters. One of them dies, and it is kind of boring. The other is Kirk’s mom, who has this ridiculous giving-birth-in-an-evacuation-shuttle scene. At least she didn’t die. It reminded me of Padme. I grit my teeth and bore through the thing, cause I knew the rest of the movie would be awesome. As J. pointed out, in Star Trek the families come with the crew, so it was not ridiculous for her to be there, just a ridiculously laid out scene. Would have much preferred her in uniform being rushed to a shuttle where she *then* goes into labor. Also, cut the fucking com with her dying husband. That was overmuch for me, even in a Start Trek movie. I wanted her to firm up her jaw and accept the sacrifice, teary eyed but tough. It was a little smarmy for me.
3) Gods, why do they go on with the overlong creature chase and Scotty-in-the-pipes hijinks? These scenes are both about 2-3 minutes too long. Not 7 minutes too long thank god, but they’re still running long for “wacky hijinks.”
I am so happy these characters didn’t suck. This was well written and very well executed. A perfect reboot. If they did this to every series they reboot, I’d be a lot happier with them. They didn’t sacrifice the heart of the show for special effects, and they had a great team of actors. It is, effectively, a soap opera, and without those character quirks, tensions, relationships, unique skills, weaknesses, foibles, and snark, you’ve just got elves in space.
This is why Firefly was so loved: it’s about building great characters and letting them run wild.
I didn’t even pay attention to the absurdities of the plot until later, because I just didn’t care. I loved the people.
At the end of the movie I thought, “Wow, Gene Roddenberry would have crapped his pants to see this.”
Because it felt a lot more like what he was trying to do. It actually *felt* like a diverse cast. It felt more like the future. Hell, it felt more like *now* than most tv shows and their lily white cornbread casting. And yes, everyone is young and beautiful, and our two primary protagonists are still white and male, and we only have three female characters, one of whom dies, but:
It’s come a long way.
Thank you for building a cast for Star Trek that doesn’t suck. Now don’t screw it up.
07
May
2009
Zing!
Runner up, from the end of the article:
“Still, nonsense about women, weight, and “health” is particularly pervasive and destructive. Indeed, if we were really concerned about medical risk factors that actually do have a significant negative correlation with a candidate’s life expectancy, the most relevant is one that has afflicted 108 of America’s 110 Supreme Court justices: being a man.”
