If it seems like I’ve fallen off the face of the planet . . . well, you’re not wrong. I got sick with a cold just as I was on my way home for Christmas, and have basically spent the last week alternately sleeping, coughing, and eating everything in sight, with a brief pause to open presents. So, y’know. Not a lot of energy or brainpower for other things.
I’ll be back, um, eventually. Am recovering, but at an annoyingly slow pace.
One of the things HRSFA did when I was in college — and still does now — was celebrate the Coming of the Hour (in the fall) and the Going of the Hour (in the spring), when the god Chronos, in his benevolence and cruelty, bestows or takes an hour away from us poor mortals. The ceremony lasted for one hour, from 2 a.m. until 2 a.m. (fall) or from 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. (spring), and most definitely did not end with us burning a cardboard clock in Harvard Yard. Because there is no open flame in the Yard. <nods>
Anyway, I must have been a good girl this year, because Chronos is bestowing the gift of the hour upon me twice. Poland switched their clocks last weekend, and the U.S. is doing it this upcoming weekend.
All hail Chronos, whose generosity I rather desperately need these days. (Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go contemplate passing out, in the hopes that I can kill this cold with sleep.)
1) I am so very, very glad that I flew from Krakow to Frankfurt to SFO yesterday, rather than connecting anywhere in the U.S. (Not even just the East Coast: the problems there have screwed up routing and plane supply all over the place.) We did have to divert half an hour further north to avoid the winds, but that’s minor compared to what could have happened with a different route.
2) My ideal would be to not leave the house today. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I have enough food on hand to make that work.
3) This rendition of the X-Men, as characters in Edo-period Japan, is pretty awesome. And if I didn’t link to it before, so is the artist’s previous take on the Avengers in the Sengoku period.
4) rachelmanija has posted notes/transcript from her panel on gender roles in The Hunger Games, so if you want to see what I sound like after a full weekend of conning and my brain is leaking out my ears, go read. On the whole, I think it was a really great panel, despite exhaustion on my part. (Warning: spoilers for the whole series, including Mockingjay.)
5) Due to a rollout of AO3 code, Yuletide signups have been extended to 9 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. Get in while the getting’s good!
There will (I hope) be more extensive trip-blogging after it’s over and done with, but in brief: I leave Krakow at an obscenely early hour tomorrow, after seven and a half days. We got a dusting of snow this morning, that half melted off in the afternoon, but lasted long enough to make the Basilica of St. Mary and the Cloth Hall and St. Florian’s Tower and so on look charmingly picturesque in a way I hadn’t already photographed. So kniedzw and I ran around repeating a bunch of shots, then hid from the cold in some museums, and then — when we couldn’t usefully sightsee anymore — went and watched Skyfall, subtitled in Polish. So ha-ha, I saw it before most of you. ๐ (Short form: quite good. And surprisingly focused on the personal side, with the Big Threat being more the vehicle that delivered the personal story, rather than the major point of the film.)
I have spent the last two days with a cold I really could have done without, but even with that sapping my energy, it’s been an excellent trip. There will be many photos, and assuming I can muster the will, some chatty posts as well.
First, though, I have to endure a transatlantic flight with a cold. Oh joy.
1) Learn from my error, chilluns. If you’re going to a foreign country, turn off 2-step verification on your Google accounts for the duration, unless you can actually get text messages on your phone while overseas. Otherwise, if your laptop refuses to talk to the hotel wireless, you’ll have to go to great lengths to get internet access long enough to turn verification off so you can check your Gmail on other computers as needed.
2) Things Krakow does very well: street musicians, fall color, street performers of the non-musical kind, hot chocolate, music not on the streets, sausage (so saith the kniedzw), and RIDICULOUSLY monumental altars/shrines in its churches. Also, veneration of Pope John Paul II (shocker, I know).
3) Things I do not do well: sleep on planes, these days. I don’t know where my ability to do so went, but it is gone.
4) I wish I could have come here two years ago, when I could pretend to the IRS that this was research for A Natural History of Dragons. Thanks to folklore (which I will report on in more detail later), there are dragons ALL OVER the place. Including one whose picture I will try to post later, because he’s awesome.
5) Off to Auschwitz tomorrow. Not exactly happy fun vacation time, but it’s one of those things you kind of have to do.
P.S. My folkloric and musical heart is kind of in love with the Heynał mariacki.
(Yes, I know my icon is not of Poland. Hush.)
It occurs to me that if I’ve made any mention here of my upcoming trip, I did so in passing, where nobody was likely to see it (and I don’t remember it). So: I’m going to Poland! On Saturday!
I will be there for about a week, in Krakow and Gdansk. I am, quite pleasingly, the first member of my family to go to Poland; given how much my family travels, this is actually an achievement worth noting. (I beat them to Costa Rica, Ireland, Israel, India, and I think Turkey. Can’t remember if I beat them to Greece or not. They — meaning my parents and my brother — have beaten me to China, Russia, South Africa, Finland, Taiwan, Norway, Malaysia, Sweden, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Japan, Zambia, South Korea, France, Austria, the Czech Republic . . . yeah.)
I intend to take a great many pictures, some of which may get posted here, depending on internet access and my energy level. Try not to break anything while I’m gone. ๐
It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Princess Bride (the film; the book had its anniversary a while ago). I, of course, celebrated by watching it again.
I had things I needed to do tonight, and I figured I could do them while the movie was on. More fool me: it’s been a while since I sat down and watched it, and I quickly realized I really just had to give it my full attention — mouthing, as I usually do, all the quotable lines* as they were said.
I can’t pick my favorite book, or my favorite song, or my favorite food. But I can pick my favorite movie. The Princess Bride is the reason I studied fencing; it’s also the reason I studied Spanish. (Can you tell which character I imprinted on?) I don’t know if it’s the first movie I saw in a theater, but it’s the first one I remember seeing. It’s one of the few fantasies from the ’80s that I would say is genuinely good, instead of just lovably cheesy.
It is, now that I watch it with a professional eye, a fantastic example of good storytelling. I could go on for a good half-hour at least about all the intelligent decisions Goldman made with the script, the elegance of the structure, all the places where the dialogue leads you perfectly along its path. It strikes that beautiful balance between comedy and drama, where the laughter makes the occasional punch land all that much harder. (Inigo’s storyline as a whole — which gained extra impact when I found out about his father dying of cancer, and Patinkin channeling his grief from that into the final confrontation with Count Rugen.) There are almost no wasted lines in this film, no random chatter to fill the time. Every bit pulls its weight.
I don’t know anymore how many times I’ve seen it. I used to keep count; I started when I could still remember all the occasions, and I kept a record on our old VHS box — the one taped off TV, eventually replaced by an official copy, eventually replaced by a DVD, eventually replaced by the Dread Pirate edition that has d_aulnoy in one of the special features. But somewhere along the line, I lost my record of the count. The last time I was sure of it, it was in the low 60s.
There is no movie in the world I love as much. They’ll never see these lines, but to William Goldman, Rob Reiner, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Fred Savage, Peter Falk, Carol Kane, Billy Crystal, Bob Anderson, and all the other cast and crew of this marvelous film: thank you.
*Approximately seventy-five percent of the script
Directly, that is, as opposed to by marriage. (I have been an aunt-by-marriage for about two years now.)
A multitude of congratulations to my brother and his wife on the birth of their son.
I have a tradition, dating back to 2003, of . . . well, rampant egotism on my birthday.
It’s an antidote to feelings of blah-ness (which were plaguing me on that day in 2003, and have been known to do so since). I make a post where I am only allowed to brag about the cool things I’ve done lately: no qualifications, no disclaimers, no undercutting myself. The last two years, for various reasons, I haven’t done the post in the usual manner (I’ve done other kinds of egotism-related things instead), so this time around, we’re gonna rack up three years’ worth of achievements.
I’m thirty-two today. What do I have to show for it?
Scandinavian Designs wins a cookie. I couldn’t find the receipt from the bed we purchased more than two years ago, but I called them up and, after providing my phone number, was told that the item is still under warranty, and they will have a replacement piece (the wood of one of the side boards has split) sent to us within 7-10 business days. The entire conversation took about a minute flat.
Edited to add: and then one minute later, an e-mail asking if I could send a photo, just to speed things up.
Now let’s see if Sprint can do equally well with my malfunctioning phone. Somehow I suspect not . . . .
The title of this post only barely merits the plural.
Bayou Arcana: Songs of Loss and Redemption, various authors and artists. A graphic novel, collecting stories by a slew of (male) authors and (female) artists, all centered around a Louisiana bayou, “one of the seven sacred hearts” of the world. (According to the afterword, some of the other hearts are in the Outback, the Amazon, and Tibet, and there will be volumes for them, too.) I felt a few of the stories in here were a bit too brief and/or elliptical for their punch to really hit me, and I’m kind of meh on some of the art — but then, that is frequently my feeling on graphic novels as a medium. I liked this one enough to want to read the next volume, now that the core characters have been set up, to see where they go from here.
Deeds of Men, Marie Brennan. Yeah, my own novella. A quick re-read for the purposes of refreshing my memory on a few things.
. . . and we’re done.
So where did this month go?
A lot of it went to illness. Not to delve into the gory details, but I had a minor procedure done early this month that will hopefully address a chronic issue that is possibly at the root of my sleep problems (and therefore my generalized fatigue); it is, unfortunately, the sort of procedure that makes things worse before it makes them better. If it does the latter at all. I should know one way or the other by the end of June. And then copy-edits landed on my doorstep, and there was KublaCon (at which kniedzw and I ran our LARP), and then con crud.
I started a number of books this month, some of which I abandoned, some of which I hope to finish soon. But the only ones I actually finished were a graphic novel and my own novella. Which is pretty pathetic. Next month I start seriously noveling again, and I also have Fourth Street — but as far as leisure reading is concerned, my count pretty much has nowhere to go but up.
One of my gmail accounts got hacked. So, first of all, my apologies to anybody who got hit with spam because of me.
Second — since this is the first time this has happened to me — tips for what I should do? I’ve already changed my password, and as I type this, I have a program scrubbing my computer for malware. I don’t know if there are things I should do beyond that, though.
Other than find the person responsible and stab them in the face.
My parents need to have fortieth anniversaries more often. ^_^
I’m in Hawaii. ^_^
I couldn’t mention it before, because it would have spoiled the surprise for my mother, but my father arranged to ship me, kniedzw, my brother, and my brother’s wife out to Hawaii for a long weekend to celebrate my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary with them. As I type this, I can pause to look out over my balcony to the lagoon down below, where yesterday I swam and basked in the sun; just past it is the sea, where in a few hours I’ll be going whale-watching.
(Yeah, I might be gloating just a bit.)
Quite apart from the beautiful surroundings, it’s great to be able to hang out with my family like this. The last pure vacation the four of us took together was also in Hawaii, nineteen years ago; the last vacation-with-another-purpose was a year or two later, when my brother was looking at colleges, and we took it as an excuse to go sightseeing in California. We see each other on the holidays, but it’s lovely to have this kind of time, where nobody has to cook or run errands or do any of the other things that can make the holidays stressful.
And, y’know, the surroundings don’t hurt. ๐ Especially in light of the fact that the Bay Area is currently receiving a lot of desperately-needed, but not terribly fun to walk around in, rain.
So huzzah for my parents and forty years of happy marriage. May they continue happy for many more years to come.
Tonight, I realized something I’m not very happy about.
There was a guy outside the grocery store, panhandling. I had to pass him both entering and leaving. And both times, I looked away and walked right past him without saying anything or slowing down.
And then I realized, If I were a man, I wouldn’t have done that.
I don’t like ignoring panhandlers and other people on the street. It erases them, and I’m sure they get that far too often. But at the same time, I know that if I had made eye contact, smiled, said anything . . . my odds of being sexually harassed would have shot up like a rocket.
It isn’t inevitable, of course. Not every panhandler would take that as an invitation to more. It’s happened to me often enough, however, that my reflex is to avoid interacting with strange men on the street, just out of self-defense. And I say that as someone who’s never been raped, or even harassed to an extent I would call traumatic; the worst was enough to put me off my stride for half an hour or so, but in the grand scheme of things, I know that’s not nearly as bad as it gets. But there’s always the little voice in my head reminding me that I’m female, and it could get worse, and so it’s safer to not engage.
(I do more often make eye contact, etc. with female panhandlers. They don’t set off the defensive reflexes in the same way.)
This bothers me a lot, now that I’ve noticed it so directly. If I were my husband — a six-foot-three man — I’d be a lot more likely to acknowledge those people, even if I didn’t give them a handout on the spot. And yet, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to chuck this pattern of behavior, either. There is no good solution, I fear, except to live in a utopian society where a) women don’t have to fear harassment, b) people don’t have to beg on the streets, or c) better yet, both.
I may try engaging more, anyway. I can withstand sketchy, unwanted compliments, for the sake of the people who don’t respond that way. I live in a pretty safe area, so I don’t think I’m likely to get assaulted just because I decided not to ignore somebody. But that isn’t always going to be true, and so this defensive habit is likely to stay — and I really wish that weren’t the case.
I mentioned a while ago the travel opportunities I’ve been fortunate enough to have. It made me curious about the rest of my family, too, so when my parents were here for Thanksgiving, I sat down with them, my brother, and my sister-in-law, and made up several maps. Check below the cut to see where we’ve gone.
Edit: the maps may not load in all browsers. I can’t see them in Firefox, but they show up in IE.
As many of you have probably heard by now, Anne McCaffrey, one of the grand dames of science fiction, has passed away.
I came to her books through Dragonsinger, I think, and the rest of the Harper Hall trilogy, before moving on to Dragonflight and the other, more “mainstream” Pern books (by which I mean the ones that focused on the riders and Weyrs). From there I went onto some of the Ship books, and the Talents, and the Crystal Singer series, and more. She was never quite one of my DNA writers — not a formative influence on me as a reader or writer — but she was part of the step out of children’s fiction and into adult SF/F. She was, however, a formative influence on a crap-ton of other people, and her oeuvre is one of the big islands in our archipelago.
And, although I never thought of it this way consciously, I think she helped print in my mind not the belief, but the assumption that writing this stuff was a thing done by both men and women. It never really occurred to me that anybody might think otherwise. If you’d asked Teenaged Me to list off important fantasy writers, I would have responded with Anne McCaffrey and Robert Jordan and Mercedes Lackey and David Eddings and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Raymond E. Feist and — well, let’s put it this way. I was a little nonplussed when I found out Terry Brooks was a man, because that was one of those names that could go either way, and women were prominent enough on my bookshelf that I thought nothing of dropping him in that category.
(No, I didn’t pay much attention to the “about the author” bit. Why do you ask?)
(And yes, you can totally see the reading tastes of Teenaged Me in that list. Don’t quibble over me putting McCaffrey in with the fantasy, though. I played the Might and Magic computer games. I was, and in some ways still am, firm in the opinion that slapping a bit of technology on a story otherwise stuffed with fantasy tropes does not make it SF.)
So anyway. I’m thankful for Anne McCaffrey, and for a whole host of other people like her, both for putting amazing and influential books into the world, but also — in the case of the women — for making it possible for me to cruise along in my blithe assumption of gender equality. That mindset has its shortcomings, but I really do believe it’s enabled me to steamroll over any number of small speedbumps that may have appeared in my path.
Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.
I actually try not to take baths too often, for reasons both noble and not. The noble one is that I live in California, which is not the most well-watered state in the Union; driving down to San Diego for World Fantasy, I saw lots of signs on fences in the Valley railing against water shortages. Baths are kind of wasteful, and so I try to save them for occasional use. The less-noble reason is that, well, I’ve mostly lived in places with tubs that are Not Quite Big Enough to be really comfortable. Some day, my friends, I will live somewhere with a proper tub, both long enough and deep enough to accomodate an adult human of average size.
But baths, man. I may have a lot of feline characteristics in my temperament, but I’m the kind of cat who adores water. The ocean, a lake, a swimming pool, just let me at it. And it’s lovely to be able to sink back in a hot tub or bath or whatever and let the tension just soak out of me.
And — as I mentioned in an earlier post — it’s so easy now. Turn on the tap, and clean, hot water comes out. No need to stoke up the fire, haul water from the well, and fill the tub one bucketful at a time. I know this is not a luxury enjoyed by everyone in the world, and so I’d like to take a moment to be properly thankful for it.
No, not my birthday; my date of birth. Which is to say, September first. I was born early, though I’m not sure by how much (I used to think my due date was the eleventh, but recently my mother said otherwise, and now I can’t remember what date she said). But really, the amount doesn’t matter — just the result.
Why does it matter? Because my school district, like most, had guidelines for determining when children should start kindergarten. You had to be five or older by the cut-off date. And what was that date?
September first.
I don’t know how strictly that was enforced. Maybe if I’d been born a few days later, I still could have started school that year. As it was, they gave my mother the choice, to start me or hold me back. Given that I was already a ferocious reader, she opted to boot me out the door and into kindergarten. And for that, I am more thankful than I can say.
People who would probably not have been in my life if I had started school a year later: kurayami_hime. She would have been two years ahead of me, instead of one, and we likely would not have become friends — at least not such close friends that these days, my parents refer to her as their other daughter. kniedzw: even if I still went to Harvard, he would have been more than a year out of college rather than recently graduated when I showed up, and by then would have distanced himself more from the friends he still had in school. We would not have begun dating, and I would not be married to him now. teleidoplex; it’s unlikely I would have gone to the Castell Henllys field school in 2000, which means we would not have met there. And while I still might have gone to Indiana University for graduate school (thus giving us a second chance to meet), I don’t know that I would have ended up playing in the Bloomington Changeling LARP — which created most of my social circle for six years, shaped my academic research, and led to me running Memento, the tabletop game that ended up inspiring the Onyx Court novels.
. . . to name just a few.
This is not to say I would have had no awesome friends, boyfriend/husband, or adopted sister had I entered school a year later. In both high school and college, I had friends a year behind me; I probably would have been closer to them in this alternate history, and they are very cool people, too. But you know what? I like my life. I like the path it’s followed. And so much of it is the coincidental result of being at particular points in the educational system at particular times. Shift me back a year, and a lot of the things I’m happiest with suddenly vanish, to be replaced by god knows what.
Dear Mom: thank you for sending me off to kindergarten on my fifth birthday, rather than holding me back an additional year. And thank you to whatever gestational butterfly flapped its wings and caused me to enter this world on September first, just a little bit ahead of schedule.
I’ve talked about Yuletide before, but as signups for it closed this evening, I was reminded that it’s a thing to be thankful for. Why? Because exchanges of that kind are a fun form of gift-giving, surprising somebody with a story written just for them. And while there are lots of exchanges built along these general lines, Yuletide is the two-thousand-pound gorilla on the scene — if the gorilla was made of fannishness and squee, and flailed around being happy and excited, occasionally grabbing people and sweeping them up into great big hugs.
I’m thankful for it because, as I’ve said before, fanfiction is one realm where story goes back to being pure play. Not that I don’t love my work — I’ve already said that I do — but it’s valuable to have a realm in which I can chill a bit more, and not worry about all the concerns that go with writing fiction for a living. The end of the year is, for me, a particularly good time to do that. I’ll be sending off the revised draft of A Natural History of Dragons soon, and once that’s out the door . . . well, okay, there’s something else after that which has a deadline, too. And technically Yuletide has a deadline. But my point is, writing my story for that will feel like a reward. Which is a thing to be thankful for, at this time of year.
