I was at FOGcon last weekend and ICFA this weekend, and in between I was busy, with the result that I am irretrievably behind on reading LJ and other such stuff. E-mail I intend to catch up on, but I’m declaring bankruptcy on blog posts; if there’s anything important or cool from the last week and a half that you think I should see, feel free to mention in the comments.

You know what I love about reading fiction?

I can do it while walking places.

For the last four years, a large proportion of my reading has been nonfiction, most of it research for the Onyx Court. Which requires my attention to follow complex sentences and complicated arguments, and often I end up taking notes: not very compatible with strolling down the sidewalk. But if the book in my hands is a Dorothy Sayers mystery? I can jaunt off to the grocery store, no problem, and not feel annoyed that the walk is taking up valuable time, because I’m entertaining myself as I go.

No doubt whatever I write next will require some amount of research. But until then, I’m going to do my very best to read ALL the fiction.

O_O

O_O,

. . . okay, this is ridiculous, I know that, but I am in mourning.

In the summer of 1997, I worked on an Earthwatch project in South Shields, England, doing archaeological excavation on the Roman fort of Arbeia. While I was there, I purchased a keychain in a local shop: a little Roman shield, rectangular and curved, with wings and lightning bolts and a round central boss, painted red and gold. The keychain being rather on the cheap side, the paint began flaking off in short order, but that was okay; the decoration was stamped into the steel, so I just stripped off the remainder of the paint and kept it plain.

This has been My Keychain for, effectively, my entire life. I never bothered with a keychain before then, and I’ve never used another since; I am not the sort of person who keeps twelve tchotchkes strung on the ring. The whole packet right now consists only of house key, mail key, bike key, car key, and the shield.

Or it did, until tonight.

Tonight, when I pulled my keys from my jeans pocket, the ring at the top of the shield broke clean through.

For years, I’ve been worried that some day I would lose my keys — worried not because I’d be locked out of the house, but because the shield would be gone. This is better; I still have it. But my husband can vouch for the utterly tragic look on my face when I realized, standing in the front hall, that it had broken beyond repair.

What will I do?

I’ll keep the shield, of course. The scoring down the center of the lightning bolts and marking the feathers on the wings has nearly been worn off; the curve of the shield has almost been mashed flat. It was never meant to survive thirteen and a half years of constant use. It’s a relic of my first dig, though, and my first solo international trip, and my love of all things Roman; no way is it going in the trash. The real question is what I do about my keys. They’re still on a ring, with what’s left of the chain; the clasp on that is so fused, I may have to cut it off. But I don’t know what I’ll do for a keychain. Do I need one? Do I want one? Maybe I need a mourning period for the old one first. I have no idea what could possibly replace it in my affections.

Yes, I’m mourning my freaking keychain. So what. It was a dear old friend, and I’m sorry to see it go.

. . . wait, the Heaviside Layer is a real thing?

I thought it was just something made up for the musical Cats.

(This epiphany has been brought to you by Tim Powers’ novel Declare, and the details on wireless telegraphy therein.)

By the way, this is what I did for my thirtieth birthday:

It’s called “indoor skydiving,” and it is FABULOUS.

My understanding is that the setup was invented to help skydivers train. You can also do it for fun, though. A giant fan beneath the wire trampoline blows enough wind upward to lift a person who’s perpendicular to the flow, simulating the effect of free-fall. The trainer is there to catch and adjust you; it can be hard to stabilize if you’ve never done it before, so you sink down or drift into the wall. Once you get the hang of it, they may spin you, or (in the case of our guy) latch onto you at shoulder and hip, put themselves into free-fall, and then take you zooming up into the shaft above, dropping down until you almost hit the trampoline, zooming up again, down again, maybe spinning as you go . . . .

OMG.

SO. MUCH. FUN.

You may be put off when you find out what your money gets you. My husband bought a group package for me and some friends/family; we each were allotted two one-minute flights. Doesn’t sound like much — but trust me, that’s a lot of free-fall. One of our group fell sick and didn’t come, so I got his extra time, making for two two-minute flights, and holy god by the end my pecs were tired. It’s like lying on your back, holding a heavy weight juuuuuuust above your chest, for one (or two) minutes at a stretch. (Since I, for some ballet-related totally inexplicable reason, found it more natural to bend at the hip rather than the knee – as seen in this photo — I also ended up with sore glutes. I’m pretty sure I would have just traded those for sore quads instead, though, had I made the effort to drag my knees down.) By the time my second two minutes were up, I was more than ready to be done.

If you have any desire to fly, you should absolutely try this out. Especially if, like me, you’ve had enough ankle-and-knee problems that leaping out of a plane (or rather, landing after such a leap) is just asking for trouble. It will make you giddy with joy.

“Socrates was kind of the original sockpuppet.” — kniedzw, in discussing Plato

I love my husband. 🙂

For no explicable reason, I slept until 1:30 today.

Apparently I was really, really tired?

I had a prioritized list of things I needed to do today, with three items on it.

Woke up and found something had happened that added another item to that list, which I put in at position #1. Now I’ve spent the last hour or so working on #3.

So much for prioritized lists.

You know the bit in The Matrix when Neo’s been freed, and then they put him into the loading program and he’s got hair again and Morpheus says it’s his residual self-image?

Mine is apparently stuck at age twelve.

In my head I am both more tan and more blonde than I am in reality. This has nothing to do with our culture’s valorization of those qualities — at least I don’t think so — it’s that I used to be such a person, and my hindbrain hasn’t quite gotten the memo that years have passed since then.

As a kid, I spent literally hours a day in the pool. I did swim team in the morning; I played around in the water during the afternoon. And fortunately the Scandinavian genes did not win out, because I tanned instead of burning to a crisp. In college, I worked on digs for a few weeks each summer; my first two years of grad school, I took outdoor jobs for the entirety of the season. I like being outside; I like getting sunshine. I often don’t realize how little I do that anymore. So when I see a photo of myself, my reaction is generally “good GOD what happened?” For some reason, looking in a mirror doesn’t do it; it’s not until I look at a picture that I realize how ridiculously pale I’ve become. Okay, sure, yay for less risk of skin cancer — but being tan makes me happy, because it tells me I’ve been in the sun, and the sun is a major source of joy in my life.

Where the hair is concerned, it’s more genetics than lifestyle (though the lack of sunlight has some effect). Like my mother and brother, I started out very blonde, and have gotten darker over time. Which is fine . . . except that again, my brain hasn’t caught up. I’ve only just wrapped my mind around the fact that I can no longer call myself even a dark blonde. My hair is brown, folks — which will come as no surprise to anybody who’s seen me, but apparently I’m a bit slow on the uptake. In my head, I’m a twenty-nine-year-old version of my twelve-year-old self.

To a lesser degree, it extends to other things, too. Most of them ballet-related. What do you mean, I can’t drop cold into the full front splits anymore? (I can still get there, but it takes warming up. I haven’t used that as the start of my stretching since I was sixteen.) My physical therapist had me doing one-foot toe-raises on the edge of a step, so my heel sinks below the horizontal, and I was appalled to discover that three sets of fifteen was (and still is) WAY beyond my capabilities; I’m up to three sets of ten, and that’s progress from where I started. My days of pointe, they are far behind me. But sometimes I forget that.

I know I’m not the only one with this kind of discrepancy between self-image and reality. We mostly hear about it in the context of weight, though: either the anorexic who sees herself as still fat, or the legions of women who feel they ought to be five or ten or twenty pounds lighter than they are. I’d like to hear about the other aspects, the weird little points where your brain is still stuck in the past, or an alternate reality that never truly existed. What’s your residual self-image?

Went to the Legion of Honor today, to see their Impressionist-era Paris exhibit — which I frankly didn’t care about that much, but I wanted to go Do Stuff with friends, and it’s a holiday weekend, and well why not.

For those of you who haven’t been there: there are probably prettier museums, and there may be museums with more spectacular settings, but I’ve never personally visited one that combines those two qualities to greater effect. Not only is it a lovely classical building with columns and such, but it sits atop a hill in the far northwest corner of the San Francisco peninsula, surrounded by flowers and grass and wind-sculpted trees, overlooking the Golden Gate. Just standing outside it in the sunshine makes me feel happy.

Then we went inside, and I spent more time looking at the photos (showing how Paris was modernized, and what it looked like before) than I did at the paintings and etchings and such, but as I’ve been studying the history of photography that’s to be expected. Of the artists displayed, I’m not a fan of Toulouse-Lautrec, but I was reminded that I genuinely do like Mucha; I’m burned out on the three or so works of his that every other college bookstore in the U.S. sells in poster form, but once I get past those to the rest of his stuff, it’s very appealing.

And then there was this one oil painting.

I didn’t have anywhere to write down the title or artist, so I can’t tell you what it was. An outdoor scene, mostly green, two women in the left foreground with a BRIGHT red umbrella. You need to understand that I’m usually not much interested in fine art; give me artifacts of the past or other parts of the world and I’m all over them, but paintings and such tend to be the galleries I skip. This is probably the first time I’ve taken a good look at a well-conserved oil painting since my conversations with tooth_and_claw, who waxed rhapsodic about the luminosity of oil paint, and the level of detail a good artist can achieve with them, and the textured quality of an oil painting seen in person.

People, she is right.

This thing seemed to leap out of its frame at me. The red GLOWED against the green, and the whole thing had this almost 3-D feel to it, the umbrella and the leaves and such standing out against their background because of the layers of paint. We also wandered through some of the standard collections, including a bunch of oil paintings in another wing, and while many of them were unremarkable, others could draw me in from the other side of the room — usually the ones that did something cool with light. A valley with a sunset sky glimpsed at the far end. People and angels gathered around a glowing baby Jesus. The only interesting still-life I recall ever seeing, because this one had flowers but also spiky holly bushes and half-dead leaves and thorny stuff in the background, in a hundred shades of rich dark green. I had heard, but never really understood, that a reproduction of an oil painting doesn’t do it justice. You really do lose the luminosity, the texture, that make oil such a compelling medium.

I am not an instant convert; I still find a lot of paintings to be completely forgettable. The card at the side may talk about the masterly brushwork or arresting composition or what have you, and I’ll just shrug and think, sure, if you say so. Art appreciation: I’m not very good at it. (Artifact appreciation, on the other hand. My favorite piece in the Sackler, frex, is a very plain but surpassingly lovely jade and bronze spear-head.) I must say, though, that I now get the oil painting thing better than I did twenty-four hours ago. To really understand them, you have to see them in person.

I’ll post a more detailed explanation later, but if you happen to be someone who follows me on Facebook, be aware that I’ll be deleting my account in a few days. (The lag is to give time for people to save any contact info they might need.) They keep doing this round of privacy violations both deliberate and accidental, and I’m done with it. The marginal value I get from the service is not worth putting up with their crap.