suzannareads

I didn't get as far as Sparkle on its first day today but I did go to the Village for a meal with a local disabled group (moat of whom are also queer/trans) which I'm adjacent to, with a friend who needed a PA.

(I was glad to learn that I can still queer this friend/PA binary; it used to make up my whole employment for like five years.)

I got to my friend's house before we went out. They had glitter on their face and offered me some. I love glitter but it was the kind of hot day where I started sweating as soon as I got out of the shower. After having to hustle over to their house, my face was so sweaty I told them not to bother putting it on my face because I'd just sweat it off. Of course I had a sleeveless t-shirt on (the one D bought me at last year's Sparkle!) so they offered to put it on my shoulders. Pretty soon both my upper arms were covered in pink, purple and blue glitter, it was great.

When I got home, D saw me and pointed this out of course (as well as my "painted for the first time in five years" fingernails (chrome with rainbow sparkles over them).

I said it'd be the perfect time to flex my biceps, now that they're extra gay.

"Guy-ceps!" he said. "Guy for guy-ceps."

altamira16

This is a weird slipstream book that feels like it is trying to horn in on Nick Mamatas's territory sometimes.

Jonathan Abernathy is a lonely adult. He is an orphan, and his life is going nowhere. He goes and begs his old manager at the hotdog stand for a job because he desperately needs the money.

But he is working on a bigger project where he is a dream auditor. At night, he enters people's dreams and sucks away the bad parts so that they can be more productive. (This is the thing that feels Mamatas-like. People are doing weird things because of capitalism.) There are all sorts of things about the dream world that are unclear. What happens to the parts of the dreams that are sucked away? What happens to the lives of the people whose dreams have been changed?

He has a neighbor named Rhoda who has a daughter named Timmy, and sometimes Rhoda asks Jonathan to watch Timmy.

He likes her. He starts seeing her in dreams, but whose dreams are they? Which dreams are real?

cosmolinguist

I have to write a bio to advertise a keynote speech I've agreed to deliver later in the summer.

I'm finding that coming up with more than one sentence to describe myself/my job is probably a lot harder than the speech will be itself!

rocky41_7 posting in

books

The day after finishing The Traitor Baru Cormorant I had to rush over to the library to pick up book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I finished earlier today.

Spoilers for The Traitor Baru Cormorant below!

The second book of a fantasy series of any kind often bears a very difficult burden. It is most often the place where the scope of the story grows significantly. A conflict which before was local to the protagonist's home and surrounding area may expand, often to the extent of the known world. New players are often added to the cast, bigger and scarier problems and challenges arise. The protagonist may have gone up in the world, wielding new power and influence, with new responsibilities. As a result, this is where many series lose their footing; a tightly-woven book or season 1 may give way to a muddled, watered down part 2 as the writers struggle to juggle this expanded focus.

The Monster suffers from none of those things. It is the place where Baru's story expands—in The Traitor, her focus was almost entirely on Aurdwynn; it was the full field of play and outside players mattered only as they influenced events on Aurdwynn. In The Monster, Baru has become a true agent of the Imperial Throne of Falcrest, and with these new powers, the entire field of the empire is opened up for her play, and it is fascinating to watch.

In The Traitor, Baru was narrowly focused on managing the situation in Aurdwynn; everything she did was to that end. In The Monster, Baru can do whatever she wants, and we get to see her finally on the open field. Even where she flounders and flails, it's delightful to watch the machinations of her mind constantly at work. Her cleverness rows against her bursts of sentimentality to produce some impressively chaotic effects, but she is as slippery as an eel to pin down, even when her rivals think they've gotten the best of her.

( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

I refuse to talk about work again, and nothing else happens to me lately, but luckily here is a giant meme from used_songs:

( 80 questions! )

mallorys_camera

Heat spell finally broke.

Hal-lay-LOOL-ya.

I have lived through heat spells before, but I can't remember any as bad as this past three days. (That's probably due to my incredibly bad memory more than climate change.)

Since yesterday was supposed to be marginally cooler than the two preceeding days, I went over to the New Paltz community garden to water the seedlings I'd planted last week.

I was expecting to find the seedlings had all died. And maybe some did, but not all: Dried grass clippings turn out to be a very effective mulch.

Place was like the asylum grounds of Hell—completely deserted with a kind of pitiless stark white HD light. It was weird to be the only person present in that vast garden! Maybe I walked 50 yards total, and so much sweat poured off me, I looked as though I'd just come out of a shower.

###

My stomach is still not 100%. I've been sleeping badly, and never more than five hours a night. I remind myself that it is these factors—and not the inherent Evil of the Universe—that are responsible for the pissy mood I'm in. And these factors are controllable. When DonkeyBody (

smokingboot™) is back to optimal functioning & I can sleep eight hours, the Universe will once more go back to being a pleasant place filled with laughter & magic.

At least, that's what I am telling myself.

rocky41_7 posting in

books

I don't actually remember where I saw Catriona Ward's Sundial recommended, but it was somewhere and convincing enough to get it on my TBR. I finished the audiobook this week so it's time to reflect.

Sundial is a domestic psychological thriller which focuses on the relationship between the protagonist Rob and her eldest daughter Callie. Or at least, that's what the novel summary posits. A good 50% or more of the book is actually about Rob's youth and her relationship with her childhood family, primarily her twin sister, Jack. I didn't get that at first, which led to me being slightly frustrated by the length of the "flashback" sections until I realized that they were at least half the true focus of the story.

Ward excels in capturing the petty toxicity of a domestic environment gone sour. Especially deftly handled are the ways in which a partner can wound in such seemingly mundane ways. Many of the exchanges between Rob and her husband, Irving, come off as completely innocuous to an outsider, but to the two people in the relationship, who have the context for these seemingly nothing interactions, the full cruelty of them is on display. This adds completely believably to the tension between Rob and Callie, who has long favored her father, and who sees her mother's responses as hysterical overreactions, because she doesn't have the context that Rob does. Ward also very neatly portrays a truly vicious marriage, where both parties have given up pretending they want to be together, at least to each other, and where the entire relationship has become an unending game of oneupsmanship, trying to get one over on your spouse.

Adding to this suffocating atmosphere is Callie, a very strange 12-year-old who is starting to exhibit some very troubling behavior, particularly in her interactions with her 9-year-old sister, Annie. Rob has always struggled to connect with Callie—in contrast with Irving, who happily spoils her to force Rob to be the bad guy enforcing boundaries—but when Callie is thought to have attempted to poison Annie with Irving's diabetes medication, Rob decides it's time she and Callie have a real heart-to-heart.

So she takes Callie on a mother/daughter trip to Rob's childhood home, Sundial, an isolated family property out in the Mojave desert.

( Read more... )

mallorys_camera

I would have voted for Cuomo.

Cuomo is an old-school Democrat and a loathsome human being by all accounts, but Cuomo is also an able administrator—and a city the size of NYC needs able administration. Weren't DiBlasio's two terms in office enough?

But hey! Maybe I would have been wrong.

Cuomo did kill a lot of old people who would have voted for him because they remember his father.

Plus, Zohran Mamdani is incredibly appealing, and I'd like to ride city buses for free-eee-eeee! Galvanizing 50,000 volunteer canvassers—Cuomo had to pay his—is no mean feat. Mamdani is like a male AOC or a younger, mega-photogenic Bernie Sanders. Mississippi Marsala is a lovely little movie. And I think it may be true that Mamdani is Trump's worst nightmare.

So, yeah: Zohran Mamdani.

The oil change yesterday went on forever, because I asked them to check the brakes and the suspension. The Prius is 14 years old & runs like a dream, but the roads in Ulster County are like one long Tourney of Potholes. If I don't rejuvenate my car's suspension system every year, one day it's gonna go over a bump and the wheels are gonna fly off.

Plus my mechanic stripped a gasket as he was finishing up, so all the new oil he'd just put into the Prius spilled all over the garage floor.

Even though I knew exactly what was happening—gasket! not a biggie—I could feel myself edging into a massive panic attack. I wanted to start sobbing. Like so many women of my age, I have Fear of the Big Box—basically because I wasn't taught about tools & engines & machinery growing up. Things with engines operate through a kind of magic that I am ignorant about! I was at the mercy of these alien priests in their grease-stained denim jumpsuits! All I could do was tremble in awe and fear—

Thankfully, I managed to talk myself out of the panic attack—because really, who wants to see an elderly lady get hysterics?

The verdict on the car: Back wheels need new shocks; car needs four new tires.

Cost will be about a grand.

Of course, I'd far rather spend $1,000 on hazelnut truffles and subscriptions to generative AI video services, but I must have a safe vehicle—my own driving abilities are wildcard factor enough on the roads.
###

My mechanic was horribly apologetic about the gasket when he brought the car out to me. He was an elderly gentleman with a very thick accent. I imagined him as a refugee from one of those countries in Africa beseiged by a gruesome civil war, Sierra Leone or Uganda or someplace.

"You know, stuff happens," I assured him. "You did a great job. Thank you so much!"

And I wrote him a five-star review, singling him out by the name embroidered over the breast pocket of his grease-stained denim jumpsuit.

Because I didn't want him to get fired over a gasket.

mallorys_camera

The whole Israel/Iran 12-Day War thing is such a blatant piece of political theater.

When the dust settles, we will all find out that Bibi & the Khomini were burning up those back-channel phone lines, maneuvering to get Trump that Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

###

Meanwhile, yesterday was fairly productive, although it was really fuckin' hot and cat ownership disqualified me from a potential housing situation—to be honest, I know the housing situation owner through the Shawanagunk Dems, and he is kinda weird, so maybe the cats saved me.

Did the rest of the trip-related errands, had an unsatisfactory phone conversation with RTT, and shortly will be taking the car in for its oil change. I am on that conveyor belt! And it is just possible I will hit my Remuneration quota before I leave on the trip.

I have been bemoaning my own lack of agency: Why don't I have more control over my life?

But, of course, agency is a relative thing. However aggrieved I may feel about my own, I still probably have more of it than 85% of the people who live—or have ever lived—upon this planet.

Forward, little conveyor belt!

mallorys_camera

Not a great day, yesterday.

Getting ill—verifiably ill with no part of it due to some subliminal desire to feel sorry for myself—makes me feel fragile, and when I feel fragile, I get depressed, I get lonely.

But nobody I wanted to talk to wanted to talk to me.

J___ L_______ didn't pick up the phone. He probably saw it was me, I thought. And who would want to talk to me?

My other phone-buddy of choice may be dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Imagine! I thought. He's letting a cancer diagnosis interfere with talking to me.

I still wasn't feeling 100%: My stomach was lodgy, my appetite nil. I felt exhausted, and with that kind of exhaustion comes a deep brain fog. I had work to do, & I was doing it but neither happily nor easily.

And it was fuckin' hot out—like that Twilight Zone episode where everybody is melting because the Earth is veering into the Sun only it turns out they are hallucinating because the Earth is really veering away from the sun.

###

When I get depressed like that, I put off doing errands.

Like my car needs an oil change.

But what if in mucking around with the car, the mechanic finds that it needs $5,000 worth of work or it will explode on the Mid-Hudson Bridge tomorrow?

Under those circumstances, wouldn't it be better not to get the oil changed?

I mean, if they don't discover the car needs $5,000 worth of work, then it can't explode, right?

###

All afternoon long, I Remunerated gloomily away. Lew & Ed's wedding is this coming weekend, and I'm going to Ithaca & Edinboro for four days. Some details I took care of way in advance, but some are still dangling—like should I worry about the cats?

Four days is kind of the max for leaving cats untended with lots of food & water, and multiple litterboxes.

I never would have left Sybyl that long, but then, Sybyl loved me, and Mabel-Molly & Molly-Mabel do not. Never in my long history of animal companions have I ever had two who seemed so utterly indifferent. It's like adopting a waif from a Romanian orphanage & taking them home only to discover they have Psychotic Attachment Disorder.

(Well—Molly-Mabel may love me a little. She follows me around the house & often leaps up, meowing, for pets. But she dislikes snuggling & being picked up. Mabel-Molly has a memory like an elephant because she has never forgiven me for trying to condition & comb out her mats, and actually hisses at me every now & then—half-heartedly, true: a hiss of dislike not of aggression, but still.)

I don't really get a whole lot back from the kiskas.

When I am feeling upbeat, this is not a problem.

But I can't always feel upbeat.

###

In the late afternoon, Ichabod called.

We were both In a Mood.

Somehow, we started talking about RTT. "You know, every time I see him, we have at least one big fight," I complained to Ichabod. "And he tells me, 'I don't even feel like you're my mother. We hardly ever talk. You don't ever know what's going on in my life—' which isn't true, by the way. Everything that goes on in his life, he immediately posts to social media.

"So then I try to call him. And he never picks up the phone!"

"You & RTT need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

"You think everyone should go to therapy," I said.

"That's true," Ichabod said.

"But I already know what the issue is. The real reason RTT doesn't feel like I'm his mother is because I'm so marginal. I don't have a home; I have a place where I'm staying for now. And he's ashamed of me because all his other friends have mothers with homes—"

"You really need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

###

In the evening, J___ L_______ texted a starburst of photos:

Was sailing up in San Francisco all day! I'll call—

We'll talk SOON, I deferred hastily because by that point, I was utterly incapable of muttering a single word to another human being.

But the pictures of the glorious and presumably cool San Francisco Bay did make me feel a whole lot better.

###

In the end, it is what it is.

You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes, you don't, and sometimes by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they have changed the rules.

In the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your narrative can compare to those stories. Still, all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is.

cosmolinguist

D and I both are encouraged by the healthcare system to take our blood pressure more regularly and/or without the white-coat syndrome (that one's me, though it's not "I'm stressed to be at the doctor's office" so much as "I'm stressed about the anti-fatness I must tolerate imminently in order to sometimes get the healthcare I need").

We had to measure our upper arms today in order to make sure the machine we're ordering has a cuff big enough.

And it turns out they are the same circumference! To the centimeter. How romantic!

mallorys_camera

I ignored the mystery stomach ache & did errands. You're just being a slacker! I told myself.

Got back to the casa & began Remunerating. But in addition to the stomach ache, I felt... off.

Now, I never know when I feel off whether I really feel off or I'm just malingering. I'm incredibly lazy, & will seize every opportunity to do absolutely nothing—

But, no. I had a throbbing headache (& I don't usually get headaches), and I felt weak, and my insides were churning—and then I broke out in a fearful sweat just before my insides did what insides do when they churn—and I felt as though I could barely crawl back to my bed.

Food poisoning or norovirus?

Spent the rest of the day and the following night in bed in a semi-delerium, listening to a bizarre Netflix show called Ginny & Georgia, which is simultaneously good & baaaaaad. (I have a thing for teenage dramas.) I had to guess what the characters looked like 'cause I couldn't open my eyes.

Woke up this morning feeling more or less normal, so I guess it was food poisoning?

Still. I'm going to be sedentary today.

###

Drama this morning: The water in the house turned off!

Icky has this ancient Orbit digital timer on his irrigation hose. It keeps not timing, so the watering hose keeps not going on—and his little tomatoes were all parched & dying. I fiddled with the Orbit settings to give the the tomatoes a soak—and in doing so, somehow managed to fuck with the water pressure inside the house.

Icky berated me soundly for this over the phone, and, of course, he was not wrong—one really shouldn't fuck with machinery unless one knows what one is doing.

Still, I felt aggrieved—I thought I was doing a good thing! Shouldn't I get credit for that?

If it's not Icky being a dick, it's the U.S. starting World War III!

Always fuckin' something.

drawnecromancy posting in

booknook

I've discovered this author through my parents, who'd read several of his books while they were in their 20s in university - specifically the Elric and the Hawkmoon series. Of course I got curious, because my parents enjoyed those books, and despite their warning that it "probably does not hold up in 2025", I've read all of Hawkmoon (or at least, all the french translations my mom had).

It wasn't... great. Sometimes it was really really bad (the orientalism at times is... something.). But it was also really entertaining and funny. There seems to be between 2 and 50 plot points per book, which are all 200 pages or less, and Hawkmoon's chief motivation is "I want to go home to kiss my wife" which is a mood, honestly. The whole "Eternal Champion" thing in the last 3 books was a bit... not to my tastes, although there were some very fun passages of it. Overall you can tell it's old and that you could just say words back then. I wouldn't recommend this series exactly, but it's pretty fascinating. I'm considering getting my hands on Elric at some point just to see if it's the same kind of batshit.

Have you ever read a book from Michael Moorcock ? If so, what did you think ? Would you have anything to recommend ?

I'll say my favorite part of the Hawkmoon books are the giant pink flamingos from Kamarg, that are used as mounts, including during war. It is really cool to picture guys flying to combat on flamingos of all things.

cosmolinguist

I read about this NatGeo documentary about Sally Ride last week and D and I watched the first half or so tonight (before I got too sleepy).

I remember being floored by a photo of Sally Ride in space, in the shuttle, that I saw in my social studies textbook in I wanna say third or fourth grade. American women could go to space. I think I was probably just about grown out of my desire to be an astronaut by this point (I'd seriously considered it until I decided my mom would worry too much about me so it wasn't a good idea...seeing how much she still worries about me, this seems very astute (the fact that I can't see did not occur to me as a dealbreaker until I was much older, by the way)) but I was fantastically interested in astronauts and the space shuttle (I had a toy version, complete with the truck to slot it on to for the drive across the country), the Voyagers still encountering planets at the time, and all that.

Reading about and especially watching the documentary now, I'm struck by how familiar parts of her story are. Never showed her emotions? Had parents who never modeled how to? (In a way that's referred to as "Norwegian"?!) This shit could literally be taken from my counseling sessions, heh.

This person as remote as the space she traveled to still feels as close as I was to that social studies textbook in elementary school.

tonithegreat

Such a difference the passing of time makes. I guess it has been less than a year since I last participated in an Idol Mini season. But still, such a difference in so many directions. It feels nice to sit with a laptop in a coffee shop and write. It feels nice to open a nostalgic window on Dreamwidth and see a slice of the internet that hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years or more. There used to be a lot of talk about how the internet was actually getting much worse, back at the dawn of the forms of social media that have taken over most of our devices now. I added my voice to those choruses. But ultimately, like everyone, I was dragged along on this wild ride consisting of so many media and culture shifts. And now here we are.

Do not fall horizontally. This mandate was issued multiple times in the instructional videos that Anson and I had to watch in order to sign the waivers required by the climbing gym that hosted roped/sport divisionals earlier this year. It became one of the quotes of the trip; one we would just say during silences in the car. It was delightfully ironic given that her routes had lots of overhangs and roof sections, making it more likely that her body would be positioned horizontally during a fall. As it turned out, both of Anson’s falls were pretty clean during the competition. But then in the evening after the competition, I took a big spill trail running- one where my whole body managed to get way out in front of my feet and I had that horrible moment of realizing I was falling with nothing I could do to stop it before the big smack. That was three weeks ago, and the skin has all grown back on my knees now. Do not fall horizontally.

June 21, 2025. Yesterday night was the solstice. Today is technically my 17th wedding anniversary! It’s before eight. And I’m sitting in my neighborhood coffee shop writing. The world is moving too quickly. Much too quickly. But just as some things are spiraling badly out of control in our world, our family’s chaotic rhythm seems to be in sort of a good place? Maybe? Dare I write that?

This fall, Rog will be two years post big brain surgery. He’s 60 this year. Almost twenty years with young onset Parkinson's and, honestly, things could be a heck of a lot worse.

Our girls are Juniors in high school now, eagerly awaiting the revelation of their AP exam scores. This is going to be such a big year for them. They’re both starting to drive which is part of why I’m actually able to pretend that I can breathe a little bit at this moment. Anson just finished a week of cello camp at FSU. Jasper is finishing up her summer synchronized swim training ahead of Junior Olympic nationals which are held over the week leading up to July 4. She’s swimming four routines at nationals this year. And I should be adding a final round of finishing touches of glitter and rhinestones to her solo suit right now. Jas decided to take the lifeguard test with the city while Anson and I were up in Georgia for climbing divisionals, and she came out of it with an offer for summer employment. I’m so proud of both of them, working hard for the things they want to go after.

The girls keep on learning and making connections. People change and grow. And the world burns around us. It’s hard to wrap my mind around.

I finished the couch-to-five-k running program again a couple of weeks ago. My own health hasn’t been my priority for an alarming couple of years. Work has been both intense and satisfying and family hasn’t been easy and I just let my health go to the back burner. My schedule hasn’t been consistent enough to let me exercise with friends or cultivate new exercise friends. I actually had to start C25K from the very first week this time, and it even threw in a few extra bonus workouts over the course of the program based on what it saw from me. But I’ve finished it again- midforties-Toni style, I guess. I’m figuring out what that means now. Perhaps primarily a lot of ibuprofen. I rolled directly into 5k speedwork with hopes for a hot summer race toward the end of next month. I still don’t honestly know if I will ever run an elusive sub-30-minute 5k. In the deeper past when I was in close to the right shape to knock one out, I was always aiming for longer races. But I might dust that old goal off again as it starts to cool down this autumn, depending on what else is happening.

I’ve never been a fast runner. My advantage in running was always just that I can slip into a frame of mind where I am genuinely happy while running and that I’m built for the long haul. Forty-inch-inseam legs make for long strides. But I’m quite heavy for me right now and that doesn’t help the running.

One thing I have done this spring is to undertake my running on trails. In times past I did a lot of road running around home, but the trails do something for me other than just giving me a place to strive cardiovascularly. I love being out in the hot north Florida green. One of the parks where I’ve been running has a gopher tortoise burrow along the loop trail I use. A little over half my laps there, I’ve been able to say hi to a tortoise friend as I go by.

The other trail that’s closer to home has been a riot of wildflowers over the last few weeks. One morning, I discovered that mushrooms had popped up along the sides of the trail, which led me to long ponderings about what the designer of the Mario Brothers games was thinking about when he made it so that the characters could power up by punching mushrooms. I’m sure that there are interviews out there where people have asked questions about this. But running that morning, and finally starting to feel good in places had me thinking that for me, running through wildflowers was the real power-up move. Running past pretty flowers and dew-covered bracken ferns. . . There are certainly worse things.

Anyway, do not fall horizontally, kids, if you can manage it.

marycatelli posting in

books

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 2 by Haegi

The story continues.

( Read more... )

mallorys_camera

In the middle of the night, I woke from a really vivid, elaborate dream:

Ben had fallen in love with a girl from a hippie evangelist Christian sect.

In the dream's meta-tags, there'd been a lot of history: He'd left to be with her. He'd come back. He couldn't live without her & left again. He came back. He had to go back to the sect to get his stuff, and he'd only be gone for four days, and he was definitely coming back—but when he came back, he was very sorry, but his love for this woman was bigger than everything—

I wasn't hurt. I was furious. Get out now, I snarled, and pushed him out the door.

He was shocked, But-but—

I wasn't sad over Ben at all. The only thing that was on my mind was how was I going to handle my life on my own? Two kids and all these animals!

###

The girl Ben had fallen in love with was married to the leader of the hippie evangelist Christian sect, and I was hip to the fact that the leader was essentially pimping her out, and that's how the leader got recruits for his sect.

Not expecting to be kicked out, Ben had invited the girl, her husband, and their four impossibly platinum-haired kids to live with us.

I found them in one of the bedrooms.

OUT, I thundered.

The girl slit her eyes and looked at me haughtily. Of course, I was curious about her—she was short, slim, had chestnut hair and oddly tilted eyes. Nothing to look at. I was much better looking. She must be some kind of sexual goddess, I thought because that was one thing Ben was very, very good at, sex, and I often felt a little inadequate because my sexual needs and performance are on the simple side: Does not take much for passion to ignite in me.

I shoved the girl and her husband/leader out the door.

Felt a bit sorry for the children who were sweet and innocent, but no, they'd have to go, too.

###

(Again in the dream meta-tags.) Stephen Silverman had found me the apartment.

I'd gone to him in great distress, and he'd told me, This is a very special building. Chateau D'Amboise (?) Rent controlled: $1,500 a month. It's a very special building; only special people are allowed to live here.

The apartment was very messy, crowded with unpacked boxes and cages in which lived a number of cats—a large ginger female and a tiny translucent Bengal, no bigger than my fingernail, among others.

There were also several black and white puppies running around yipping.

You've got to get RTT to walk the puppies, otherwise they'll shit all over the place. And you've got to get the cats water—

Only in transferring the tiny snail-like Bengal to a cage with water, I somehow killed it. Felt an impulse to mourn and reminded myself sternly: You don't have time for that now.

Went out with the puppies. Somehow ended up at one of the outdoor cafeterias at U.C. Berkeley where I filled my pockets up with candy. Knew I had to get back to the Chateau, but didn't know which bus to take. Guessed I'd have to find a taxi, but could not find one.

###

Finally, I was back at the Chateau, only I couldn't remember which floor I lived on. Took the elevator to various floors. The floors all had various themes—I remember the tenth floor was Paris: You got out of the elevator, and you were in France.

Somehow I was in another family's apartment, & I recognized the family—You're Tamsin's mother, aren't you? But they did not recognize me. I did notice, however, that even though the family had lived in the apartment for years and years and years, it was almost completely empty. The interior decor of my apartment, as cluttered as it was, was actually more attractive.

Finally went back downstairs to the lobby and asked the concierge: Where do I live?

The concierge was a burly gentleman in elaborate livery with an elaborately curled mustache. He consulted an illuminated medieval scroll and told me, You live on the 15th floor—

And I awoke.

###

The heat dome had not yet descended yesterday, and so I spent four very pleasant hours playing in the dirt at the New Paltz community garden.

The New Paltz community garden is vast:

This morning I woke up with a mysterious stomach ache & kind of freaked because how am I gonna keep Black Chicken comfortable when the Heat Dome descends plus my car's AC isn't working—it's an expensive fix and requires sitting for an entire day at the dealership in Kingston—& suppose the Nazis invade, and I have to flee?

But I suppose it will all work out.

It almost always does.

tonithegreat

This is not a good idea. I have way, way too much on my plate right now. There’s an entry due tomorrow already! But fine, I’m in. Gonna play LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! And you should too. Sign up here:

https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1182845.html

cosmolinguist

Happy Nystagmus Awareness Day. I wrote a kind of FAQ about nystagmus a while ago.

I had to explain the basics of what nystagmus is to the assessor who did my PIP assessment the other day. (They used to at least tell you they were a physio or a nurse or whatever, now they don't even bother letting on how unqualified they are to be assessing your particular condition.)

Oh speaking of, I got a phone call today, from an 800 number I'd been ignoring for a few days because it never left a message or anything. I mostly answered it by accident today. And it turned out to be from Maximus or whichever shitty entity the DWP have outsourced their assessments to in my region, saying they need more information from me so now I have to talk to them on the phone on Monday! Ugh. I've never had this happen before.

Got a text this morning saying that I need to book a blood test before I get more meds too. Ugh! More needles and more lectures about being fat. Not a fun day for admin relating to having a body!

mallorys_camera

Met up with BB, back from Germany.

We caught up on gossip—more on his side than my side. I live an exceedingly quiet life.

And then we talked about death, which is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently.

"Wait! You think about death?" I asked.

"Oh, only like every day for one or two hours," BB replied. "And have been since I was a kid."

##

Did I think about death when I was a kid? Only once that I can remember: I was three, maybe four years old, and sitting in the back of my grandfather's old Chrysler. (Even today, the smell of stale cigarette smoke is comforting to me because it reminds me of my grandfather!) We were parked at Coney Island. My mother, my two aunts, and my little cousin David were also crammed into the Chrysler, and my grandfather was expounding in his melifluous voice about how one day soon, the sea would rise up and swallow the land—

Four-year-old children have no sense of time, so I figured that my grandfather was saying that the sea would rise up in 10 minutes or so. And I would cease to be...

I didn't have any particularly negative associations with my own extinction. It was just something that was going to happen.

But I was practical. Clearly one should avoid extinction if one could. Why don't we just drive away? I chirped at my grandfather.

"Wait!" said BB. "You believe in reincarnation! So, didn't you think you would be reincarnated?"

"Well, I had very strong memories of having once been somebody else at that point in my life," I said. "But I don't think I was old enough to attach any system of causality. So, no. I didn't think about reincarnation. I only thought about the enormous wave that would wipe everything out—and me with it. It wasn't an unpleasant thought! But I figured if there were other options, we should take them."

We met at the oh-so-charming Gardiner Bakehouse: great coffee, interesting pastries, and an outstanding view of the Gunks, which unfortunately, no camera can separate out from the telephone wires:

The Gardiner Bakehouse is hosting some kind of storytelling event:

"You should enter," BB said.

"I should!" I said.

So, maybe I will.

###

Other than that, it was lots o' Remuneration. (I have a deadline coming up, which I have ignored successfully but which I should probably double up on.) And a trip to the gym through looming thunder clouds, which fortunately did not break till I was back from the gym. A good thing! The storms brought temperatures down by maybe 10 degrees, so that it's relatively cool this morning.

And now I must take advantage of the relatively cool temperatures to scamper off to New Paltz and do some gardening, even though I'd much rather sit here with my eyes slightly unfocused.

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December 2011

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Reading

Biceps for guys

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

I'd rather be the one giving the speech than the paragraph in the brochure about it

"The Monster Baru Cormorant" by Seth Dickinson

Here's some nonsense

Heat Spell Breaks

"Sundial" by Catriona Ward

Gaskets

Conveyor Belt

It Is What It Is

Matchy-matchyy

Always Fuckin' Something

Discussion : Michael Moorcock

(no subject)

LJ Idol, Wheel of Chaos! Week 1 - Quality

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 2

The Fifteenth Floor of the Chateau D'Amboise

LJ Idol - Declaration of Chaotic Intent!

Bodies!

Driving Away

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December 2011

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