Wow...

The white lines, man, I can still see the white lines when I close my eyes.

My mind is seething with ambition: gotta get that table loom that Meg gave me warped up; want to finish that biography of Cleopatra I started; want to start processing the fleeces I got this weekend (step one - read up on spinning in the grease); want to write my "What I Did This Weekend" report; want to clean the house (Dear God it's a mess)...

All the while my body is saying, "Bitch, we just spent 18 hours out of the last 72 in the car. Go pass out."

I think I'll take the majority vote.

Sunday Miscellany: The End of the World. With Peacocks.

Universe save us from the eschatologists! Look, ok, this week has been Special. Really, really Special. But a bigass earthquake in Japan (now with added radiation) and a new war in the Middle East does not an apocalypse make. Is this stressful and anxiety-producing? Absolutely. But I don't care what the Mayans said, this stuff isn't more frequent; it's just that the advent of cheap recording devices and unlimited bandwith has just made it more immediate. Even twenty years ago, a terrible tsunami was just Something Awful that Happened in Foreign Parts. Now you're watching the shaky camera video of water lapping at someone's feet and desperately hoping they got out okay.

But! You say, Nostradamus predicted that in the End Times a Second Sun would rise over Japan!

Seriously, you're taking life-changing advice from a guy who doesn't know the difference between fission and a fusion reaction? Puh-leeze!

I've never gotten the obsession with predicting the end of the World, nor the apparent glee that some of the predictors take from the prospect. Really, you want all your non-believing and differently-believing friends and neighbors to die horrible deaths in war and torture while you get swept up to Heaven? Do you dream of their last agonizing thoughts being about how they should've listened to you and accepted Jesus into their hearts?

And they call *me* passive aggressive.


To quote Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite books):

"I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff--well, if you could see them all in Heaven--serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add."

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I learned a new word this week:

Pavonicide: The killing of a peacock.

Those of you who went to Grand Outlandish in the years after they moved it from Sir Kragon's land will know exactly why I'm glad there's a word for it, but for those who don't, we spent several entire Memorial Day Weekends on a piece of land owned by someone who raised peacocks.

OMG those birds are annoying. I can still do a damned accurate imitation of a peacock call courtesy of that weekend. AT ALL HOURS, they went off. Let me tell you, the LAST thing you want to hear at the crack of dawn after you've been out at bardic circles all night long is one of those things going off in your ear.

The peacocks escaped the weekends unscathed, to my certain knowledge, despite the presence of a thousand people with the weaponry and know how to dispose of them properly. We even had recipes...

Beware The Ides of March...

It's hard to know what to say about the ongoing crisis in Japan without sounding trite. I can't even imagine the horror of the whole thing, and frankly, I don't want to. I continue to be humbled before the brave stoicism of those affected directly by this; I don't know if things would be the same if this happened in an American city. If an agnostic's prayers count for anything, they've got them.

What do we even call it? The Sendai Earthquake-Tsunami-Volcano-Radiological Disaster of 2011? The Great Embuggerance? And seriously, what the hell? For crying out loud, Universe, didn't Japan have enough bad karmic crap happen to it in the 20th century?

I've been watching the coverage pretty much non-stop since it happened; BBC and NHK mostly. (The American networks have been mostly useless. CNN is close, but they're trying too hard to tart up the story, as if it needed it.) Every time there's some sort of crisis, I take to the news like a crazed junkie. I feel really ghoulish doing it, but it verges on compulsion.

The thing of it is that I'm this way about a lot of things. A quick scan of my personal library shows more than a few books on plagues, catastrophes, sociopathy, psychopathy and other horrors. My husband makes fun of me: I can't watch horror movies, as obviously fake as they are, but I will watch all sorts of documentaries about disasters and serial killers. He actually asked once, "So you can only watch when it's actually happening to real people?"

But it's more complicated than that.

I can't NOT look, when something terrifies me. I'm getting better about flying, but at the depths of the phobia, I was infinitely more comfortable in a window seat staring at the ground, the better to see that it was still 30,000 feet below me. Once, when I went to visit my friends who live at the top of the HILL of DEATH in Colorado, my friends drove me back down the HILL of DEATH so we could go to the pub. They noticed that my conversation was becoming increasingly disjointed, and looked to see my eyes transfixed on the edge of the cliff we were driving along, and they said, "Just don't look!"

But I have to. It's like somehow if I keep my eyes on the Peril, that I'll be able keep it at bay.

Irrational, I know, but there it is. So you're on notice, O Great Embuggerance, that I'm watching you.

Watching the ongoing coverage does make doing a customer-service-related job somewhat awkward. It is VERY tempting, when someone calls in crying, "OMG I'LL DIE IF I CAN'T GET TO FACEBOOK THIS HAS RUINED MY WHOLE DAY I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!" to respond with something along the lines of:

"Just shut the fuck up and move to Sendai."

It was the week that was...

I'm on a news diet. I just spent the last three days staring at various video feeds running the horrible, horrible news from Japan. I'm not allowed to go to BBC, NHK or the NYT for the rest of the night.

I can go to CNN, though. It's not like they actually show news, anyway.

I am at a loss for words. The people of Honshu are living through every nightmare scenario I could ever imagine, their entire world wiped out in the blink of an eye. My heart goes out to them.

A freaking 9.0. I mean the goddamned earth *moved.* The axis tilted 4 inches, the day slowed down a little for a second, and a freaking TECTONIC PLATE dragged itself over two feet. Watching all the footage, it looked for all the world like I'd dumped out a box of legos and ran a garden hose through it. If I'd seen this in a movie, I'd have slagged the SFX guys for overplaying it.

It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget that the space in which we live is so very fragile, that we live on this tiny little strip between ice and fire...

Excuse me, I gotta go hug my kids.

Sunday Miscellany...

For the record, I don't hate all contemporary art.  For example, Brian Dettmer is 15 kinds of cool with a side of awesome-sauce.  I didn't think I'd ever admire book desecration this much, but it's absolutely fascinating.
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I alternate between being amused and appalled at this NYT story on the  Native Society, "a new club that is limited to native New Yorkers, many of them city dwellers who might reside in 10021 — the ZIP code of upper Park and Fifth Avenues — or be graduates of certain prep schools."

It's a wonderful example of a reporter very gently snarking on the subject of his article.  The undeserved arrogance is a schadenfreude-tastic joy to behold.  Take, for example, this quotation:

“It’s not about who you were born, or what you were given, but what you’ve made of yourself,” explained one member, Alexa Winner, a 22-year-old stylist and fashion designer. “Anyone can come from a wealthy family, but it takes actual brains and ambition to do something with that.”

SweetieHoney, if you’re 22 and you’d actually accomplished something Earth-shattering, then the New York Times would be writing about You the Wunderkind and Your Fabulous Accomplishments, not the Sooper-Seekrit Ultra-Cool Members’-Only clubhouse that you and your little friends came up with.

Seriously, kids, if someone is comparing you to an Edith Wharton novel in this context, it's not a compliment.  :)

On the plus side, I now totally get that "Sex and the City" episode, "Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women."
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I'm reading the comment threads on the Austen threads at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog (Disqus is blocked at work) and I have to say that I've never quite gotten the mindset that hates to see a favorite book turned into a movie.  I'm not saying that good books don't get totally screwed over into bad movies, because that happens more often than not, but that the book and the movie are two different media, with two different requirements.  What makes a good book does not necessarily make a good movie, and vice versa.  There is room in this world for two different interpretations of the same story.  Embrace the "And."  Maybe the movie will suck, maybe it won't, but it doesn't (or at least, shouldn't) change your relationship with the story itself.

Incidentally, this will be my 21st year on the Internet, and I will tell you that every group of fans has the Flamewar Topic: the question that, if introduced, will cause the group to instantly balkanize and lob insults at each other.  On the Star Trek groups, it's Kirk vs. Picard; on the MST3k, it was Mike v. Joel.  Rec.arts.polymer.clay could not be relied upon to discuss the relative merits of Fimo and Sculpey in a rational manner, and for the love of God, avoid the Rabid Ianto Fangirls at all costs.

You'd expect better of the Jane Austen fans, but, seriously, don't bring up the subject of Fanny Price without donning asbestos undies first.

It's early.

I'm sitting in the line to sign the kids up for a very good summer school.  Apparently, turning up at 4:00 makes you a piker.... the really hard-core folks camp out overnight.

This seemed like such a good idea in the light of day.

There's a strange, vaguely tent-city vibe to the whole affair; people cocooned in sleeping bags on lawn chairs.  People who, probably, a decade or so ago, sat out all night for rock concert tickets.  (Or, in my case, for tickets to see Star Wars: Episode One.  I had a great time in that line - a much better time than I did at the movie.)  There's probably some profound observation to be made about that dichotomy, but I'm too cold and tired to think of it.

All I can say is that this better count towards a better nursing home.

Lunchtime Blogging: Austen v. Coates

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a married blogger in possession of a good blog, must be in want of some Jane Austen.

The inestimable Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading his way through the Jane Austen novels, and it's been interesting to watch; there's a sort of ZOMG THIS IS ACTUALLY GOOD reaction that is entertaining, and it's combined with the fun of watching someone read something you love for the first time.

I can't wait until he gets to Persuasion.