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thanateFinished one and a half of the large things on my to-do list for this week, but we had a nice hard rain this morning and so the part of the basement with the mostly-empty file cabinet is flood central (why have we not done anything about this yet? The woe-meter is rising! Although at least the file cabinet is still on dry ground; it's just wet to get to it.) and thus difficult to move things around in, since there's limited dry floor space, and I have been reduced to wandering around the living room wishing we had a mud room to put all this sports junk into, not to mention enough space for that other bookshelf...
At least all the fabric is indoors, in the highest and still dry corner of the basement. With all my non-resin dolls, who of course care whether they're wet or dry or kept at a decent temperature. Someday I will have a couple of curio cabinets and put them, and the small rodent skulls, and the interesting rocks in unusual wine glasses, and all my other interesting and completely useless stuff on display somewhere. This is the theory, at any rate. Perhaps we can intersperse them with display swords and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grauwulf's award scrolls for balance. That, some bookshelves, some windows, and maybe the turtle tank sounds like good living room decor, yes?
In the present (as opposed to hypothetical time) I have drawn up plans for a hutch with bookshelves to sit on the back half of my desk, and if I manage most of this week's goals in good order, I think I'll be ready to go get the hardware store to cut up a sheet of heavy plywood to my specifications, and possibly indulge myself with a box of nice short self-tapping screws. This weekend I'm kind of looking forward to the local event, which will be the first time I've managed to attend an Artisan's Row. (SCA craft day! whee!) I can't really remember the last time I went to an event without intent to fence (or at least dressing so that I could) but I'm not eligible for the novice tourney, and not interested in the triple elim, so we'll see. I guess I should scare up a period project to work on in the next day or two, huh?
In the mean time, I've been populating my friends list with author blogs, which is a strange and fascinating thing. I haven't decided how I feel about fandom, as such; to a certain extent it's a bit creepy, and that's why I've previously read books but not researched or followed authors. There's some benefit to reading what people who write fiction I enjoy write in their journals, though, and getting a bit more familiar with other people's mechanics of writing and with the SF/F fandoms & publishing industry is probably good for me. But then there's the problem of reading what other people write, and starting to feel like you know something about someone who wouldn't know you from a hole in the ground (or might, but might not and you have no way of knowing...), and this confuses me. Not, I think, excessively important, but there's a definite learning curve. I tend to reply to posts when I think someone has said something interesting, but I'm trying to learn to censor the pointless agreement or "yes, that was interesting" impulses in the direction of strangers, while not be scared off too much by 50+ comments already on an entry if I have something to say.
The other advantage that's sort of a disadvantage is that I hear about all sorts of cons at which people who I would love to hear discuss their various advertised panel topics are about to appear. And these things all seem to take place in Boston, or Minneapolis, or central TX, or someplace on the left coast. The only things I know of in the Baltimore/DC radius are anime cons, which are all very well for art and costumes, but I'm not particularly interested in the programming. (Come on people, you know you want to have a SF/F con with real authors in the Baltimore Convention Center...) If there are any closer things, I also don't know how to find out about them. My lack of internet search skills continues to betray me.
And then, too, a broader internet world has put me into the orbit of yelling class. If it had happened a year ago, I honestly wouldn't know that this was going on, and while I'm sure I could seek out all the original bits of RaceFail09 or whatever it's being referred to by others, it is very much the sort of thing I avoid when I can. Like, er, politics and current events? Partly, and this is horrible but true, I am honestly far more interested in politics of the late Roman Republic than in the Holocaust Museum shootings last week. (which I only heard of becausegrauwulf mentioned them...) I was raised to think that complete ignorance about current events/social climates is not actually ok, and I pretty much believe this, but I'm still about as much interested in politics as in watching TV. The TV here hasn't even been turned on since before the wedding.
The other main factor (and this is a large part of why I don't do politics, either) is that I HATE the point where people get so upset about what they have to say that they stop listening to anything else. I can't argue worth anything, as once I get angry my brain shuts down and all I'm capable of doing is throwing mud. I don't appreciate this in myself, and therefore I attempt to avoid it. I appreciate it even less in other people: raised voices, tones of accusation, and generalized slurs thrown in my direction send me into a physical curl-up-and-cry reaction whether I will or no. The fact that this frustrates me only exacerbates it. And aside from concerns of comfort and emotional stability, as far as I'm aware being yelled at is not generally recognized by those who study brains as a good way to change people's minds. If it's my mind you're trying to change, a "hey, you might want to consider this..." followed by ignoring my instant reaction of "But that doesn't make any sense!" and bringing up the subject again a few days or a week later is probably the best approach. It's not a particularly useful pattern, but I've seen it in other people, and in myself enough times that I finally figured out that is what I do. I don't mean to say that's going to apply well to communications between masses of people on the internet, but I don't think reading other people's flamewars is going to help me become a better person, either.
At any rate, since it's one of those things I've been Taught One Ought To Do (ie, think about these issues when they arise. Thank you, Black History Month. Thank you, Women's History Month. Thank you, several teachers who hyperfocused on various aspects of post-colonialism and cultural or racial dynamics and distorted their curriculums accordingly.) I've been picking though little bits of the sum-ups. (er... off this list, and this one which was pretty good) It's difficult, and I haven't read most of it yet, and I don't know if I'm going to. I definitely don't have any conclusions about any of it yet. I probably haven't read half the books or seen most of the movies/TV that are being complained about (well, except the eBear one from her second letter, and... I don't remember noticing that Whisky was supposed to be black. I was sick and probably missing bits, particularly of description, at the time, but all that sticks with me was horse & dark hair. I am sure the fact that I don't really visualize characters very strongly as I read would be taken in some circles as inherent racism.)
Anyway, all of you either can read this stuff, or already have, or don't care. And I don't think I have the mental energy to gather up all the things I was thinking about writing here when I started. But the gist of it is that intellectually, I am aware that I'm nearly at the top of the socially coddled scale-- white, female, attractive, intelligent, "first world", financially stable, sexually "normal"... I've got everything but a life-long annuity and social graces going for me. And I've never actually wanted to do anything where being female would be to my disadvantage; the battles I would have fought were pretty well dealt with by the generation before mine. My childhood was full of brave young fantasy heroines and irritating feminists who think it's ok to talk about the incompetence of men, to the point that I get more irritated with the introduction of modern feminist thought into supposedly historical characters than I do with, say, Tolkien's world view. (er, and don't get me started on the revisionist female roles in the movies...) I want people to accept history for what it was, and address the present without yelling at me for things that happened before I was born.
So aside from the social incompetence (which, at least in someone who's perceived as smart enough to know better, can be as damning as any other subconscious/unrealized handicap) I'm in that oblivious float above the surface category. But... if you read about basic cognitive dissonance, you learn that our brains will automatically group the world into "like me" and "not like me." And my "like me," by virtue of being me, is awfully skewed. Honestly, the number 1 appearance-based factor is probably length of hair. Most people in my statistical demographic are very much "not like me," and that's pretty much any demographic you choose to put me in. I don't get on with statistics well. That is not to say that I'm at all immune to any of the racial or cultural prejudices being flung about here; I'm a little more educated in multi-cultural histories than a lot of people (my parents collect and tell folklore from all over, my mother and at sometimes I collect ethnic dolls from around the world, I've studied ancient history of India and bits of the Americas, little things like that) but I don't interact in the *modern* cultures at all. Heck, I barely know *my* modern culture. Come on, make a pop culture reference, see if I get it.
And so far, I mostly write about intelligent rodents. My head is probably populated with northern european generic medieval fairytale tropes; it's also my cultural background, what I identify with, and what I love. If I have done with mice, I don't know where else I'd be likely to go. I do hope this debate bears enough fruit to get other cultures' fairy tales and settings out there; the ones I've read (Barry Hugart comes to mind...) have been pretty good, but I have no particular basis for how westernized or bastardized they are. And I'm just not that interested in reading modern America with modern social problems, because it's really not my thing. Not even with vampires in.
But if I'm not there with the prejudice, I do at least understand the frustration, if only in a second-generation sense. When I was a kid, there were a million cheap girl & horse books, and I never really took advantage of them, because I always felt like being horse-mad was my mother's thing, even if she had outgrown it long before I was born. I just couldn't compete. And when she was a girl, there was National Velvet. And then there were a handful of boy & horse books (Walter Farley's chief among them) and then she had to resort to reading boy & dog books because they were the next best thing, and what existed. I had Wren, and Peri, and Polly Whittacker, and Cecily of Norwell and all sorts of others to grow up with along with the drek and the insulting-to-the-trained-brain historical works, and I've always been mistily aware that so far as I'm concerned, this is more of a privilege than the sea of not-[pick your favorite prejudice trigger] that I share with a lot of others. It's the difference between the things you just are and the things you get to pick, and having them *to* pick makes all the difference. Which, actually, is probably why I started wanting to be a writer. This is what is so important to me that I want to be one of those people who makes more of it. And so I'm divided-- I want people who aren't british isles heritage english speaking american girls to have their fantasy too. But I have trouble with people who start saying that because my fantasy and my heritage isn't theirs, I should be writing something else instead,and immersively researching it (with someone else, 'cause they can't be bothered by newbies...) so as to make up for my predecessors' mistakes. (er, sorry; I have a lot of sympathy to hand out, but only to people who don't judge me as an ass based on other people's behavior. As above mentioned, I have a lot of things very much not in common with my fellow human beings, and doing one's best to judge other people by what they are rather than what you think they probably are is important to me. Which is not, admittedly, to say that I often do any better at this than anyone else. But it's one problem I definitely am aware of.)
No conclusions, just rambling. Things written down can be re-considered later; things in my head go away again, and when I change I lose track of it. ((one of the anecdotes one of my obsessed-with-mulitculturalism teachers had was about difficulties between the probably-British colonial government and tribal authorities in some part of the world (African or island somewhere I'm afraid I couldn't tell you) where legal debate was settled by the keepers of oral history. And the colonial authorities with their newfangled ideas tried to write down the histories and discovered that ten years later, circumstances had changed, and the histories changed along with them to support the revised circumstances. I forget what his point was, but it's a pretty accurate representation of how the brain processes & remembers things, and there are definitely worse ways to run a small government.))
At least all the fabric is indoors, in the highest and still dry corner of the basement. With all my non-resin dolls, who of course care whether they're wet or dry or kept at a decent temperature. Someday I will have a couple of curio cabinets and put them, and the small rodent skulls, and the interesting rocks in unusual wine glasses, and all my other interesting and completely useless stuff on display somewhere. This is the theory, at any rate. Perhaps we can intersperse them with display swords and
grauwulf's award scrolls for balance. That, some bookshelves, some windows, and maybe the turtle tank sounds like good living room decor, yes?In the present (as opposed to hypothetical time) I have drawn up plans for a hutch with bookshelves to sit on the back half of my desk, and if I manage most of this week's goals in good order, I think I'll be ready to go get the hardware store to cut up a sheet of heavy plywood to my specifications, and possibly indulge myself with a box of nice short self-tapping screws. This weekend I'm kind of looking forward to the local event, which will be the first time I've managed to attend an Artisan's Row. (SCA craft day! whee!) I can't really remember the last time I went to an event without intent to fence (or at least dressing so that I could) but I'm not eligible for the novice tourney, and not interested in the triple elim, so we'll see. I guess I should scare up a period project to work on in the next day or two, huh?
In the mean time, I've been populating my friends list with author blogs, which is a strange and fascinating thing. I haven't decided how I feel about fandom, as such; to a certain extent it's a bit creepy, and that's why I've previously read books but not researched or followed authors. There's some benefit to reading what people who write fiction I enjoy write in their journals, though, and getting a bit more familiar with other people's mechanics of writing and with the SF/F fandoms & publishing industry is probably good for me. But then there's the problem of reading what other people write, and starting to feel like you know something about someone who wouldn't know you from a hole in the ground (or might, but might not and you have no way of knowing...), and this confuses me. Not, I think, excessively important, but there's a definite learning curve. I tend to reply to posts when I think someone has said something interesting, but I'm trying to learn to censor the pointless agreement or "yes, that was interesting" impulses in the direction of strangers, while not be scared off too much by 50+ comments already on an entry if I have something to say.
The other advantage that's sort of a disadvantage is that I hear about all sorts of cons at which people who I would love to hear discuss their various advertised panel topics are about to appear. And these things all seem to take place in Boston, or Minneapolis, or central TX, or someplace on the left coast. The only things I know of in the Baltimore/DC radius are anime cons, which are all very well for art and costumes, but I'm not particularly interested in the programming. (Come on people, you know you want to have a SF/F con with real authors in the Baltimore Convention Center...) If there are any closer things, I also don't know how to find out about them. My lack of internet search skills continues to betray me.
And then, too, a broader internet world has put me into the orbit of yelling class. If it had happened a year ago, I honestly wouldn't know that this was going on, and while I'm sure I could seek out all the original bits of RaceFail09 or whatever it's being referred to by others, it is very much the sort of thing I avoid when I can. Like, er, politics and current events? Partly, and this is horrible but true, I am honestly far more interested in politics of the late Roman Republic than in the Holocaust Museum shootings last week. (which I only heard of because
grauwulf mentioned them...) I was raised to think that complete ignorance about current events/social climates is not actually ok, and I pretty much believe this, but I'm still about as much interested in politics as in watching TV. The TV here hasn't even been turned on since before the wedding. The other main factor (and this is a large part of why I don't do politics, either) is that I HATE the point where people get so upset about what they have to say that they stop listening to anything else. I can't argue worth anything, as once I get angry my brain shuts down and all I'm capable of doing is throwing mud. I don't appreciate this in myself, and therefore I attempt to avoid it. I appreciate it even less in other people: raised voices, tones of accusation, and generalized slurs thrown in my direction send me into a physical curl-up-and-cry reaction whether I will or no. The fact that this frustrates me only exacerbates it. And aside from concerns of comfort and emotional stability, as far as I'm aware being yelled at is not generally recognized by those who study brains as a good way to change people's minds. If it's my mind you're trying to change, a "hey, you might want to consider this..." followed by ignoring my instant reaction of "But that doesn't make any sense!" and bringing up the subject again a few days or a week later is probably the best approach. It's not a particularly useful pattern, but I've seen it in other people, and in myself enough times that I finally figured out that is what I do. I don't mean to say that's going to apply well to communications between masses of people on the internet, but I don't think reading other people's flamewars is going to help me become a better person, either.
At any rate, since it's one of those things I've been Taught One Ought To Do (ie, think about these issues when they arise. Thank you, Black History Month. Thank you, Women's History Month. Thank you, several teachers who hyperfocused on various aspects of post-colonialism and cultural or racial dynamics and distorted their curriculums accordingly.) I've been picking though little bits of the sum-ups. (er... off this list, and this one which was pretty good) It's difficult, and I haven't read most of it yet, and I don't know if I'm going to. I definitely don't have any conclusions about any of it yet. I probably haven't read half the books or seen most of the movies/TV that are being complained about (well, except the eBear one from her second letter, and... I don't remember noticing that Whisky was supposed to be black. I was sick and probably missing bits, particularly of description, at the time, but all that sticks with me was horse & dark hair. I am sure the fact that I don't really visualize characters very strongly as I read would be taken in some circles as inherent racism.)
Anyway, all of you either can read this stuff, or already have, or don't care. And I don't think I have the mental energy to gather up all the things I was thinking about writing here when I started. But the gist of it is that intellectually, I am aware that I'm nearly at the top of the socially coddled scale-- white, female, attractive, intelligent, "first world", financially stable, sexually "normal"... I've got everything but a life-long annuity and social graces going for me. And I've never actually wanted to do anything where being female would be to my disadvantage; the battles I would have fought were pretty well dealt with by the generation before mine. My childhood was full of brave young fantasy heroines and irritating feminists who think it's ok to talk about the incompetence of men, to the point that I get more irritated with the introduction of modern feminist thought into supposedly historical characters than I do with, say, Tolkien's world view. (er, and don't get me started on the revisionist female roles in the movies...) I want people to accept history for what it was, and address the present without yelling at me for things that happened before I was born.
So aside from the social incompetence (which, at least in someone who's perceived as smart enough to know better, can be as damning as any other subconscious/unrealized handicap) I'm in that oblivious float above the surface category. But... if you read about basic cognitive dissonance, you learn that our brains will automatically group the world into "like me" and "not like me." And my "like me," by virtue of being me, is awfully skewed. Honestly, the number 1 appearance-based factor is probably length of hair. Most people in my statistical demographic are very much "not like me," and that's pretty much any demographic you choose to put me in. I don't get on with statistics well. That is not to say that I'm at all immune to any of the racial or cultural prejudices being flung about here; I'm a little more educated in multi-cultural histories than a lot of people (my parents collect and tell folklore from all over, my mother and at sometimes I collect ethnic dolls from around the world, I've studied ancient history of India and bits of the Americas, little things like that) but I don't interact in the *modern* cultures at all. Heck, I barely know *my* modern culture. Come on, make a pop culture reference, see if I get it.
And so far, I mostly write about intelligent rodents. My head is probably populated with northern european generic medieval fairytale tropes; it's also my cultural background, what I identify with, and what I love. If I have done with mice, I don't know where else I'd be likely to go. I do hope this debate bears enough fruit to get other cultures' fairy tales and settings out there; the ones I've read (Barry Hugart comes to mind...) have been pretty good, but I have no particular basis for how westernized or bastardized they are. And I'm just not that interested in reading modern America with modern social problems, because it's really not my thing. Not even with vampires in.
But if I'm not there with the prejudice, I do at least understand the frustration, if only in a second-generation sense. When I was a kid, there were a million cheap girl & horse books, and I never really took advantage of them, because I always felt like being horse-mad was my mother's thing, even if she had outgrown it long before I was born. I just couldn't compete. And when she was a girl, there was National Velvet. And then there were a handful of boy & horse books (Walter Farley's chief among them) and then she had to resort to reading boy & dog books because they were the next best thing, and what existed. I had Wren, and Peri, and Polly Whittacker, and Cecily of Norwell and all sorts of others to grow up with along with the drek and the insulting-to-the-trained-brain historical works, and I've always been mistily aware that so far as I'm concerned, this is more of a privilege than the sea of not-[pick your favorite prejudice trigger] that I share with a lot of others. It's the difference between the things you just are and the things you get to pick, and having them *to* pick makes all the difference. Which, actually, is probably why I started wanting to be a writer. This is what is so important to me that I want to be one of those people who makes more of it. And so I'm divided-- I want people who aren't british isles heritage english speaking american girls to have their fantasy too. But I have trouble with people who start saying that because my fantasy and my heritage isn't theirs, I should be writing something else instead,
No conclusions, just rambling. Things written down can be re-considered later; things in my head go away again, and when I change I lose track of it. ((one of the anecdotes one of my obsessed-with-mulitculturalism teachers had was about difficulties between the probably-British colonial government and tribal authorities in some part of the world (African or island somewhere I'm afraid I couldn't tell you) where legal debate was settled by the keepers of oral history. And the colonial authorities with their newfangled ideas tried to write down the histories and discovered that ten years later, circumstances had changed, and the histories changed along with them to support the revised circumstances. I forget what his point was, but it's a pretty accurate representation of how the brain processes & remembers things, and there are definitely worse ways to run a small government.))