The weather forecast says it will be 4 degrees above freezing tonight, 2 in the suburbs, risk of frost. I have tomato plants in big plastic pots. Should I bring them in the house, or wrap them up in a rug, or what??

I really admire people who say things, listen, regret saying them, apologize, and then speak passionately about their new understanding / realize their ass is hanging out, and then go around spreading the gospel of pants. (metaphor omitted because of first commenter's objection). I do sometimes read or listen to people being idiots in avoidable ways and think, why didn't they keep their mouth shut and/or get a beta-listener first, but I still really admire smart people who take stands and then correct themselves as needed.

That being said, I wish I were more like that. I remember as a 25yo student that I was very reluctant to even do things like write letters to the student newspaper, because my opinions might change and then I would look dumb. The strong opinions about which I was thinking at the time included being in favour of abortion rights, opposed to capital punishment, and in favour of acceptance of queer people. I haven't changed my mind on any of those things over the intervening time, and all of those opinions have become more mainstream in Canadian culture, too. But I still feel too much like that for my own comfort -- that I want to learn by listening rather than by opening my mouth and sounding uninformed or by saying something that I might have to take back later. As well, nowadays I'm a bit more sensitive to not jumping in to conversations about minority issues to take up conversational space with my "101" questions or my own story as a person of privilege.

I would welcome comments and insights (especially gentle ones) on any of the above. But I'm also thinking about a specific example, below. For the moment, at least, this is an unlocked post, but I may lock and filter it if I start feeling too uncomfortable. (And you can send me e-mail if you want to say something to me privately. hobbitbabe at livejournal is a good one.)

Recently I've started thinking about some gender-related issues in a new way. As someone who grew up in the 1970s, I found terms like "feminine" extremely loaded - on one hand, my feminist side despised the normative nature of their use and was determined not to care, but on the other hand, I somehow internalized the message that anything the opposite of feminine - "tomboy" for example, to say nothing of "butch" or "dyke" later on - was negative, was unattractive to men, and was somehow less female. So my way of coping was to kind of deny the whole existence of "feminine" and "masculine" as meaningful descriptors at all.

Okay, so fast forward through having lots of crushes on people who presented somewhere in the middle of such a continuum, finding out that some people actually were attracted to me the way I was (as well as some who did give me the impression that I was insufficiently feminine), and eventually coming to identify as bisexual. More recently, I've encountered people (one in particular) who use expressions like "hard femme" or "soft androgyne" in an apparently value-neutral way as a self-descriptor or as a way of expressing traits they are attracted to. Part of me cringes - it kind of feels like people judging my pubescent self as insufficiently girl because I liked hockey and science fiction and didn't know how to apply eyeliner - but part of me is fascinated about the possibility of embracing this kind of identity descriptor. Especially if it will help me find more people who might be attracted to me the way I am, and help me describe and identify people I'm attracted to too.

So I want to talk about this, but I don't want to be a jerk. I remember the discussion several months ago about the essay about how someone being fetishistically attracted to the "transgressive" nature of androgyny was completely disrespectful to transgendered people when zie included trans people in zir attractions. More recently I looked at the nice pictures on the Hot Butches list as well as the lists of 100 hot men picked by queer men and 100 hot women picked by queer women (I'm sorry I can't find the links now) and enjoyed the looking and followed the conversation about letting people choose their own labels. What do people even call this kind of gender-expression / butch-femme / feminine/masculine continuum model? Is there a sense that a cisgendered person who wants to identify as somewhat androgynous or to speak of being attracted to androgyny is somehow co-opting terminology from the real issues of transgendered people, or is being disrespectful?

Eep.

Michael Jackson is dead. He was 50. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/michael-jackson-dead-reports/article1197443/

Farrah Fawcett is also dead. She was 62. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/farrah-fawcett-loses-cancer-battle/article1196788/

What book is this? I had it confused in my mind with Logan's Run, meaning it was probably written around the same time and may also have been a movie.

Earth (or the part of it in the book) is very overpopulated. Nobody is allowed to reproduce. Most people live in extremely crowded conditions. The protagonist couple is lucky, because they are the assistant curators of a 20th-century house that is kept as a museum, so they can live in one room of the house and their boss and his wife live in another room. Because women would be unhappy without babies, people have these very realistic baby dolls.

Oddly enough for a society in which contraception was so essential, the method used was easy to circumvent. It was some type of thing people had in their bathrooms that the woman sat on after sex. Or didn't, in the case of the female protagonist, who gets pregnant, eventually meaning that the two of them have to escape or something -- where it blurs into Logan's Run.

Does anyone else remember this??

Some panels I went to - at which I mostly chose to knit rather than take notes.

Open and Affirming Childrearing: This is one of the ones I'd volunteered to be a panelist for, but they didn't have room for me. I ended up having quite a bit to say from my place in the audience. The moderator (who did a great job) was a longtime friend of mine, and her kids are now teenagers. The other panelists and most of the audience seemed to be parents of kids under 10. They had a lot to say about the pink shirt and Disney princess issues. "If it's okay for your son to be wrapped up in Disney princesses, why are you uncomfortable with your daughter's interest?" "In the culture I was raised in, pink was for boys, but boys could never wear yellow." "My daughter likes leggings / floor-length dresses, but they keep getting wrecked when she climbs trees." "You need to make a rule that these clothes are not for climbing trees." (Here my hand shot in the air to point out that this policy runs the risk of producing kids who are out of the habit of climbing trees.) Dealing with "gay" as an epithet was another point of commonality, as was how one can respond to kids in one's community who have more conservative parents.

Safe(r) Space at Cons: (epi_lj took some notes.) How it feels to be a person of colour in a majority-white place. How it feels to be called a racial epithet and have nobody to tell who will get it. Disability inclusion. Wiscon fast response to the photographic harrassment last year. Discussion of OSBP, but when one person asked for clarification, moderator offers to explain off-line rather than checking whether the asker was the only one.

Bisexual and Pansexual Characters in SF/F. More cool panelists. Lots of works suggested - maybe someone's done a reading list already. Lots of Torchwood. Sensible comment that you often can't tell that a character's bisexual if he or she is monogamous. Frustration about characters who have been involved serially with both sexes being described as either straight or gay at any given time.

Witches and Wizards: Gender and Power in portrayals of magic. Even more cool panelists, including Beverly Friend who was wearing a pointed hat. The first-floor meeting rooms were too cold.

The Obligatory Workshop Panel: The panelist had all been to one of the Clarions, and some also had experience of Writing the Future. They didn't really know Viable Paradise which I'm kind of more interested in. The Clarion groups are 6 weeks long, mostly for short stories, with a different famous instructor every week. They said that to be "ready", you should have some experience with critique and rejection, so that you aren't too thin-skinned about that and can get more out of it. (The panel about on-line critique groups was at the same time, oh well.) The audience was very small, but I felt all tongue-tied and didn't say anything.

Adaptations: The neatest thing about this panel was the way it shifted smoothly among genres of story and genres of work, from the Cottonpatch Gospel to Rosencrantz&Guildenstern to a bunch of anime I didn't know to music mashups. There was a lot of audience contribution and I thought it was really fun and interesting.

Poll #1405512 Library books
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Is it okay to ask an author to sign your library book?

Did any of you, or anyone else I know, attend or work at Columbia University?

As my daughter graduates from University of King's College, I'm wondering about connections with its daughter institution.

If you are already a fan of Elise's jewellery art, you will already have noticed that she's having a sale. If you hadn't already seen this one, here's the link. http://elisem.livejournal.com/1473318.html

I don't know what I like more, the detailed silver twisty bits, the bright colours, or the magical names.

(People who usually buy me birthday presents probably already have enough ideas; this isn't specifically a hint.)

There's a big sale of used books at the downtown library today. I had never actually been to the downtown library before and I didn't take time to explore it today. But they have an automated return checkin bar code conveyor belt which is cool.

The sale takes up a whole floor of the parking garage. The books are $10 a box. A box of books doesn't fit in my backpack. So now I am exploring a restaurant.

Have I mentioned lately that I love living in an unexplored city?

When I take the bus, I ride by a couple of car dealers. One of them had a big sign painted on the windows that I caught out of the corner of my eye and had to look back at.

But it didn't really say "Your Corvette Congestion". It said "Your Corvette Connection".

This is the >usual map of the Montreal Metro transit system.

This version was linked by embryomystic the other day and it's still cracking me up.  
</lj>

Lifelode, Jo Walton, 2009. You can buy this book from NESFA Press through their website, for the bargain price of $25 hardcover. It's a really neat story. Sharyn November has an introduction in which she says that it reminds her of The Dubious Hills - I really wish I hadn't read that before I read the book, because I would rather have come to that analogy myself. Both of them are books with ordinary-ish people living interesting ordinary family lives, and the ways in which the physics and metaphysics of that world are different from ours kind of sneak up on the reader, giving me this unsettled intrigued feeling in the back of my head.

Lifelode includes a word, raensome, for that very familiar concept of people being so very who they are, and by extension feeling affectionate towards them for being themselves. And the characterization in Lifelode is good enough that I felt like that about lots of the characters by the end - like Oh, Ranal, of course you would say that, or whatever - sometimes they were themselves in ways that pleased me, and sometimes I wanted to shake them, and I could see people changed by events in credible ways.

I also liked the concept of people having a lifelode, basically a calling. Some people find theirs easily, and some try one thing and another before settling to a life's work. And I particularly like seeing that managing a household can be such a calling, as much as craft or study or the law or priesthood.

The ways in which people's relationships and their feelings about each other unfold in the story are disturbingly credible. This reminds me a bit of Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing, which I am re-reading, in which the communal households and non-monogamous relationships of the utopic community are not immune to the normal complications of people being people. In both cases, I don't have a sense that the complications are inherent to the kinds of family/culture that they have, but they do seem consistent with the characters being themselves. Which, see above.

It's not told in a linear mode. And once I got into the main part of the story, I resisted going back to the starting chapter to look just which characters were reminiscing and look for clues about the rest ... so I had the fun of finding that all out at the end. The narrator is someone who sees "shadows", past and future snapshots of people. When she is thinking about things that happened in the past or describing her family members, suddenly she's talking in present tense about what someone was like years ago and then back to past tense about the events of that time, which gives a sense of what it must be like to have all these pasts layered on the present. That was jarring the first couple of times it caught my eye but then I liked it. I also liked the way that the story structure answered some of the questions of what happened afterwards, and left some other questions completely unanswered, without that seeming artificial.

So I'm typing on my phone in a taxi in Montreal racing before the battery runs out. But before that I was completely off the net for seven whole days. I had a great week. And I missed you.

I don't know how to say thank you for anonymous Valentines!

Why do people want to get tattoos in languages/scripts that they need to ask strangers on the internet for help with?

Why does every bus contain two emo-scene kids who block the exit door?

Why does it get warm and stay warm as soon as I spend some money for a warmer vacation?

I can't offer you any references except Wikipedia, but getting this one in my in-box was a great start to my day. (Well, I could follow Wikipedia's links and search independently, and I probably will, but I'm trying to go to work earlier today.)

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is the Prime Minister of Iceland. She is the first female Prime Minister of Iceland. She is the "world's first openly gay head of government of the modern era."

And -- get this -- they have coalition governments in Iceland. She's part of the Social Democratic Party, but it sounds like she wasn't the leader of it before they agreed to form a coalition with the Left-Green Movement; it sounds like the coalition talks included a discussion of who would lead, and she was a cabinet minister with a high approval rating.

Maybe you've seen this list before, but it made me giggle too much not to share it.

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.



--Barack Obama, 20 January 2009

ailbhe is a poet, an environmentalist, a Terry Pratchett fan, and a mum. I'm sure she wouldn't put them in that order, either! But I enjoy reading her journal for all of those reports.