Once again, these are comments on other people's posts, most but not all of them here on Dreamwidth:
In a book review,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll referred to a novel as "most sincerely out of print," which led to me writing:
I am amusing myself with "most sincerely out of print":
"I'm a poor lonely out-of-print book, please take me home from this used bookstore."
"I'm out of print and unappreciated, this cheap-looking paperback is rare and valuable. Worth a lot more than the three dollars the second-hand shop wants for it."
"I'm out of print, and I like it that way." *hides in the attic to avoid being scanned, OCR'd, and put up on the Internet Archive*
*weeps* "I've been out of print for years, you could get the reprint rights for a couple of bucks, there's a real market for Westerns IN SPACE....Wait, come back, don't you care?" *more tears*
kaberett asked for a non-gendered relationship word instead of "aunt" or "uncle," and I made a suggestion:
Invented on the spot: "tíe". That's putting the (new/recently introduced) non-gendered ending "e" on the Spanish word that would be either aunt or uncle if it had the standard Spanish gender markings. ("Niño" is "boy," "niña: is "girl," so "niñe" is "child.")
So you could be "tíe Alex." (I might not bother with the accent mark, except that it signifies both "this isn't the English word 'tie'" and "that's two syllables, not a diphthong.)
In response toelisem talking about bisexuality and being non-binary, and being told those identities aren't real:
Thanks for posting this.
Also, possibly useful metaphor*: phase in the sense of solid/liquid/gas/plasma, in which *everything* is a phase. So some people do go through phase changes, but there's no preferred direction, physically or figuratively. Ice can melt to water, or sublimate to gas, and water can evaporate or boil, or freeze into ice; gas can condense out as a liquid or a solid. (And lightning can turn bits of the atmosphere it travels through into a plasma.)
Using that metaphor, for some people being either straight or gay might look like a phase, before they later come to be/realize they are bisexual, or lesbian or gay when they had believed themselves to be straight.
*(I'm writing this after tea, but before breakfast; it may evaporate later in the day.)
On Feb. 23,dreamshark asked whether she's the only one worrying about the new coronavirus. My response was
I am somewhat worried, but it's something that I don't really see much I should, or can, do right now. Well, lunch in Chinatown tomorrow, but that's anti-unreasonable fear, rather than anything that will keep me or others safe. And on some level this is one more scary thing I am powerless against, and I think I used up my emotional reaction on climate change, Trump, and Brexit.
Toeftychia on May 20's QOTD, "Never trust anyone who carries a gun but not a first aid kit.":
The other difference, I think, is that in the fantasy they're protecting ("America" and) themselves from dangerous strangers; in the reality, they're being asked to protect other people from themselves.
Typing the above, it occurs to me that, also, a lot of complaints about "political correctness" are about having to be polite and kind to everyone, even people they don't know and have been told are their inferiors.
emerald_em was thinking about how to prioritize her hobbies, and I started thinking-by-typing. The specifics here are rellevant to her, but the broader strokes might be useful to me, or other people:
My thoughts would be to take a little while to think about which things are most urgent, where "urgent" could mean any of: has to be done soon because there's an outside deadline, or an important-to-you deadline; or has to be done before something else can be; or has to be done on an ongoing basis (there must be food, interesting or otherwise).
That's separate from what's most important, which isn't the same as urgent; I don't know what that is, because we're different people and in different situations. But what was clearly most important last year might or might not still be.
Also, which things have clear end-points? "Salvage all the CDs" can be completed in a way that self-education about racism can't. There might be ways to define a useful stopping point: "writing" is ongoing, but "finish a first draft of this novel" does.
On taking COVID-related precautions even when it feels unfair that I need to keep doing so:
I am being more cautious than the state and local governments require, in part because other people aren't. I can stay home a lot, stay out of restaurants, bookstores, and the subway (things I do miss), and wear a mask when I go out. There are a lot of good things I can't do--I'm not eligible to donate blood, for example.
I mind having to be more careful because some people are being careless. But it needs doing, so I'm trying to think of it as a mitzvah, a small but real contribution of the ongoing project of trying to make the world a better place.
And then I trust Past-me, from a week or three ago, and act on her decisions rather than re-analyzing things in the absence of new information.
A friend was talking about their use of access filters, prompting this:
I have a few legacy or ghost filters--I imported them from LJ, along with posts that were filtered to them, and haven't seen any reason to do the work of looking at those posts and deciding whether they should go in some other filter, the general access list, open, or private.
In a book review,
james_davis_nicoll referred to a novel as "most sincerely out of print," which led to me writing:I am amusing myself with "most sincerely out of print":
"I'm a poor lonely out-of-print book, please take me home from this used bookstore."
"I'm out of print and unappreciated, this cheap-looking paperback is rare and valuable. Worth a lot more than the three dollars the second-hand shop wants for it."
"I'm out of print, and I like it that way." *hides in the attic to avoid being scanned, OCR'd, and put up on the Internet Archive*
*weeps* "I've been out of print for years, you could get the reprint rights for a couple of bucks, there's a real market for Westerns IN SPACE....Wait, come back, don't you care?" *more tears*
kaberett asked for a non-gendered relationship word instead of "aunt" or "uncle," and I made a suggestion:Invented on the spot: "tíe". That's putting the (new/recently introduced) non-gendered ending "e" on the Spanish word that would be either aunt or uncle if it had the standard Spanish gender markings. ("Niño" is "boy," "niña: is "girl," so "niñe" is "child.")
So you could be "tíe Alex." (I might not bother with the accent mark, except that it signifies both "this isn't the English word 'tie'" and "that's two syllables, not a diphthong.)
In response to
elisem talking about bisexuality and being non-binary, and being told those identities aren't real:Thanks for posting this.
Also, possibly useful metaphor*: phase in the sense of solid/liquid/gas/plasma, in which *everything* is a phase. So some people do go through phase changes, but there's no preferred direction, physically or figuratively. Ice can melt to water, or sublimate to gas, and water can evaporate or boil, or freeze into ice; gas can condense out as a liquid or a solid. (And lightning can turn bits of the atmosphere it travels through into a plasma.)
Using that metaphor, for some people being either straight or gay might look like a phase, before they later come to be/realize they are bisexual, or lesbian or gay when they had believed themselves to be straight.
*(I'm writing this after tea, but before breakfast; it may evaporate later in the day.)
On Feb. 23,
dreamshark asked whether she's the only one worrying about the new coronavirus. My response was I am somewhat worried, but it's something that I don't really see much I should, or can, do right now. Well, lunch in Chinatown tomorrow, but that's anti-unreasonable fear, rather than anything that will keep me or others safe. And on some level this is one more scary thing I am powerless against, and I think I used up my emotional reaction on climate change, Trump, and Brexit.
To
eftychia on May 20's QOTD, "Never trust anyone who carries a gun but not a first aid kit.":The other difference, I think, is that in the fantasy they're protecting ("America" and) themselves from dangerous strangers; in the reality, they're being asked to protect other people from themselves.
Typing the above, it occurs to me that, also, a lot of complaints about "political correctness" are about having to be polite and kind to everyone, even people they don't know and have been told are their inferiors.
emerald_em was thinking about how to prioritize her hobbies, and I started thinking-by-typing. The specifics here are rellevant to her, but the broader strokes might be useful to me, or other people:My thoughts would be to take a little while to think about which things are most urgent, where "urgent" could mean any of: has to be done soon because there's an outside deadline, or an important-to-you deadline; or has to be done before something else can be; or has to be done on an ongoing basis (there must be food, interesting or otherwise).
That's separate from what's most important, which isn't the same as urgent; I don't know what that is, because we're different people and in different situations. But what was clearly most important last year might or might not still be.
Also, which things have clear end-points? "Salvage all the CDs" can be completed in a way that self-education about racism can't. There might be ways to define a useful stopping point: "writing" is ongoing, but "finish a first draft of this novel" does.
On taking COVID-related precautions even when it feels unfair that I need to keep doing so:
I am being more cautious than the state and local governments require, in part because other people aren't. I can stay home a lot, stay out of restaurants, bookstores, and the subway (things I do miss), and wear a mask when I go out. There are a lot of good things I can't do--I'm not eligible to donate blood, for example.
I mind having to be more careful because some people are being careless. But it needs doing, so I'm trying to think of it as a mitzvah, a small but real contribution of the ongoing project of trying to make the world a better place.
And then I trust Past-me, from a week or three ago, and act on her decisions rather than re-analyzing things in the absence of new information.
A friend was talking about their use of access filters, prompting this:
I have a few legacy or ghost filters--I imported them from LJ, along with posts that were filtered to them, and haven't seen any reason to do the work of looking at those posts and deciding whether they should go in some other filter, the general access list, open, or private.
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In English, we use they/them pronouns for our youngest cat; the older cats are their aunties (the 7 year old sisters) or great auntie (the 16 yr old), babycat is their nibbling. I might use the Portuguese titles with our furballs.