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roadnotes and baldanders's home, just hanging out quietly. Mostly Roadnotes and I talked; Baldanders was wrestling with a recalcitrant computer.
We caught each other up on recent events, and random gossip old and new, while drinking tea and eating lemon-ginger cookies. I realized too late that I'd had lots of sugar (both the cookies and in the tea) and not much protein. Despite a salami sandwich (and water, rather than a drink with sugar of any form) for supper, and two ibuprofen tablets, I have a bit of a headache.
Both the conversation with Roadnotes and reading my LJ friends list remind me that I don't really comprehend dating. Relationships, more or less, but not dating as a way of getting into them. When I was up in Montreal for New Year's,papersky mentioned that part of why zoos have trouble breeding pandas is that pandas aren't interested in sex with pandas they don't already know fairly well. This clicked for me because I am panda-like in this: I get to know people as friends, and once in a while that becomes a romantic/sexual relationship. Even when I was having more casual sex, when I was a lot younger, it was with women I already knew moderately well, not with people picked up in bars or just met at parties.
On the subway home I finished Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, which was sent as a Tiptree possibility. I have no idea why we [the Tiptree jury] were sent this—it does nothing remotely interesting with gender, nor is it in any way feminist. Then again, I have no idea why the publisher bought it: the narrator is a self-aggrandizing asshole with whom I didn't want to spend 300 pages, and both the science and the plot generally are questionable. I finished this largely because I had started and figured one of us ought to read it. I suppose the book might be of some interest to anyone who wants to write a first-person narrative by/about an obnoxious person.
The large scientific problems unfortunately include the key plot points. The viewpoint character is an anthropologist, working in South Dakota. One of his graduate students finds a Clovis [earliest verified North American culture] site, complete with skeleton and artifacts. The artifacts include two hollow clay spheres, which, if it happened in reality, would overturn a lot of assumptions, because no Clovis ceramics are known, or expected. The graduate student opens the first sphere and finds what looks like corn—another revelation, because there's no evidence of maize that early, or that far north until much later. After calling a paleobotanist and giving her half of it, they cook the other half as popcorn, which is shared among nine or ten people.
The second sphere is opened by other people, as part of the dedication of a new casino. On television, we see odd dark-brown powder come out of it. An epidemic begins soon after, which has an almost-100% fatality rate. "Almost" because the people who ate the popcorn are immune to the epidemic(!). They track each other down, and eventually decide to head for Okinawa, because they expect to find surviving humans there. They ask whether they might transmit the plague to that island, and then ignore the issue. As a side note, the narrator, despite his PhD in anthropology, knows little enough about either biology or the ongoing contemporary extinction that he states that the 35 species of North American mammals wiped out by the Clovis people are more than wiping out every species of bird, as apparently was done in a panicked response to the epidemic. (That's not a spoiler because the narrator wanders semi-randomly back and forth through the timespan covered by the story, something that might be foreshadowing were it a bit subtler, so we learn early that, in the future he is addressing, there are no birds.
(Based on my description,cattitude wants me to tell you that the book is full of borglenuskies.)
roadnotes and baldanders's home, just hanging out quietly. Mostly Roadnotes and I talked; Baldanders was wrestling with a recalcitrant computer.We caught each other up on recent events, and random gossip old and new, while drinking tea and eating lemon-ginger cookies. I realized too late that I'd had lots of sugar (both the cookies and in the tea) and not much protein. Despite a salami sandwich (and water, rather than a drink with sugar of any form) for supper, and two ibuprofen tablets, I have a bit of a headache.
Both the conversation with Roadnotes and reading my LJ friends list remind me that I don't really comprehend dating. Relationships, more or less, but not dating as a way of getting into them. When I was up in Montreal for New Year's,
papersky mentioned that part of why zoos have trouble breeding pandas is that pandas aren't interested in sex with pandas they don't already know fairly well. This clicked for me because I am panda-like in this: I get to know people as friends, and once in a while that becomes a romantic/sexual relationship. Even when I was having more casual sex, when I was a lot younger, it was with women I already knew moderately well, not with people picked up in bars or just met at parties.On the subway home I finished Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, which was sent as a Tiptree possibility. I have no idea why we [the Tiptree jury] were sent this—it does nothing remotely interesting with gender, nor is it in any way feminist. Then again, I have no idea why the publisher bought it: the narrator is a self-aggrandizing asshole with whom I didn't want to spend 300 pages, and both the science and the plot generally are questionable. I finished this largely because I had started and figured one of us ought to read it. I suppose the book might be of some interest to anyone who wants to write a first-person narrative by/about an obnoxious person.
The large scientific problems unfortunately include the key plot points. The viewpoint character is an anthropologist, working in South Dakota. One of his graduate students finds a Clovis [earliest verified North American culture] site, complete with skeleton and artifacts. The artifacts include two hollow clay spheres, which, if it happened in reality, would overturn a lot of assumptions, because no Clovis ceramics are known, or expected. The graduate student opens the first sphere and finds what looks like corn—another revelation, because there's no evidence of maize that early, or that far north until much later. After calling a paleobotanist and giving her half of it, they cook the other half as popcorn, which is shared among nine or ten people.
The second sphere is opened by other people, as part of the dedication of a new casino. On television, we see odd dark-brown powder come out of it. An epidemic begins soon after, which has an almost-100% fatality rate. "Almost" because the people who ate the popcorn are immune to the epidemic(!). They track each other down, and eventually decide to head for Okinawa, because they expect to find surviving humans there. They ask whether they might transmit the plague to that island, and then ignore the issue. As a side note, the narrator, despite his PhD in anthropology, knows little enough about either biology or the ongoing contemporary extinction that he states that the 35 species of North American mammals wiped out by the Clovis people are more than wiping out every species of bird, as apparently was done in a panicked response to the epidemic. (That's not a spoiler because the narrator wanders semi-randomly back and forth through the timespan covered by the story, something that might be foreshadowing were it a bit subtler, so we learn early that, in the future he is addressing, there are no birds.
(Based on my description,
cattitude wants me to tell you that the book is full of borglenuskies.)Tags:
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From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I don't like suspense in personal relationships. I also know that dating is artificial and totally wrong for me -- like repeated job interviews. As an introvert, I operate most comfortably through pixels or in community. I'm most myself meeting people when I am already on intimate terms with them -- which is why online life works so well for me.
Dating undermines your self-respect and self-confidence. Worrying about how someone else will respond to you is no recipe for a good time. As Florence King said in Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady:
"Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody."
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no subject
Am I being dim and is this sentence parodying the disorganised nature of the book. if not I'm finding it very confusing.
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no subject
I hope that's clearer--I'm just up and still on my first cup of tea.
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no subject
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no subject
As to the rest, can I offer you a chorus of "Like a panda, touched for the very first time..."
From:
Velut panda
From:
Re: Velut panda
(That's my father's office nickname, as displayed on the office t-shirt.)
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Re: Velut panda
Or, perhaps, that shared attitude is why I'm still sleeping with my stuffed panda, 30 years on.
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no subject
Ai ya.
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Truly awful reading
These are the ones that got published. Heaven help the poor slushpile readers.
I remember one, from many years ago, where the main character was told, over and over, "Stay the way you are, and nothing will hurt you." So she did, and nothing hurt her. Of course, there was no character development, either, but, it's not like you weren't warned.
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no subject
From: (Anonymous)
Dating
Well, if you change "romantic" to "employment", you get a job interview. If you want to find a romantically-compatible
employeepartner, dating may be a way of doing so. Judging from my incomplete understanding of the ritual's design, it seems to be fairly counterintuitive interface, whose main benefit is that it has a fairly large body of practitioners.I ran into another view about 15 years ago while I was pondering the possiblity of a romantic relationship with a friend. She said if the guy pays for the two of them, it's a date. I don't know whether to agree or not, but...
I'm still married to her.
--Dan Hoey