Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

As I posted last night, on Sunday afternoon and evening I'd been feeling as though I hadn't accomplished much during the weekend. Much of this is an illusion: we've split up certain household tasks so that I'm doing stuff that can mostly be dealt with in three minutes here and five there, and cattitude is doing stuff that gets done in larger chunks of time. He usually does those Sunday, which means that it's possible for me to notice him doing laundry, and overlook that I've been doing the dishes all week, in small chunks of time. Another piece of the puzzle was that I had deliberately set Saturday aside as a rest day, but however useful or necessary rest is, it doesn't look like getting something done.

Part of why we have this division this way is that I like not having to set aside chunks of time for household tasks, and he prefers to be able to get stuff over with in a batch. (Another piece of it is that he really dislikes doing dishes, because it can hurt his back, and my back is better to start with.) So I need to remember, or remind myself, that I am getting things done. That the work is incremental doesn't stop the task from being accomplished. Also, it's more practical to batch laundry into a week or ten days' worth at a time, which doesn't work with dishes. Those, I load into the machine as they accumulate. I run the dishwasher at night, and do most of the unloading while waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning.

I've talked some of this over in email with Q, which may also help me remember that yes, I am doing stuff, pulling my weight, and so on.

Yesterday, I not only worked a full day, I spent my lunch hour at the bank, dealing with my new IRA. The official investment advisor wasn't there, and while the bank manager is licensed to set up the investment account, she was extremely hesitant to accept my "just put it all in a midcap fund" and insisted I talk to the investment advisor first. So we filled out paperwork, and she gave me the investment advisor's card, and made a note for her to call me when she's next in that branch. ( I will then say "no, I know what I want, do this," but I wasn't up to arguing with the bank manager about it.) There was also the fine moment when she asked for ID, and (as I reached for it) I pointed out that she shouldn't need it, because one of her staff had, unprompted, looked at me, greeted me by name, and asked what I needed. Ten years ago, I think she would have accepted that.

There was a moment at work in the late afternoon where I found myself thinking, disgustedly, that I was the first person to have actually read parts of the manuscript I'm copyediting. I should have been at least the third: the author, and the editor who accepted it, should have read it before me. There's just a lot of the sort of careless error that can slip in when you write quickly and don't reread the material before sending it off. For example: "not all A are B" when it's actually that not all B are A, and all A are B. (See also: why you shouldn't proofread your own work.) The editor told me it was a light reworking of a previous book; there've actually been a lot of changes and expansions. This is fine, from my viewpoint as a copyeditor and I hope the viewpoint of the state that's being offered the material, but suggests she didn't take a close look at it.

After work, I went to the gym. In the morning, I'd told Cattitude I was thinking of a short workout. He said "some say, a long workout." When I was done at the gym, I called him and said "some say, a middle-sized workout." I'm not actually good at predicting how long I'll exercise, unless there's a time constraint: I'd predicted short because my elbow had been bothering me in the morning, but skipping the gym altogether isn't good. Without a time constraint, the length of the workout will depend on how tired I'm feeling at that moment, on any random joint pains, and on how crowded the gym is.

Then I did some freelance proofreading on the way home from the gym. Conclusion the first: doing it on the way in is more practical, because I can count on a seat. I can proofread while standing on the A train, but marking the corrections is tricky. Conclusion the second: Stan Kelly-Bootle is seeing just how far he can push his copyeditor, and the English language. Conclusion the third: just because the book reviews are picked up intact from a different ACM publication doesn't mean they'll be clean. Only the first of these is new, although the book reviews are often clean copy by the time I see them, and this month decidedly weren't.

( cutting the gym numbers, because this is quite long enough already )

Back at Thanksgiving, after the intended challah came out as a rather different bread and I didn't want it, adrian_turtle said, in a very off-hand tone, "You don't like surprises." She said about the same the next day, I think in the context of my disinclination to try a new ice cream place in Harvard Square when it Toscanini's was nearby. It was the same matter-of-fact tone that she'd have used to observe that I like purple, but it startled me: that's not how I thought of myself.

We talked about that over the next couple of days, and since, and I've bounced it off cattitude.

There are ways in which she's right, of course. In particular, I'm a lot happier with "here's a new dish I invented, I think you'll like it" or "would you like to try this birch juice?" than with a food that I have reason to expect will have a particular flavor and texture, but doesn't. Even there, it varies: I was startled when I went to Tchang Kiang with rysmiel and papersky and the "shrimp with lobster sauce" turned out to be in a brown sauce, not the white sauce I'd get anywhere in New York, but after the initial surprise, I enjoyed it. I suspect the differences include my own state of mind, and what sort of sensory cues I get before I taste the thing. (The not-exactly-challah looked a lot more like a conventional whole wheat challah than the Montreal shrimp with lobster sauce looked like the New York one.

There are other kinds of surprises I like, including unwrapping presents. I don't usually want to be able to predict the plot of a book or play. Rereading, or watching a new production of something familiar, offers different pleasures, and I wouldn't be happy with, say, a production of Hamlet that changed the ending, or left out something that I was expecting to see. [Yes, almost all stagings of Shakespeare are trimmed at least a little, but there's a rough consensus on things that should not be cut.]

Not liking certain kinds of surprises appears to be recursive: it took me a while to get used enough to this idea to be willing to write about it here. A piece of that is that a lot of my friends consider neophilia to be an actively good thing. Some discussions of that suggest that if some novelty, or enjoyment thereof, is good, more must be better. Many mental traits that are valuable at some level can be taken too far, but that doesn't get much attention unless the subject is the excesses (OCD and mania come to mind, as does the "Focus" in Vinge's Deepness in the Sky).

When I started thinking about this, neophilia as a perceived good tied in with some of what roadnotes has said about being resilient, though I don't think that was her intended meaning: resilience is like having a healthy immune system, a useful way of dealing with life but that doesn't mean that you want lots of serious infections to fight off, and I'm not seeking out trauma, emotional or otherwise.

Liking or not liking surprises, or liking only some kinds, isn't a big deal: what feels important is being able to adjust my self-image if either I change in significant ways, or an untested assumption proves false.

There's a useful distinction between my enjoyment of learning or trying new things, and the idea that everything needs to be new: I can like new ideas and information without being delighted to find that everything I know is wrong.

It seems worth noting that the ways in which I am thrown by surprises are something I could probably have gone another ten or twenty years without noticing, if Adrian hadn't been close enough to see it, and looking at me with fewer assumptions about myself than I've accumulated over a lifetime.

I've edited my userinfo slightly, to reflect that I'm no longer surprised to be working out regularly; it took a while for me to really get used to it, but at some point I do.

[There's other stuff about self-perception and overlooking things, but I need to think about that a bit more before I write it up.]

I went to the gym this morning. When I got done with my cardio, one of the new trainers commented that I was doing well. I said something to the effect that I always do the cardio first, so I have the weights ahead of me as a reward; if I did the weights first, I'd never get to cardio. She noted that it's also useful warm-up, which I acknowledged. Then I did my first weight exercise, and she said something about my having been making a lot of progress in the last month. I pointed out that I've been going there for several years, and said that I wasn't making progress, just getting back from having been sick.

Then I thought about it a little more. Progress from two months ago counts, even if it's not where I might have been in an ideal universe where I wasn't sick for a month, and perhaps where I was a little more diligent about working out when traveling. And I feel as though I'm making progress on other scales, like actually going to see people, and having gotten a very encouraging reply to an email I sent yesterday about possible work. So I went back and told her "I shouldn't put myself down, I am making progress" (though I didn't include the reasoning above).

The measurable results of the weight work are incremental, and not monotonic: an extra 2.5 pounds on this exercise, but not up to what I'd been thinking of as my fairly stable level on that one. But I know I feel better when I work out, and my partners say they can see the muscle. Certainly, it comes in handy when someone asks me to carry her walker up the subway stairs because the elevator is out of service, and I've got a sack of groceries in one hand (she could climb the stairs using the handrail, but not get the walker up with her).

( some gym numbers )

All names are chosen names. It's just that some of us are using names we chose ourselves, some are using names chosen by people close to us (especially parents), and some are using, and I hope happy with, old choices.

Outside LJ, I use "Vicki," the name my parents chose. (Mom wanted the long form, Dad the shorter, he won that argument, so I insist on the spelling as given there.) redbird was chosen in an odd moment for use on ElderMOO, and is totemic, from my first tattoo.

My surname comes from a great-grandfather who sojourned in Germany for a while.

I could change any of them, some more easily than others, but I'm basically happy with what I've got, and continuity has its own appeals. So, for some people and purposes, does discontinuity, and reading a post related to that prompted this: a name change can be a way of affiliating with something or someone new, or of saying "I am no longer who you thought I was."

My beloved adrian_turtle just called, because she thought I could use a friendly voice and some reassurance. She was right. Among other things, she pointed out that even if I find the notebooks in question, they may not contain the information I'm looking for.

She also reminded me that if I decide to go look for them, I don't have to do it right now: it's reasonable to find the idea scary, and there's nothing that's about to happen, or needs to be done, that means it can't wait.

I've kept a paper journal, in various ways, since I was in high school. Generally, I finish a book, put it on the shelf, and go on to the next, rarely looking at the old material: whatever needs it's filling seem to be satisfied by the writing.

This morning I was looking for some of my very old journals, and couldn't find them. I found the very first, which was a bit too early and ended with the note "Continued in next book." The notebook next to it was from several years later, and then the ones following on were of the same physical style, and apparently in chronological order.

I am now considering opening some boxes that have been sitting in the foyer since we moved in here, to see if they contain what I'm looking for. Alternatively, I can rummage through those memories without the paper that might add to, confirm, or contradict what I remember. In some ways that feels safer.

[Comments on this entry screened, because the topic is somewhat fraught and I may not be up to dealing with certain topics in comment threads.]

papersky posted some interesting thoughts about kinds of lying, and when to tell what truths this morning. I kept thinking of it while watching King Lear. Much of the action in Lear is driven by a liar and his plots; much of the rest is driven by the mad king's demand that his daughters flatter him.

Some of what Papersky was reacting to was a discussion where "she lied to me" slid into "she betrayed me." In some sense, most betrayals may involve lies, if only the implicit lie of leading someone to trust you with their safety or secrets; it is not the case that most lies are betrayals. Many just aren't that important, either because the subjects are trivial or because there isn't enough of a connection for betrayal to be a meaningful concept: it's not betrayal if I let a random shopkeeper in a city I'm visiting for three days think I'm married when I'm not, or vice versa.

I've left a couple of comments on Papersky's discussion, and recommend it if the topic interests you and you aren't reading her journal.

I just followed a link that looked interesting from the title and description, saw who it was by, and immediately hit "back." This surprised me: I hadn't realized I had a sufficiently strong reaction to this person's specific loud stupidities that I wouldn't read zir on a subject that zie was likely to be sensible and useful on.

juliansinger offered to pick a letter for anyone who asked, and then we're supposed to pick ten things that start with that letter, and write about them and what they mean to us.

She gave me T. I started by listing some things, and then selected from them based on what I felt ready to write about. This proved trickier than I thought it would be (lots of T's in that sentence, but not ones I want to use) and the results may be more free-associative than was being asked for.( cut because it got quite long )