Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Coats, and other clothing stuff

My body shape has changed over the last couple of years, which means that a bunch of clothing that used to fit doesn't.

( cut for length and for clothing/body size stuff )

I saw Emilie last night, for the first time in two weeks. She spent a bunch of time on massage, after I told her my shoulder had been hurting, possibly from pulling the wheeled suitcase. I also did some exercises.
( details behind cut )

Yes, part of me is still a mathematician. I may not remember all the names of angles (complementary and such) in geometry, but I just left an editorial query on this eighth-grade math project noting that my suggested change was inelegant.

Also, I think my job is clarity. Not just here: on the uptown 6 this afternoon, someone wanted to know how to get to 14th Street, and after I explained that (the "Union Square" label on the strip map being unclear) she said she was trying to get to 13th and Ninth, so I explained about the L. She thanked me profusely.

(After work, I went to the gym, which was surprisingly crowded. Not just surprising to me: I overheard a discussion of why it was moreso than the previous Wednesday evening. I'm also thinking, based on the noise levels that leak out with the door closed, that the spin class probably ought to come with a safety warning, and OSHA might want to take a look at it. ( numbers ))

cattitude and I both got home late, I because of the workout and he because of a last-minute meeting, and I had some freelance stuff to do; on nights like this, I am very glad to be able to get acceptable pizza delivered.

More saved comments: ( critics and criticism, reasons for coming out, body image, chai, names, how long nations last )

A couple of weeks ago, someone (friends-locked) was talking about how she dressed, and why, and said something about expecting that she would "age out of pretty altogether", and that even if she could still dress well then, it wouldn't be as effective, because of the competition from younger, prettier women. My reaction was an odd certainty that I didn't need to worry about that anymore.

I don't know if I was ever pretty in the sense she's talking about, but what I have now is something equally real and less ephemeral, I think. It's not just personality; I know my partners like looking at me.

The almost immediate follow-up to the thought that I didn't need to worry about aging out of my looks was to wonder when and where I got that self-confidence. I'm still not sure, but it's there. Not always, and not about everything, but somewhere along the line I've gotten a lot more comfortable with how I look. Not just in terms of not fretting about it, not wanting to spend a lot of money and time on it, but that I look good.

Last Sunday, I bought cough syrup at a Walgreen's in Cambridge, Mass. The cashier started to ask for my ID, and as I reached for it corrected himself, saying that he only needed my date of birth, which I gave him. I don't know if not selling dextromethorphan to people under 18 is store or state policy, but he clearly was sure that I was old enough, so it didn't actually matter if the answer I gave him was valid. (It was: I can reel off two or three zip codes other than my own without thinking, but asked date of birth and I'll either tell the truth or maybe ask why you want to know. More likely the former.)

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.

eleanor posted about overhearing a conversation between two men, the second of whom said that he considered himself a big reader too, but didn't read much. I commented with what still seems to me like the most likely interpretation, and she told me I was being incredibly generous.

I get comments by email, and when I read that email I started saying "I'm not trying to be generous," and then realized that the thought behind that sentence was that I shouldn't be taking credit for generosity.

Not because generosity wasn't my aim (my aim was understanding, maybe empathy, not generosity to a stranger who'll never see this discussion), but because I somehow felt I shouldn't give myself credit for being generous, because I don't think of myself as unusually so. Like not self-identifying as sensible, despite numerous friends telling me I am.

I think this connects to discussions, both in person with rysmiel and on pegkerr's journal, about being the person I want to be, the best Vicki I know how to be. The person I want to be is sensible (though sometimes silly), is generous within what I can afford (which is as much a matter of priorities as quantity), and understands the world around her. In that light, I'm glad to be getting to where I want to be.

I feel as though everything I've done with my hair lately was a mistake.

Before I went up to Montreal, rysmiel had offered to trim my hair for me. I liked this idea, because I'd rather trust a long-haired friend to take off no more than necessary. Unfortunately, by the time the removal of split ends was done, there wasn't enough left to braid properly. I feel as though I've lost about a year of growth, and am hoping to have it long enough to braid by summer. papersky says that hers grows about 2 cm in the two weeks after a trim, which would be nice if it happened for me as well. In the meantime, it'll have to go back in a stupid little ponytail while I'm exercising.

Also, the purple seems to be almost gone. While I was in Montreal, I was enjoying that my relatively subtle purple highlights were calm and modest by local standards, because we saw lots of people with really impressive not-found-in-nature color jobs. But one more shampoo, this morning, plus the haircut, seems to have left me almost purple-less. But with the damage from the bleaching.

I think I'm going to go buy a can of the spray-on purple.

And I'm going to try not to be too disturbed and distracted by this, because it really is trivial. But the significantly shorter hair feels different, when I brush it or reach back to run my hand through it, which I do quite a bit when it's loose.

though it may take a while:

I happened to notice my reflection at work today, and thought "looking good." It still surprises me to think that in just ordinary going-about-my-day contexts (not being admired by my beloveds, nor yet being strong and visibly tattooed at the gym).