Kat Dancing

The two most-heard comments at WorldCon:

a) "Cool tattoo."
b) "Is that your real name?"

It's good to have both a tat and a nametag that give people an easy way to start a conversation with me, since in general I'm too shy to start one with them.

WorldCon is in general great - everyone is insanely friendly, several people have kind of adopted me and taken it on themselves to show me around, most notably my roomate, and everyone talks about sf all the time. This is great. The panels are fab (even if only half the people show up for the ones they're supposed to be talking at about half the time) the people are great, the parties are great, it's generally an amazing amount of fun.

But I'm hungry all the time. I wonder what I'm forgetting to do?

Got two books signed by Terry Pratchett, which I probably would not have done, since the line was absoultely insane, except that I wanted a gift for a friend. When I got to the head of the line I said, "could you sign that to Dixie?" He started to glance at my nametag so I said, "No, not me, it's for a friend. Actually, DIxie's a man."

He signed it and then gave me this long, thoughtful look, and said, "That man can either fight well or run well."

I laughed and babbled something (I don't do well with meeting famous people) and handed him the next book.

"For Dixie as well?"

"No, this one's for me," he looked at the nametag again, "Kat."

"Ah. Kat Feete." He gave me another one of those thoughtful looks and said, "You must have a very interesting hometown."

I laughed again and babbled some more and gathered up my books while he talked to me a bit more. And this after a full hour of signing books. I would like to say, for the record, that Terry Pratchett is an *inhumanly* nice person.

Interesting tidbit: the Church of Satan charges a lot of money to join, and the more you pay, the more you advance. I know this because I ran across a site done by someone who was, apparently, a practicing but poor Satinist, and he was complaining about how unfair and immoral this is.

And about the only thing I could think was, well, DUH. They're SATANISTS.

Found a rather nifty new webcomic called Space Opera. And no, that's not where I got the Satanism thing. That's from spending too much time playing on the web and coming up with bizarre word searches to google.

We watched "Bowling for Columbine" last night. Two words: watch it.

It made me cry. It also made me think. One of the major points of the movie was *fear*: how scared Americans are. Of *everything*. Robbers. Rapists. Muggers. Jellyfish. Getting the flu. Terrorists. Drug users. Their own children.

This is disturbingly true. Going abroad kind of pinpointed that one for me... over there I was doing stuff - sleeping on park benches, hitchhiking, striking up conversations with strange drunk men in lonely, deserted train stations, walking home alone at night - that the Kiwis or the Brits would lecture me mildly about, and probably rightly. But they were more amused than anything.

Over here I get shock and awe because I, a female, traveled alone. And also lectures about how deeply dangerous that is, graphic descriptions of the things that could have been done to me, and almost inevitably the conclusion - delivered in a righteous tone of voice, usually - "Well, you were lucky. *I* wouldn't take those sorts of risks."

I mean, come on! Yes, travelling alone was probably dangerous (although less dangerous than, say, being in a car, statistically speaking.) So? *Everything* is dangerous. That doesn't mean I'm going to sit on my butt for the rest of my life.

But what's striking isn't the danger; as I say, everything is dangerous. It's the sense of proportion. *Especially* about crime. It is much, much less likely that you will be shot, raped, mugged, or killed than that you will be sent through your windshield by some drunk the next time you go for a spin, but people who will happily jump in their DeathTrapMobile every day are terrified to walk down an empty street. Particularly if there are ethnic minorities or homeless people about. Why?

One factor is the media. A nice statistic thrown off in "Bowling for Colombine" was that, in a period of time when murders have decreased by 20%, media coverage of murders had increased by 600%. I'm willing to bet that the statistics for rape and violence against women are just as ridiculous. Moreover, I'd love to see the breakdown of stranger-attacks versus "date rapes". I know that most - I don't have the statistic, but well over 50% - rapes and assults come from someone the victim knows, but when was the last time you heard one of those covered on TV? No, they're all of women attacked by strangers in back alleys... an occurrance which is the rarest of rare of all rapes.

It would be wonderful to blame the media for everything, but unfortunately there's another, more insidious, factor at work. Control. I heard an interesting tidbit on NPR a while back about this. Even people who know that cars are *much* more dangerous than airplanes will say that they feel safer in a car - because they can control the car. Similarly, something like crime is frightening because it is uncontrollable. and so people will invest in something that makes them feel they have control - eg, a gun - even if they *know* it is much, much, much more likely that the gun will be used to kill a member of their own family.

So we're conditioned to fear the uncontrollable, and gifted with a media and a government and a set of corporations that exaggerate our fears out of proportion to serve their own ends. and the more fear we feel, the less we feel in control. Return to beginning of sentence. Repeat until nice men with straightjacket come for you.

In the meantime my preperations for travelling (alone, I might add) to Toronto continue, and I continue to leave my door unlocked. Unsafe, I'm sure, but oddly I have more peace of mind than most people I know.

You know, one of these days I'll get my BA.

It's not that I'm not good at school. I'm very good. I'm just sick of it. Getting through these two measily little Internet courses is like hauling myself across the desert with the dead camel that is my motivation chained to my ankle and the Mirage of Procrastination flickering into my sight at every corner, tempting me to once again leave the path.

Gloom.

On the bright side, the schedule for Torcon is finally up - I'm downloading it right now. Yay! The list of participants went up a few days back. Among other majorly cool people there will be China Mieville, David Brin, Connie Willis, Walter Jon Williams, and Guy Gavriel Kay. Excited is not even the *word* for how I feel right now.

On the other dark side, very little getting done on the story, due to Evil Internet Courses and Even More Evil Mirage of Procrastination.

So it's Gloom, Yay! and Gloom. Oh, well, I've had worse days.

The guy that sold us four pigs came and bought a calf from us today. What goes around, comes around. And hopefully the two escaped pigs will come around sometime soon, because I really don't think starting a feral pig population on farm is a good idea.

No Harmony today, but that's all right, because I *finally* finished the Vision article I told Lazette I'd do in, oh, MARCH. Oops. It took me a bit longer to compress-and-translate a 20-page acedemic philosophy paper into a 6-page how-to for writers than I estimated. Hopefully she'll be forgiving. It finished at 3K, a thousand words longer than Vision's top length, so I'm looking at splitting it into two articles.

In the bad news zone, the water pump blew up again, meaning Dad went zipping around on the four-wheeler cussing all day, trying to get water to all the animals. He was in an absolutely foul mood, and it trickled down, as these things do... the whole family spent all day snapping at each other. Sigh.

1,200 words on Harmony today, and two scenes from the old version reworked to fit. Yay!

The problem is I now want to do a rewrite. Or, more accurately, a reshuffle. I have five scenes, all occurring on the same day; four to do with the murder, one not. The one not is a seperate problem. I hate digressions in my own work - I'm not sure why, as I don't much mind them when I *read*, as long as they're good, but when I'm writing they fret the hell out of me. Possibly because I am not, at heart, a good plotter, and therefore regard anything that's not plot as suspicious and potentially self-gratifying rubbish.

The reshuffle, however, is the immediate trouble. I don't much like the order the scenes are currently in; it leaves certain stuff - namely the position of the spacers - until too late, and generally just doesn't fit. I'm not sure what to do about it, though. I shall jigsaw the pieces around for a while, I suppose, and see if I can't make them fit....

The good news is that this finishes off the first "part" of the book - the book now, in my mind, being divided into five distinct parts. This was the Intro section, where the problem was laid out, and various characters and plot elements introduced, and so on. It runs about 23K at the moment, which is about where it should be for the 100K I estimate the finished book will be (I'm assuming that the forth bit will be fairly short and the last bit quite short). Now I just have to figure out what happens in part 2, what I think of as the "Deterioration" segment.

I may post a bit on this later. At the moment I am too disconcerted. I had just happily finished the last bit of reworking on Harmony and was gradually returning to the real world, starting to notice my surroundings - hmm, Dido on the CD player, time's getting on, snake crossing the floor at my feet -

SNAKE?!?

His nose was actually about 2 inches from my foot, but when I screamed in an embarrassingly feminine way he apparently had a line of thought something like "Shit, you mean this thing is *alive*?" and hastily reversed himself. I got a good look at him - all five feet of him - before he disappeared into the hall closet.

Ack. Okay, I don't mind snakes really, but this was a bit much.

I went and fetched my brother, reasoning that if there was ever a male job this was it, but by the time he got there the snake had Abandoned Closet and was crawling through a hole in the side of our disused kitchen cabinets. The bro made an attempt at pinning his head with a forked stick, as he'd seen done on the telly, only to discover that pinning down what is essentially a five-foot long muscle is not as easy as it looks. The snake waffled around a bit, clearly made nervous by the stick, and then zipped off into the depths of the cabinet while my brother was still vanely trying to put enough pressure on the stick to hold him. He's still skulking back there somewhere, probably waiting for the mad people to go away so he can get on with his hunting.

Ah, well. At least that explains why my rat problem mysteriously solved itself. Shall be wearing shoes in the house from now on.

I went to Blacksburg on a beer run for my parents today. My parents, you see, are *serious* beer drinkers. A few years back they bought each other a kegging system for Christmas, and they have been happily enjoying beer on tap ever since. Except, of course, when there is a miscalculation and the keg runs dry. Thus my emergency trip to Blacksburg.

I was hoping to get in a little shopping in a decent-sized town, aka one where The Evil That Is WalMart is not the sole retail outlet of choice, but, sadly, there were no bookstores in Blacksburg. Weird. There were some music stores, though, so I got to indulge in my second-favorite shopping vice. (Clothes, by the way, don't even make the list. I handle clothes shopping like a combat mission: identify target, plan route of attack, get in, get target, get out with minimal casualties.) I ended up walking out with Tom Waits, Sarah McLaughlin, Ben Folds Five, and Marilyn Manson, which you'd think would warrant some kind of comment from the staff, but it didn't. I doubt those folks pay attention any more.

Manson was a surprise. I bought the album because I was really in the mood for something different and, even though I don't like heavy metal much, it *was* different and I'd heard Manson on the Matrix soundtracks and liked him okay. But I was skeptical. I'd heard all the usual stories about Manson, and I was not impressed by that at *all*. I dislike showyness and play-rebellion, and I figured the music would be more of the same.

This stuff is fabulous!

Okay, so Manson now goes in the same category as Jim Morrison, aka "wouldn't touch him personally with a ten-foot pole but damn, he's good." And he is. He's an artist. A complete nutter, mind you, but an artist. The music can be kindly described as "dark", and I'm not usually impressed by the bands that play the "dark" game, like Ozzy Osborne, Alice Cooper, Limp Biskit, Rage Against the Machine, and so on. First off, the're showy, and as I said I'm not a fan of showy. Second, they're not very good musicians. Most of this stuff is repetitive gang-bang guitar with a drum machine cranked up to full in the foreground and a couple of idiots screaming their heads off in an attempt to cover the fact that they can't actually play an instrument. (This may be where "showy" comes in, too.) Manson seems to be ahead of the crowd there. It's not exactly musically complex, but it's at least on a par with most rock'n'roll. But third, and most of all, it's fake. When it comes right down to it, these guys are just as scared of the Beast as the rest of us are. They don't want to look it in the eye. So they cover it up with cliche expressions of rebellion against suberbia, cuss a lot, talk about sex a lot (apparently with the idea that this is rebellious, although frankly people talk about sex all the *time* these days, or at least the people I know do) and finish it off with a smug - sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken - assertion of their own superiority over the sheep, the cattle, the normal. "We are the chosen people." The same assertion, in other words, that every one of the religions and institutions they attack are making, from the American Dream on down. They pretend to escape, but in reality they're simply yet another reinforcement of the old meme, albeit a reinforcement in trendy black leather.

I am well aware that, posting this, I am in a way playing the "chosen people" game with myself. I'm not *blaming* these guys. It's not a trap you can ever completely escape. But when yet another dead-end escape route is *all* that exists in a style of music, it fails to interest me.

They've also got no sense of humor about their message or themselves, always a bad sign. Manson is ahead of the crowd there as well; although there's more than enough normal-bashing to go around, there's a heavy irony to most of the songs, a full awareness of the chosen-people meme that he plays into. Almost as often as he is setting himself up above the "cattle" he's cutting himself down, turning in on himself, as in Use Your Fist Not Your Mouth, where the catchline is the distinctly militant "This is the black collar song / Put it in your middle finger and sing along / Use your fist and not your mouth" - but then the "black collar politician" twists things a little with "I woke up today and wished for tomorrow / I don't want to be like anyone else / I woke up today and wished for tomorrow / I don't want to even be myself".
Another classic is Para-Noir, where a deadpan female voice acts as, as the liner notes put it, "The Women of the World List Their Reasons for Fucking Me." These are not pleasant reasons. ("I fuck you because you're famous. I fuck you to control you. I fuck you out of boredom. I fuck you to make the pain go away. I fuck you because I can.") Again and again, the prophet turns his poison teeth on himself, in a rare, peculiar kind of humility.

But that's not the real reason I found myself, against all expectation, liking Marylin Manson. I like him because he's really on the hunt. He doesn't turn away at the last moment to shelter in cliche slogans and bang-bang shock value imagery. He goes in and he gets the Beast. All the twisted perversity, the things you didn't want to know about, the thoughts you didn't want to admit having, the nastiness that builds up behind your eyes just from being alive... he seems to know it well, to twist his music around it, to drag it out where you have to look it in the face. And that's *good*. I love it.

Anyone who is actually following this blog may be trying to reconcile this little rant with the doughnut-eating, Princess-Bride-watching girl of the last post.

First off: Jeez, people. I am *not* a Nice Girl. Okay, I am, but only because that's what I *am*, not because I was told to be. Therefore I feel no need to limit myself to Nice Girl activities. Conversely, I'm not a Rebel, and I don't feel a need to dye my hair black, stalk around scowling at everything and saying that life sucks, nor do I feel a need to limit myself to Rebellious activities. I'm just me. I reserve the right to do whatever I like.

Second: I'm impressed by bravery. On the rare occasion that I face up to the Beast, I hide it in stories, in stuff that happens to other people, even if they are people who exist only in my head. Manson goes after it full-tilt. I'll forgive him the show and the nonsense for that; everyone needs some protection.

Third: Manson is weird - gleefully so - and I'm all for that. America seems to be disturbingly afraid of weird these days. And most of the people that are targeted seem to go at it wrong, by insisting that whatever it is they're doing, from reading science fiction novels to sleeping with people of the same sex, is normal. They try to redefine the definition of normal to include them, which is really just pushing back the boundaries, when what they *ought* to be doing is trying to redefine "abnormal" until it does not automatically mean "bad."

This irritates the hell out of me, as you can perhaps tell.

And, although we seem to have forgotten it, we *are* a democracy here. We're supposed to be a byword for openness and tolerance, for fuck's sake. As Manson says himself in his journal:"If the U.S. stands for democracy and freedom, then the most patriotic thing an artist can do is to fight for those liberties. My opinion is a sharpened stick, poking democracy to make sure that it's not dead." I read that and thought: yes!

Finally: The Beast is *there*. You don't get anywhere by hiding. The Beast is, in fact, strengthened by people hiding from it; it's when you look it in the face that it shrinks. Happy-joy-light pictures cast shadows; and if there aren't shadows, it's a two-dimensional picture, it's fading away, it's dying, getting brighter all the time, while the unseen shadow gets deeper and darker for all the things pushed into it. I am, overall, an optimistic, happy person, but I'm also reasonably intelligent. I *need* people like Manson to rub my nose in the shadow every now and then, and I know it.

I need to be reminded that evil is not something "out there". That "those kind of thoughts" are not something that exist only in other people. I'm evil too.

As such, humility becomes me.

And one final reason to listen to Marilyn Manson - he's got one hell of a backbeat going.

Righto, end of rant. Clearly I should not be allowed to spend several hours in a car driving with nothing better to do than listen to music and think.

Rainy day. Blah. Re-watched 'The Princess Bride,' which was fun, and got homemade doughnuts from our partying friend delivered. They beat the crap out of Krispy Kreme. I ate myself sick, and we've still got at least two dozen left. Friendship is a wonderful thing.

Cows are evil, but at least Dad wasn't too mad about them getting out. Of course, this was partly because I weakened and didn't admit that it was because of me leaving the gap down. Bad Kat. I still have a weird flinch reflex about getting yelled at by my dad, one I need to vanquish somehow. I'm 22, for God's sake....

Anyway. I will think more about this.

Wrote nearly 1500 words on Harmony. Yay! It's still like pulling teeth to make myself write - drudgery - but it's getting better. If I can just get over this hump somehow....

Well, I have officially skipped the Fiddler's Convention. I feel a bit guilty - it is right here in town, after all - but after Clifftop last weekend I am a bit Fiddler'd out, and besides, it's been raining all week and there are 10,000 people camped in that park. It does *not* look pleasant down there. Why go if you won't enjoy yourself?

I did go to a party, though - at my friend's house - this is the friend with wall-to-wall science fiction novels in every room of his house. He always throws a big party on Fiddler's week. It was good fun, lots of good food and I played Twister for the first time ever, and possibly would have won if my brother hadn't gotten bored with running the spinny-thing and shoved me with his foot. Bastard. My mother won instead. The bro got squirted with hand-sharks for his trouble (you probably needed to be there) and then glow-in-the dark bracelets and wash-off tattoos were applied to all (you *really* needed to be there). The rocket launch was a failure, do to tire pump blowout, but the homemade ice cream was a success, and then we chased all the kids out for a bit. I should probably mention that, amongst those wall-to-wall science fiction books, you can occasionally stumble across more rarified objects, some of which were quite a shock to me in my youth; there's an anatomically correct sheep chained to the ceiling, a box of edible panties in one of the lofts, and a bronze statue of a couple in an extremely athletic position on the mantle, to name a few of my finds. But *any*way, what we turned out to be chasing the kids off for was something my friend's wife wanted us to see, a documentary on an Australian stage act called Penis Puppetry. This is kind of like Shadow Puppets, but not quite. Without going into too much detail, I will say that it was a)not in the least erotic, b) funny as hell, and c) caused all the guys in the room to leave somewhat white about the mouth and with their hands firmly clamped over their groins. I was particularly impressed by the Windsurfer. Those Ozzies, eh?

Was stopped by the cops on the way home - they always do liscense checks at fidder's, which I had forgotten. No big, I hadn't been drinking anyway. The cop did look at me a bit oddly, but he just checked my liscense and asked where I'd gotten my glow-in-the-dark bracelet. I explained I'd been at a party where they'd been handing them out, and he laughed and said, "I can see that. You have a nice night now."

It wasn't until I was driving away that I remembered the wash-off tattoo of an eye that I was still wearing on my forehead.

On a less humorous note, I realized when I'd gotten home that I'd forgotten to lock the cows in their field for the night. I hiked out there immediately, but the damage was done - they'd broken into the next field down and were spread out, happily chewing their cud. I might have known. They'd already taken advantage of one downed gap today. I thought about driving them out, but they'd already pretty well ruined the field they were in, and I figured I'd do more harm than good, so I just shut the gap on them and went home. Leaving me with the glum prospect of explaining my mistake to Dad in the morning.

Well, fuck.

And only about 400 words done on Harmony today.

Went to see "Pirates of the Carribean." Again. It was still damned good the second time. Not a great movie, in the "timeless literature" way, but a great movie in that it's fun and, more, that there are so few letdowns. The acting is, throughout, supurb, particularly Johnny Depp, who is mad as a hatter and good at it. The style is impeccable. Even the obligitory romance is unobnoxious, and both the male and female leads were *perfect*, in their way. In fact everyone was perfect - which is why, for all its shallowness, it's a great movie: it is, for its type, perfect.

Do you get the idea I liked it?

Other than that - mad day. *Finally* got my new modem, which did not work. Of course. Spent an hour piddling with it and another hour and a half on *hold* to tech support. Now this is a real scam - these guys have their "free" support line, which is what I was on, and then a 1-800 number for "express" troubleshooting, for which you have to pay $7 a pop. So they don't answer their "free" line. Cute. Also the "free" line is not toll-free, meaning I was paying for that hour and a half on hold. So... if you ever have an opportunity to pass up a BestData modem, do me a favor and do it. Strike a blow for decent treatment.

Then I got back from the movie and tried the modem again, just for the hell of it, and it worked. Didn't change anything, didn't even shut down the computer, just let it sit for a few hours.

One more blow against science and logic, I guess, and one more reminder that the computer is based on the quantum Uncertainty Principle.

Did a thousand words on Harmony, if you count the passages I rescued from the scrap file. Which I am. I am desperate enough to count *anything* as progress, right now.

Now *that* was a hiatus.