Kat Dancing

Yesterday was one year, to the day, from when Dan and I first met. And how did we spend it? Meeting his parents.

Is this a good omen or a bad one?

I tell a lie - the first half of the day was spent on a bus coming down to New Jersey to meet his parents, and I slept through most of it, being worn out from packing and then helping halfwitted move house, a story in and of itself, so for now let's just say that, hey, you can get a loveseat and a couch and three people into a van, after all. And after that we met up with Dan's sister in Toronto. I liked her overall, although most of the time trying to think of them as siblings gave me a severe case of mental whiplash. About all they share is a certain pig-headed stubbornness. On the other hand, at certain points it was really easy to think of them as siblings; that good ol' sibling rivalry came out. Dan was not nearly as older-brother and dignified as I think he wanted to be; his sister probably had the advantage there, as I think she was trying to be the younger sister and get him in trouble. I spent a lot of the evening grinning at my plate.

But then I got to meet his father and stepmother, and it's going, overall, pretty well. The downside is communication; my Russian is nonexistant and their English awkward. As the only one fluent in both Dan spends a lot of time translating. On the upside, they both seem genuinely disposed to like me, Dan and I are allowed to sleep in the same bed and even shower together, and I haven't stuck my foot in my mouth too badly yet. (That I know of. *turns around* Dan, have I stuck my foot in my mouth yet? No? Okay then.) This is three big points better than the last time I had to meet the parents.

Besides, what is being lost in translation is being made up for in the universal language of food. His stepmother likes feeding people, and as meals have been a bit irregular of late I need feeding, so we are making each other happy. I can smell breakfast now and wow, does it smell good. And large. Two more days of this and I ought to be prepared for the inevitable meal-skipping at WorldCon.....

Yes, I'm procrastinating again.

You are a RSIG--Reserved Sentimental Intellectual Giver. This makes you a People-Pleaser.

Oh, RSIG! You are the most complicated and dynamic of any type. You are brilliant, tender, romantic and a joy to be with. You're the favorite of many of your friends. It's just not a party until you get there. You are bursting with feeling and sentiment and insight but you very rarely express it -- it's not how you want to present yourself to the world. Although you are always studying your non-romantic relationships -- you turn a blind eye to romantic relationships.

You're highly adaptable, and you conform to your circumstances (maybe you're a youngest child?). You would probably be content with almost anyone, and almost anyone would be blissfully happy to have you. But just because you're content doesn't mean you're happy. Don't settle!

You'd rather ignore your problems than rock the boat by creating conflict. Please understand that in the long run ignoring conflict will make you unhappy and your partner exhausted. Try picking a fight just to see how it goes. You'll find out that solving problems is so satisfying for you that it makes conflict worth it.

Your sex life could be fantastic if you could stop worrying about everything so much (did I wash my hands? how do I look? what do I need to do tomorrow?). You need a sweet, expressive lover who makes you feel at ease and never puts pressure on you. If you feel secure with your partner outside the bedroom, it will make all the difference.

You cry at movies. A lot.

Of the 17960 people who have taken this quiz, 7.8 % are this type.

Take the quiz

I do not cry at movies.

The good news: I got something written on Kind of Mind.

The bad news: Not much.

The bad news, part two: I'm pretty sure this story needs a second narrator, and I've no fucking idea who.

I am going to go have a lie down and think about this.

Incidentally, here's the opening of the story. Extremely first draft, for which I apologize, but feel free to comment anyway.

----

He was without ears, without eyes, without a sense of time, floating and empty. It was the most restful thing to happen to Isaac in weeks.

What are they doing to me?

The thought was a distant one; he couldn't really bring himself to care. It disturbed him. Isaac was - he would say - a happy man. He had a wife and two children, all beloved. He had just turned fifty, and his doctor thought he might live another century easily, with the new life-extending techology coming in. Just that morning he had been scanning the news headlines and thinking how different they would have been twenty, thirty years ago, in his youth: starvation, poverty, war... how lucky we are. How blessed now, compared to the way the world was going when I was young. We should be thankful.

And yet, he was pathetically grateful for the whim of scientists that removed him, however briefly, from that world. It was, Isaac decided, a perversity of his that should not be encouraged.

He drifted, letting thoughts come and go as they would. It was a moment of peace. It would leave him, as all peace eventually did.

Nicked from whynotsteve.


You are mRNA. You're brilliant, full of important,
interesting information and you're a great
friend to the people you care about. You may
have sides to you that no one understands. But
while you understand more than most people,
you're only half-there most of the time.


Which Biological Molecule Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla



Procrastinating? Who, moi?

One thing I love about blogging: it gives you a lovely excuse to lay things out for others, often thereby making them clearer to you yourself. Or babble nervously. Take your pick.

Since I want to do this about the story I want to start writing tomorrow, a story y'all may or may not be interested in, I'm hiding it behind a cut. However, I've no idea how my RSS feed will handle this. It didn't like yesterday's pic at all. Apologies if there is a great long post in spite of me.

[Read More!]

Forward Motion is doing a three-day novel contest - no prize, but then again, no $50 entry fee like the official Three Day Novel Contest. Also, you get four days, which I am cool with.

I decided to do it this year because a) I have entirely too much time on my hands and b) I haven't gotten anything significant done on Harmony Station since June. Of course, once I started brainstorming the new story, the writer's block that had kept me from working on Harmony vanished and I've gotten like 10,000 words revised. Such is life and the perversity of the muse. And, hey, as long as I'm getting some writing done, who's complaining?

I'm still going to try the new story, though, which looks... interesting. More on that once I figure out what it's about. Right now I'm in the process of outlining, which, thanks to Inspiration looks something like this:



Have I not pimped Inspiration lately? Consider it pimped. More on this as (and if) I go on with it.

What if the whole world could vote in the American elections?

Early morning conversation:

*I reach for the door, about to make the walk to the washroom naked*

Dan: Don't. Our co-op student housemate has his door open and is packing.

Me: *reaching for a robe* Thanks for the warning. I don't like him enough to give him a going-away present.

Dan: Neither do I, so "heart attack" might have been appropriate.

I got hijacked into going to Canada's Wonderland yesterday, which was a Happy Thing on several levels.

First off, I'd never been to an amusement park - correction, I have, but I was too young to remember, which doesn't count. I'd never been on a rollercoaster before, which made the experience rather more intense than I suppose it ought to have been - I spent half the time laughing in delight, half the time screaming and thinking "I paid to have someone do this to me? I must be fucking insane!" On most occasions the two emotions overlapped until I wasn't sure which set of emotions (and noises) were predominating. It was fun.

Dan sat beside me for all but one of the rides, laughing like a hyena the whole time - apparently I was making some pretty odd faces. I'm still thinking up a suitable revenge. It will involve cows. Let's see how he deals with my world.

But the biggest joy was the people I was with. Dan was, of course, formost, and with the schedule he's working getting to spend a whole day just playing was an amazing treat. But I was in a whole group of funny wonderful geeky people (being with a bunch of geeks and engineers going onto a rollercoaster ride certainly makes standing in line more interesting....) And getting talked into doing something I really shouldn't, just because people really want me to come along - that's something that, well, prior to this summer I can still count the occasions on my fingers. People that really want me around are still a novelty to me. A fabulous luxury indeed....

I had fun. A lot of fun. I want to go back sometime, maybe with my brother the adrenaline junkie, who will enjoy it even more than I did. And to all the people who talked me and Dan into going: thank you.

Even if that's not exactly what I was screaming on some of those rides.

A Violently Executed Blog linked to this article on conservatism.

It's good. It's very good. Read it. Make your friends read it.

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

How to Make Gnocchi:

Bake four good-sized potatoes. Five if they're smaller. Once they're cool enough to handle, peel them and run them through a potato ricer, or, if you don't have one of those, a cheese grater.

Add one egg, about a teaspoon of salt, and just enough flour to make it a dough rather than an amorphous blob.

Boil a pot of water. Roll the potato dough into long ropes about the width of your finger - remember making play-dough worms in kindergarten? Like that. Cut the rope into segments. About an inch seems to work. Drop the segments into the boiling water and cook until they rise to the top, about a minute.

Cover with melted butter lightly flavored with an herb of your choice. Rosemary and sage are particuarly good.

Eat.

----

Now, oddly enough, this is my kind of recipe. It's simple as all hell, ingredient-wise, and pretty straightforward as far as steps go: there's a bit where you're supposed to smoosh the gnocchi with a fork before you boil them that I haven't tried yet because it's complicated, but other than that, I could probably do the recipe from memory.

And yet it is insanely tricky. No recipe can tell you how much flour to add, for example: that has to do with the potatoes, and whether you cooked them a lot or a little, and what kind they are, and even the warmth of the day and the texture of the flour and whether the bowl was damp or dry... and then there's how big the things are supposed to be. You try getting six or eight play-dough ropes exactly the same thickness and then cutting them into exactly the same length. And then there's how long you cook 'em: leave them too long and they go mushy, not long enough and they taste like glue.

But mostly it's the flour.

I've made gnocchi four or five times now, and I'm almost getting a handle on how to do it now. This is very satifying. It'll be even more satisfying when I'm good at it, mind you, but hey. Everyone needs goals.

The kind of recipe that requires me to shop for essence of whale balls and has ten thousand precise steps that must be taken, on the other hand, drives me bonkers. I'm sure that says something very profound about my character. Those who try to figure out what don't get fed.

Sometimes you write something into a paper that's good, and well written, and intelligent, and generally makes you feel like you are One Smart Cookie (at least until you read it the next day and realize it's dreck.) There's just one problem. It's in the wrong paper. And so, grinding your teeth, you must delete it.

Here's something I cut from a paper on Shakespeare.


-----

The modern Western audience, as I mentioned before, is skeptical of the supernatural. We do not accept it as part of our reality. In fact, we are not even very comfortable with it as fiction, an attitude that fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin calls "secular Puritanism." In her 1974 essay "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" she argues that this attitude is epidemic and deep-rooted:

To read War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings plainly is not "work" - you do it for pleasure. And if it cannot be justified as "educational" or as "self-improvement", then, in the Puritan value system, it can only be self-indulgence or escapism. For pleasure is not a value, to the Puritan; on the contrary, it is a sin.

For most people watching Shakespeare qualifies as "work"; it is educational, and there is also a comfortable feeling of proving one's social standing and taste. If it happens to be entertaining, that's nice: and if there are a few clearly defined moral lessons presented, all the better. It is socially relevant (aka "more work"). Witches and ghosts and fairies, though - that speaks uncomfortably of fantasy. Fantasy is childish, not grown-up like Shakespeare. It is self-indulgent. It is not work.

And if it's not work, it must be play; if it's play, it can't be work. Western culture is perhaps more open to self-indulgence than it was in 1974, or perhaps not, but at any rate we like clear boundaries. A thing must either be Entertainment, or Art. It cannot be both. If it entertains, it must not challenge; if it challenges, it must not entertain. Our Shakespeare had damned well better not be entertaining, because that's cheating; we're here to be improved, dammit.

And it had better not have childish things, fantastic things, in it. Okay, you can't avoid witches sometimes, but they must either be shoved into the background as much as possible or made into Metaphors. Metaphors aren't scary. Witches are. Not just because they hint at something we don't know, but because they suggest that the imagination - true imagination, not spoon-fed homilies and knee-jerk morality - maybe isn't just for children.

You are Xuan Wu!

Mythological background: Because the turtle has a
thick, solid shell that serves as protection -
this animal is associated with stability. You
enjoy intellectual pursuits.
Also, in Feng Shui (the Chinese myths behind
choosing a house), the black turtle's solidity
is used to protect from cold northern winds.


Which Chinese Mythological Being Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla


Nicked from Arcaedia.

Well, it's official. I'm out of money.

Rats.

I have an awkward relationship with money. As a kid, I never had any: we were farming, and as with any small business, any spare cash we had went straight back into the farm. I can't remember a time when I didn't know to look at the price tag before I bothered wanting something. But at the same time we were never desperate: we grew most of our own food and my extended family was upper middle class. The money was always there, if you were willing to swallow your pride and ask for it.

I went to an expensive private college where I wore hand-me-downs and Goodwill clothes.

I was given a car. I went to New Zealand. I once survived for a week on $8 NZ, although I had to be careful standing up and things towards the end because the hunger was making me light-headed.

On those occasions that I've had a job it's been bewildering largesse. My jobs have generally provided room and board along with, and I don't willingly spend money on much, and really, there's only so many books and CDs you can buy.

I suppose I've never been convinced that money was real.

Of course, at the moment I have no job and no money and as money's what I need to do what I want - aka stay in Canada - the whole thing's become suddenly frightfully real.

I suppose this is what they call "growing up". Damn. I was hoping to avoid that for a while yet.

Random stuff:

1. The other day I galloped into the house in a tearing hurry to get to class, remembered to kick off my shoes to protect the wood floor, ran upstairs, got my bag, ran downstairs, got my book, ran outside, ran back upstairs for my purse, ran back outside, jumped in the car, and took off. It wasn't until I got to class that I figured out what I'd forgotten to do.

Like, put my shoes back on.

I've forgotten many stupid things while tearing around in a hurry not to be late, but this is a new low.

2. It is surprisingly easy, while making a resume, to stretch "very little experience" into something substantial-sounding. I doubt it's substantial-sounding enough to convince someone I'm worth going to all the trouble of getting a work permit for, but still. I'm proud of me.

3. The Playstation game "Karoke Revolutions" is a lot more fun than you'd think.