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You Should Be A Capricorn |
 What’s good about you: hard working and ambitious, you’re practically a guaranteed success What’s bad about you: you can be unforgiving toward people who fail you In love: you’re very picky, but extremely devoted to the one you choose In friendship, you’re: likely to be a good friend but expect a lot in return Your ideal job: rock climber, sculptor, or practitioner of black magic Your sense of fashion: preppy and put together You like to pig out on: meat and potatoes |
Archive for Miscellany and Whatever
What Sign *Should* You Be
It Just Feels Right
One of the hardest things to learn is that your gut feeling is not my gut feeling.
Don’t trust your gut.
Okay, go ahead and trust your gut for you. That’s good sense. That’s using your intuition wisely. But your gut feeling is not an indicator of human gut feeling. How you feel doesn’t tell us how “all men” or “all women” or “all parents” or “all teenagers” feel. (When I see the ubiquitous “What do women want?” “What do men find attractive?” message board plaint, I am often tempted to ask if the poster really believes that all men/women/girls/boys are the same.)
No one seems to know this, yet the knowledge is crucial. So get this: Just because homosexuality squicks you out, doesn’t mean it is against nature. It just means it squicks you. Just because polyamory offends your sensibilities doesn’t mean it is inherently offensive. Just because your gut says “wrong, wrong, wrong” when you think of aborting a fetus, doesn’t mean that this is the right and normal way for a woman to feel.
Years ago, I got into an abortion argument with a friend and I said that to me it felt, viscerally, really violating to have anyone tell me what to do with my uterus (in fact I said it felt as bad to be told not to have children as to be told not to abort). He said it was all well and good that I felt that way, but his wife’s viscera were every bit as trustworthy as mine, and she felt differently.
He was right. Basing an argument about choice on my gut feeling was wrong. But the thing is, lots of arguments are based on that. The whole anti-gay propoganda machine is all about that it feels unnatural to straight people. And it does feel unnatural; if you visualize screwing someone you don’t want to screw, that feels ew yuck oh no no way no. (It feels especially unnatural to people in denial about their own gayness, but that’s another story.)
What’s needed in our world, in many arenas, is for people to unhook from the idea that they can predict nature, right, wrong, and all of human society based on what makes them go “ick.”
What Firefly/Serenity Character Are You?
You are HOBAN WASHBURN, or simply “Wash”.
You are the ever-quirky pilot of Serenity and husband to first mate Zoe. You willingly admit your bouts with cowardice, wear garish Hawaiian shirts, and play with dinosaurs.
You always provide the comic relief and demonstrate true dedication to your wife.
**Which Firefly/Serenity Character Are You?**
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I am a black comedy
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The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy |
 In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh. You may end up insane, but you’ll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho |
The world is less smart and funny today
Wendy Wasserstein has died. Wasserstein was probably best known for her play Uncommon Women…and Others, a PBS version of which, starring Swoozie Kurtz, Meryl Streep, and others, used to play in virtual perpetuity on TV.
I saw the brilliant The Heidi Chronicles with my mom on Broadway (it was her birthday gift to me). I cried at the scene where Heidi complains about feminism being swallowed up by the next generation’s indifference. A few years later, also for my birthday, mom and I saw The Sisters Rosensweig, and we joked that we’d do this every year that a new Wasserstein play was out. Now I guess we won’t anymore.
Wasserstein wrote with humor and insight about feminism, and she had a unique voice about what we now call “Will and Grace” relationships; about the connections between straight women and gay men (she also wrote the screenplay for The Object of My Affection).
She made my life richer. Funnier. Smarter. I’m sad she’s gone. May she be born again among us.
Finally!
Finally have my sites restored to the new hard drive, so I can start updating. The Events page now lists the Conference in Brazil (and not much else, but it’s early yet; the bookings will pick up in February or March) and I tidied up the home page on my main site.
Now I have to get work on the James Bond site.
Ten Views I Hold Without Evidence
Because memes are the fun.
1. That Watusi is out there somewhere, looking for the perfect kill, and when that bird is dead, dead, dead, she will come home.
2. That the Democrats will win back Congress this year. (Okay, there’s some evidence, but the stars they are in my eyes.)
3. That I am, yes indeed, the hottest hottie in Hottenville, despite weighing 100 pounds more than when I was 22. This is only fair, since when I was 22 I had no idea I was a hottie, and I thought all those passes I got were flukes. So now that I know I was a hottie then, when I had evidence, it’s only right that I also know I’m a hottie now, without evidence.
4. People are basically good.
5. Coincidence isn’t.
6. I have good taste in clothing. Which, don’t ask.
7. People want to see my scars. Really. I come upon the notion, from time to time, that showing others my big, ugly, scary scars with staple marks is the height of social interaction. I suppose they’re an improvement on my clothing.
8. People want my advise. This is not unlike #7. While it is true that sometimes, on rare occasions which I find memorable and thrilling, someone actually asks my advise, it is largely the case that I give it, unsolicited, and then, noticing it has not been taken, give it again. The “not been taken??? part of the equation might constitute evidence to some, but my belief is unshakeable.
9. Vulgarity is next to godliness.
10. Cat people are better than dog people. They just are.
Meta-Blogging
Why blog? I feel sometimes that my blog has no one, specific identity, and is therefore alienating.
I started this blog as a convenient way to communicate my appearance and publication schedule. Write up post-event reports. That sort of thing.
Then there was a new book with no relation to the earlier ones.
So do I blog about events? About Wicca? About James Bond?
But then, I got more and more interested in blogging about politics and feminism. And I do that now. I worry that people here for Wicca will walk away because of politics. And vice versa.
Ultimately, I have to go with the idea that you’ve shown up to read what I write for some unknown reason, and that whatever I write might be of interest to you. Or not. Because if not, then you can leave and I can talk to myself and actually that’s fun too.
So what’s your excuse?
Yet Another Meme
Got it from Sue.
Hair: Very curly. Highlights cover the gray. What gray? No gray!
Wearing: Jeans & a light blue shirt with sparkly thingies.
Drinking: Black coffee, as ever.
Listening: To a couple of guys playing ping pong. Pa-ping. Pong. Pigpigpigping PONG. Pa-ping.
Reading: Witches, Druids and King Arthur, by Ronald Hutton. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Myths and Mysteries of Same Sex Love, by Christine Downing.
Expertise & Pixelation
With certain fonts, if you select a very small size (say 6 points) the lower case c is indistinguishable from the lower case e.* If you think of a bitmap as a simple grid, with every box either white or black, each lower case letter, at that size, is confined to a 3×3 box. There’s no room for the crosspiece in the middle.
The interesting thing about this Is that your eye fills it in. You can read the word “face??? just fine, and your eye fills in the distinction between the c and the e. Only an expert; someone who has zoomed in 800% and diddled around at the pixel level, knows the difference.
