Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Sorry all!
I've been hiding in a hole a bit this summer. I will resume posts about the camping trip soon! Thanks for patience!
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Trip, Night 2: North Bloomfield
We decided to go for the ghost town. After a long day, during which at least two semis tried to murder us and we got a spectauclar taste of the very worst of San Jose driving, (and Sacramento, and Grass Valley--it was like everyone on Interstate 80 decided to try smoking weed while driving), we arrived at Mallakoff Diggins State Historical Park.
Mallakoff Diggins was one of the largest hydraulic goldmines, before the massive environmental and economic damage the hydraulic mines wreaked led to them being banned. The above picture of the pit doesn't do it justice. In its heyday, the mine and the giant monitors (see below) that attended it would work around the clock. A thriving town grew up alongside it, North Bloomfield.
Originally written off as barren and dubbed 'Humbug' by disappointed miners, North Bloomfield remains today in pristine if uninhabited condition. (Well, mostly uninhabited. A few of the houses up there do have residents, just not permanent ones.
We arrived, made much of the town (look how tiny the saloon is!) and then headed out to the campground, where we were greeted by this sign.
We were now officially screwed. The drive up had been hell; actually getting to the park had required two hours or so to go ten miles over a steep, heavily potholed road. It was also heavily trafficked--there was a very popular little river on the way, and the locals were out in force.
It was looking like we'd have to go back to Grass Valley and get a hotel when we found a ranger. Turned out that they had little cabins for rent, restored versions of what the miners would have lived in. So we paid up and moved in.
We were only intending to stay for one night.
Even after finding the metric ton of wasp nests in the cabin, we stayed for two.
We did a lot of hiking around. Above, my parents walk around the lake that supplied the water pressure to power the hydraulic monitors. Below, Dad is a great scale object for the tunnel leading into the mine itself. (It's a long tunnel and VERY cold--you could feel the chill from about where he's standing).
There was a little administrative barf with the reservation system, leading to someone else being very surprised to find us in the cabin they'd reserved, (fortunately, the other two were open, so it was settled with the maximum of good feelings and minimum of fuss, helped by the people in question being absolutely lovely) so we left after the second night, and headed up to Taber Mine and the water company of La Porte.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Better late than never: The Trip, Day One
Without further ado, the trip.
Our first day of driving was easy; very little traffic, and nice temperatures. (The drive home was a totally different matter, but I get ahead of myself). The most interesting things that happened were a giant wasp in Dad's hair at the rest stop, and a large sign somewhere in the middle of nowhere advertising the virtue of cork corks over plastic corks.
We stayed in Coyote Lake campground our first night. It's a county park instead of a state park, and really rather nice--there were even showers. The showers were...interesting...but they were hot so none of us were inclined to complain. Unnervingly, the list of regulations for the camp did not list fine amounts. It listed bail amounts.
Don't mess with Santa Clara County, guys.
Here's the camp. My parents' tent is hiding behind the car, while mine lurks near the bear safe.
As soon as we got everything set up, Mom settled down to paint the view. It was a very quiet evening--we had a stirfry for dinner, cooked over the camp stove, and crawled off to bed at what was (for us) an obscenely early hour. A contributing factor was that we had not the slightest, hairiest clue what the hell we were doing the next day. We had two possibilites: head up to Santa Cruz and see giant trees, or cut across the San Joaquin Valley and head to Malakoff Diggins State Park, a ghost town some distance outside of Grass Valley and Nevada City.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Hello again!
I just got back from a two week camping trip. Expect this to turn into a travel blog for a few weeks--I have lots of pictures and silly experiences to share! Now just to get three memory cards of pictures sorted out...
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
I beg your forgiveness, good reader...
...for this week has been hell, and the entire tank of urchins I blogged about earlier spawned.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
So I had a fun day in lab.
And by fun, I mean horrifying. And kinda hilarious.
My advisor took off recently to do important professorial things, and so through a series of events, I wound up being the only person in lab today, which made me feel very important indeed. It's the first time I've been put in charge of a whole entire laboratory, even for a day.
We've got two cultures that I'm growing that are rather sensitive; the algae and the baby urchins. The baby urchins need constant temperature, filtered seawater and algae, all of which need to be kept free from contamination. The algal cultures are just as sensitive.
So I come in this morning (after a simply hellish time parking my bike) and open up the lab where three of the algal cultures are and it's sweltering--about 75+ degrees. This may not seem so hot to most people but the lab typically runs about 10 degrees cooler. To my relief, the algal cultures are doing fine, but the bubbler (that aerates them so the pH doesn't go screwy) has managed to unplug itself during the weekend.
I fix this. Then I go into the other room, dump out the acid rinse from the culture plates (note, culture plates are impossible to pour neatly), and then make my way to the tank room. At this rate, I'm expecting that something else has gone terribly wrong--a seawater hose has disconnected and the room is flooding, there has been a mass urchin escape and they're all in the drainpipe, a tank has exploded and both of the above have happened, the bucket with the larval culture has fallen over, the air hose into the larval culture had disintegrated, the temperature has gone flooey and all the inhabitants are dead....
You can imagine my relief when I open the door and everything is normal; the temperature is what it should be, the bucket is upright, there are no visible escapees and no floods of water. I breathe a sigh of relief and saunter over to check the larval culture.
And there is a starfish.
In the larval culture.
A fat, filthy, actively excreting starfish. In my larval culture. My nice, clean larval culture, with the seawater that needs to be filtered through a 20 micron filter and the air that needs to go through other filters and the algae that need to be grown so they're pure cultures.
I stared at it in mute fury for a few minutes. The starfish crapped more.
Then I started laughing. It was that or break something and all the breakable things were expensive.
In the end I fished out the starfish and filtered the culture (which seems to be dead as a result) and spawned urchins (the female kept flipping over and the male exuded simply VAST quantities of sperm, and filtered water and went home with the sincere hope that the experience wouldn't be repeated on the morrow.
And then I played video games.
And by fun, I mean horrifying. And kinda hilarious.
My advisor took off recently to do important professorial things, and so through a series of events, I wound up being the only person in lab today, which made me feel very important indeed. It's the first time I've been put in charge of a whole entire laboratory, even for a day.
We've got two cultures that I'm growing that are rather sensitive; the algae and the baby urchins. The baby urchins need constant temperature, filtered seawater and algae, all of which need to be kept free from contamination. The algal cultures are just as sensitive.
So I come in this morning (after a simply hellish time parking my bike) and open up the lab where three of the algal cultures are and it's sweltering--about 75+ degrees. This may not seem so hot to most people but the lab typically runs about 10 degrees cooler. To my relief, the algal cultures are doing fine, but the bubbler (that aerates them so the pH doesn't go screwy) has managed to unplug itself during the weekend.
I fix this. Then I go into the other room, dump out the acid rinse from the culture plates (note, culture plates are impossible to pour neatly), and then make my way to the tank room. At this rate, I'm expecting that something else has gone terribly wrong--a seawater hose has disconnected and the room is flooding, there has been a mass urchin escape and they're all in the drainpipe, a tank has exploded and both of the above have happened, the bucket with the larval culture has fallen over, the air hose into the larval culture had disintegrated, the temperature has gone flooey and all the inhabitants are dead....
You can imagine my relief when I open the door and everything is normal; the temperature is what it should be, the bucket is upright, there are no visible escapees and no floods of water. I breathe a sigh of relief and saunter over to check the larval culture.
And there is a starfish.
In the larval culture.
A fat, filthy, actively excreting starfish. In my larval culture. My nice, clean larval culture, with the seawater that needs to be filtered through a 20 micron filter and the air that needs to go through other filters and the algae that need to be grown so they're pure cultures.
I stared at it in mute fury for a few minutes. The starfish crapped more.
Then I started laughing. It was that or break something and all the breakable things were expensive.
In the end I fished out the starfish and filtered the culture (which seems to be dead as a result) and spawned urchins (the female kept flipping over and the male exuded simply VAST quantities of sperm, and filtered water and went home with the sincere hope that the experience wouldn't be repeated on the morrow.
And then I played video games.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Keep a blog, they said...
...it'll be good for you, they said. And then Google keeps highlighting the writing. Anyone knows how to keep random sections of my prose from turning white, I will be so so happy if you'd tell me.
Okay, angstpost coming up.
I'm getting very vexed with the fetishes in the writing profession. They're presented to every young writer, and usually follow these lines:
No adverbs (excuse me, I like me some adverbs. Shakespeare used adverbs. As long as they're not everywhere and copulating in the margins, you're good.), no italics (see previous), only use 'said' as an attribution (booooring), no semicolons (you can pry my semicolons out of my cold, dead hands, and even then I might come back as a zombie and bite you) and no cliches/figures of speech.
Yes, sparse prose is pretty. You know what else is pretty? Shakespeare. Les Miserables. The Aubrey/Maturin books. Les Miserables has so many adverbs in it you could probably still wind up with a 500 page book if you took everything but the adverbs out. How about The Three Musketeers? Exclamation points. Adverbs. Figures of speech. The Scarlet Pimpernel? Eh... I may be hurting my argument there. Lord of the Rings. Think about it, people. Just because it's the 'in' thing doesn't mean that anything that doesn't follow the rules is bad. The Canterbury Tales. Seriously, I mean Chaucer. Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Pride and Prejudice, for chrissake! Jane Austen does not give a delicate lady's shit for your extermination of adverbs, sir!
Basically, I'm getting disillusioned. I don't want to write the Next Great American Novel. I'm a scientist. I already have a career and a field with specific rules and vicious editors and puking sea urchins. Really, I don't want to be a master of the art of writing. I just want to write things that people can read on the bus or the train or listen to in traffic, and wonder about what's going to happen next and fret about the characters. I just want to make people's days a little brighter. I want to make stories. Not art. And I don't want to have to do it by a whole batch of arbitrary rules that really are taking the aspect of someone's Hemingway fetish gone way out of control.
Good writing is not something you do by formula! (Oh, look an exclamation point. You may all proceed to faint now, at my use of that most hideous form of punctuation). If you write like shit, you'll still write like shit even if you excise all these things. If your characters are shallow or your plot absurd or you genrally idiotic, the lack of adverbs will not save you. These rules lead to a woodenness of expression, a general sameness of the written word. You're excising a part of speech, a punctuation, a way to add emphasis to your words, a variety to attribution. You are, to make a culinary comparison, making beef stroganoff without the vinegar or pepper. Sure, they're not strictly necessary, but the dish is going to be damn bland with none of it.
But, you protest, you needen't excise everything! If you do it tastefully, sparsely...
Then why say never? That's inaccurate. Also, my argument still stands. A tasteful sampling of those most forbidden, dreaded parts of speech, of language, would do most delightful things to our wealth of literature. We needn't all write like Hemingway.
Thus saying, I have most likely ruined all my chances for respect from my writing teachers forever. But I have been told I need more emotion in my writing.
We'll see how that balances out.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
The Joys of Being Lazy
So this weekend I got to go back to being genrally useless and that's been wonderful. I got a bunch of editing done on my novel, and I'm really happy with where it's going. I got to play one of my favorite video games, Team Fortress 2, a lot. There's something deeply satisfying to an all-out brawl with other people from across the world. (Team Fortress 2, for those who don't know, is a first person shooter multiplayer comedy war game. Yeah, you read that right. Probably going to write a post later on why a raging feminist such as myself loves a game where the entire cast of playable characters (with the possible exception of the Pyro) is male.) Exciting things are due to happen in that fandom, including the release of a video concerning the aforementioned mysterious Pyro, so there was that as well.
And then I went after the parsnips and apricots and am gearing up to make an apricot sorbet tomorrow, and had a lot of long walks and started rereading one of my favorite books, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, which is pretty much a satire of religion and involves god being turned into a tortoise and learning to be a better god.
So yes. A gloriously lazy weekend. Tomorrow I go in and transfer one load of urchins into the lab and check my cultures and perhaps start algal cultures for the young urchins, and then come home and make sorbet which I shall assuredly post about in more detail than you want to know.
And then I went after the parsnips and apricots and am gearing up to make an apricot sorbet tomorrow, and had a lot of long walks and started rereading one of my favorite books, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, which is pretty much a satire of religion and involves god being turned into a tortoise and learning to be a better god.
So yes. A gloriously lazy weekend. Tomorrow I go in and transfer one load of urchins into the lab and check my cultures and perhaps start algal cultures for the young urchins, and then come home and make sorbet which I shall assuredly post about in more detail than you want to know.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
This Is How NOT To Do It.
Even though this has been blogged about by other people already, I wanted to add my voice to the cacophony, because it arrived with perfect timing.
First, a video. Keep your barf bags handy. Bags. Plural.
This is an ad run by the European Union meant to encourage young women (teenage and younger) to be scientists. While a noble goal, (and the rest of the campaign looks absolutely great) I was very disappointed; apparently, I've been doing it wrong!
I spent yesterday in lab in deep shit. Literally. I was moving a batch of sea urchins from one tank to another so I could clean the old tank out and get it ready for a load of urchins being moved out of the lab proper so that another batch could be brought up from the tank room and housed in the lab. (A sort of echinoderm musical chairs.) There were a lot of urchins. Sea urchins eat a lot, and, accordingly, excrete a lot. I don't think I need say more.
In my mind, I was doing them a huge favor by moving them into a new tank with more kelp and more space and less shit. Of course, the urchins thought that some big evil thing was coming to take them to urchin hell and decided to go down fighting. An urchin can stick to damn near anything; the tank walls, the kelp, the strange slimy object in the middle of the tank, the spatula you're using to pry them off of everything else, you...and it takes significant persuasion to get them to let go. Even worse, you can't just grab them and yank unless you really get them by surprise; an urchin is in form and function the illegitimate purple lovechild of a tribble and a porcupine, and can give you world-class splinters.
So there I am, in my nice white labcoat, prying urchins off of the tank walls with my hands and a barbecue spatula, getting slimed up to my armpits, and hoping I'm not freaking them out. Freaked out urchins start to spawn. As soon as someone spawns, everyone's doing it (like a college party), and suddenly the tank's a huge mess of gametes and then there goes all the data from the urchins, because the gametes are the bit everyone wants to study and that can't be done in a tank full of urchin doings.
Accordingly, between prying angry urchins off everything and realizing that this poor labcoat is really going to need a wash, and trying to make sure the worst of the shit is out of the tank, I'm checking to make sure that no one is being publicly indecent in the next tank over and yanking out the urchins that are (hopefully before any of the others notice) and putting them in some other lab's unused tank so they don't crawl off and get stepped on. And that was before I even started to seriously clean the old tank, which was even more exciting. I did this all before lunch. Lunch happened at three. Then I came home and saw this video and laughed my ass off.
I love science, even when things are mucky and hectic (like yesterday). I get to tell stories about it afterward and enjoy the absurdity of the situation. (Two older women, obviously visitors, came by in time to see me rushing across the room, white labcoat covered in urchin shit to the armpits, holding a large barbecue spatula with an even larger urchin on it, kelp in the other hand, saying "Okay okay, I have a new tank for you I have food for you oh GOD DON'T SPAWN." I like to think I bolstered their faith in the humanity of the scientific community...) And I get to do important, useful things, uncovering things that we didn't even know that we didn't know. I love that things don't work out neatly, that there's so much to do and that there's uncertainty in everything. I love it because it's real, because it's something I can go and do things about. And besides, it's hilarious. Just look up the debate on Komodo Dragon prey capture methods.
Science isn't high heels and lipstick and confidently scribbled equations. It's not a fashion shoot. It's not really all that glamourous. I'm pretty sure that the audience this is aimed at knows that; they must at least have done some sort of science class by now, and seen the textbook depictions of scientists. In the end, the ad just winds up being condescending and absurd. It's like the producers sat down and went, "Hey, what do girls like?" "Fashion!" "Sweet, let's put lots of fashion in and just make it science themed." "Brilliant!" and no one called them on it. Their other videos are spectacular, showing female scientists at work and talking about why they love their work. I'm just sorry that they led the campaign off with this absurdity.
(Also sorry for weird formatting--Blogger is being PURE EVIL today and keeps ruining everything!)
(Also sorry for weird formatting--Blogger is being PURE EVIL today and keeps ruining everything!)
Monday, June 18, 2012
Life at home
It has been very interesting going from dormitory life to home life. It's a bit like coming back from a city to live on a farm, only we don't really have enough animals to be an actual farm...
The first thing to greet me when I got home was the bee swarm. It'd taken up residence in a trashcan near the grill, and though it'd been relatively polite so far, my parents called in a beekeeper to take it away. She appeared, and mother and she talked and then Mom found out that there was a beekeeping class in town this summer. So of course I'm enrolled now. This is what I get when I don't have a summer job. We may end up with a beehive.
Yeah. Unlikely to want a job at this rate!
For the rest of the time I've been pottering around in the garden, picking things. It's the beginning of the summer, and it seems like absolutely everything is producing something. The cucumbers are appearing, huge green coils hidden in spiky leaves, and the squash, which are fat green globes, hidden in itchy leaves. The green beans are practically holding the plant up (more itchy leaves), and the lima beans are fruiting for the second time this year. Even the parsnips are coming in! I thought this very irregular indeed, as parsnips are usually something one encounters in winter, but we pulled some up yesterday as long as my forearm. I'd post a picture of them, but my phone isn't sending it to my email, because it is being a rat.
There are also apricots, and potatoes and the tomatoes are looking threatening. As a committed tomato-dreader, I'm worried about that. The parents planted a LOT of tomatoes this year. The potatoes, though, have already reached the end of their broadcast day. We managed to get most of them before the gopher did, but not before a few succumbed to the same pest that caused the Great Famine in Ireland, and we spent the evening picking crunchy potatoes out of the potato salad. The good ones were amazing, though.
And, most importantly, home is very, very quiet. I like that.
The first thing to greet me when I got home was the bee swarm. It'd taken up residence in a trashcan near the grill, and though it'd been relatively polite so far, my parents called in a beekeeper to take it away. She appeared, and mother and she talked and then Mom found out that there was a beekeeping class in town this summer. So of course I'm enrolled now. This is what I get when I don't have a summer job. We may end up with a beehive.
Yeah. Unlikely to want a job at this rate!
For the rest of the time I've been pottering around in the garden, picking things. It's the beginning of the summer, and it seems like absolutely everything is producing something. The cucumbers are appearing, huge green coils hidden in spiky leaves, and the squash, which are fat green globes, hidden in itchy leaves. The green beans are practically holding the plant up (more itchy leaves), and the lima beans are fruiting for the second time this year. Even the parsnips are coming in! I thought this very irregular indeed, as parsnips are usually something one encounters in winter, but we pulled some up yesterday as long as my forearm. I'd post a picture of them, but my phone isn't sending it to my email, because it is being a rat.
There are also apricots, and potatoes and the tomatoes are looking threatening. As a committed tomato-dreader, I'm worried about that. The parents planted a LOT of tomatoes this year. The potatoes, though, have already reached the end of their broadcast day. We managed to get most of them before the gopher did, but not before a few succumbed to the same pest that caused the Great Famine in Ireland, and we spent the evening picking crunchy potatoes out of the potato salad. The good ones were amazing, though.
And, most importantly, home is very, very quiet. I like that.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
FREEEDOOOOM!
Just finished my last final and moved home! I have time for posting again!
But not now. I'm super tired and might just wind up yammering about how I like bugs and grapefruit and anime and video games and then your concept of me as a grown-up would be ruined.
So I'm just gonna get off the internet now.
But not now. I'm super tired and might just wind up yammering about how I like bugs and grapefruit and anime and video games and then your concept of me as a grown-up would be ruined.
So I'm just gonna get off the internet now.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Bullying
I've been torn over whether to post this for a while. A few weeks ago, I had what can only be described as a break-up with a long term friend over politics--namely, human rights. You see, this person saw fit to praise a teacher who had posted about gay marriage, comparing it to theft and murder. Yes, a teacher. A high school teacher. We're all reasonably intelligent beings so I assume I needn't elaborate on the hostility of that classroom to anyone who doesn't fall within the 'acceptable' gender or sexual orientation parameters.
I hesitated over writing about this because I didn't want to a) make things worse, or b) shove my privileged heterosexual, only-possibly-gender-queer nose into this and pretend like I had enough personal experience to charge to the rescue when there are a LOT of people far better experienced and qualified than I.
I came to the conclusion that I really didn't give a damn if it made things worse, because this person has lost all of my respect and the issue was driving me crazy. I overcame the second hesitation because I realized that I did have some pertinent experience. Namely, being bullied.
Elementary school sucked with a purple passion. A number of my peers decided that bullying the outspoken, nerdy girl for being Chinese would be really fun, and no one bothered to disabuse them of this notion for four years. They were smart enough to realize that any physical harm would get them in a lot of trouble, but that didn't stop them from getting creative. My picture on the board in the classroom got its eyes poked out, the whisper of 'chink' followed me everywhere, and I couldn't present or answer questions in class without someone interrupting or laughing at me. I'd be taunted with such gems as, "You're pretty. Pretty ugly," and the school counselor only told me that I needed to learn to be more flexible and that I needed to ignore the bullies and not retaliate. No one else did anything about it, not until my parents went to the superintendent and got nasty. To this day, my mother wouldn't tell me what they said, but things got a little more tolerable in sixth grade, and I went to a private school in seventh, which was wonderful and made all of the previous bullying unimportant.
I came out of it well, I think. I'm still not comfortable around 'popular' people, especially rich people, because that was what most of my bullies were like. I still retaliate viciously when I'm insulted or picked on or think that I am, because I feel that I can't let anyone get away with hurting me again or it'll never stop and elementary school will happen again. I have trouble trusting people. But I like myself, I like my life, and I do still have good friends. I have no sense of just waiting for someone to turn on me anymore, and for the most part, I don't remember or think about most of what happened--there are more interesting things in the present.
The reason that I'm not a wreck is my family. My mother and father were incredibly supportive, and did everything they could for me. They made it clear that the bullies were the bad guys, that I didn't deserve what I was going through, and that things would get better. And they were right.
Now imagine what it would be like to go through that without the support of a family. Imagine being told by people you trust, your mother, your father, your pastor, that you deserve that because you're a boy who's just realized he prefers other guys, or because she's found she isn't a guy in the first place. Or a girl who isn't interested in other girls or is actually a guy in the wrong body. Imagine what it's like being told from all angles either, "You're horrible because of who you are," or "We love you, but you're a bad person for what you feel and you're going to hell." (Translation: You deserve to be bullied. Or, to the bullies: This person is a bad person. The latter isn't tacit encouragement, but it just makes it that much easier).
At least half of the young people in this country who identify as other than cis-gendered or heterosexual will contemplate suicide. Far, far too many will follow through.
Every time you say that being gay or trans or otherwise different is an abomination, no matter how throughly you wrap it in 'Oh, I love you, but you're a sinner', you make it that much easier for the bully, and that much harder for the victim to get help. You're like the person that told me that it was my fault for not being 'flexible' enough. You make it their fault that they're being hurt. And that is sick. You're as guilty of bullying as the person who hurls insults or blows.
I do not tolerate bullies.
(It's late and I'm tired, but I'm considering doing a follow-up post about this, listing the 'arguments' that I got thrown at me for people who haven't had the misfortune to run across one of these bullies before. Anyone interested--would that be helpful?)
(Upon getting feedback, I realize I neglected the role of microaggressions--things that aren't meant cruelly but are still hurtful. Here's a site with a lot of examples of them: http://www.microaggressions.com/)
I hesitated over writing about this because I didn't want to a) make things worse, or b) shove my privileged heterosexual, only-possibly-gender-queer nose into this and pretend like I had enough personal experience to charge to the rescue when there are a LOT of people far better experienced and qualified than I.
I came to the conclusion that I really didn't give a damn if it made things worse, because this person has lost all of my respect and the issue was driving me crazy. I overcame the second hesitation because I realized that I did have some pertinent experience. Namely, being bullied.
Elementary school sucked with a purple passion. A number of my peers decided that bullying the outspoken, nerdy girl for being Chinese would be really fun, and no one bothered to disabuse them of this notion for four years. They were smart enough to realize that any physical harm would get them in a lot of trouble, but that didn't stop them from getting creative. My picture on the board in the classroom got its eyes poked out, the whisper of 'chink' followed me everywhere, and I couldn't present or answer questions in class without someone interrupting or laughing at me. I'd be taunted with such gems as, "You're pretty. Pretty ugly," and the school counselor only told me that I needed to learn to be more flexible and that I needed to ignore the bullies and not retaliate. No one else did anything about it, not until my parents went to the superintendent and got nasty. To this day, my mother wouldn't tell me what they said, but things got a little more tolerable in sixth grade, and I went to a private school in seventh, which was wonderful and made all of the previous bullying unimportant.
I came out of it well, I think. I'm still not comfortable around 'popular' people, especially rich people, because that was what most of my bullies were like. I still retaliate viciously when I'm insulted or picked on or think that I am, because I feel that I can't let anyone get away with hurting me again or it'll never stop and elementary school will happen again. I have trouble trusting people. But I like myself, I like my life, and I do still have good friends. I have no sense of just waiting for someone to turn on me anymore, and for the most part, I don't remember or think about most of what happened--there are more interesting things in the present.
The reason that I'm not a wreck is my family. My mother and father were incredibly supportive, and did everything they could for me. They made it clear that the bullies were the bad guys, that I didn't deserve what I was going through, and that things would get better. And they were right.
Now imagine what it would be like to go through that without the support of a family. Imagine being told by people you trust, your mother, your father, your pastor, that you deserve that because you're a boy who's just realized he prefers other guys, or because she's found she isn't a guy in the first place. Or a girl who isn't interested in other girls or is actually a guy in the wrong body. Imagine what it's like being told from all angles either, "You're horrible because of who you are," or "We love you, but you're a bad person for what you feel and you're going to hell." (Translation: You deserve to be bullied. Or, to the bullies: This person is a bad person. The latter isn't tacit encouragement, but it just makes it that much easier).
At least half of the young people in this country who identify as other than cis-gendered or heterosexual will contemplate suicide. Far, far too many will follow through.
Every time you say that being gay or trans or otherwise different is an abomination, no matter how throughly you wrap it in 'Oh, I love you, but you're a sinner', you make it that much easier for the bully, and that much harder for the victim to get help. You're like the person that told me that it was my fault for not being 'flexible' enough. You make it their fault that they're being hurt. And that is sick. You're as guilty of bullying as the person who hurls insults or blows.
I do not tolerate bullies.
(It's late and I'm tired, but I'm considering doing a follow-up post about this, listing the 'arguments' that I got thrown at me for people who haven't had the misfortune to run across one of these bullies before. Anyone interested--would that be helpful?)
(Upon getting feedback, I realize I neglected the role of microaggressions--things that aren't meant cruelly but are still hurtful. Here's a site with a lot of examples of them: http://www.microaggressions.com/)
Monday, June 4, 2012
It's almost time for FINALS!
And so I may not be posting as regularly as I'd like. I'm a bit ahead of things now but my schedule's already rather hellish. Eeugh.
I had a rotten weekend. I wasn't able to sleep Friday night because of someone banging on my wall, my stomach decided it didn't like me (again--this happens with great frequency) and then Saturday night a bunch of the more idiotic first-years decided to smoke pot in my bathroom. Suffice it to say that I did not enjoy it and wound up going home, where, out of sheer exhaustion, I slammed my finger in a door.
Left index, if anyone is interested, and it's usable.
And then I found out I was getting to do finals instead of a writers' conference, because someone decided to hold it at a hotel which was booked for the week that the conference was usually held. Though I'm not sure I could have gone anyway; I am not, after all, made of money. (It always struck me as a little off that it was held at a ritzy hotel. There is a university with cheap housing and food and lots of conference space available even closer to the airport...)
So yes, I'm grumpy. Oh well. Time to go and study for finals. *sigh*
I had a rotten weekend. I wasn't able to sleep Friday night because of someone banging on my wall, my stomach decided it didn't like me (again--this happens with great frequency) and then Saturday night a bunch of the more idiotic first-years decided to smoke pot in my bathroom. Suffice it to say that I did not enjoy it and wound up going home, where, out of sheer exhaustion, I slammed my finger in a door.
Left index, if anyone is interested, and it's usable.
And then I found out I was getting to do finals instead of a writers' conference, because someone decided to hold it at a hotel which was booked for the week that the conference was usually held. Though I'm not sure I could have gone anyway; I am not, after all, made of money. (It always struck me as a little off that it was held at a ritzy hotel. There is a university with cheap housing and food and lots of conference space available even closer to the airport...)
So yes, I'm grumpy. Oh well. Time to go and study for finals. *sigh*
Saturday, May 26, 2012
In which I lose every scrap of badass to something 1/1000th of my size
(Not for arachnophobes)
My mom, the badass she is, worked very diligently and very carefully to make sure I'd never be afraid of spiders. Since I spend a lot of time cooing over invertebrates, it seems she's succeeded (though after one awful incident involving a black widow and my favorite sweater, there are still some species I kill on sight). I'd rather pet a tarantula than a mouse, for instance, and I'm okay with spiders in the corners of my room, because they thin the mosquito population out come summer (and the fly population if a rat dies in the roof--yeah, I live on a farm. More on that later.). But last night, to my deepest embarrassment, I think I lost my badass invertebrate fan cred.
This being the 21st century, the solution for that is to blog about it. Here goes.
I'm at home. It's well after midnight. I'm getting ready to shower, and being vexed with the bathroom light because it isn't working too well. I go to the long-unused bathtub, and just as I turn the tap on, the biggest spider I've ever seen not out in the wilderness comes scooting out of the bath mat and makes for me. It's huge. It's black. I don't have my glasses on. The next instant, rusty water gushes out of the tap.
Rusty water looks a hell of a lot like blood. At least, it does at 12:30 am without your glasses on and a huge brown recluse/black widow/Shelob look-alike coming at you from the depths of the bathmat, with nothing but a pastel bathrobe between you and arachnid-inflicted eternity.
I uttered a wail of dispair and recoiled back against the toilet. (Spider: 1, Biologist: 0)The water gushed for a few moments, finally running clear. No enraged eight-legged war machine made its way up the edge of the tub to murder me for flooding its home. I waited a moment. Then the biologist took over. Oh no! I just killed a huge spider, and now I'll never find out what it was! So I went back to look.
Spider was still alive, clinging to the middle of the bathmat. I turned off the water. Then the spider and I looked at each other for a bit. I didn't want to get in there with it. I didn't want to kill it, because that would be admitting I was more scared of it than interested. But I didn't want to grab it with toilet paper because I didn't want it biting me through the toilet paper (an utterly unscientific concern, but it's almost one in the morning and I don't have glasses on). So I did the first thing to come to mind.
"MOMCOMESEETHESPIDERINTHETUBHOLYBALLSIT'SFREAKINGHUGE!
Then I ran away.
To get a paper cup to stick it in. Really. I thought I might be able to manage something with that and a bit of paper.
(Yeah, right. Spider: 10, Biologist: 0)
About five minutes later, I found out two things about my mother. Firstly, she is much more badass than I will ever hope to be. Secondly, that she really hates spiders.
She came out with that spider in a clear plastic cup, watching it with the sort of expression reserved for something that's begun to tick. I'm not sure, but I think the spider was cowering. Dad, who'd heard the whole commotion, looked at the spider and said, "Oh, that's not too bad. Remember that one in Florida that was this--" indicating a legspan of about twelve inches diameter "big?" It should be noted he further away from the spider than we did.
"I don't want to think about it," Mom snapped.
(Spider: 100, Biologist, Badass Mom, and Biologist With Doctorate: 0)
The spider turned out to be totally harmless. An inch across, but totally harmless.
So that is how a spider completely destroyed my self-image of a competent, non-squeamish human being. I shall drown my sorrow over the loss of my dignity by blowing virtual things up in a video game.
My mom, the badass she is, worked very diligently and very carefully to make sure I'd never be afraid of spiders. Since I spend a lot of time cooing over invertebrates, it seems she's succeeded (though after one awful incident involving a black widow and my favorite sweater, there are still some species I kill on sight). I'd rather pet a tarantula than a mouse, for instance, and I'm okay with spiders in the corners of my room, because they thin the mosquito population out come summer (and the fly population if a rat dies in the roof--yeah, I live on a farm. More on that later.). But last night, to my deepest embarrassment, I think I lost my badass invertebrate fan cred.
This being the 21st century, the solution for that is to blog about it. Here goes.
I'm at home. It's well after midnight. I'm getting ready to shower, and being vexed with the bathroom light because it isn't working too well. I go to the long-unused bathtub, and just as I turn the tap on, the biggest spider I've ever seen not out in the wilderness comes scooting out of the bath mat and makes for me. It's huge. It's black. I don't have my glasses on. The next instant, rusty water gushes out of the tap.
Rusty water looks a hell of a lot like blood. At least, it does at 12:30 am without your glasses on and a huge brown recluse/black widow/Shelob look-alike coming at you from the depths of the bathmat, with nothing but a pastel bathrobe between you and arachnid-inflicted eternity.
I uttered a wail of dispair and recoiled back against the toilet. (Spider: 1, Biologist: 0)The water gushed for a few moments, finally running clear. No enraged eight-legged war machine made its way up the edge of the tub to murder me for flooding its home. I waited a moment. Then the biologist took over. Oh no! I just killed a huge spider, and now I'll never find out what it was! So I went back to look.
Spider was still alive, clinging to the middle of the bathmat. I turned off the water. Then the spider and I looked at each other for a bit. I didn't want to get in there with it. I didn't want to kill it, because that would be admitting I was more scared of it than interested. But I didn't want to grab it with toilet paper because I didn't want it biting me through the toilet paper (an utterly unscientific concern, but it's almost one in the morning and I don't have glasses on). So I did the first thing to come to mind.
"MOMCOMESEETHESPIDERINTHETUBHOLYBALLSIT'SFREAKINGHUGE!
Then I ran away.
To get a paper cup to stick it in. Really. I thought I might be able to manage something with that and a bit of paper.
(Yeah, right. Spider: 10, Biologist: 0)
About five minutes later, I found out two things about my mother. Firstly, she is much more badass than I will ever hope to be. Secondly, that she really hates spiders.
She came out with that spider in a clear plastic cup, watching it with the sort of expression reserved for something that's begun to tick. I'm not sure, but I think the spider was cowering. Dad, who'd heard the whole commotion, looked at the spider and said, "Oh, that's not too bad. Remember that one in Florida that was this--" indicating a legspan of about twelve inches diameter "big?" It should be noted he further away from the spider than we did.
"I don't want to think about it," Mom snapped.
(Spider: 100, Biologist, Badass Mom, and Biologist With Doctorate: 0)
The spider turned out to be totally harmless. An inch across, but totally harmless.
So that is how a spider completely destroyed my self-image of a competent, non-squeamish human being. I shall drown my sorrow over the loss of my dignity by blowing virtual things up in a video game.
Friday, May 25, 2012
An important article
I just read this and it is amazing. It should be required reading, I think...
On a lighter note, happy Glorious 25th of May. Truth, Justice, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard Boiled Egg! Never forget the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road.
Also I am informed that it is Geek Pride day. Happy that, too.
On a lighter note, happy Glorious 25th of May. Truth, Justice, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard Boiled Egg! Never forget the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road.
Also I am informed that it is Geek Pride day. Happy that, too.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
The Avengers (spoiler free)
Or why it's taken me so long to write about seeing the movie.
As it turns out, I saw it twice on the same day, with the end result that I felt I'd spent most of the day in the Marvel universe, and kept expecting to run into Thor or Hawkeye in my dormitory. (The next twenty-four hours were, accordingly, disappointing.) And, since I didn't get back from the second showing until after one in the morning, I spent most of the next day walking into trees and staring off into space, which wasn't conducive to writing a blog post.
And then there was the Week Of Procrastination.
So, I've finally made myself sit down and write about it. No more excuses. Hopefully.
Let's just start by saying Joss Whedon is brilliant. As one friend commented, he's really good at writing ensemble casts, so no one character gets excluded, and Avengers was no exception. Everyone gets character development, even Hawkeye and Black Widow, who didn't even have their own movies to work from. Heck, he even made me like the Hulk, who has always been one of my least favorite superheroes. (Oh, Bruce Banner and Tony Stark. You two are adorable when you're doing science together!) And, of course, there were the strong female characters. There's even a minor strong female character who doesn't die, and saves Fury at at least one point. Unfortunately, it doesn't pass the Bechdel test... but it does treat its female characters in such a way that I'm not going to complain too much about it.
And then there was Loki. Loki, who I was throughly prepared to sympathize with. I did. But he acted in such a way that I couldn't wait to see him lose. I still wanted to take him home and feed him cookies, though, despite the whole "I don't get the throne of Asgard so I'm going to have a tantrum and conquer Earth" thing. The nasty gendered insult he throws at Black Widow almost broke the sympathy thing (though I hope that the portrayal of the incident gets people to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of the objectification and hatred entailed in such a situation. I'm looking at you, mikespamming cretins), but Tom Hiddleston managed to play him in such a way that even I still felt somewhat sympathetic to him. But this Loki is very definitely a different Loki than the one in Thor. The Loki in Thor is sympathetic, an angsty, unhappy teenager. This one has edges and is actually dangerous. You have to wonder what happened to him between the two movies.
The interactions between our heros are wonderful, and I am happy to report that Pepper Potts has recovered from her terrible characterization in Iron Man II (but then again, Joss Whedon). I highly recommend this movie for a bit of fun. I also recommend that you stay through ALL the credits. There's an absolutely vital scene at the very end...
As it turns out, I saw it twice on the same day, with the end result that I felt I'd spent most of the day in the Marvel universe, and kept expecting to run into Thor or Hawkeye in my dormitory. (The next twenty-four hours were, accordingly, disappointing.) And, since I didn't get back from the second showing until after one in the morning, I spent most of the next day walking into trees and staring off into space, which wasn't conducive to writing a blog post.
And then there was the Week Of Procrastination.
So, I've finally made myself sit down and write about it. No more excuses. Hopefully.
Let's just start by saying Joss Whedon is brilliant. As one friend commented, he's really good at writing ensemble casts, so no one character gets excluded, and Avengers was no exception. Everyone gets character development, even Hawkeye and Black Widow, who didn't even have their own movies to work from. Heck, he even made me like the Hulk, who has always been one of my least favorite superheroes. (Oh, Bruce Banner and Tony Stark. You two are adorable when you're doing science together!) And, of course, there were the strong female characters. There's even a minor strong female character who doesn't die, and saves Fury at at least one point. Unfortunately, it doesn't pass the Bechdel test... but it does treat its female characters in such a way that I'm not going to complain too much about it.
And then there was Loki. Loki, who I was throughly prepared to sympathize with. I did. But he acted in such a way that I couldn't wait to see him lose. I still wanted to take him home and feed him cookies, though, despite the whole "I don't get the throne of Asgard so I'm going to have a tantrum and conquer Earth" thing. The nasty gendered insult he throws at Black Widow almost broke the sympathy thing (though I hope that the portrayal of the incident gets people to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of the objectification and hatred entailed in such a situation. I'm looking at you, mikespamming cretins), but Tom Hiddleston managed to play him in such a way that even I still felt somewhat sympathetic to him. But this Loki is very definitely a different Loki than the one in Thor. The Loki in Thor is sympathetic, an angsty, unhappy teenager. This one has edges and is actually dangerous. You have to wonder what happened to him between the two movies.
The interactions between our heros are wonderful, and I am happy to report that Pepper Potts has recovered from her terrible characterization in Iron Man II (but then again, Joss Whedon). I highly recommend this movie for a bit of fun. I also recommend that you stay through ALL the credits. There's an absolutely vital scene at the very end...
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Procrastination
I am guilty of it. Funny thing is, when I'm procrastinating on one thing, I get lots of others done. For instance, this week I have:
- Declared my minor in History
- Gotten my classes for next quarter sorted
- Called the doctor
- Emailed my boss from last summer to see about jobs
- Various other administrative stuff
- Cleaned and packed my dishes from the house kitchen
- Cleaned my room
- Arranged a date to take my learner's permit test (again)
- Gone to fencing practice
- Admired the fact the bug bite on my knee swelled up to the size of a golf ball. Or maybe a ping pong ball, but you get the point. Procrastination.
Yeah. That list includes no homework. Oops. I have a midterm and a presentation (ohgod, gonna die...) next week, and a hunk of (uncooperative) novel due, and this blog (erm), and I should probably start worrying about finals and moving out (AAAUUUUGH)... The problem with this method is that the important stuff still doesn't get done. I'm going to go have a temper tantrum in the corner, okay?
Enough of the complaining. Here, have a video of someone rapping about tea. It's about tea, so it almost redeems the entire genre of rap music.
Almost.
- Declared my minor in History
- Gotten my classes for next quarter sorted
- Called the doctor
- Emailed my boss from last summer to see about jobs
- Various other administrative stuff
- Cleaned and packed my dishes from the house kitchen
- Cleaned my room
- Arranged a date to take my learner's permit test (again)
- Gone to fencing practice
- Admired the fact the bug bite on my knee swelled up to the size of a golf ball. Or maybe a ping pong ball, but you get the point. Procrastination.
Yeah. That list includes no homework. Oops. I have a midterm and a presentation (ohgod, gonna die...) next week, and a hunk of (uncooperative) novel due, and this blog (erm), and I should probably start worrying about finals and moving out (AAAUUUUGH)... The problem with this method is that the important stuff still doesn't get done. I'm going to go have a temper tantrum in the corner, okay?
Enough of the complaining. Here, have a video of someone rapping about tea. It's about tea, so it almost redeems the entire genre of rap music.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
For Mother
I was going to avoid this. I know how you are about cards (waste of trees and money) and flowers (the cats eat them) and holidays like Mother's Day and Father's Day and anything that involves vast expenditures on little pieces of paper. And it isn't as if we're so bad at communicating that I have to set a special time of year just to say how much I appreciate you, because I sincerely hope that is clear every time we talk on the phone or come home. But among the myriad tributes to mothers I've seen on the internet today, there was one that galvanized me to write this. It wasn't for a good reason.
The tribute (a facebook status) in question praised the mother for being a wonderful mother and teaching the girl in question to be a good wife and mother, to cook and clean, and to be a lover not a fighter, among other things.
Mama, this is something you most certainly never did.
And I don't think I can begin to describe exactly how incredibly grateful I am for that. You have never taught me how to be a 'good wife' or a 'good mother'. You taught me how to be a good person. You did not teach me how to cook or clean or say yes to the man I marry or to be a housewife. You taught me to be a fighter and a scholar and a vicious bitch. You taught me to stand up for people who are being picked on, to help people, to defend myself and to do what is right no matter how hard it is. You taught me that there were things more important than I was. You read me stories about tetanus and smallpox and leprosy and taught me how to channel my outrage at the injustice of the world so that I could actually do something about it. You taught me, unlike what that status said, to be a fighter, not just a lover, because that was what you were. You taught me how to deal with my own demons, guilt and self-hatred and blame.
The tribute (a facebook status) in question praised the mother for being a wonderful mother and teaching the girl in question to be a good wife and mother, to cook and clean, and to be a lover not a fighter, among other things.
Mama, this is something you most certainly never did.
And I don't think I can begin to describe exactly how incredibly grateful I am for that. You have never taught me how to be a 'good wife' or a 'good mother'. You taught me how to be a good person. You did not teach me how to cook or clean or say yes to the man I marry or to be a housewife. You taught me to be a fighter and a scholar and a vicious bitch. You taught me to stand up for people who are being picked on, to help people, to defend myself and to do what is right no matter how hard it is. You taught me that there were things more important than I was. You read me stories about tetanus and smallpox and leprosy and taught me how to channel my outrage at the injustice of the world so that I could actually do something about it. You taught me, unlike what that status said, to be a fighter, not just a lover, because that was what you were. You taught me how to deal with my own demons, guilt and self-hatred and blame.
You also taught me most of my dead baby jokes, and how to deal with a sucking chest wound and how to break into the house.
There's a reason I still think of myself as a girl. It's not because of the demeaning cultural norms that seek to disempower women by referring to them by juvenile terminology. It's because you've given me such an idea of what a woman is that I know I am not there yet; I do not have the confidence or the gravitas or the competence, not yet. But thanks to you, I will one day. Regardless of marital status or children.
There's a reason I still think of myself as a girl. It's not because of the demeaning cultural norms that seek to disempower women by referring to them by juvenile terminology. It's because you've given me such an idea of what a woman is that I know I am not there yet; I do not have the confidence or the gravitas or the competence, not yet. But thanks to you, I will one day. Regardless of marital status or children.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Why it's hard for me to like Literary Fiction
In class, we just finished reading a book called The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, and I did not like it. If I am to be completely honest, I enjoyed the Team Fortress 2 (a supremely plotless, gory video game) fanfiction I read this week more than I did this accoladed work of American Literature (with the capitals, the capitals are necessary). Accordingly, I am somewhat concerned about my taste. Or lack thereof.
I write with the intention of entertaining. This means that I read a lot of speculative fiction, with explosions and monsters and dastardly villains and hopefully a good snog somewhere in there, because biology is important. But I do make an effort to read literature. I love Les Miserables and Shakespeare, because they're compelling works. They have lots of plot and characters I can fall in love with. So I am prejudiced and perhaps not the best person to write a review of this. But it brought home quite firmly that, given a choice between this sort of literary writing and mean, moneygrubbing entertainment writing, I am better suited to the latter.
Plague of Doves is a series of short pieces (a glance in the back of the book will show them to have been published separately. In my opinion, they should have stayed that way--like doves, they are tolerable on their own or in pairs, but together they are tiresome), united by setting. Our stage is the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, and the adjoining reservation. The time is somewhere in the 1960s or 70s, and in 1911, a group of Ojibwe were lynched for the murder of a family (of which, of course, they are innocent). The collection of vignettes deals with the effects of this on the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators.
The problem is it doesn't. We get scraps from lives: some have little to do with the original event, and are little affected. There are other events to keep us interested in the meantime; a kidnapping, a cult, a murder, the theft of a violin. Some of these simply establish characters who step in and have an incidentally huge effect on the plot that we never even see onscreen. Even during the famous sewer tangent in Les Miserables, the plot goes on. One puts up with Hugo's exhaustive descriptions of the sewers of Paris because 1) it is fun to listen to Hugo being catty about Napoleon III and 2) Jean Valjean is in those sewers and you want to see him get out in one piece. In Plague of Doves, we are given new plots with very little to do with the others, and they only connect by the barest thread of coincidence. I found this frustrating.
The other thing is the role of coincidence. The characters all seem to be mind readers. They know what another is thinking just by looking at him or her, and then respond appropriately. Never do we have someone ask someone else who is staring profoundly into space if dinner disagreed with them; we receive plot-relevant statements, great revelations. Stylistically necessary, yes, but not very realistic.
We also have the role of strange reactions and overreactions. Our main character in one arc (Evelina) realizes she's a lesbian, and soon after her lover leaves. Evelina accordingly sinks into a depression and is admitted to the same mental institution as she was working in. It seemed far too much of a reaction to swallow easily, even with her history of falling tragically in love. A young (and I thought initially) incredibly moral judge recounts how he stepped over his lover's gravely bee-stung husband and nibbles at the honey of the broken hive, only being stung twice. I should think a sensible person would get the living hell away from a bee swarm, and that any sensible bee would react with extreme prejudice to something munching at its broken hive. Perhaps I mistake strange reactions for magical realism, of which there is a great deal in the book.
Then there is the sex. Sex is great. Sex is an attention grabber. Here, it is used to advance the plot and establish character development, and is described in such ways that make it seem as compelling as taking a dump. I found myself skipping those bits, because there was a certain limit to my tolerance in listening to the male characters worry that the bed would fall down, as they 'make their way toward bliss'.
The next problem is voice. I cannot stand the voice. It is passive. No, the bits of it that ought to be passive are active, and those that should be active, passive. We do not get to be in the room when the persecuted Marn murders her despicable husband with a syringe of snake venom while having sex. She tells us about it. But we hear every blow of a conversation about stamps between two old ladies.
When the voice discribes, it does it with a real will to poetry. Indeed, nothing but a metaphor will do if it may possibly fit. It is lyrical, sure, but I am somewhat allergic to figurative language, especially if it's in the middle of a important turning in the character's life or in the plot.
In the end, I am left befuddled. I cannot see how people enjoy this, and yet they do. It's prettily written--but there's too much of the prettiness and it seems put on after a while. It's profound, but the profundity seems to focus on how shitty people are, which I already knew and don't like being reminded of. It's a huge tapestry of lives...but I can bring myself to care about none of the characters and there's too little plot to compensate for that. Reading this book, I experienced much the same thing that I do when staring at a stripy canvas in an art museum--confusion and a general feeling that I'm doomed to wander through life a positive barbarian, unable to enjoy anything but the most obvious beauty that walks up and smacks me upside the helmeted head. In short, I don't get it. I suppose it's good in its genre, as it exemplifies every reason I avoid said genre.
Perhaps it's an acquired taste. Like mushrooms or tomatoes.
I write with the intention of entertaining. This means that I read a lot of speculative fiction, with explosions and monsters and dastardly villains and hopefully a good snog somewhere in there, because biology is important. But I do make an effort to read literature. I love Les Miserables and Shakespeare, because they're compelling works. They have lots of plot and characters I can fall in love with. So I am prejudiced and perhaps not the best person to write a review of this. But it brought home quite firmly that, given a choice between this sort of literary writing and mean, moneygrubbing entertainment writing, I am better suited to the latter.
Plague of Doves is a series of short pieces (a glance in the back of the book will show them to have been published separately. In my opinion, they should have stayed that way--like doves, they are tolerable on their own or in pairs, but together they are tiresome), united by setting. Our stage is the fictional town of Pluto, North Dakota, and the adjoining reservation. The time is somewhere in the 1960s or 70s, and in 1911, a group of Ojibwe were lynched for the murder of a family (of which, of course, they are innocent). The collection of vignettes deals with the effects of this on the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators.
The problem is it doesn't. We get scraps from lives: some have little to do with the original event, and are little affected. There are other events to keep us interested in the meantime; a kidnapping, a cult, a murder, the theft of a violin. Some of these simply establish characters who step in and have an incidentally huge effect on the plot that we never even see onscreen. Even during the famous sewer tangent in Les Miserables, the plot goes on. One puts up with Hugo's exhaustive descriptions of the sewers of Paris because 1) it is fun to listen to Hugo being catty about Napoleon III and 2) Jean Valjean is in those sewers and you want to see him get out in one piece. In Plague of Doves, we are given new plots with very little to do with the others, and they only connect by the barest thread of coincidence. I found this frustrating.
The other thing is the role of coincidence. The characters all seem to be mind readers. They know what another is thinking just by looking at him or her, and then respond appropriately. Never do we have someone ask someone else who is staring profoundly into space if dinner disagreed with them; we receive plot-relevant statements, great revelations. Stylistically necessary, yes, but not very realistic.
We also have the role of strange reactions and overreactions. Our main character in one arc (Evelina) realizes she's a lesbian, and soon after her lover leaves. Evelina accordingly sinks into a depression and is admitted to the same mental institution as she was working in. It seemed far too much of a reaction to swallow easily, even with her history of falling tragically in love. A young (and I thought initially) incredibly moral judge recounts how he stepped over his lover's gravely bee-stung husband and nibbles at the honey of the broken hive, only being stung twice. I should think a sensible person would get the living hell away from a bee swarm, and that any sensible bee would react with extreme prejudice to something munching at its broken hive. Perhaps I mistake strange reactions for magical realism, of which there is a great deal in the book.
Then there is the sex. Sex is great. Sex is an attention grabber. Here, it is used to advance the plot and establish character development, and is described in such ways that make it seem as compelling as taking a dump. I found myself skipping those bits, because there was a certain limit to my tolerance in listening to the male characters worry that the bed would fall down, as they 'make their way toward bliss'.
The next problem is voice. I cannot stand the voice. It is passive. No, the bits of it that ought to be passive are active, and those that should be active, passive. We do not get to be in the room when the persecuted Marn murders her despicable husband with a syringe of snake venom while having sex. She tells us about it. But we hear every blow of a conversation about stamps between two old ladies.
When the voice discribes, it does it with a real will to poetry. Indeed, nothing but a metaphor will do if it may possibly fit. It is lyrical, sure, but I am somewhat allergic to figurative language, especially if it's in the middle of a important turning in the character's life or in the plot.
In the end, I am left befuddled. I cannot see how people enjoy this, and yet they do. It's prettily written--but there's too much of the prettiness and it seems put on after a while. It's profound, but the profundity seems to focus on how shitty people are, which I already knew and don't like being reminded of. It's a huge tapestry of lives...but I can bring myself to care about none of the characters and there's too little plot to compensate for that. Reading this book, I experienced much the same thing that I do when staring at a stripy canvas in an art museum--confusion and a general feeling that I'm doomed to wander through life a positive barbarian, unable to enjoy anything but the most obvious beauty that walks up and smacks me upside the helmeted head. In short, I don't get it. I suppose it's good in its genre, as it exemplifies every reason I avoid said genre.
Perhaps it's an acquired taste. Like mushrooms or tomatoes.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Tea
It seems I am incapable of doing a post that doesn't have a specific subject. I suppose it's because my life is really rather boring at the best of times. At the worst of times, I'm too busy to think of posting. (Like when studying for that Herpetology midterm last week. Which it's quite possible I failed.)
Anyway, this post is inspired by a blog post by Gail Carriger, one of my very favorite authors. I only wish I could be as supremely civilized as she, but I am in college and it sometimes seems that civilization and college are contradictory terms. (Yeah, someone was smoking pot in my bathroom. Again. Aiiiiiii....)
I, too, adore tea, though not in a terribly discerning manner. This is partly out of necessity, because I found out quite early on that I'm impressively allergic (or overreactive, not sure which) to something in coffee. It makes me parinoid and short tempered and then I don't sleep for three days afterward. Oh, and I get a migraine. It's Dad's genes--he does exactly the same thing, and so he introduced me to tea and how it ought to be made at a very young age. And since I am living in a situation where a lot of my friends do terrible, terrible things to their tea, I thought this necessary.
Yes. I confess. I'm a tea snob. A moderate unassuming mild-mannered snob, but still a snob. I drink black tea for preference, though sometimes green tea.
Firstly, the water must be filtered. The tap water around here has a ridiculous quantity of solutes in it, and this leads to a nasty white rime around the insides of the kettle, and then you get white bits in your tea, which is many kinds of NOT OKAY. The tap water also gives the tea a bitter flavor. Heating it in the dormitory microwave simply doesn't do the trick, firstly because everyone pops popcorn there and the tea always comes out with a skim of grease on the top and a distinct odor of fake butter, and secondly because telling when it's boiled is very difficult.
The water must be heated to boiling. I have a friend who only heats the water to the temperature he wants the tea to be--lukewarm!--and then sticks the teabag in. It makes me twitch. I have another friend who sticks the teabag in the cold water in the cup and then microwaves the whole thing, which makes me cry and hide under the bed. It must be boiling when I put it in the cup. I'll use teabags (because looseleaf requires extra prep, and is impossible to use in the college cafeteria for a number of reasons), and I do sweeten the tea (trying to compensate for coffee intolerance here!)
Writing it down, I realize that I'm not nearly as snobbish as I could be about tea. I'll drink iced tea, even the sort from a bottle. But still, my requirements of a good cup of tea are enough to prevent me from getting to drink tea at college very often. The dining commons use tap water and don't always heat it to boiling and the tea provided is simply pathetic. Really, the closest thing I can get to good tea are chai lattes, which simply aren't the same thing at all!
All things considered, I'm really looking forward to moving into my own apartment, where I can heat the correct water to the correct temperature and stick milk and sugar in it to my heart's desire...and have my own tea set.
Anyway, this post is inspired by a blog post by Gail Carriger, one of my very favorite authors. I only wish I could be as supremely civilized as she, but I am in college and it sometimes seems that civilization and college are contradictory terms. (Yeah, someone was smoking pot in my bathroom. Again. Aiiiiiii....)
I, too, adore tea, though not in a terribly discerning manner. This is partly out of necessity, because I found out quite early on that I'm impressively allergic (or overreactive, not sure which) to something in coffee. It makes me parinoid and short tempered and then I don't sleep for three days afterward. Oh, and I get a migraine. It's Dad's genes--he does exactly the same thing, and so he introduced me to tea and how it ought to be made at a very young age. And since I am living in a situation where a lot of my friends do terrible, terrible things to their tea, I thought this necessary.
Yes. I confess. I'm a tea snob. A moderate unassuming mild-mannered snob, but still a snob. I drink black tea for preference, though sometimes green tea.
Firstly, the water must be filtered. The tap water around here has a ridiculous quantity of solutes in it, and this leads to a nasty white rime around the insides of the kettle, and then you get white bits in your tea, which is many kinds of NOT OKAY. The tap water also gives the tea a bitter flavor. Heating it in the dormitory microwave simply doesn't do the trick, firstly because everyone pops popcorn there and the tea always comes out with a skim of grease on the top and a distinct odor of fake butter, and secondly because telling when it's boiled is very difficult.
The water must be heated to boiling. I have a friend who only heats the water to the temperature he wants the tea to be--lukewarm!--and then sticks the teabag in. It makes me twitch. I have another friend who sticks the teabag in the cold water in the cup and then microwaves the whole thing, which makes me cry and hide under the bed. It must be boiling when I put it in the cup. I'll use teabags (because looseleaf requires extra prep, and is impossible to use in the college cafeteria for a number of reasons), and I do sweeten the tea (trying to compensate for coffee intolerance here!)
Writing it down, I realize that I'm not nearly as snobbish as I could be about tea. I'll drink iced tea, even the sort from a bottle. But still, my requirements of a good cup of tea are enough to prevent me from getting to drink tea at college very often. The dining commons use tap water and don't always heat it to boiling and the tea provided is simply pathetic. Really, the closest thing I can get to good tea are chai lattes, which simply aren't the same thing at all!
All things considered, I'm really looking forward to moving into my own apartment, where I can heat the correct water to the correct temperature and stick milk and sugar in it to my heart's desire...and have my own tea set.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
A Review of Thor (SPOILERS)
So I'm (hopefully) going to go see The Avengers this weekend. In light of this, I gave in and watched Thor last night. Just so you know, there are going to be general spoilers, so if you're worried about that sort of thing, you have been warned.
I was kind of hesitant, because I'd heard that it was the weakest of the set of movies leading up to Avengers. I heard that the main plot was 'Scientist Chick meets Magic God, gives up Science', which was worrying for obvious reasons. I was expecting the sort of train-wreck that was Iron Man II (seriously, take all the character development from the first movie and throw it down the garbage disposal? And then take moderately-badass Pepper Potts and then render her incapable of running the company that she's basically been running because Tony Stark can't get his sorry steel butt in to work half the time? Puh-leeze!) except with more long-haired screaming men waving large hammers. I expected it to be a case of tough jock beats up treacherous little nerd. Honestly, I was only interested from a sense of obligation (because OHMIGODJOSSWHEDONAVENGERS?OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD!) and the general sort of interest that any applicably-oriented individual might feel about watching long-haired screaming men waving large hammers.
The plot is simple. A group of scientists in the New Mexican desert are nearly turned into hamburger when the atmospheric anomaly that they are studying turns up on top of them. As if near-death were not enough, a guy falls out of the sky on top of their truck. This is Thor, who's just been booted out of Asgard because he went off and broke a hard-forged peace by going berserk on the Frost Giants' planet when their king called him a princess. His father, Odin, was accordingly unamused, stripped Thor of his powers and his right to the throne, and banished him. In a moment of creative manipulativeness, he chucks Thor's warhammer after him, with the promise that, if he is worthy, he will get both the hammer and his powers back.
While Thor rattles around on Earth, gets tased and tranquilized and hit with trucks and arrested, his brother Loki is putting a cunning plan into action. He enlists the Frost Giants to help him take control of Asgard and kill Thor (the rightful heir) and Odin. But Thor's buddies in Asgard come to Earth to get him back to foil Loki's plot. Shenanigans ensue.
It was fun. Despite the rather predictable plot, it was some of the most fun I've had in ages. For one thing, it passed the Bechdel Test within the first minute or so, which is not something I usually expect from a superhero movie. (Captain America, as much as I loved it, barely scraped by with one female character giving another a code-phrase. Iron Man, as best as I can recall, failed.) And it continued with this. No, my fellow scientists, our heroine does not renounce the ways of logic in favor of Chris Hemsworth's gleaming abs. Instead, she learns what she can, treats it like science, and incorporates it into her research so she can go looking for him after the movie ends. (He is pining for her in Asgard, she is looking for him--seem like a long-awaited reversal to anyone?) They don't just flop into bed for the sake of some fanservice--their relationship is a very early, tentative one, and mostly just plain sweet. One gets the impression that, if they do have sex in some future movie, it will mean something to the characters rather than just fulfilling the desires of the audience, which is a nice break from the norm. Also, she is far more active in initiating it than is usual, which is also really nice.
Most importantly, I was entranced by the characters. Honestly, I would have been perfectly content to watch the lot of them playing cards for 150 minutes. Loki stole the show, as you've probably heard from another hundred and fifty reviewers. I'm a huge sucker for sympathetic villains who think that they're doing the right thing, and Loki hit all my 'aaaawwwwww!' buttons. And I wound up liking Thor a lot more, too. It wasn't so much that he had a character arc as that the plot put him in new situations that showed the good aspects of his character. His relationship with Loki was wonderful and complicated, and by the end I wanted to take both of them home and feed them cookies and tell them it was all going to be fine.
The heroine, Jane Foster, was smart and ruthless and above all snarky. Sif, the goddess of war and one of Thor's buddies, was incredible fun to watch--I love it when a movie treats a female warrior like one of the guys and doesn't insist on sexualizing or weakening her. The rest of the supporting cast was fun and didn't get in the way too much (the requirements of a good supporting cast, if you think about it).
I am running out of time and must go to dinner, so I will wrap this up quickly. Thor is worth the time to watch. Indeed, I enjoyed it enormously more than the masterpiece of literature that we're reading for class, and I think that it was far more satisfying and less inclined to do things for the shock value than said book is. (Sorry professor!) It left me both happy and wanting more; I can't wait for Saturday now!
I was kind of hesitant, because I'd heard that it was the weakest of the set of movies leading up to Avengers. I heard that the main plot was 'Scientist Chick meets Magic God, gives up Science', which was worrying for obvious reasons. I was expecting the sort of train-wreck that was Iron Man II (seriously, take all the character development from the first movie and throw it down the garbage disposal? And then take moderately-badass Pepper Potts and then render her incapable of running the company that she's basically been running because Tony Stark can't get his sorry steel butt in to work half the time? Puh-leeze!) except with more long-haired screaming men waving large hammers. I expected it to be a case of tough jock beats up treacherous little nerd. Honestly, I was only interested from a sense of obligation (because OHMIGODJOSSWHEDONAVENGERS?OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD!) and the general sort of interest that any applicably-oriented individual might feel about watching long-haired screaming men waving large hammers.
The plot is simple. A group of scientists in the New Mexican desert are nearly turned into hamburger when the atmospheric anomaly that they are studying turns up on top of them. As if near-death were not enough, a guy falls out of the sky on top of their truck. This is Thor, who's just been booted out of Asgard because he went off and broke a hard-forged peace by going berserk on the Frost Giants' planet when their king called him a princess. His father, Odin, was accordingly unamused, stripped Thor of his powers and his right to the throne, and banished him. In a moment of creative manipulativeness, he chucks Thor's warhammer after him, with the promise that, if he is worthy, he will get both the hammer and his powers back.
While Thor rattles around on Earth, gets tased and tranquilized and hit with trucks and arrested, his brother Loki is putting a cunning plan into action. He enlists the Frost Giants to help him take control of Asgard and kill Thor (the rightful heir) and Odin. But Thor's buddies in Asgard come to Earth to get him back to foil Loki's plot. Shenanigans ensue.
It was fun. Despite the rather predictable plot, it was some of the most fun I've had in ages. For one thing, it passed the Bechdel Test within the first minute or so, which is not something I usually expect from a superhero movie. (Captain America, as much as I loved it, barely scraped by with one female character giving another a code-phrase. Iron Man, as best as I can recall, failed.) And it continued with this. No, my fellow scientists, our heroine does not renounce the ways of logic in favor of Chris Hemsworth's gleaming abs. Instead, she learns what she can, treats it like science, and incorporates it into her research so she can go looking for him after the movie ends. (He is pining for her in Asgard, she is looking for him--seem like a long-awaited reversal to anyone?) They don't just flop into bed for the sake of some fanservice--their relationship is a very early, tentative one, and mostly just plain sweet. One gets the impression that, if they do have sex in some future movie, it will mean something to the characters rather than just fulfilling the desires of the audience, which is a nice break from the norm. Also, she is far more active in initiating it than is usual, which is also really nice.
Most importantly, I was entranced by the characters. Honestly, I would have been perfectly content to watch the lot of them playing cards for 150 minutes. Loki stole the show, as you've probably heard from another hundred and fifty reviewers. I'm a huge sucker for sympathetic villains who think that they're doing the right thing, and Loki hit all my 'aaaawwwwww!' buttons. And I wound up liking Thor a lot more, too. It wasn't so much that he had a character arc as that the plot put him in new situations that showed the good aspects of his character. His relationship with Loki was wonderful and complicated, and by the end I wanted to take both of them home and feed them cookies and tell them it was all going to be fine.
The heroine, Jane Foster, was smart and ruthless and above all snarky. Sif, the goddess of war and one of Thor's buddies, was incredible fun to watch--I love it when a movie treats a female warrior like one of the guys and doesn't insist on sexualizing or weakening her. The rest of the supporting cast was fun and didn't get in the way too much (the requirements of a good supporting cast, if you think about it).
I am running out of time and must go to dinner, so I will wrap this up quickly. Thor is worth the time to watch. Indeed, I enjoyed it enormously more than the masterpiece of literature that we're reading for class, and I think that it was far more satisfying and less inclined to do things for the shock value than said book is. (Sorry professor!) It left me both happy and wanting more; I can't wait for Saturday now!
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Labwork
When working in a laboratory, there are a couple of things one has to look out for, and a few offers you will regret taking up. The first is when someone at a microscope turns around and says, "Hey, wanna see something gross?" The person at the microscope has been there all day, looking at nasty things all day. If they think it's gross, it's really gross. I know. I've been that person. (Last time was a giant beetle with a member half its own body length. Being a biologist has made me appreciate how very simple and comfortable human sex is. Don't believe me? Look up Tasmanian Devils. Or cats.)
The other is cleaning the freezer.
We had a pair of high school students in our lab last summer. They were in a research mentorship program that let them get lab experience and conduct their own projects. But they had yet to quite sort out the projects, and so the graduate student mentoring them did what any intelligent graduate student would do: set them to working on something that needed to be done, but he really didn't want to do. Which was cleaning the freezer.
The freezer in question was shared by not one, but two laboratories. Directly opposite this freezer was the sole microscope with a functional light in either laboratory. At that point, I was doing a project that involved identifying a few hundred samples of insects and me and my little glass jars and wafting fumes of insect-infused ethanol had a front seat to the ensuing drama.
It started out normally enough. There were a lot of samples of grasses and seedheads, and these passed without comment.
"Dude! This is full of bugs!"
I looked up. "Oh. Yeah, those are ours."
Silence for a bit longer. Then one of the guys, looking puzzled, walked past me with a styrofoam tray of test tubes, all of which were filled with what looked like frozen pond water and duck weed.
A bit later, "Why is there a dead lizard in here?"
"Uh," I said. "I think it may be one of ours again. We found it in one of the pitfall traps we set for these," with a gesture to the bottled bugs, "and I guess someone decided to keep it."
"Oh," they said, and went back to work. I was rather envious. The most exciting thing that had happened on my project that day was a bright blue, utterly unidentifiable wasp.
Some time later, a sudden stillness behind me made me look up. The students were standing there, looking at something with identical bewildered expressions. I slid down from my stool to go look as well.
There was a snake in the freezer.
Neither lab studied snakes. The lab down the hall did, but that professor was very careful of his specimens and he studied live animals, not dead ones. We hadn't had a snake fall into any of our pitfall traps. Certainly not a snake that big; this one was a milk snake, at least two feet long. In short, there was no reason whatsoever that there should be a snake in the laboratory freezer.
"Yeah, that's...not one of ours," I said after a few moments.
"Let's just make sure it doesn't thaw," said the shorter of the two, and closed the door.
It turned out that one of the professors had found that snake dead on his driveway, and not knowing what else to do with it, had brought it in and popped it into the shared freezer. He took it with him after he saw it, and I don't think I ever found out what he did with it.
A bit later, one of my friends got a position in another lab, this one studying urchins. On her first day, she got to help clean out the freezer. She didn't have anything as interesting; she spent the day digging through frozen urchin gut contents, which is as appetizing as it sounds. What made it exciting was that the freezer was a walk-in one, and she departed that bright, sunny morning in mittens and a scarf.
The other is cleaning the freezer.
We had a pair of high school students in our lab last summer. They were in a research mentorship program that let them get lab experience and conduct their own projects. But they had yet to quite sort out the projects, and so the graduate student mentoring them did what any intelligent graduate student would do: set them to working on something that needed to be done, but he really didn't want to do. Which was cleaning the freezer.
The freezer in question was shared by not one, but two laboratories. Directly opposite this freezer was the sole microscope with a functional light in either laboratory. At that point, I was doing a project that involved identifying a few hundred samples of insects and me and my little glass jars and wafting fumes of insect-infused ethanol had a front seat to the ensuing drama.
It started out normally enough. There were a lot of samples of grasses and seedheads, and these passed without comment.
"Dude! This is full of bugs!"
I looked up. "Oh. Yeah, those are ours."
Silence for a bit longer. Then one of the guys, looking puzzled, walked past me with a styrofoam tray of test tubes, all of which were filled with what looked like frozen pond water and duck weed.
A bit later, "Why is there a dead lizard in here?"
"Uh," I said. "I think it may be one of ours again. We found it in one of the pitfall traps we set for these," with a gesture to the bottled bugs, "and I guess someone decided to keep it."
"Oh," they said, and went back to work. I was rather envious. The most exciting thing that had happened on my project that day was a bright blue, utterly unidentifiable wasp.
Some time later, a sudden stillness behind me made me look up. The students were standing there, looking at something with identical bewildered expressions. I slid down from my stool to go look as well.
There was a snake in the freezer.
Neither lab studied snakes. The lab down the hall did, but that professor was very careful of his specimens and he studied live animals, not dead ones. We hadn't had a snake fall into any of our pitfall traps. Certainly not a snake that big; this one was a milk snake, at least two feet long. In short, there was no reason whatsoever that there should be a snake in the laboratory freezer.
"Yeah, that's...not one of ours," I said after a few moments.
"Let's just make sure it doesn't thaw," said the shorter of the two, and closed the door.
It turned out that one of the professors had found that snake dead on his driveway, and not knowing what else to do with it, had brought it in and popped it into the shared freezer. He took it with him after he saw it, and I don't think I ever found out what he did with it.
A bit later, one of my friends got a position in another lab, this one studying urchins. On her first day, she got to help clean out the freezer. She didn't have anything as interesting; she spent the day digging through frozen urchin gut contents, which is as appetizing as it sounds. What made it exciting was that the freezer was a walk-in one, and she departed that bright, sunny morning in mittens and a scarf.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Faith (eek!)
There are things that mildly cheese me off, like people walking slow in front of me or sudden loud noises, or the rotter across the quad who blasts his tasteless music at obscene levels during finals week or the fact the bathroom smelled like pot earlier this week and made me smell like pot afterwards, or people not doing their dishes or being late.
Then there are the things that make me chew on my keyboard with rage. There are a lot of these. Most are related to politics. If I were to address all of these, I would probably miss my next three classes and bore everyone to pieces, so I will refrain and talk about one thing that is rather central to a lot of the issues in US politics right now: religion. More accurately, my lack of one and the way it is perceived, and why that perception and the way right-wing leaders talk about it really pisses me off.
Firstly, I have really good reasons for being an agnostic. I wasn't always one. I won't go into the details of why exactly I lost my faith, but I did. And it was a loss. I do miss it sometimes, because it would be comforting, and those of my friends who are religious are very happy with it. It was not something I consciously chose to do.
When I say that my lack of faith wasn't a choice, I mean it. At this point in my life, I am completely unable to believe in a higher power. That may change; it changed in the past. But it's not like I woke up one morning and told myself, "I'm going to deny the existence of God because I want to".
Secondly, I'm not an atheist. I may say that when I'm arguing, because it's a shorter word and I'm not thinking straight because I'm mad, but atheism implies certainty; I am a scientist, and the existence of God is a hypothesis that cannot be empirically tested. It would involve just as much faith to say that God didn't exist as it would to believe She did. I'm not an agnostic because I can't make up my mind over whether I want to believe in God or not. It's simply being logical. (Aside: A lot of scientists believe in God, even us horrid biologists with our nasty Theory of Evolution. Darwin believed in God and thought of evolution as the way God had decided to make the world work.)
Thirdly, the fact that I do not belong to a faith does not mean that I am immoral, amoral or otherwise lacking in the conscience department. I have a conscience. It does not carry a big stick so much as it carries a 300 pound battleaxe. It just runs along a set of rules that don't require a central deity, and the lack of said deity does not mean that I am going to go around viciously savaging people with my axe-like wit and a grapefruit.
Not having faith isn't depressing, either. Whenever I need cheering up, I go outside and look at a tree, or a beetle or any other sort of living things. There are a lot of wonderful things in the world that I enjoy. There are a lot of really ugly things, too, but one can ignore them for a little while when looking at the wing of a butterfly or the play of shadows on the grass under a tree.
I'm happy with the way I am now. If I regain faith, it'll be on my own time, in my own way. It'll happen or it won't, and it's something personal to me. I hate people trying to convert me. I hate people telling me that I'm a bad person because I don't believe what they do, or that my lack of belief is an inherently bad thing. I hate people pitying me for that. I hate people trying to force these beliefs on me through religiously-based laws. (Saying 'God' in the Pledge of Allegiance bugged me. It was more or less lying because I was basically saying I thought He existed when I didn't, which I'm pretty sure is wrong whosever standpoint you look at it from.)
If someone does have faith, whatever it is, good. Enjoy it. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone and you're not trying to force it on me, it's none of my business, and I expect people to regard my lack of faith the same way.
Then there are the things that make me chew on my keyboard with rage. There are a lot of these. Most are related to politics. If I were to address all of these, I would probably miss my next three classes and bore everyone to pieces, so I will refrain and talk about one thing that is rather central to a lot of the issues in US politics right now: religion. More accurately, my lack of one and the way it is perceived, and why that perception and the way right-wing leaders talk about it really pisses me off.
Firstly, I have really good reasons for being an agnostic. I wasn't always one. I won't go into the details of why exactly I lost my faith, but I did. And it was a loss. I do miss it sometimes, because it would be comforting, and those of my friends who are religious are very happy with it. It was not something I consciously chose to do.
When I say that my lack of faith wasn't a choice, I mean it. At this point in my life, I am completely unable to believe in a higher power. That may change; it changed in the past. But it's not like I woke up one morning and told myself, "I'm going to deny the existence of God because I want to".
Secondly, I'm not an atheist. I may say that when I'm arguing, because it's a shorter word and I'm not thinking straight because I'm mad, but atheism implies certainty; I am a scientist, and the existence of God is a hypothesis that cannot be empirically tested. It would involve just as much faith to say that God didn't exist as it would to believe She did. I'm not an agnostic because I can't make up my mind over whether I want to believe in God or not. It's simply being logical. (Aside: A lot of scientists believe in God, even us horrid biologists with our nasty Theory of Evolution. Darwin believed in God and thought of evolution as the way God had decided to make the world work.)
Thirdly, the fact that I do not belong to a faith does not mean that I am immoral, amoral or otherwise lacking in the conscience department. I have a conscience. It does not carry a big stick so much as it carries a 300 pound battleaxe. It just runs along a set of rules that don't require a central deity, and the lack of said deity does not mean that I am going to go around viciously savaging people with my axe-like wit and a grapefruit.
Not having faith isn't depressing, either. Whenever I need cheering up, I go outside and look at a tree, or a beetle or any other sort of living things. There are a lot of wonderful things in the world that I enjoy. There are a lot of really ugly things, too, but one can ignore them for a little while when looking at the wing of a butterfly or the play of shadows on the grass under a tree.
I'm happy with the way I am now. If I regain faith, it'll be on my own time, in my own way. It'll happen or it won't, and it's something personal to me. I hate people trying to convert me. I hate people telling me that I'm a bad person because I don't believe what they do, or that my lack of belief is an inherently bad thing. I hate people pitying me for that. I hate people trying to force these beliefs on me through religiously-based laws. (Saying 'God' in the Pledge of Allegiance bugged me. It was more or less lying because I was basically saying I thought He existed when I didn't, which I'm pretty sure is wrong whosever standpoint you look at it from.)
If someone does have faith, whatever it is, good. Enjoy it. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone and you're not trying to force it on me, it's none of my business, and I expect people to regard my lack of faith the same way.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Surprises
I was coming back from class one day when I found this on the lagoon lawn.
It was a surprise, as I'd been off campus since about seven that morning and had only noted a very large truck parked in the area. I make a habit of ignoring most of the emails from the office of student affairs, as there are only so many times you can be alerted about fraternity fundraisers, rap concerts and beach cleanups before it gets old. Especially if you're carrying a heavy schedule.
I was also puzzled. I had not the foggiest clue what this thing was. It looked like one of the exhibits for the county fair had gotten lost and decided to set up anyway. Much puzzled, I asked one of my friends.
It turned out that the strange spaceship thing was the Mirazozo Iuminarium, a traveling piece of art. And bizarre as it was, the outside was not the point. It was the inside. The silver parts of the structure were opaque, and the only light inside came from translucent, colored strips of plastic.
My friend scolded me and dragged me off to have a tour of the thing, ignoring my protests of homework.
We spent about half an hour inside. They encourage taking pictures of the structure, so we did just that.
It was a good thing we went when we did. The next couple of days, the line was three hours long.
In the end, I think it was one of the most successful de-stressing events our student government ever put on. But it's unlikely that I'm going to repent and reform my email-ignoring habits. There's too much of it.
(All photos courtesy of the aforementioned friend, who shall here remain anonymous.)
Fanfiction
This last week has been one of those classic college sequences--first a midterm, then a presentation, then three high-school students crashing on my floor as they participated in an outreach program, then being stage crew at my middle school's talent show. In other words, there was a lot of fuss and not much got done.
The presentation was fun, though. I got to watch all three professors have a huge argument. It took their attention off me, an excellent thing indeed.
Being as it was one of those weeks, I spent a lot of time bouncing around the internet and procrastinating. In the course of these adventures, I encountered this.
It astounds me how negatively authors see fanfiction, even as another author. Yes, I've heard the horror stories about people actually trying to sell fanfiction or stealing your copyright entirely, but really?! I'd think that most of these people would have the sense not to come down on their fans like a ton of bricks for the crime of creating fanfiction. In the first place, it's like telling a roomful of kindergardeners to stop fidgeting: it's not going to happen, and you can't enforce it by punishment because there are too many people to punish. This article made me lose a lot of respect for a number of authors, for the reasons listed below.
In the second, it's jumping up and down on the fingers of new writers. Young writers often start out with fanfiction. I know this because I was one of them. Somewhere on my hardrive lurks a terrible Lord of the Rings fanfic, and a still more terrible Les Miserables one. Neither should ever see the light of day, but I owe the fact I'm a writer to that LotR fic, because it was the first thing I'd ever taken pleasure in writing. If I'd been forbidden from writing it, I don't know if I'd ever have started writing in the first place.
This stance is also just plain being a dick to your fans. They're writing fanfiction because they love your world. They're reading fanfiction because they love your world. If you feel like you're going to barf just looking at it, don't. (Actually, you shouldn't because of copyright reasons--you shouldn't steal their ideas, even if they're your characters.) Don't throw the lawyers at them! If they're not making money off you, they're no threat! For the most part, they can't afford the lawsuit, and it makes you look terrible and scares further people away from your fandom. (Which means that fewer people will buy your books!) If you take a long time per book, you are being really unfair; you're expecting your poor fans to wait long periods with absolutely nothing new, and forbidding them from coming up with it themselves.
Personally, I think Neil Gaiman has the most sense about this. But then again, he usually does...
The presentation was fun, though. I got to watch all three professors have a huge argument. It took their attention off me, an excellent thing indeed.
Being as it was one of those weeks, I spent a lot of time bouncing around the internet and procrastinating. In the course of these adventures, I encountered this.
It astounds me how negatively authors see fanfiction, even as another author. Yes, I've heard the horror stories about people actually trying to sell fanfiction or stealing your copyright entirely, but really?! I'd think that most of these people would have the sense not to come down on their fans like a ton of bricks for the crime of creating fanfiction. In the first place, it's like telling a roomful of kindergardeners to stop fidgeting: it's not going to happen, and you can't enforce it by punishment because there are too many people to punish. This article made me lose a lot of respect for a number of authors, for the reasons listed below.
In the second, it's jumping up and down on the fingers of new writers. Young writers often start out with fanfiction. I know this because I was one of them. Somewhere on my hardrive lurks a terrible Lord of the Rings fanfic, and a still more terrible Les Miserables one. Neither should ever see the light of day, but I owe the fact I'm a writer to that LotR fic, because it was the first thing I'd ever taken pleasure in writing. If I'd been forbidden from writing it, I don't know if I'd ever have started writing in the first place.
This stance is also just plain being a dick to your fans. They're writing fanfiction because they love your world. They're reading fanfiction because they love your world. If you feel like you're going to barf just looking at it, don't. (Actually, you shouldn't because of copyright reasons--you shouldn't steal their ideas, even if they're your characters.) Don't throw the lawyers at them! If they're not making money off you, they're no threat! For the most part, they can't afford the lawsuit, and it makes you look terrible and scares further people away from your fandom. (Which means that fewer people will buy your books!) If you take a long time per book, you are being really unfair; you're expecting your poor fans to wait long periods with absolutely nothing new, and forbidding them from coming up with it themselves.
Personally, I think Neil Gaiman has the most sense about this. But then again, he usually does...
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Math and other issues
I have always struggled with math.
No, let me correct that. Struggling implies a degree of success and competence. It does not quite cover the tantrums, anxiety attacks, and utter bewilderment that have dogged every mathematical venture. I have not, for the most part, had great difficulty with other parts of my schooling, so my difficulty in preforming even the most basic of arithmetic has been confusing and distressing. I hoped I was dealing with some sort of learning disability; otherwise, this implied that all my issues with math were my fault. I was either lazy, and refusing to try with something I didn't like very much, or I'd just talked myself into being bad at math by repeatedly telling myself that I was. I got my first F on a test in 6th grade math, and it took me two years to complete my high school precalculus course.
Until this last year, I never pursued getting tested for a learning disability. I could function in high school math classes; I could even get As because I actually did the homework. But my first quarter of college changed that.
I took Chem 1A, and then Chem 1B. And even with the assistance of a brilliant tutor, and doing all of the assignments, and starting to study weeks before the test, and going to CLAS (university provided group tutoring) sessions, I barely scraped through with Cs. I'd never gotten a C before in my life. I decided that enough was enough, and went to get tested.
Friday, I got the results back. Apparently, I have a 'math disorder', which sounds like I need to take antibiotics for an integer infection. My ability in mathematics is 1.5 standard deviations lower than that in other subjects.
I'll get a lot of help with classes that require math. If I want one, I'll have a note-taker (!), and a private room to take my test in (!!), and extra time (!!!). But none of these really compare to my relief. I now know that it's not my fault. I know that I need to work around something, and now I've been given tools to do it. I can stop being scared of people thinking that I'm a bad student when I do badly on subjects that require math.
If you're struggling with a subject, getting things wrong that you were certain were right, if the rules seem arbitrary, if 24 and 42 are the same number to you, I'd encourage you to get tested. If you do have a learning disability, it'll get you help.
No, let me correct that. Struggling implies a degree of success and competence. It does not quite cover the tantrums, anxiety attacks, and utter bewilderment that have dogged every mathematical venture. I have not, for the most part, had great difficulty with other parts of my schooling, so my difficulty in preforming even the most basic of arithmetic has been confusing and distressing. I hoped I was dealing with some sort of learning disability; otherwise, this implied that all my issues with math were my fault. I was either lazy, and refusing to try with something I didn't like very much, or I'd just talked myself into being bad at math by repeatedly telling myself that I was. I got my first F on a test in 6th grade math, and it took me two years to complete my high school precalculus course.
Until this last year, I never pursued getting tested for a learning disability. I could function in high school math classes; I could even get As because I actually did the homework. But my first quarter of college changed that.
I took Chem 1A, and then Chem 1B. And even with the assistance of a brilliant tutor, and doing all of the assignments, and starting to study weeks before the test, and going to CLAS (university provided group tutoring) sessions, I barely scraped through with Cs. I'd never gotten a C before in my life. I decided that enough was enough, and went to get tested.
Friday, I got the results back. Apparently, I have a 'math disorder', which sounds like I need to take antibiotics for an integer infection. My ability in mathematics is 1.5 standard deviations lower than that in other subjects.
I'll get a lot of help with classes that require math. If I want one, I'll have a note-taker (!), and a private room to take my test in (!!), and extra time (!!!). But none of these really compare to my relief. I now know that it's not my fault. I know that I need to work around something, and now I've been given tools to do it. I can stop being scared of people thinking that I'm a bad student when I do badly on subjects that require math.
If you're struggling with a subject, getting things wrong that you were certain were right, if the rules seem arbitrary, if 24 and 42 are the same number to you, I'd encourage you to get tested. If you do have a learning disability, it'll get you help.
Monday, April 16, 2012
5 Evil Responses to Noisy Neighbors
*WARNING* This post is not intended for those without a dirty sense of humor. If you are possessed of Victorian sensibilities, read no further!
The lovely webcomic xkcd has one suggestion but not all of us can obtain an elliptical reflector dish and a noisy girlfriend on short notice.
Before I proceed, I must add that I have only used one of these, and that was because I had a final the next day and it was the second time it had happened that night (and it was late. *grumble*). I accept no liability for injury of any sort resulting from the use of these responses.
1. Wait till they shut up, then applaud.
2. Play 'You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want' from Avenue Q. LOUDLY.
3. Shout 'FINISH HER!' (suggestion from a friend).
4. Make embarrassing noises of your own and gradually make them weirder and weirder (helps if you have a friend).
5. Email them above xkcd comic. Just because you don't have an elliptical reflector dish YET doesn't mean that you WON'T... (And it'd work so well with #4)
Now that I've gotten that rage!post out of my system, I'll return to the salamanders. A batch of them don't even have internal fertilization...
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Mary Sues
For those unfamiliar with the term, a Mary Sue is a character most often associated with fan fiction who is overly idealized. Recently, this label has been applied to characters in original fiction as well, perhaps most notably to Bella in Twilight. (I think no more needs be said?) Further definitions are here and here. This paper deals with the role of Mary Sues in a cultural context.
I don't pay much attention to the definition of Mary Sues in fanfiction. I figure that I will begin worrying about the Sueishness of one of my self-insert characters the moment that I actually show any of my fanfic to anyone, i.e. never. My issue is with characters in original fiction being branded as Mary Sues and accordingly abandoned. A new writer is highly likely to write a work with an idealized character, and having a new character or a new work be dismissed as 'A Sue' is highly discouraging.
Let us start with the Mary Sue Litmus Test. There are a lot of these on the internet. I use them frequently, because I find them amusing and I like procrastinating far too much. Here is one of the ones I use far too often. It's simple: you go down a list and click on the checkboxes next to things that apply to your character, and then the website evaluates how much of a Mary Sue your character is.
A bit ago, I used this test on one of my own characters, the love interest in a series of novels that I've been working on for a few years. Here are the rankings of Mary Sues that the site provides:
And here is what my character scored:
Now, said character, when evaluated in light of the afore-cited paper is not that much of a Sue. He's very similar to the rest of his species in regards to the scope of his powers, he has some serious failings, and most of the reason he's described as so physically attractive is that the novel is written in first-person from the perspective of a character who's deeply in love with him. I certainly don't think that starting over completely is the solution to this; I'll start worrying about that when his eyes start changing color or he starts sparkling. It should also be added that I tested the rest of the major characters in the novel, and they scored 36 and up (and then, out of curiosity, I tested myself. 41. I'm a Mary Sue. You can all flee now).
Nevertheless, it's a rather worrying result. I've workshopped this novel quite a lot, so I'm reasonably confident that this character is not off-putting in his abilities, but I must admit to a certain qualm when I first saw the result. If I had tested this character with this the minute I'd created him, I probably would have had a far more difficult time writing him, and felt highly discouraged about the results.
From the above, it is understandable that the critics of the label 'Mary Sue' in original fiction often say that the application of the trope actually stifles new writers--there are even some schools of thought that hold that the creation of a Mary Sue as a main character is the first step any beginning writer takes. Another problem is that the very term 'Mary Sue' is gender-biased; strong female characters are far more likely to run afoul of this accusation than male characters. Indeed, on many litmus tests, one of the questions has to do with whether the character follows expected gender roles.
Another issue with Mary Sues is that they're rather popular. Harry Potter, Irene Adler, Artemis Fowl and even Jean Valjean all classify as Sues. In David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, the eponymous heroine has often been accused of being a Sue. I haven't checked, but I'm willing to bet Katniss Everdeen has more than a few accusations of Sue-ness leveled against her.
In the end, accusations of this character or that being a Mary Sue begin to seem less like thoughtful literary critique and more generalized put-downs. So, discuss. Is a Sue a terrible horrifying thing that must be rooted out of all stories? A harmless wish-fulfillment starting point for a new writer? Extant only in fan fiction? Or a definition that has gotten entirely too broad and now includes many of the characteristics necessary in a main character? (Guess which camp yours truly is in.)
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Fieldwork
I was fortunate in the first lab that I worked for. It was an ecology lab that focused on the impacts of global climate change on California grasslands. The people were wonderful, the work fascinating, and, most importantly to a restless undergraduate, our research required a lot of fieldwork. All of this took place out at Sedgwick Reserve, an ecological preserve owned by the University of California. It looks like this, a lot of the time.
(all of that stuff in the foreground, by the way, is non-native and invasive. Woo European grasses!)
Here, we spent hours upon hours collecting samples, counting plant reproductive structures, and being bitten by everything in existence.
There are a few long term experiments running at Sedgwick, one of which involves grazing (aka, cows). We didn't have any plots in these areas, but we could only imagine the difficulty of those scientists who did.
What we did have were mountain lions. Or, more accurately, mountain lion spoor. Masses of it.
We also found the carcass of a deer once, quite fresh. We didn't get much work done that day; we all got the rather erie feeling of being watched, and were too twitchy to do much good.
In short, the whole experience was an excellent one for a new lab slave. I quickly learned that science was not clean, that involved an enormous quantity of manual labor, and that it frequently bordered on the absurd. In short, that science was bloody fun.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Culinary Adventures
I love food. Because of this, life in the dormitory can become a bit trying; though the dining commons at my university are certainly among the better sort (as in, the food is largely identifiable, and even tasty), they still commit heinous crimes such as thickening the lemon bars with gelatin, and dumping runny oversalted sauce all over the stir-fries. Occasionally, in a fit of environmental responsibility, one of the commons will have 'Green Monday' which means that everything on the menu will be vegetarian.
Fortunately, my house is equipped with a kitchen, and, when I'm fed up with spagetti and microscopic fragments of meat, I can cook for myself. Or whoever decides to help me and pay for the food.
This evening, we decided to cook a chicken. We flavored it with honey, soy sauce, garlic and star anise, and then cooked it for an hour and a half in a covered container in the oven. It was served with bok-choi and rice/potatoes, all steaming hot, and everyone settled in and enjoyed the respite from mass produced food.
At least, that was the plan.
Let us consider the dormitory kitchen, or, for that matter, any kitchen shared between fifty people. Let us consider the pile of dishes on the counter, the sticky residue in the sink, the refrigerator that reeks of mold. Let us consider the much-abused dishwasher, the ragged sponges. Then let us add two very OCD people trying to utilize these facilites.
The first thing we found was that the chicken pot had gone missing. Fifteen minutes or so of diligent searching was rewarded when we found it in the fridge, serving as a sort of glorified tupperware to an odd concoction of apples and rasins. After dislodging this, we had to wash the pot.
Which presented a new challenge. The sink wasn't draining properly. We ran the garbage disposal, and were rewarded by a fingernail-sized piece of metal hurtling from the interstices of the drain. Then the dishwasher started making funny noises. Further investigation revealed that the much-abused machine had decided to try to do its job without water. Environmentally noble, yes. Effective, no. This being a dormitory, half the dishes were there. Cue swearing. Cue dishwashing. Cue water being on too hot. More swearing.
Things seemed to be going smoothly (we propped the bok choi pan up so that it didn't lean drunkenly over to one side due to its convex bottom) until we got to the potatoes. They were greenstruck. We peeled them, bunged them in the microwave, and perched to watch it with hungry eyes. Three minutes passed. They were not done. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen.
One potato burned onto the bowl, but only one. The rest were raw. The swearing reached new heights of creativity. We gave up and had leftover rice. We put the rice into the microwave. Twenty seconds. Nothing. A minute. Lukewarm, good enough. It was 8:40 at this point, and no one was in much of a mood to wait longer.
The only redeeming point of the meal was the chicken. It turned out well. But we turned to our homework afterward with the distinct feeling that it was the lesser frustration.
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