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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.