magistrate | Entries tagged with entry: rambledansen

If you wanted to count the combined wordcounts of everything I've worked on since the start of the Write-a-thon, we'd be up to 624 now! If you wanted to count the actual words I've written since the start, we'd be at... something more like 87.

Neither of these are particularly inspiring numbers, but I'll take them, because they're greater than 0.

Today's 87 words went to The Angel at the Gate, a story inspired by a YouTube video of Silent Hill: Homecoming, the long-completed webcomic 1/0, and thinking about Biblical cherubs. Naturally, the story is about a group of friends who were tossed out of another world after fighting for and saving it as destined heroes, and who find themselves unable to leave the city they've been thrown into because there's a supernatural phenomenon which blocks their way out.

(They name the phenomenon Azrael. Who was not a cherub, if you were wondering.)

Long story short, my fiction rarely bears any resemblance to its inspiration, so I hope the preceding explanation made no sense to you.

...

...hey, who wants an excerpt!

I look up to see Zeph straddling the peak of the roof, nailing down siding, and the arc of the hammer in his hand takes my breath away. It doesn't take long for him to look down and see me, loitering in the middle of the road.

I sign, Remember the flight to the burning cathedral? Your sword scattered the sunlight and gave you wings.

Zeph grins and hefts the hammer, then sees something in my face and sets it down. And he signs back, with emphasis on every word:

Don't. Start. Crying. Here.

[Semi-boilerplate text: As always, I hope you'll check out and support the Clarion West Write-a-thon (and me in particular, if you feel so inclined). Your donation will help a workshop that allows its students to create quality work like mine! Except often better, and coherent.]

Staring down the beginning of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, two things seem especially important.

First, that I just re-ran-into the Adrienne Rich quote which reads, "To know we are not alone, that our identity is not random but has a history and a meaning shared with others—that our existence has its own special kind of beauty—this is the great force of art to people moving against alienation."

And second, that I'm about to start a new job at the beginning of July, and that I am, even now, searching for a new apartment and preparing to turn my life upside-down again.

Second explanation first: my big barrier to completing my Write-a-thon goals in years past was that the WAT always corresponded with the end of the fiscal year at the University where I worked, and I happened to work in a financial department. Apparently the theme of my life getting really busy as soon as the WAT rears its formidable head is not going away with the passing of the job.

And the first explanation second: well, if there's a pie-in-the-sky idealistic goal, not just for my Write-a-thon writing but also for my writing in general, it's to wedge a few more ideas into the ever-evolving discussion that is fiction. Gender is one I keep coming back to; so are cultural estrangement, signification, relationships, power, the inability to communicate, the majesty of the known and unknown, and the existence of questions which have neither easy nor satisfying answers. I spend a lot of time circling around those high, idealistic goals, though how well I achieve them is another question entirely.

(And here I'm reminded of another quote, Michael Cunningham's: "You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire."

As I've said on my Write-a-thon page, I don't know what I'll write, or how much I'll write. But you can expect to see some of the above themes cropping up alongside the other, more magpie-minded projects.

Anyway, I hope the writing (and writing about writing) will be entertaining to those of you reading, and I hope you'll consider sponsoring me or any one of the many, many other fine writers in the Write-a-thon this year. There's a wealth of talent banding together to support a new crop of talent which, in turn, is being taught by a roster of extraordinary talent, and I, for one, am excited to get started.

...meanwhile, my brain is giving me someone named Tether, an aromantic, touch-hungry, skin-averse, heterophysical, sex-repulsed asexual who undergoes violence-hunger cycles in accordance with lunar cycles, peaking at the new moon. She gets paired with some guy called Knife, who as far as I can tell is a fairly vanilla heterosexual guy somewhere on the aspie spectrum, with a nearly eidetic memory and somewhat decentralized cognition. Who may also be a high-functioning sociopath.

I have no idea where my brain is going with this, but I suspect they fight crime.

You know, I'm agnostic-skeptic when it comes to omens and signs. I think most of the weird coincidences we see are just coincidences, and not actually that weird. It's just that we notice them, and the billions of tiny co-occurrences that don't hold any special similarity go unnoticed because there's no reason to give them any attention. "I wrote a blog post about gluten-free desserts, and then I turned on the radio... and there was a story about an embassy bombing!" ...okay? That sort of stuff happens all the time, with overwhelming frequency, yet it's always the "I was thinking about quitting my job, and a copy of the newspaper classifieds blew onto the sidewalk in front of me!" events that get all the attention. "What are the odds!" As it turns out, just what it took for the event to happen, and all the dreg is still there in your peripheral vision.

But, you know, that doesn't stop me from going after the "signs" and "omens" that do crop up in my life. It's a magical-consciousness thing.

By which I mean: in my low-key, homegrown magical practice, a big central philosophy is bricolage: "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". So when I write a post about being afraid to move forward and then the next day I wake up to a Live Your Legend mailinglist email about how the biggest threat to your success is quitting, and once you get that under control, all the other risks are small potatoes, I still interpret it as basically a message from $god*.

*Here I'm using the PHP variable syntax – $variable_name – to indicate, basically, "god-of-choice". God is another thing I'm both faithful and agnostic on.

And that's because I've taught myself to glean meaning and inspiration from things. Meaning, motivation, inspiration, and direction are things I need in my life, and I know that I sometimes have to be creative in fulfilling those needs. So when I see a coincidence that I can use to feed into my motivation – in this case, it's a "sign from the universe not to give up" – the framework of my thinking goes something like this:

Something called itself to my attention. => Is there meaning I can ascribe to this? => Is the potential meaning helpful or harmful? Can I interpret it in a way that makes it helpful? => If it's helpful, DUDE! It's an OMEN! If it's harmful, whoo, look at that, it's another wacky coincidence, and I go on my way.

This is a pretty blatant logical fallacy, of course – it's the same sort of thinking that contextualizes a misfortune that happens to someone of $x_particular_faith as a "test of faith" and an identical misfortune that happens to anyone else as a sign of $god's displeasure. But I'd rather look at it as a mindhack. Yeah, it's spurious and completely arbitrary, but I'm aware of it and can watchdog it so its net effect on my life is positive and it doesn't harm anyone else. I can glean a spot of inspiration from my own coincidences, and if I ever come across an arrangement of rocks in a stream that seems to spell out KILL THEM ALL, I'll take a picture and share it on Twitter with a note about how wacky patterns in nature can be.

Around the end of August, I finished the first draft of the first novel I've ever felt confident enough about to start shopping out. (The last original novel I finished before that was... in sixth grade. I probably still have the completed draft on my flash drive or harddrive somewhere, but it very much reads like something a sixth-grader wrote. And we won't get into fanworks.)

Throughout September, I let it sit and didn't even open the file, and I threw all my effort into writing the sequel while a bunch of incredibly wonderful beta readers went through my story and gave me feedback covering a wide range of topics – conventions expected by the target audience, questions left unanswered, plot snarls, places where the prose or plot was unclear, places where they were hooked or lost, strengths and weaknesses.

Now, I've compiled all those responses into a document – a sort of menu of things to fix – and I've been ticking off each issue, one by one. Except that now I'm stalling.

It's strange. I remember this sort of hand-wringing and avoidance (because a part of this is that I know once I'm done with revisions, I'll have to send out the novel to agents, and whatever I've done or failed to do will have to stand on its own merits, and that's scary, yo) – I remember it from when I started submitting short stories. Now, approaching my 80th short story submission (I just got a response – a rejection – on my 78th submission of all time), I'm used to that process, and while there's still a flutter of anticipation every time I send a short story out or get a response back, for the most part, it's routine.

But shopping out a novel is a completely different beast.

Sort of. From what I've researched of the process, there are a lot of similarities, and even some of the differences (synopses, partials) just seem like short-form submissions' big sibling. There's a bit more weight to the process, which is understandable given the heft of the work you're submitting.

But there are palpable differences. For one thing, generally a relationship with an agent is a long-term one; a relationship with an editor can evolve to the point where they'll drop you a line once in a while and ask if you've got anything new, but the expectation is that every story is a new deal. For another, an agent takes a lot of the responsibility off your back, and that means trusting them with something precious to you, if you value your writing at all. They take stewardship of your work in a very real way. Even before you internalize the prevailing wisdom that a bad first book can torpedo you as a novelist, there's a lot at stake.

The writing style I use means a lot of revision and rework during the process of writing. After that, I did a first-pass revision. Then I got crits on it and I'm doing a second revision now. Once those edits are in place, I'm going to do a final readthrough to make sure I haven't introduced new problems or errors. When I send this out it's going to be polished, and even after that, I'm fairly sure my (eventual, hopeful) agent and/or editor will come back with yet more crits. Everything is going to be done to give my book the best chance it can have. I'm just dragging my feet because even the steps to move forward are scary.

Still. This is about how I felt when I started submitting short stories too, and that turned out all right. I'll just keep telling myself that, then taking a deep breath, and addressing the next challenge on the list.

I'm staying home sick today. It's been one thing after another: waking up at 4 and being unable to get back to sleep, getting severe cramps, being unable to breathe due to congestion, getting a bloody nose... on like this. And because I can't go into the office, I'm missing a meeting, and because I'm missing a meeting, I spent a good two hours – before the workday would even start, mind you, as I sent in my sick note at around 6 – stressing about it.

And I think, you know, this is really sort of a screwed up system this society's built, isn't it, that I have all this guilt and stress over missing a day of work due to circumstances beyond my control? I'm eating healthy. I'm getting about an hour of exercise, if not more, just about every day. I'm sleeping enough. It's not as though I'm getting sick over some sort of negligence on my part, and the two previous days this week where I was too sick to go in, I worked from home and met all my goals and deadlines. Illness is a natural part of being alive, and should not be something to feel guilt over.

And yet.

And really, a lot of these fundamental assumptions of How Things Go are kind of screwed-up. I've been reading through The 4-Hour Workweek recently, and kinda going "Hm, I wish, I wish" at it, but the central message is something of a paradigm shift: the entire professional life is built around putting off the things that are valuable to you until you've lost the best (most healthy, most free, most able, for the most part) years of your life. And as an added twist, the thing that's to take up most of our waking hours, the thing by which society expects us to define ourselves ("What do you do?" "I'm a web application developer." I am is a powerful term) is the mechanism by which we make money. Making money doing something we find meaningful is considered an advanced skill – and something you're lucky to have.

...I've been reading a lot about earthships, too (in that same I wish, I wish) vein), and one of the things Earthship Man Michael Renolds says is that economies should exist to take care of people; people shouldn't live to take care of economies. (One of the tenets of the earthship philosophy is that people shouldn't be reliant on an economy for the basics of their survival.) It's a compelling idea.

I find that, more and more, I want to be engaged in something meaningful. I'm lucky to have my job, and I'm learning from it – not just about the technical skills, but also about things like project management, documentation and reference structure, interacting with people and communicating clearly, setting measurable goals and motivating myself through them – but there's only a very small service component (I'm helping to support the University, and education is one of my big starry-eyed idealistic values), and there's no spiritual component to it, at all. I feel like if I didn't have the dry, pragmatic concerns – cost of living, cost of paying debt, especially my mountain of student loan debt – I wouldn't be at this job at all.

I don't know what I would be doing. I have dreams, certainly – teaching (teaching something), writing, building Earthships, building communities – but they're all dreams at this stage. For some, I don't know what my criteria for success are. For others, I don't know the criteria to begin.

I want to do something more with my life than what I'm doing. I want to know how to start.

You know, I feel like I did this last year, too. Dove into the Write-a-thon with both feet, conveniently forgetting a few salient facts. In this year's case, the facts I overlooked are these:

1) The end of June is the end of the fiscal year for the University of Iowa, and I support and develop financial applications for the University; and

2) I'm going to spend just about every waking hour of next week in Laramie (or driving to and from Laramie) to learn about astronomy.

In short, I haven't had the time to work on fiction, nor will I.

But I have this week, and let's hope I can get something done this week.

What do we have up? *drumroll, please*

After The Land of Dragons

(A working title, which cribs too much from the excellent After the Dragon by Sarah Monette, which you should definitely read.)

It's a story about shattered communities, altered bodies, collateral damage, and unexploded landmines, except that the landmines are really dragon bits. Fun times!

( It's a thinly-scaled political allegory. And that was a horrible pun. )

I wrote the first draft of this for my Iowa City crit group, who unanimously told me that it needed to be a novel. I think that with a bit of tinkering and clarifying the arc and focus, I can make it work as a short story first. Let's see if I can, this week.

Oh, and have an excerpt, too!

( Excerpt under the cut. )

There's still time to sponsor me and help out an awesome workshop! Clarion West is supported by cool folks like you.

In true Clarion West Alum style, I am diving into this week slightly belatedly and with no clue what I'm doing! Join me for the ride.

THE CHARACTER: An Owomoyela, your narrator, a graduate of the 2008 class of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, author of various and sundry things.

THE CONFLICT: Your intrepid narrator has agreed to work on a different writing project every week for six weeks and blog about the results, in the hopes that you, O Readers, will sponsor hir and hir cause. In return for your money, your encouragement, or simply your occasional attention, you'll receive ramblings, blatherings and excerpts from a variety of different thingbobs!

THE FIRST CHAPTER: An will be – and hang on, se's just deciding this now – working on (drum roll, please)...

Slivers, (or) The Child Born With Fangs
A xenofictive fantasy YA novel concerning gender and the nature of humanity.

Slivers begins with a child named Rankiryo, a name meaning "Child of the Old Ways." He's a lyncis by species, and I'll provide a link to a visual aid for what lyncis folk look like. So, yes, I'm writing a fairly shameless catperson novel, but that's alright, 'cause I'm an author, and I can do what I want.

( Continue reading on the subject of lynxes... )

( Or perhaps you'd like an excerpt? )

Every once in a while I realize how idiosyncratic the shapes and conventions of my world are to their particular points in time. The visual arrangement of the walls and ceiling and doors and decorations in my room are only available as I perceive them from the posture and position in which I sit to observe them, in the time when exigencies of finances and the social freedom of being a bachelor-type (if not in all regards a bachelor) drive me toward certain arrangements of housing. In my life, the things which were familiar to me will become foreign to the welling society. As a kid, I used to be fascinated with film canisters; I used to keep small keepsakes in them or fill them with some concoction or other to pretend that they were magical potions. It struck me as I was sitting here that fewer and fewer people are going to recognize them by sight, as time goes on. Fewer people will know what I'm talking about when I mention them. Film canisters.

I spend so much time in the back of my head or off in other worlds that I don't pay much attention to the granular detail of the world around me. As a result, even details of familiar environments seem novel and surprising when I turn my attention to them. I don't consciously process the arrangement of my room. I don't consider the makeup or implication of the clutter on my floor. I don't remember the tiny truths tucked away inside my memories. Except that sometimes I do, and the world gets this cast of realness to it, and it's strange, and frightening, and heartening. And foreign, and familiar, all the same.

Yesterday's xkcd had an interesting challenge in its mouseover-text.

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

So far, I've tried it with Spark Plugs, Banana Slugs, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Chuck Palahniuk, Infantry, Carnarvon (Western Australia), and Fatal Hilarity. It all works. Usually inside of twenty-thirty clicks. After doing this long enough, you begin to see certain patterns and get a feel for when you're getting close to the Philosophy goal. For example, once you hit Natural Science or Social Science, you know there's no escape.

I think it has everything to do with the format of defining everything in more-general terms. So you can start with something that seems entirely unrelated to anything philosophical like Vilii, a "type of yoghurt (a mesophilic fermented milk) that originated in the Nordic countries," with a "ropey, gelatinous consistency and a sour taste resulting from lactic acid," but Viili is a kind of yoghurt, which sends you on through dairy product » food » plant » living (and here you start thinking, uh-oh, we're on the track for philosophy) » objects » physics (and here, the physics link is marked as already visited; you end up at physics in a lot of the paths) » natural science (remember how I said there was no escape?) » science » knowledge » facts » information, sequence, mathematics (admittedly, once you get onto the "information" leg, it does circle around a little), quantity, property, modern philosophy (uh-oh), and finally, philosophy.

There's already a significant amount of talk on the phenomenon on the Philosophy "Talk" page. People have found articles that put you into an infinite loop (as of this writing "understatement" was the first qualifying link in the Ernest Hemmingway article, and the first qualifying link in the understatement article was "Ernest Hemmingway"), but it seems to hold true for the majority of articles people have tested.

So, there's your random minor mindblow for the day.

The strange thought that crossed my mind: taking all the creative works of all people of all time, just on this one little planet drifting through the universe that would seem, by comparison of size, to be rendered insignificant; taking into account all the nuances of circumstance and idiosyncracy and story and history and personality and interest and action, even if only imagined, even if never written down, thinking of that vast pool of glimpses into the lives of people real or imagined, how many people have we apprehended? How much of this universe would those lives have filled?

The mind has the capacity to exceed the capabilities of the world. Something. I don't know. There's a concept here, but I can't quite get it out into sentences.

I'm asexual, though panphysical, and largely aromantic. I mistrust external significations made on relationships. I'm polyamorous, though I love slowly; I reserve judgment, I reserve trust, I'm not great at communicating my emotions to anyone, and I tend to dissect them interminably before going out and saying I have them. I dislike courting, I dislike the romantic ideals of love as a conqueror of all things or a supreme ideal to which all other ideals should or must be subjugated. I'm not interested in laying an exclusive claim on anyone, or letting anyone lay an exclusive claim on me. I don't believe that, having realized you love one person, the natural result should be that you cease to love all others. I don't think formalizing a relationship in the eyes of other people changes the truth of the relationship between the people in it. I don't think a relationship needs to be defined, formalized, or recognized, in order to be valid or profound.

I'm also, as of the 26th of December, engaged.

I'll understand if you have some questions.

( In the light of all that, what's /left/ for marriage to signify? )

[ETA] Also there's the matter where I love L very much, but, uh, that was supposed to go without saying?

[ETA 2: Son Of ETA] Cepheid variables, I am bad at this.

Sometimes I get things that don't belong to me.

Or maybe I should rephrase that: sometimes things come to me that have no belonging with me. It happens fairly frequently with the art I do. Sometimes with other physical objects. Sometimes with works by other people – poems or books or whathaveyou. But something will come to me, and it won't let me alone, but it won't be mine. In these cases, I'm slowly learning that my job is to wait for the lurch of SEND THIS OFF NOW or make an educated guess at where that needs to be.

Once, frex, I was idly sketching, and a dragon came out. Not the one I'd been intending to draw, but when I erased him and started over, he came out again. And again. And then I was going to send him off to a friend who worked with that sort of dragon, but I got a sense of no, not now from it, and when I made to ignore those, a series of unlikely coincidences (including forgetting the flash drive I carried with me daily) conspired to prevent me from sending it off. So he sat on my hard drive and I'd poke him occasionally and give up again until one day, out of nowhere, I got this Send this off NOW spike which wouldn't let me leave the room. So I sent him off, where he was received, so I'm told, at exactly the right, critical time.

Or there was the time after I made skullbaby that I decided to make another mask, and started in on an Anubis one. Which then fizzled out and wouldn't let me finish it, and then I started hanging out with someone who worked with Anubis as an aspect. That mask now has a home, and is semi-finished, at least, and has already been used in a production.

It's things like this.

And my sense for these things isn't perfect; that's the cost of guessing, I suppose. But there have been enough hits (and only one real catastrophe) that I keep going with it, because if I don't, I end up feeling like a cad for weeks afterward.

Speaking of which, is there anyone who feels, metaphysically, like they're missing an epic Bengali lyrical love poem from me?

You know what? I have a headcold right now which is making it difficult to think about anything coherently, let alone put it into words, but it seems to me that the works people turn to in order to laugh, or to cry, or to get inspired by, or to masturbate to, or to fill an otherwise empty time are works which get remembered. If they're not remembered in specific detail, they're still remembered in favorable generalities, or why else would people make a habit of turning to them? The person who reads through en entire shelf of pulp novels, each one pretty much the same to an outside perspective, is getting something from those novels. The novels are filling a need.

And because they fill a need, or just because they comprise a present and recurrent part of the consumer's life, they converse with the consumer's worldview. People get inspired by a football play or moved by an anecdote in Reader's Digest, and those are real effects on real people. If you're good at matching a need to an audience, you can use those vehicles to make real changes.

You can use movies to liberalize attitues toward homosexuality. You can use photo galleries (link NSFW) to alter standards for physical attractiveness. You can use video games to educate children as to how to avoid landmines. You can use moments in softball games to teach lesson abut grace. This is true despite the fact that you'll have no difficulty finding people who will dismiss, out of hand, how seriously film or art or video games or sports should or can be taken.

Intended audiences derive meaning from what's produced to entertain them. By accident or design.

Which is why I balk when people dismiss the impact things like fiction – even fanfiction – can have, or when people say that no one should care what messages are put in movies, because they're just movies, after all. The implication is that things like racism or sexism or ableism or whathaveyou doesn't matter if it's shown in these things, because they matter so terribly little. Because of course the constant omission of the voices of people of color in literature doesn't contribute to the creation of a single story, and the fact that Edward is a vampire and thus clearly fictional means that a generation of young women readers won't grow up to romanticize stalking and other sorts of potentially dangerous behaviour.

Statements like "It's just fandom." "It's just TV." "It's just for fun." assume that people segment their experiences in such a way that those experiences don't ever cross over, ever inform each other. They assume that we gain and learn nothing from those things. And they assume that those things occur in a vacuum, sealed off from the rest of our experiences of the world, whether we're the consumers or the creators.

Human endeavor comes out of human experience and feeds back into human experience, whether or not it's supposed (or assumed) to. In many ways it's completely involuntary, as familiar scents trigger memories or, as Chimamanda Adichie recounted, our opinions of others fill themselves in on a paucity of facts. It's why watching our media, our art and our entertainment, can be such a valuable diagnostic tool as to the lives and opinions of the people – and why working to improve that can feed back and improve society as a whole.

I spent most of last week feeling like crap either physically or emotionally. (Or both. It was sometimes both.) Along with a persistent low-grade fever, I got hit with a case of I'm not doing anything with my life, I'm not going anywhere with my life, I will never amount to anything and I'm never going to mean more than I mean right now. Which is silly, and which I know is silly, because for where I am in my life I'm doing just fine – I've got a college degree, I've got a few publications, I've got a salaried job, and these are not small accomplishments. Which prompted some introspection on my part, and while this was originally going to be a much longer post rambling my way through that thought process, I don't have the focus to write it all out right now, so I'll just hit the highlights:

* I keep thinking that if I just do this or do that, I'll feel a lot better about myself, which isn't, so far as I can tell, true. I mean, when I was 19 I thought that being a Published Author!! would grant me some sort of inner sense of validity, which isn't really true; now that I've got fiction appearing here and there in magazines, what I'm really wondering is why it's not appearing in more. And why all of it is short-form. Honestly, I don't think that finishing a novel or sending it out or seeing it on bookshelves is going to be anything revelatory, either, if I manage it; there's still Ways Up to go.

* Phrased another way, the above can be succinctly summarized as if I just HAVE MORE accolades, I bet I'll be a happier person! I think this is about as useful as buying a new sportscar. ...perhaps moderately more useful. It still won't get me what I'm looking for.

* Honestly, I think some of it is that I keep looking for objective measurements that I'm doing well, and it's a big ol' thorny subjective world out there, and there are six billion different and usually contradictory rubrics available to grade myself against.

* * For example, I am an absolutely wretched conservative Christian.

* * But I like to think I'm at least a competent speculative fiction author.

* So, if I have to discard the HAVING THINGS/ACCOMPLISHMENTS model of Feeling Good About Myself, that leaves me at the common-sense stage of "...maybe instead of focusing on the XBox Acheivements (real life edition) of concepts of self-worth, I actually have to learn to like myself on my own terms, and for my own self (rather than Because It Can Be Demonstrated That I Am Doing Well), which is something I'm still learning how to do.

* * But I'm making some progress, I think.

Grah, I'm angry today.

I'm angry because insurance companies consider domestic violence a pre-existing condition (and thus ground for exclusion from coverage), I'm angry because privilege is invisible and people have to lie with bigotry from people they like and love.

I'm angry because a popular show I didn't particularly care about sucks balls when it comes to racial issues and a popular show I actually enjoy is unconsciously knee-deep in racial and gender issues.

I'm angry because calling a good female athlete "secretly a man" or a transsexual or a hermaphrodite is perfectly acceptable and grounds for humiliating them or ruining their careers.

I'm angry because we live in a broken society, and the people with the most power and perhaps the most responsibilty to change that society don't see any need to change it.

But most of all, I'm angry because I don't feel able to transmute that anger into something productive, something reformative. I need to teach myself how to write again, without worrying overmuch about the end product before I get to the end. I need to learn how to harness rage in a way which retains its power and gives it direction.

I need to learn how to sing for our lives.

Like several other states, California allows same-sex couples to enter "domestic partnerships", which afford many of the same rights as marriage.

But activists say such partnerships are not equivalent to marriage.

California Ruling on Gay Marriage, BBC.co.uk

Every time I see this mentioned, I just think: Wait a minute. Didn't we try something like this before? Didn't we decide it wasn't a good idea?

On the rhetoric angle: It seems as though a lot of the furor over same-sex marriage is about sullying the institution of marriage, as though allowing couples a religion doesn't approve of to me married, whether or not that religion has any bearing on the wedding or couple itself, will tear down everything. It's not Christian marriage or Catholic marriage or $religion_of_choice marriage that's in the courts, it's civil marriage, but I can still see the point if I tilt my head. Honestly, I'd be a lot more comfortable if all legal joins of this sort were referred to partnerships because marriage is such a loaded term; same- and different-sex couples would all seek partnerships through civil authorities and marriages through $religious_entity_of_choice. But that's me.

There's an article up on Wired about how a new form of socialism is emerging on the web – not one born out of an ideology or advanced by a political party, but one which emerges naturally out of the ways in which we use the 'net, and the tools and opportunites which the 'net provides. The first page includes this sentiment:

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. […] Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

I have a feeling that a lot of people would take exception to having their marriages "demoted" to partnerships. (Equal in the eyes of the culture, right.) If we're calling it marriage, let's call it marriage. Let's make it truly equal. You can't say "These two things are equal, but." Separation is not equal; maybe in a pure (and therefore necessarily theoretical) ideal society, but separation invites and allows differences in treatment.

C'mon, society, stop making excuses. Or at least know your history.

Well, I'm a college graduate now, and you'd think life would be quieting down and letting me focus on other things.

You'd be pretty much wrong.

I'm caught up in a flurry of job applications (jobseeking in this economy is, let me tell you, a constant trial of confidence), packing (early, early, I know, but I'm the sort who likes to have things worked out in advance), trying to work out exactly how to navigate this future of mine (with the great and abiding gratitude that L and I are sticking together), and engaging in mortal combat with various shortfics. Including that one which Cat Rambo of Fantasy Magazine is still waiting on a revision for. (I'm sorry! I'm working on it!)

I'm working full-time over the summer, and hoping to find a job prior to my move down to Phoenix. If I don't, I'll be looking for a temp job anywhere I can find as soon as I move in down there, and keeping my fingers crossed that I'll find a Web Development job at least before November when my student loan payments rear their ugly heads.

At work, I got a grand auld task last week – programming a project-specific timeclock for use with a Site-Specific Browser. It used a lot more JavaScript than I was used to working with – fun! – and it's being developed for the Fluid SSB – also fun!. This is one of those things I'm hoping for: that I'll find myself in a job where I'll have to keep doing new things. I don't quite feel right if I end the day only knowing the stuff I knew yesterday.

...

So, you may have noticed that I've got a Dreamwidth account. (Actually, two.) (Those of you reading along on LiveJournal, assuming that DW's auto-crossposting works as advertised, know that I'm posting this to http://magistrate.dreamwidth.org/ and your screens, you know, totally lie.) I'm still in the process of developing what it is I want to do with these, but the current plan is this: this account (magistrate) will be life an minutia; my other,

an_owomoyela will be all about writing and web development. Personal stuff will probably go here, access-controlled, or (if I'm really overserious about separating presentation and content) possibly to an eventual third journal. But it'll likely be to this one, because the annoyance of keeping track of multiple journals grows exponentially as you add them on.

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magistrate

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March 2024

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Page Summary

In which our intrepid author types non-sequiturs
(no subject)
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Omens
Stalling
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or, Why I am Bad At Write-a-thons
Right! The write-a-thon.
Film canisters
XKCD, Wikipedia, Fun, Games, and My Aparent Lack Of Anything Better To Do
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An odd note on my spirituality...
In defense of stuff.
"So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."
We are a gentle, angry people; we are a justice-seeking people.
Your tired, congested bloggist brings you... politics. This is a good idea.
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