Friends

mizchalmers

09:55 pm - i’ll eat you up, i love you so

Decentish flight. The girls were awesome and Julia in particular completely won the heart of a 20something Turkish? Lebanese? guy sitting across from her. I watched Samson and Delilah, the first feature by an indigenous director to earn more than $1m. Wrenching, luminous. We emerged blinking into an overcast Sydney Christmas morning and I drove with great care to 7a. Julia flung herself into Janny’s arms. Claire was occupied in counting the stairs to the front door.

We had Christmas lunch at Lulworth. I barely recognized Ric. He has lost a lot of weight and is mostly in a wheelchair and hardly talks any more, although he did ask very characteristically “From where did their flight originate?” The children were buried in toys. After a brief recess we resumed festivities for Claire’s birthday and dinner and cake. If I woke at 6am on the 23rd and flew out at 11pm and the flight was 15 hours and then I was awake from 9am to 9pm, I think that makes about 54 hours of Christmas? In the event it was just about one hour too long. I retired to bed and slept for a year or so.

Woke to the sound of birdsong and rain. Called Kay and Thussy and arranged to see them; bundled up the kids and Jeremy and Jan and went to the lovely Randwick Ritz, a beautiful old Art Deco cinema palace, where we finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Clearly, I am a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king; it all makes sense now. We went to one of the cafes on Bronte Beach for lunch and saw a hundred or so white sails against the grey sky as the yachts set out for Hobart.

Mirrored from Yatima.

whumpdotcom

06:56 pm

The roast is in the oven, and I'm cooking down the apples for a tart tatine on the stove.

Everything else was 'pre-catered' from the grocers, so I just have to heat them up.

There are tamales in in the fridge, which I'll steam for the Boxing Day open house. I need to wrap cynthia1960's gift before she gets here.

Arcade Fire's playing on the media server.

Merry whatever you're celebrating.

dreadberry

02:55 pm - Trailer Psychosis with Charisma Carpenter

that is my daughter at 1:42...

whumpdotcom

11:17 pm - For those of you tiring of holiday music

The Smithereens playing Behind the Wall of Sleep live in a small club, fierce as ever.

Nataly Dawn covering OK Go's Do What You Want. I love how she uses composition to expose the production process in her work.

I love this version of Y.M.O.'s Technopolis and Rydeen on electric piano and bass. The edit's rough but they are having a blast.

mizchalmers

04:55 pm - taking flight

Enormous mood oscillations as we run the last few errands and try to pack for Australia without leaving the apartment in its customary shambles. I’m going to miss you all, right down to the mean old cat.

Mirrored from Yatima.

nancymcc

10:14 pm - What I want from social media

I said it in my Social Media Marketing class, and I'll say it here. Then you can make the same response I got from the instructors and the more savvy fellow students.

I want to "see myself as others see me"! When I update my profile or make a post, please show me exactly what other people will see! LinkedIn is good... it has a link to "Public Profile." FaceBook actually gave me a way to specify "see your profile as your friend so-and-so sees it (based on your Privacy settings)." That's pretty cool (if I can ever find that interface again on FB, always dicey).

But when I do an LJ cut, I can never figure out how to tell if it worked. I've tried loggin g out and going to a friend's Friends page, but I don't see my post. Huh? And on Twitter, I was changing my profile. When I wanted to view it, I kept getting a page saying "this is YOU." Duh! Show me what other people see, you idiots!

Now, your line is (and my instructors said): "Nancy, quit being such a control freak. Social media sites aren't like all those web sites you've built and updated for 15 years; people don't hold you responsible for the format."

But I'm a designer, dammit! Besides, if my LJ cut doesn't work, then I've just filled up my friends' Friends page with long text. I want to practice the Golden Rule.

mizchalmers

06:25 pm - by satellite, by satellite, by satellite

If you go to flummery.org and scroll down to Handlebars, which is right now the second on the list, you’ll see the awesome inspiration for yesterday’s gloom. It’s a portrait of the Tenth Doctor as the lonely trickster God, getting increasingly out of control. It got me thinking about how the Doctor is in some ways the personification of Britain, or even of the Anglosphere: brilliant, in love with humanity, in love with cleverness, lacking a sense of proportion, ruthless, Death, destroyer of worlds.

It’s a remarkably prescient piece of work, foreshadowing not only the 2009 story arc of Doctor Who itself but also that of the Obama administration. But as the first-hand accounts start trickling out of the smoking embers of Copenhagen, it’s clear that the days of the Anglophone trickster are over. It was China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the USA that sat down in the decisive meeting, and it was China that prevailed. It’s the Monkey King’s century now. It’s his planet to destroy.

Mirrored from Yatima.

opalmirror

06:27 pm - Mostly better, and yet...

Today has been a fun, wonderful, indulgent, busy, choreful, and not at all productive day... tomorrow is very clear of distractions so I'm hoping that I can make two day's progress in it. In general I am doing way, way better with my grief and the distracting, encouraging power of the week's vacation in Puerto Rico (photos going up a few at a day) was just what I needed to keep me more on an even keel. However, tonight brings a lot of tears, and today feels like it's pretty much done as far as my attention and will are concerned.

One of the things I did today was grocery shopping. Early in our relationship shopping was Kathryn's job, but the last few years she became less and less able to do so from physical, mental, chemical problems. So, I picked up the slack and did most everything that required venturing forth, although in the end she'd leave the house to drive herself to her doctors, and occasional trips out to events with friends.

I still drop in on the store. It's just about as often, because really, Kathryn did not eat much. :-( I went through Oregon City today the back way, going past the hospital where I last saw her alive. That night after she called me in the ER, was stabilized, and sent up to the hospital, refused further care and checked out of the hospital - I helped her into a cab to take her home because I was worried she would make another scene in the pickup if I took her home as she requested. That was such a wretched night, but I am glad I was there to help a little and at least to see her. Because we were seperated I never saw her again until Valerie and I viewed her dead body about seven weeks later.

Several times now I have gone back to stand in that same spot at the hospital where the cab picked her up. It was about a year ago, about Dec 12 or so, just before the huge snowstorm. I've left flowers there too on a few occasions... even dahlias from the garden I planted in her memory. I miss looking into her eyes and the look on her face, even though at the time I knew I could not clear the fog of her confusion, depression, addiction, confusion.

I've been buying her favorite cut flower, freesia, and they perfume the entire main floor of my home. They make me smile. I light the candles and sit in my living room and the tears come and I miss her. It may be a mistake, it's definitely looking backward. My beautiful girl, I miss the wonderful times and the good times very much. I miss my companion. There's no way to get those days back. It's too much work and effort to train someone else up who would understand me, and they would be different. I still feel so emotionally exhausted. I just want fun and love and sunny days and a hand in mine and someone who knows all my stories that I can curl up with. I had that, off and on, and then off a long time, and now she's dead, completely gone from loving, completely gone from the hope of more good times. Still I buy the flowers and smile, but then I cry and cry.

This time is but a moment, a glint from the turning gem that is life. I'm fine, I'll be OK, I just feel the loss tonight of what I built with my mate. Time to treat myself with love and care and tomorrow will be a better, more effective day.

ETA OK I think I have this figured out....the cause and effect. Last night a (non-romantic) friend came over for a movie and we hugged and sat side by side on the sofa while looking at travel photos. Today I had a massage, the first in a long time. That part of my brain involved with people and touch is awake for the first time in a while. I bet it[s linking up with all the Kathryn connections which is making my brain wonder 'where is that girl? she should be around here somewhere!' and that is where the missing/loss feelings are coming up for me. It's only natural. I need to gently retrain those associations over time, and let them know Kathryn isn't the only source of warmth and closeness. I'll work on it.

mizchalmers

01:15 pm - power and pragmatism

In some ways it’s more painful to live under the Obama administration than under Bush. You seriously never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? It’s impossible, however, to avoid the conclusion, if you sit down and look at this botch of a health care bill – women and children thrown under the bus again – and the near-total-disaster of Copenhagen – saved only by the man himself arriving in his Tardis at the last possible moment and salvaging something, anything from the wreckage.

I had hoped for so much more. I don’t know what. Comprehensive, single-payer health insurance and a binding treaty on climate change, for a start. I know Obama is at heart a moderate, a reformer, one who believes in institutions and working through them. I don’t know whether I am that moderate any more. I held on through the tumultuous summer and fall but when he committed tens of thousands more troops to the war in Afghanistan – I almost wrote fresh troops but they won’t be fresh, they’ll be the same tiny minority of working-class people on their sixth or seventh tour – the president broke my heart.

I am not saying I have better options. I guess that’s my point. I let myself dream of better days, and now those days are here and they involve a difficult and disappointing set of compromises with the real world and its constraints, and I no longer even have the fire of my outrage to keep me warm. Paul Krugman, who is rather like Jeremy in his infuriating habit of being right about everything all the time, tells me to suck it up. “If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.”

No one is coming to the rescue. Time to grow up.

Mirrored from Yatima.

dreadberry

03:36 pm - Kurtis Barks Remix

mizchalmers

08:30 pm - christmas came early

Epic days these days usually have a substantial barn component; today was barnier than most. Erin was giving us a dressage lesson and Toni rode past to report that whoever was supposed to ride Bella hadn’t turned up, and that Bella would need to be ridden.

“I’ll ride her,” I said cheerfully. Toni and Erin looked at each other, and Toni said: “Okay. This can be your Christmas present.”

So I had an hour on Scottie, keeping my hands still and soft, trying to get him to work off my leg; achieving with satisfaction two good canter transitions where I squeezed him with my calves and felt his hind legs stepping forward – outside/inside – into the gait. Then I got off and saddled Bella and got back on and had an hour on her; a brief school in the indoor arena, and then a long walk around the Stanford Linear Accelerator with Erin, who was riding The Flying Dutchman. We walked above 280 for a bit and revelled in the knowledge that at least some of the people driving past us wished they could be us.

So I wanted Bella for Christmas, and I got her.

On the drive home I had a good idea for a YA novel.

As 280 swung down to San Jose I saw this fire starting – first the old cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which could have been no more than shadowy slip of fog, but by the time I got to Randall Street a thick black mushroom of ill omen. I am glad all the people got out, and I am very sorry about the cat.

Then we picked up Rowan and drove to Heather’s house, where we decorated and ate approximately one million cookies, and the children were reasonably charming, and we met a man who had grown up in Ryde in Sydney and who is flying out on the same flight as us on Wednesday, and we started listing people we might know in common and his first one was Rachel Moerman. So I laughed and said: “Have you met her boyfriend?” “Who, Big?” “Yep. Notice the family resemblance?” “Oh!”

Now there are eggs baking for dinner.

Mirrored from Yatima.

gayathri

06:28 pm - some days, you should just stay in bed

I've been having terrible nightmares and having a ton of trouble sleeping.

This holiday season in particular, I'm having a _ton_ of trouble dealing with the Holiday Sugar Craze. As I'm continuing this journey on maintaining good blood sugar control, overindulging is now even more obvious in the immediate - high blood sugars make me feel like _crap_ and trigger lows that make me feel worse.
I know people are trying to be nice and generous during this time, but I really really do not want to go down into the kitchen at work, and am happy I'm avoiding being in the office today as its apparently "Cake Day" - already, gingerbread cookies, cinnamon rolls, muffins, various chocolate cakes are being advertised on the local office mailing list. I love gingerbread. LOVE it. :(


I dont know why in particular its so difficult this year, but I just wanted to note it to comment to myself.

(Results from the doc are in, my internal estimates were correct, just a boot to the ass to get myself in gear again regarding being consistent about exercise.)

Upcoming: starting to keep a food log, keeping up on the exercise log and bg logs - looking back at my bg / exercise logs, I can see where I'm falling off, and the correlation between the two.

Current Mood: cranky

mizchalmers

01:37 pm - millennials

It’s no secret how I felt about this decade geopolitically; a decade that started with massive election fraud (not that liar Lieberman would have been a better VP than Cheney), that devolved into state-sponsored mayhem and murder, that saw the ocean rise up and swallow a quarter of a million people and flood one of my favourite cities on earth.

Speaking personally, though, holy wow.

Mirrored from Yatima.

badgerbag

09:36 am - Half-truths

Why men don't promote women

Some truths there but it's bullshit. Women don't get the same reaction or reward, on the whole, for being pushy or aggressive or promoting themselves.

I'm fine with trying, but there are good reasons more women don't do this, it's because often there are negative consequences and hostility and more exclusion when we do.

mizchalmers

08:53 am - bukes of the year

Offshore</p>

Laugh out loud mordant.</p>

Mary Olivier: A Life</p>

I can’t imagine why this perceptive, penetrating novel isn’t considered a modern classic.</p>

Of Human Bondage</p>

This is, of course, and God knows why it took me so long to read it. It’s wonderful. I am looking forward to everything else by Maugham.</p>

The Aquariums of Pyongyang</p>

Included not so much for its writing as for its astonishing and chilling survivor testimony from the North Korean gulag.</p>

The Halfway House</p>

A despairing, beautiful, haunting account of Cuban refugees in Miami.</p>

Lilith’s Brood</p>

Octavia Butler was the single most important find of the year, and this may be her masterpiece.</p>

The File</p>

The ideal book to read on the 20th anniversary of the fall of East Germany.</p>

The American Painter Emma Dial</p>

As vivid and sad as a drowned bird in a swimming pool.</p>

The Story of a Marriage</p>

Set in my San Francisco in the forties, and containing a couple of twists that I did. not. see. coming.</p>

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court</p>

Gossipy and absorbing; good background for the appointment of Sotomayor, and terrifying in its portrayal of the ultra right wing Roberts court.</p>

Tales from Outer Suburbia</p>

An artifact from the world of my childhood, which never existed.</p>

Ice Bound</p>

The memoir of the doctor who, while wintering over at the South Pole, found a lump in her breast. A love song to the ice.</p>

China Mountain Zhang</p>

I didn’t know science fiction could do that.</p>

Shelter</p>

Or that.</p>

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living</p>

(sings) “C! S! I! RO!”</p>

Seed to Harvest</p>

Saint Octavia hear my cry.

Kamikaze Girls</p>

Entirely responsible for my newfound love of Lolita culture.</p>

Brother, I’m Dying</p>

Immigration is murder.</p>

The Girls Who Went Away</p>

Essential companion reading and a corrective to Juno.</p>

Fledgling</p>

Not my first Butler but the first to sink its fangs into my throat, to my great delight.</p>

Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe</p>

Doreen Baingana c’est moi, if I had grown up in Uganda and become a wonderful writer.</p>

Tales of Nevèryön</p>

Reformatted my brain and opened a new eye.</p>

The Arrival</p>

As predicted, the best book of the year.</p>

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination</p>

Smashed my heart into tiny shards.

Books by women: 14/24
Books by writers of colour: 11/24 – I owe this entirely to the fantastic 50books_poc community.
Books from the San Francisco Public Library: 18/24. I LOVE YOU SFPL.

Mirrored from Yatima.

jrtom

02:35 pm - Alice in Wonderland...and quaternions?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391.600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved.html?haasFormId=4755e0cc-f51b-4173-80d7-021bf157cf4a&haasPage=0

(I think that it's possible that the author is making a tempest out of a t-pot, but it's an amusing article.)

Current Mood: amused

mizchalmers

02:47 pm - a serviceable paradise

I finally made it over to the new Blue Bottle Coffee location near work, for yogurt parfait and New Orleans iced coffee. It’s a stunning place, all blond wood and huge windows, just like my idealized typical Sydney cafe. Idealized Sydney is awesome; the food is incredible and there are no cockroaches and everyone is going to live forever. I am about to head back to Australia and tear myself apart all over again, the neurotic expatriate’s annual orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt. Whee. I didn’t love my country until I left it and now I long for it with an intense and hopeless passion. I also greatly fear having to move back. Don’t you wish you were me? To paraphrase Garfield, until you actually go and live there again, Sydney makes a very serviceable paradise.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with the notion of sanctuary: a farm in a green valley fortified by impassable mountains (it was somewhere near Lithgow, or maybe Braidwood), a nine-hundred-year-old college quadrangle, a city on a hill. After ten years of war and bloodshed and political heartbreak, and after having my babies in an empire that seems to have gone mad with its own power, my longing for safety is more intense than ever. And at 38 I am finally smart enough to have figured out that nowhere is safe. Bushfires threaten my parents’ little country town; California’s bankruptcy is the water eroding the foundations of UC Berkeley; San Francisco trembles astride the San Andreas fault.

James Ellroy says “Closure is bullshit,” and he is right. Sanctuary’s bullshit too, and so are happy endings, and so is vindication. The grave’s a fine and private place; other places are busy and beset with interruptions and altogether not so fine. I blame time. It’s time that slams asteroids into your Chicxulubs and shoots your last breeding female in the eastern migratory Whooping Crane population. Of course it’s also time that puts a brand new baby Claire in your arms in the dark of a Christmas morning; that wakes you up at dawn to look into the wide blue eyes of a brand new baby Julia. I would not, in fact, have wanted to miss those moments.

Sanctuary is bullshit. Imaginary Sydney is imaginary and so is imaginary San Francisco, and this sensation of treading water, of struggling to finish a to-do list that gets longer the more items you cross off, this is, in fact, the experience of life itself. You wake up and hug your brilliant, stubborn children, you go to work and listen to peoples’ stories and try to figure out what it is they are asking for and which wishes of theirs you can grant, you listen to music and you mourn your beloved dead. And if you’re lucky you get a few minutes a day, three strides of Bella in a collected canter, one really good cup of coffee, kissing Jeremy on his throat and feeling his heartbeat quicken. The memory of the candlelit table on Sunday night, and everyone laughing.

Mirrored from Yatima.

gayathri

08:50 am - Happy Birthday

To the United States Bill of Rights - I've been sort of feeling like I no longer had all of them, but I'm still hopeful that this will keep changing.

Current Mood: cheerful

whumpdotcom

11:14 pm - Gender's not a binary, unless you're in advertising...

As reported elsewhere, Live Journal will now require all new registrants to declare their gender, the motivation for this is most likely reporting to advertisers, and as many of you have experienced, advertisers ability to target is on par with the circular error probable of early Soviet ICBMs, and compensated with a corresponding level of overkill (i.e. weight loss ads.)

I did change my name on LJ (as well as unsetting my gender bit,) for the sake of snark. I hope that Alice Sheldon would had approved.

mizchalmers

03:00 pm - another cheering thing

…is to try to host a small dinner for Optimal Husband on the occasion of his birthday, and to have it pack out the beautiful back room at a favourite local restaurant, and to look up the table at our friends’ faces bathed in candlelight and to be amazed all over again at how smart and funny and pretty they all are, and how much I love them.

Mirrored from Yatima.