“Every time you let a homophobic or transphobic joke or slur pass, you tell the speaker that you condone their speech, and you help perpetuate a culture in which hatred of LGBTQIA people is acceptable and in which violence against LGBTQIA people is inevitable. ” — MakeMeASammich.OrgSix months ago today an angry man walked into Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando, and murdered 49 people. According to the FBI and his own family, during the weeks and months leading up to the attack, he had become more noticeably outraged every time he saw gay men in public together. He plotted the crime carefully. He set up fake profiles on gay hook-up apps and used conversations there to find out which night clubs would have the biggest crowd. It was a carefully crafted anti-queer hate crime.
All of those things are still true. And with hate crimes on the rise since November 8, even more heart wrenching.
Please take to heart the words in the graphic I included at the top of this post: “Every time you let a homophobic or transphobic joke or slur pass, you tell the speaker that you condone their speech, and you help perpetuate a culture in which hatred of LGBTQIA people is acceptable and in which violence against LGBTQIA people is inevitable.” That’s not an exaggeration. If our very existence is nothing more than a joke, that implies our lives and deaths don’t matter. Those attacks and dismissals perpetuate the lie that we deserve pain and suffering. They perpetuate the lie that we shouldn’t exist. They perpetuate the lie that our love isn’t real.
And all of those lies add up to one message that some angry people are all too ready to take to heart: that beating us, shooting us, and killing us isn’t really a crime.
We got married four years ago on the first day that it was legal in our state, and I kept treating it as an elopement. My reasoning was that first, Michael and I had been together for over 15 years already, and second we had very vague plans to try to do something more official later. Which we have failed to do. Anyway, some of our friends who were helping didn’t take my casual attitude to heart, and they surprised us by decorating the home where we were doing it with a ton of beautiful flowers in Christmas colors, not to mention the surprise live music and so forth. So our wedding flower colors were white and red, therefore I buy Michael a Christmas-themed bouquet on our anniversary, now.So, for the last couple of weeks my plan for our wedding anniversary was that I was going to get up before Michael did (as I always do on days he doesn’t have to work), go pick up some flowers, and then make him breakfast, so I could wake him up with a Happy Anniversary thing, right? It was a plan, it was a good plan, with only one problem.
For some reason, I thought Saturday was the 9th. And I had Friday off as a vacation day, whereas he was going to be working. And I knew I had to finish the Christmas shopping on Friday, so it would be the perfect time to pick up the fixin’s for the breakfast, right?
Well, Friday we got snow, so at about 5:30am when my hubby usually goes to work he woke me up to tell me he’d decided to take a personal day rather than ride his bike on the ice- and snow- covered roads while Seattle drivers were losing their minds because of snow. Fine, no problem, I could still do this. When I woke up later I was working on some writing and trying to decide when I should go shopping when I finally noticed that my calendar app on the computer had a big ol’ 9 on the icon.
Funny side note: on Thursday, that same calendar app gave me a reminder that a former co-worker’s birthday was Friday. But it didn’t remind me that my anniversary was the same day because genius that I am, I have never entered our anniversary into the calendar. D’oh!
Midmorning I realized that our anniversary wasn’t Saturday, but it was that day. So I went upstairs, wished him a happy anniversary, and apologized for getting the days mixed up. He pointed out that he hadn’t said anything about it, either, so I didn’t really have anything to apologize for.
So, we went out to brunch, then we did the Christmas shopping together, I didn’t pick up the breakfast fixin’s. It was okay.
This morning, I woke up and decided that I would proceed with the plan. So I walked to Ballard Market, picked up flowers, picked up fixin’s for biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs, and bacon breakfast, and came home and got to work.
I was about midway through cooking when he got out of bed earlier than usual and came downstairs. He expressed surprised I was cooking a big breakfast. I told him that I was in the middle of making a surprise breakfast for him, and shoo-ed him out of the kitchen saying, “Go look at your late Anniversary Flowers!”
And he said, “They aren’t late. They’re Anniversary-plus-one Flowers.”
Since I was the kind of nerd who had toy rockets as a kid and watched the news whenever NASA had a mission on the air back in the 60s, I’m more than a bit saddened that John Glenn has left us.
Last weekend we got the outdoor Christmas lights up, set up and decorated the tree, and assembled and hung the wreaths on the door. I also got out lights to put in the windows and had planned all week long to put those up, but I haven’t. I’ll try to get that done this weekend.
Anyway, here are links to stories I found interesting, sorted by category.
Sherman Alexie Talks About Writing in the Era of Trump. “Trump won because of two specific groups of white people. The moderate working-class whites and the leftist Jill Stein voters. One side rooting for an America that never existed and one side rooting for an America that is never going to exist. It was the romantic dreams of both sides that gave us Trump. And it’s a small population in the swing states: It comes down to 250,000 people. If 250,000 of them over seven states changed their mind, this would have been a Clinton blowout. So it’s not just a certain kind of conservative voter we need to be appealing to. We also need to straighten out those leftist assholes. I’m a far leftist who thinks no one like me should be in charge of shit.”
“You know how you just wake up some mornings and you feel so refreshed and cheerful, you’re like ‘I don’t even need coffee’? Me, either. And I don’t trust anyone who says they do. Uncaffeinated freaks.” — Nanea Hoffman, SweatpantsAndCoffee.comOne time my husband and I were discussing sleep schedules, and specifically how I much I regret it if I stay up too late on weekends, because it is so difficult to get up and going on time come Monday morning. He didn’t quite understand what I was getting at, and made a comment along the lines of, “Maybe since you don’t drink coffee during the work week, you shouldn’t drink coffee in the weekends.”
I stared at him open-mouth for a moment then asked, “What make you think I don’t drink coffee during the work week?”
“I’ve never heard you say you’re going on a coffee break.”
So I had to explain to him that in the software industry (at least the places I’ve worked) people don’t take official coffee breaks. You get to the office, you hang up your jacket and so forth, boot up your workstation, grab your coffee mug and head to the kitchen. You then bring your full coffee cup back to your desk and sip it while you work. And you go back to the kitchen and refill your coffee cup whenever the heck you want to, and bring it back to your desk.
Yeah, sometimes you wind up hanging in the kitchen chatting with co-workers. And some folks prefer to have a specific time they leave their desks for a break, but most of us take a lot of mini-breaks throughout the day. And, of course, folks whose jobs involve answering the phone (tech support, customer service, sales) don’t have the flexibility to get up and go refill coffee whenever. But for the rest of us, particularly since most of us aren’t hourly and wind up putting in more than 40 hours a week anyway, don’t really worry about rigid break times.
I do block off lunch time. I used to not do that, and work while eating at my desk like a lot of my co-workers. But some years ago I had a boss who really believed that one of your responsibilities is to take care of yourself so you can do a good job. I still eat at my desk, but my work computer is logged out, and I spend the time writing on my iPad or catching up on the news.
At the time we had this conversation, I was drinking on a typical workday at least six mugs of coffee a day.
The other reason he thought I didn’t drink coffee during the week is that I seldom made pots of coffee at home during the week. I’m a cheapskate, son of cheapskate, grandson of penny-pinchers, et cetera. Of course I’m not going to make extra coffee for myself if I can get it free at work! Which proves that I’m nowhere near the caffeine fiend that I sometimes talk like, because I can muddle through the morning get ready for work routine without several cups of coffee.
Note, however, that I didn’t say without caffeine. See, on a typical Monday morning, for instance, there is coffee in the pot left over from Sunday. And yes, I will stick a mug of that in the microwave and heat it up on Mondays. And other days, well, before I had the fancy electric teakettle thing, I would fill a mug with water, drop a teabag in it, and stick it in the microwave. Just a little caffeine to start the day, right?
On a typical work day, then, I have a mug of some caffeinated beverage early in the morning, then a couple of mugs of office coffee once I get to the office, and then four or so cups of tea in the afternoon. I betray my cheapskate heritage on that, because the office tea selection is often pretty boring, so I have a few of my favorites (double bergamot earl grey, aged earl grey, jasmine green, lavender earl grey, blackberry oolong, green & black earl grey… that sort of thing) in a drawer at the office.
So, yes, I need my caffeine. It gets me through the day. And some of it is in the form of coffee. And I sometimes make disparaging remarks about people who don’t indulge. And I know that I shouldn’t. Some folks have medical reasons to avoid caffeine. Some people have religious objections. And some people just don’t like coffee or tea. I am boggled at the last, but try to remind myself that lots of people are completely baffled at just how much I hate the taste of raisins.
So I try to live in peace with the decaffeinated freaks around me, even the ones who actually like the satanic fruit in muffins or cookies or whatever new kind of food someone has decided to ruin with raisins. And I hope that they will be equally accepting of what a weird caffeinated freak I am. Because on the whole, all people are strange. If there’s someone who doesn’t appear to be weird in some way, that just means you don’t know them well enough.
It’s December, and that means I’m trying to write yet another original Christmas Ghost Story to read at our annual holiday get together. But as is often the case, I have too many plots and can’t quite settle on which one to write.
Which is where you can help!
If you haven’t already, go to Which Christmas Ghost should I write? and take the poll. Seeing which things interests people does help. I may not wind up finishing the story more people vote for this time around, but just seeing people voting gives me at least a bit more motivation.
“Coffee is a drug… a warm delicious drug.”— BrainlessTales.comDecember (and the latter half of November) in the office is always weird. People take vacation time. A lot of people take vacation time. Business slows down. Even the tech support lines get quieter. At the same time, any issue that comes up always seems to be urgent. I think the increased urgency is in part a consequence of the people being gone in our company, and the vendors’ offices, and the customers’ offices—either the person who knew who to call when something goes wrong is out, or the person who was covering for someone else who was out didn’t recognize the seriousness of a problem, or there are just longer gaps of time to get approvals so by the time a go-ahead comes through it was needed last week.
So it’s always weirdly quiet, some days to the point of making you wonder why you bothered coming into the office, with random moments of frenzied activity, leaving a lingering hint of impending calamity in the air. It’s just fraught.
For the last twenty-eight years I’ve worked in the telecommuncations industry, and in the early years some more experienced co-workers said it was typical for our industry in particular and tech industries in general. I don’t know if it’s really just us or not. But I have gotten a lot better at not getting as discombobulated when a director or veep calls me directly to tell me to drop everything and work on this, or to ask why this thing that I have heard about only seconds before the call isn’t done, yet. But knowing that the stuff I’m already working on is due at a date that is not realistic, and that some of the people who I need to get information from are not going to be available for significant stretches of time during that interval, and then getting a call from a Senior Director saying he needs help with this thing—that uses up a lot of spoons.
Which is a long way to get to saying that I haven’t been in a good place mentally at lunch time to get writing done for a few weeks. And while it never seems as if the amount of writing I get done at lunch is that much, I recognize that spending that fifteen-twenty minutes thinking about the current writing project in the middle of my day goes a long way toward getting me to a productive space by the time I get home.
Because I usually walk home from work (it takes just a bit over an hour), I’ve gotten used to having that time to think and process. When I’m in a good writing groove, most of the walk will consist of characters in my head having lively discussions about things. I’m noticing that if lunchtime writing isn’t good, then the walk home doesn’t involve those character conversations.
I don’t know how to fix that, right now. I’ll just have to keep muddling forward.
But you can help. If you haven’t already, go to Which Christmas Ghost should I write? and take the poll. Seeing which things interests people does help. I may not wind up finishing the story more people vote for this time around, but just seeing people voting gives me at least a bit more motivation.
Since 1995 I have written an original Christmas Ghost Story that I then read (or otherwise perform; one required ukulele, there have also been costumes) at the annual Holiday Party “sponsored” by the Tai-Pan Literary and Arts Project. Some years the ghost story is set in the Tai-Pan universe (which makes it fun, since that universe is a hard sci fi universe; I’ve had to be a bit creative about the definition of a ghost), some have been set in universes of my own creating.
I have a rather long document that I keep adding Christmas Ghost Story ideas to, so even though I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, I’m not out of ideas. That’s actually the problem, I have so many ideas, that trying to get myself to focus on one and finish it is always a little bit of a struggle. Thus the many times I have posted a comment to social media in the wee small hours of the night before the party that I have finally finished this year’s…
Anyway, I’ve kind of narrowed it down to four that are speaking to me this year, and still trying to decide. So, I’m turning to the wilds of the internet and giving you a chance to weigh in. Read the titles and teasers below, and pick the one that you would most like to hear on a spooky winter’s night:
Some notes: in the past some friends have at first declined to vote because they didn’t feel that they were sufficiently familiar with the universe or stories. Please don’t let that stop you. People who are familiar with my work will have a really good guess who at least one of the protagonists above is, but don’t feel you have to be in the slightest familiar with me or my work to cast a vote.
I don’t guarantee that the winner is what I’ll work on. Some years I spend days nearly finishing one story, and then have a blast of inspiration that results in my writing a completely different tale. But I can’t decide, so maybe you can help!
Technically, the President (and the Vice-President) are not elected until the electors for each state meet in the capital of said state and each cast one vote for President and one for Vice-President. Each state has a number of electors equal to the total of their representatives in the lower house of Congress plus their Senators. This means that the states with lower populations actually have a disproportionately greater say in the outcome of the Presidential election because even states that don’t have enough population to get more than one Representative have two Senators. We can argue later about why the Founding Fathers set up this system1, but it’s the system we have.
And this is how we’re in a spot where one candidate has received more than 2 million more votes than the one that everyone is calling the winner.
So, on December 19 the electors meet, and under the Constitution can technically cast their votes for just about anyone. Many states levy fines against electors who do not cast their votes for the candidate who won the most votes in that state, but 33 do not. And that’s what this movement is about. And it’s not just about signing a petition. There’s more: 16 DAYS LEFT: AN ACTION PLAN TO STOP DONALD TRUMP.
I don’t have a lot of hope for it, to be honest. Each campaign that has a candidate on a state ballot submits its list of electors, and the electors already pledged to one candidate or the other are the only ones who meet to cast their votes. This is why the recount lawsuits were our best2 shot at stopping the orange narcissist and the band of neo-Nazis that he is putting in charge from coming to power. If a recount in a state showed that a different candidate had won, then a different set of electors would meet in that state’s capitol.
So, if you participate in the letter writing campaign, understand that we’re asking people who committed to vote for the Bratman to, instead, vote for the candidate that most of them loathe3. And know that one of the Texas electors is so angry at people contacting him that he tried to get the Texas Attorney General to file charges4 against the first many people who did so.
Still, even if all we accomplish is get a few more people to understand exactly why the Electoral College must go6, this effort will have been worth it.
1. Two reasons:
they were extremely fond of legislative bodies which they believed were more thoughtful than ordinary voters,
the slave states had lower population densities than the non-slave states at the time and liked a system that gave them some leverage to get the northern states from ending slavery by a popular vote.
2. And we knew it was a slim chance, but…
3. Decades of demonization by Fox “news” and white nationalists et al will do that.
4. I don’t know what crime he thought they committed. And here’s the thing: technically, being an elector means that you are, for at least a brief time, a government official. That means petitioning you is a right that we are all guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution. The same one these manbabies are always citing when they want to call discrimination “religious freedom.”5
5. And when I said in the first footnote that the Founding Fathers were fond of legislative bodies, one of the things they envisioned was citizens being able to contact the electors and say, “I know the vote went one way earlier, but we have more information now…”
6. Previous times that the candidate who lost the popular vote won the elector college vote have all resulted in disastrous presidents. Just sayin’!
I think we all could use a hug from Chewie…My brand new Macbook Pro arrived two days before the end of NaNoWriMo, and three days before another deadline I was trying to hit, so I set it up as quickly as I could and tried to just muddle through any of the typical glitches you get whenever you migrate all your stuff to a new machine. All of the glitches so far seem to be software related. Many the sorts that wind up being fixed by deleting preference files or other configuration things that were imported from the old machine and rebooting to get the operating system to rebuild them.
I’m not doing a full review, yet, because I haven’t really used it under circumstances where I think everything of that nature has been cleared up since. But, I am very happy with it, so far. I think following my hubby’s advice to buy the most powerful model I can afford now was the right choice.
While I’m feeling pretty good about our plans and prep for Christmas (I have at least one present for every person on my list, though I have a couple of big ones I still need to get). I did not get the Christmas tree set up or any of the lights up last weekend. But I think once I get the two errands out of the house I need to do today done that I’ll be able to jump into that.
I started working on the Christmas card list. I thought my first step was going to be pinging people I don’t think I have a current address for. But no the first (very depressing) step was deleting some addresses because the person has died in the last year. Yes, there were multiples.
Anyway, after I did that I decided to take a look at tumblr to cleanse my brain, and someone had posted that gif of Chewbacca giving Leia a hug, and I realized we all need a good hug.
Who benefits from a higher minimum wage? (Click to embiggen)It’s a Friday. The first Friday in December and oh my goodness where has the year gone?
I’m not working from home today. Which is a good thing for this blog post because what with trying to finish both NaNoWriMo and another writing deadline I had, I didn’t have as much time to work on the links this week as usual.
Anyway, here are links to stories I found interesting, sorted by category.
Amid government ignorance and equivocal science, Flint residents mold their lives around perpetual crisis and endless unanswerable questions.. I’m putting this under science in part because of some of the scary things it says about our entire water supply and how little we understand it: “We know very little about the microbial water quality in pipes and distribution systems and household plumbing,” said Joan Rose, a microbiologist at Michigan State University who has been actively researching the emerging Flint crisis since 2014. In March, Rose was awarded the prestigious Stockholm Water Prize for her research into water quality, microbiology, and public health. “You mean we know very little about that in Flint?” I asked. “No, I mean we don’t know that much about it at all, anywhere.” “Well,” I replied, “that’s kind of terrifying.” “It should be,” she said.
How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media. “Our journalistic and political assumption is that each side to a debate will “try” to tell the truth — and will count it as a setback if they’re caught making things up. Until now the idea has been that if you can show a contrast between words and actions, claim and reality, it may not bring the politician down, but it will hurt… None of this works with Donald Trump. He doesn’t care, and at least so far the institutional GOP hasn’t either.”
Bloomberg: Breitbart writer Milo makes money from gay “sugar daddies”. The headline is a little misleading; it’s not the Bloomberg published an expose of a scandalous secret: Milo bragged in the interview about the tens of thousands of dollars men have paid him for having sex with them. What? This story is short and hilarous, go read it!
My NaNoWriMo project this year was to fix the gaping plotholes in two novels that I had decided to split apart from a previous NaNoWriMo. I had decided that there were just way too many subplots for one novel, and the fact that for at least three-fourths of the original 105,000 word draft that there were a bunch of the characters who never interacted with the others until the end, led me to try separating it.
But it wasn’t a matter of arbitrarily breaking it in the middle and trying to write something that would feel like climax but still lead into book two. The first two-thirds of book two happens at the same time as the entirety of book one, and then all the characters from book one start coming into the main plot of book two. Also one of the sets of subplots came together in a big battle (it’s a light fantasy in an epic fantasy wrapper, so there are battles) in the second half of the original rough draft made the book feel as if it had two climaxes, so trying to turn it into two books made sense.
Anyway, I had second drafts of two related books that didn’t work and had a some missing connective bits, so I made that this year’s project. Existing scenes that required a major re-write were counted in this year’s word count along with completely new scenes. And I hit the 50,000 mark, and have at least improved things, but I don’t feel as if I’ve actually fixed the plot problems. Which was what I had hoped for.
I don’t really have a conclusion. I know my productivity went way down after the election, and I haven’t really gotten back into a good space where I’m being productive and liking what I write.
Font Folly 