Tag Archives: people

Drumming

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I loved those Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies, when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those silly black and white films that I first saw the jungle drums as communication trope. Supposedly all the tribes of the jungle, no matter their culture or language, participated in this form of long distance communication where the pounding of drums could warn the neighboring villages of some disaster, perhaps, or to call the tribes to war.

So when I later first heard a pundit or read an editorial that referred to people advocating an escalation in our military actions in Vietnam as “the drum-beat of war,” I thought of those jungle drums. And it seemed to fit the context of the editorials.

In the movies the drumming was always a bad portent. The drums always signaled something that would menace our heroes. Something savage, unpredictable, and utterly merciless (there was, of course, more than a little racism in this trope).

Since drums had been used in various European armies centuries before any of those Hollywood depictions of Africa came to exist, I’m certain that particular turn of phrase also predates the jungle drum trope. Still, whenever I hear the phrase “the drum-beat of” my imagination conjures up black and white images of people dressed in khaki and pith helmets, fearfully looking this way and that, but only able to see impenetrable leaves and vines.

So, when the leader of one of the groups trying to hide their homophobia and religious supremacism behind an innocuous sounding pro-marriage name starting referring to the shift public opinion has been undergoing regarding gay rights in general as “the drumbeat of gay entitlement” I started laughing. Many of the other haters have picked up the phrase, and when they say it on one of those news show, they get such a serious, worried look on their face. Often exactly the same expression from those old jungle movies that the one person who knew what the drums meant would have while he explained to the rest of the party.

They describe gay people and gay-friendly straight people as being on a crusade to destroy all that is right and good in this world. When they do, they have that wide-eyed look of someone who knows the menace is near, but can’t figure out from where the menace will strike.

There isn’t an evil, menacing army beating those drums and preparing to ambush them. The forces for tolerance and equality are not savage, unpredictable, nor merciless. There is a battle going on, but not that kind. And the people beating the drums aren’t at all like that.

A great example was a police raid on a gay bar in Atlanta three years ago. A SWAT-type team of cops from multiple agencies stormed into the bar without a warrant, made everyone lay face down on the floor, and proceeded to harass, threaten, search, and occasionally assault the customers for about 90 minutes. When the news first broke, city officials said the officers were following a lead in a perfectly legitimate investigation. Some veiled comments about “those kinds of people” were made, and they expected it to go away, just as tens of thousands of such raids have in cities everywhere for years.

They didn’t expect a protest march made up primarily of church ladies. For years people like those cops could count on at least two things to protect their bigotted actions from a serious investigation: virtually none of the men they harassed or assaulted would press charges (for fear of being outed), and families of the men harassed would be so ashamed of their gay children that they would never pressure any politician to look into the matter.

Neither of those things are universally true, any longer. A bunch of those men had parents who were not ashamed of their sons. Some of those parents stood up in their churches to describe the warrantless, unjustified police action. And a bunch of those church members—surprise, surprise—thought that “love your neighbor as you love yourself” didn’t include handcuffing innocent people, shouting at them, and kicking them in the head.

The church lady march was only the beginning. With the unexpected pressure from the community, the city had to conduct a real investigation. No evidence of any crime was ever found. No explanation of a legitimate case in progress was ever given. The review board ruled that two of the officers and some supervisors were provably guilty of misconduct, though the punishments at the time were minor, and to this day the city claims that other than those few “mistakes” nothing was wrong with the raid. Eventually, six of the officers involved in the raid were fired for lying about events in the raid, but the city tried to do it very quietly. A report was reluctantly released under a freedom of information request detailing how a total of 16 officers had lied or destroyed evidence to try to cover up the misconduct.

The drummers aren’t just bleeding hearts from liberal churches. Last year, while marriage equality was being debated in my state’s legislature, one legislator who was known not to be in favor of the bill hosted a townhall-style meeting in her district to let people from the community give her their thoughts. After a couple hours of person after person passionately speaking in favor of same-sex marriage, the surprised legislator said that she knew their had to be voices in the community who felt differently. She looked at a man in a police uniform who had been sitting in the front row, looking angrier and angrier the entire time. “This gentleman, for example, hasn’t said anything.”

The cop reluctantly rose to his feet. He explained that he hadn’t said anything because he hadn’t had time to change out of uniform before coming to the forum, so he didn’t want people to think he was speaking for his department. But if she insisted, well, he just wanted to say that as a father of four sons, he wanted all of his boys, including his gay son, to be able to marry the person they fell in love with.

She never found anyone at the meeting willing to speak against the bill. She eventually voted in favor of it.

Or the pair of grandparents I saw, speaking at a legislative hearing in another state, who said, “We want to dance at the weddings of all of our grandchildren, including our lesbian granddaughter.”

There is a drumbeat out there. But it isn’t calling us to march to war. It isn’t warning you of a slaughter or some other danger.

It’s inviting you to come dance at some weddings.

At least Scrooge found redemption

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Many, many years ago, before what most people think of as the internet, I was active in several forums on Fidonet. One December someone started a thread about Christmas movies, and someone else posted into that thread a brief explanation of why The Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, and Rosemary Clooney White Christmas was their favorite movie.

And one of the first replies to that post was a cranky rant about how that movie was not the film which had introduced the song of the same name, that the song had been originally written for the Fred Astaire film, Holiday Inn, and no one should like White Christmas because it wasn’t the movie that introduced the song.

Nothing in the original message had even mentioned the song, “White Christmas.” The person had even said that the movie was full of corny and silly bits, with a highly improbable plot.

I shrugged my shoulders at the cranky, crazy person, and went on to read other people’s recommendations of their favorite Christmas movies.

A year or so later, I think it was on a Usenet forum, a similar thread was in progress, and again, not long after someone mentioned White Christmas, there was another angry rant about how that movie wasn’t the one that introduced the song, and how much the person wished people would stop saying it had. Except, of course, that once again, no one had.

I’ve seen it again, and again. Mention the movie, White Christmas, and some troll will post a rant about it not being the movie that introduced the song. Now, sometimes, before the troll got there, someone would mention in a more friendly way the fact that the song was originally written for another movie, but had become so popular that a studio decided to base an entire film on the song. But eventually, there would be the angry post conveying the same fact.

When I posted on an old blog a list of my favorite Christmas movies, I got an anonymous message from someone, ignoring all the other movies in the list, to angrily tell me he’s tired of people mistakenly believing that White Christmas, the movie, introduced “White Christmas,” the song. Which, of course, I hadn’t said.

It’s perfectly legitimate to dislike a movie that someone else likes. It is also socially acceptable to join a virtual conversation about a movie by sharing some trivia about the film, one of the people in it, and so on. The part that I don’t get is why this movie, of all the innocuous, corny, trivial films that have ever been made, seems to always attract this one particular rant.

I have wondered if it’s just the same troll. Does he have alerts set up searching for mentions of this film, so he can log into whereever someone mentions it and post his rant?

If it isn’t the same troll, what makes several people feel a need to react with righteous outrage about a movie named after a song which it didn’t introduce? How can such a trivial detail provoke such outrage?

People get angry about things that other people enjoy all the time. No matter how wrong headed (and factually wrong) it is, I underatand why people get worked up about the so-called war on Christmas, for instance. Something that represents their faith and their personal history appears to be under attack. I think they are deluded to think it’s under attack, but I understand why traditions and beliefs and treasured memories are important to them.

But which movie introduced a sentimental holiday song? Really?

And of all the things about that song to get exercised about, again, it’s which movie introduced it? Not the fact that it’s a secular song about a sacred holiday? Not that a song for a Christian holiday was written by a Jewish man? (Actually, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that—because now the war on Christmas folks will decide that Irving Berlin started their whole war, or something.)

Maybe these folks just need to be visited by some ghosts, perhaps the spirits of Musicals Past, Present, and Yet To Come.

Haven’t you always wanted to see those ghosts doing jazz hands?

Trolls, baiters, hecklers, and drama queens

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We’re all drama queens sometimes: little things that go wrong feel like complete disasters, someone reacts differently than we expect to something and we start to wonder if it indicates a bigger problem, or we can’t stop talking about this bad thing we’re either in the middle of or just got out of.

I’ve had a few friends who were like that all the time. When I first met them, I thought, well, they’re having a bit of bad luck right now, and maybe they’re more emotional about it than I would be, but I’m not the one having the problem. Plus, I don’t know everyone else involved, so maybe it really is this bad. But as time went on and I got to know more of the other people involved, it became clear that they were always blowing any and every problem way out of proportion to the actual difficulty involved.

One wonders why one would remain friends with someone like that. In the case of the ones that I still consider friends many years later, part of it was because they were very witty, and always made jokes about the trouble they were going through. You might even say a better term for them would be comedy queens. It also helped that one lived a thousand miles away.

One time, on a fannish online forum, I wound up saying to a friend who was also on the forum something to the effect of, “Stop being a drama queen!”

And I was jumped on by some people for being a homophobe, since the friend I had called a drama queen was a gay man.

I foolishly responded by pointing out three facts: 1) I am also a gay man, 2) the guy in question was a friend in real life who often referred to himself as a drama queen, and 3) it was a joke.

Which unleashed a storm of righteous fury. Just because I was gay didn’t mean I couldn’t be homophobic. It doesn’t matter how he took it, what matters is that strangers who read the post out of context would be offended. Everyone ought to be offended anyway, because the phrase itself is deeply offensive.

The last point spawned the most interesting discussion. I remember picking up the term “drama queen” from mostly gay and lesbian friends in the mid-80s, where it was usually being applied to some gay men by other gay men sometimes derisively, sometimes teasingly. It fit right in with several other slang terms we slung about: opera queen, snow queen, clean queen, gym queen, and of course, size queen. The application of a female gendered term, “queen” to a man puts us solidly into societal sexist issues. Many a thesis (and some entire academic careers) have been spent exploring the prejudice, the perpetuation of class and power structures, and so on, inherent to using such words as insults in that way. And specifically applying feminine terms as insults to gay men—or masculine terms to lesbians—tangles us up even further in those sexual politics.

However, there is something to be said for taking words back. It was Queer Nation’s entire raison d’être! Take an insult that people have been flinging at you your entire life, wear it as a badge of honor, and rub the bullies’ faces in it. Such as one of the few times I was ever as clever as some movies and series portray all gay men as, when a guy angrily called me a bastard, and I replied, “My parents were married, and to each other, thank you very much. The word you’re looking for is ‘b*tch.’ And don’t forget it!”

Explaining all of that didn’t help, of course. There was one person who kept insisting, again and again, that I had said that all gay men are effeminate, and that all gay men are always melodramatically making mountains out of molehills. No matter how many times I, or the guy I had originally told to stop being a drama queen, explained that I had clearly applied the term to him, and only him, and only to the specific conversation, this guy kept insisting that his interpretation was the most logical inference of the term “drama queen.”

“We must put an end to the rhetoric that there’s something wrong with being an effeminate man!”

Once he used that phrase, I realized what the problem was. Any argument that begins with “put an end to the rhetoric of…” is a lost cause. Only a very specific sort of troll uses that argument. I call it the paranoid troll, as is, “Oh, my god! You’re talking about me, aren’t you? I know you are! You’re always talking about me!” The paranoid troll is not interested in discussing the topic at hand. They are not interested in what you meant by what you said, because they leapt to the conclusion of what you meant long ago, and no amount of evidence is ever going to change their mind. In fact, every piece of evidence you bring forward will be distorted into confirmation of their original thesis.

There’s nothing to be gained attempting to communicate with them. The only solution, as with all trolls, is to ignore them. Don’t let yourself get sucked into their drama.

Decoding

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When I posted Mr. Open-minded Seldom Is, it got me thinking about other ways people describe themselves, particularly online.

I’ve been reading online profiles, and getting to know the real people behind them, for about 27 years. That’s right, there was a ‘net back in 1985. The technology looked a lot different back then, but human nature changes much more slowly than technology. Over all of those years I’ve noticed certain patterns—instances of high correlations and tight covariants indicating a high probability of predictive success—which may serve as warning signs as one navigates the worlds of social networks, et al.

Gene’s Guide to Decoding Online Profiles

Open-minded: As explained in more detail earlier, when a person feels the need to mention their open-mindedness in their online profile, it frequently means that they have been accused often enough of being narrow-minded or intolerant that they are now trying to preempt more accusations. Some are genuinely trying to be open-minded, whether because they feel guilty about how some of their past behavior hurt someone, or because they don’t like other people to think them intolerant. Others think that open-minded means smiling condescendingly at people, ideas, or behaviors they disapprove of—sometimes even encouraging the behavior—only to ridicule and condemn it later when the person isn’t around.

Not everyone who mentions being open-minded falls into the above categories, of course. However, the more prominently it is mentioned in the profile (particularly in conjunction with near synonyms: tolerant, easygoing), the more likely it is to be a codeword for one of these other traits. There is a strong gender correlation, guys being extremely more likely to be the sort of person who is the exact opposite of what the word is supposed to mean. That goes triple if they put open-minded or a synonym into their user name.

Discreet: Discreet (rhymes with cheat) has slightly different meanings depending on where you find it. If it’s in guy’s profile in any social network where most of the users are heterosexual, it means, “I am involved in a relationship where my partner thinks we’re monogamous, but I am constantly looking for someone to fool around with.” This code meaning is usually only used by women on an explicit dating site.

If you find the word in a guy’s profile on any even vaguely gay site (not just hook-up or dating sites), it means, “I am a closet case who donates to anti-gay causes in my real life, and say horrible things about gay people whenever it comes up, but can’t get enough sex with men.” Usually married (to some unfortunate woman who has no idea) and scared to death that someone is going to guess he’s gay, so he represses any part of his personality that he thinks of as non-masculine and may overcompensate in gay-friendly settings. Doubly true if he also describes himself as masculine.

If he goes so far as to say, “you would never know if you met me” he’s extremely bad at the repression (as in, gayer than a clutch purse full of daffodils in a Glee finale), he pings the most oblivious person’s gaydar from miles away, and you will be astounded at how deeply in denial his wife must be not to have guessed.

Intense: when a person describes their personality as “intense” it means that they are a world-class jerk. Typically they want things their way, never have any sympathy or understanding of other viewpoints, and don’t think much of the social niceties.

Hint to anyone whose friends have ever told you that you have an intense personality: this is polite code for “you are extremely difficult to put up with, and we frequently have to apologize to our other friends for your rude behavior.”

Tired of drama: When someone says they are tired of drama or games it means either they are holding on to a lot of resentment about past relationships, or they are the justified cause of the resentment in all their exes. In the latter case, the person is living under the delusion that drama is when other people object to their rude, obnoxious, and self-centered behavior. Often the person seems incapable of talking about anything but those past dramas.

I work hard and play hard: Half-true at best. This often means, “my schedule and plans will always come first, and if we become friends or more, you will be lucky if I even think to tell you before I make plans that impact you.” Sometimes it is code for, “I am an extremely heavy drinker/partier, but if challenged I will rationalize it by talking about the stress of my job.”

Honesty is important to me: Usually this means the person is a controlling jerk with a habit of biting the heads off of people who express opinions they dislike. This has caused their previous friends and relationships to develop habits of keeping unpleasant information from them which, when it finally comes to light, causes them to become angry at said friends or significant other for “lying” to them.

If they aren’t controlling, they’re refusing to let go of resentment about some past problems with their exes. See “Tired of drama” above.

Fun-loving: On the face of it, this is simply a meaningless statement. Who doesn’t love fun? Since there are millions of things that people find fun (and for every fun activity you can name there are millions of people who don’t enjoy it) this could mean anything.

But depending on the context, “fun-loving” can tell you some things.

If you’re on a dating site, it most probably means the person has no clue how to describe themself and have resorted to clichés. It can mean that they are afraid to say anything that might scare off a potential date. This latter is most likely if they also list a lot of generic activities that they like.

If they are a guy, and if none of the photos of themselves show them smiling, grinning, or having even a twinkle in their eye, it often means that all of their ideas of fun have to do with inflicting pain or ridicule on others. Look for other key phrases such as “easygoing” and “friends say I have a wicked sense of humor” to confirm that they are angry, bitter, verbally abusive guys who don’t realize that often people laugh around them in hopes of not becoming the next target of abuse and ridicule.

“, actually” When used to qualify any positive trait, means they are tired of people calling them on the opposite trait.

I don’t own a TV/I loathe mainstream TV: This means, “I am a judgmental snob.” Often also means that they have a disturbingly large collection of some specific type of television series/movies series/sports series/games which they spend far more time watching on their computer or other device than the average channel-surfing couch potato, and will become outraged when you point out that really isn’t all that different than watching “mainstream TV.”

And since it isn’t the 1990s any more, it also means they have no clue that pop culture has moved far beyond the point where there are any single networks getting enough of an audience for the word “mainstream” to have any relevance to the television medium—a bit over half the shows on the big networks get fewer viewers per week than many viral YouTube videos. Time to update your snobbery!

I hate writing these/I don’t know what to say: Means either the person has been called out in the past for a grossly inaccurate or misleading profile, or the person spent an ungodly number of hours trying to craft a profile that appears spontaneous and simple, or the person is really insecure and bad at expressing themself.

Mr Open-minded Seldom Is

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As a gay man hoping to one day enjoy full equal rights under the law, I spend probably far too much time reading about people who are trying to prevent those rights from being granted. A surprising number of them describe themselves as open-minded, just before they start spewing their most bigoted talking points.

Which reminded me of a discussion I had with some friends a while back. We had all met people who had described themselves as open-minded, yet once we got to know them, they were quite the opposite. There are several reasons for this phenomenon:

The first is defensive: some of them have been accused often enough of being narrow-minded or intolerant that they are now trying to preempt more accusations. Like the professional spokespeople for various hate groups, they operate under a delusion that simply saying they are open-minded will somehow cause you not to notice their narrow-minded behavior or statements.

If they aren’t delusional, they’re simply trying really hard not to appear to be intolerant, because they’ve realized that if people think you’re intolerant, only intolerant people will hang out with you, and they aren’t usually good company. You would hope that realizing this would make them try to figure out how to actually be more open-minded. Maybe someday it will.

Some people are genuinely trying to be open-minded. In some cases, they recognized that their past narrow-minded behavior ruined a friendship, broke up a relationship, or simply hurt someone they cared about. Now they feel guilty and are trying to be open-minded. And there’s nothing wrong with trying, per se, but it is a little disingenuous to say they “are” open-minded when they’re only in the hoping-to-be stage.

There are others who aren’t at the trying stage, they simply misunderstand what open-minded means. For instance, for some open-minded means smiling condescendingly at people, ideas, or behaviors they disapprove of—sometimes even encouraging the behavior—only to ridicule and condemn it later when the person isn’t around. It’s a form of social entrapment: I’ll pretend I accept you as you are in order to get you to reveal more of yourself, then use what I learn against you.

Similarly, some think being open-minded means letting the other person have their say before telling them just how very wrong they are. Now, sometimes that’s how a debate can look to an outsider, but every interaction shouldn’t be a debate. And there’s a difference between gritting one’s teeth while waiting for the other person to finish spouting off their nonsense so you can tell them what they ought to think, and sincerely trying to understand why the other person feels that way. And consider whether maybe there might be room in your worldview for more than one opinion on the matter.

Along the same lines, some folks think that they have a nuanced position on some issues, because they are willing to be friends with the unfortunate people who are so wrong-thinking. “I’m not bigoted! I know that it’s not really your people’s fault that all of you are mentally ill and morally bankrupt. It’s like a sickness. And look at how big hearted I am, willing to be next to you and not at all afraid it might be catching!”

Most of these are just a subset of a bigger truth about human behavior: the more eager someone seems to be to describe themselves with a particularly positive treat, the more emphatically they insist that they do not feel a particular negative way, the more likely that the opposite of what they are saying is the truth.

As Hamlet’s mother famously observed, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Personal isn’t always private, part 2

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For a long time there was a forum on Reddit called “jailbait” whose purpose was for people to post pictures of underage girls they thought were hot, sexy, what have you. Most of the pictures posted there had been stolen from Facebook accounts or similar online forums, where the picture had originally been posted by the girl herself. The guys who frequented the jailbait forum and posted there rationalized their theft because “if the girls didn’t want people looking at those pictures, they shouldn’t have posted them.”

None put forward the argument more loudly or prolifically than the moderator, a guy who called himself Violentacrez (pronounced “violent acres”). Continue reading Personal isn’t always private, part 2 →

Abby someone

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One of my favorite scenes in Young Frankenstein is when, after the recently animated monster goes on his first mini rampage, the doctor gets Eyegore to admit that he dropped and destroyed the brain of the brilliant scientist Dr Frankenstein had hoped to revive and had taken another brain from the brain depository.

“Abby Someone… Abby Normal, I think. I’m almost certain that was the name.”

No one wants to be labeled “abnormal,” but most of us also don’t want to be described as “ordinary.” We want to be close enough to normal to be excluded from the freak category, but also to be considered above average at something. So many of us spend at least part of our lives walking a tightrope, trying to find a path through that ill-defined territory that brings both acceptance and maybe a teeny bit of acclaim.

One problem with walking a tighrope is that there isn’t any room for error. And certainly no opportunity to explore new territory.

I fell off the tightrope pretty early in life. At some point before kindergarten, my parents figured out that when I was talking (or rather, babbling incessantly) while playing by myself, that I was responding to voices that I was hearing in my head. I thought everyone heard voices like that. It was the only way I knew how to think, to have conversations with different parts of myself.

I tried explaining that, but being only—what, three years old?—didn’t have the experience, vocabularly, or conceptual framework to get the idea across. All my dad understood was that 1) I heard voices, 2) I did not think of them as imaginary friends, and 3) I couldn’t stop them.

So he told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was never, ever to let anyone hear me talking to the voices. If I did, very bad things would happen to me. The least of which were that no one would be friends with me and that I would be taken away and locked up somewhere.

Dad isn’t exactly a touchy-feely kind of guy, you know?

Now there’s neuroscience to show that talking to oneself makes several mental process work better. There’s additional evidence that imagining different trains of thought as a conversation is simply an outgrowth of a number of perfectly unexceptional mental processes. The extent to which my internal monologue splits into a couple dozen dialogues is more than a single standard deviation away from the median, but it’s not so far out as to be worrisome.

I also see relationships between things differently than most. It’s the reason I used to confuse some of my fellow orchestra and bandmates when I would say that playing the tuba was no different than trumpet, you just needed to move the root note of the scale. Reading Bass or Treble clef (or, once I took up bassoon, Alto and Tenor clef) was simply a matter of sliding the starting spot up and down, as well. Switching between bassoon, saxophone, clarinet and flute was all about transposing or rotating finger positions.

I think the one that weirded them out the most was trombone. “First position is just like all valves open because the air path is shortest.” (Though French horn was actually the hardest—I had to visuallize it as air paths, but my fingers kept wanting to treat it as one of the other valved instruments.)

None of which made me a musical genius—it was just me looking at music as a series of math problems. (Of course, there were the other math majors in college who thought my love of Differential Equations was the equivalent of performing black magic).

Seeing those transpositions and substitutions as being the same whether we’re talking about notes, numbers, labels, or commands is why I can quickly (I mean really quickly) learn new scripting or programming languages, et cetera.

Which all sounds really impressive and cool and such. But that same brain is incredibly proficient at losing my keys, or the pile of papers I just had in my hand, or what do you mean my glasses are right there? I looked five times already and they’re not… Oh, well, what do you know?

Rough, manly sport, part 2

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So there I was, hanging upside down, flailing ineffectively as the bigger kid shook me, called me names, and most of the other kids laughed.

Continue reading Rough, manly sport, part 2 →

Memory landmarks

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Navigating one’s own memory can be tricky. My husband has been talking about replacing the small laser printer on the upper shelf of his desk for a while, and when he recently mentioned that the one he has is about 10 years old I scoffed. I bought him that as an upgrade “just a couple Christmases ago.” I was certain.

Nope. Because of the way he obsessively backs up device drivers, he could show me that the original drivers he installed for the computer were for Windows 98, second edition. “Remember, when you upgraded to Win 2000 shortly after, we had trouble getting drivers that would work.”

“Ah!” I said, “I knew that printer was before I switched back to Apple, but didn’t realized how much Before Mac it was!”

Before Mac and Since Mac is a fuzzy divider, because sometimes I put the line in May ’09, when I replaced my desktop computer with a MacPro tower, and other times I put it in Jan ’09, when for laptop use I stopped bouncing back and forth between my Sharp PC and my Mac Powerbook, and bought myself a Macbook.

A much more solid mental landmark is the Before Layoff and After Layoff. Of course, having been employed at the same company for more than 20 years (having survived 5 or so previous recessions), June 30, 2008 sticks out quite prominently.

The previous major landmark was half-fuzzy, and half so hard-and-bright-it-hurt: Before Ray Died, and After. The Before is very, very clear. The only reason there’s fuzz at all is I kind of, sort of, almost completely went to pieces for a few months after my first husband died. I remember things that happened during that time, but I’m really unclear on the precise order some of them happened in.

That’s why there’s some fuzziness on another landmark. Michael had known Ray and I for a couple years before Ray’s death, and Michael and I started dating about three months after Ray died… But it was still during that period when my memory is a bit shattered. Don’t get me wrong, I remember dating and falling in love, just don’t ask me which date happened when.

There are lots of other landmarks. Before Grandma Died, Before Grandpa Died, Before I Came Out and Divorced, Before My First Marriage, Before Seattle, Before Longview, Before My Folks Split Up… and so on.

Others are less about the physical world. I’ve already mentioned Before Mac, and at least implied Before Win2000 but there are a lot more. Before InDesign, for instance, and much earlier, Before PageMaker. Then there’s many different phases of During WordPerfect (since my workplace swtiched to it, away from it, back to it and away; during most of which time and long after WP was my preferred word processor for personal use). There’s Before I Gave In And Got A Cell Phone, there’s Before I Embraced Word Processors, or Before I Figured Out Orson Scott Card Was An Evil Bigot And That’s Why So Much of His Writing Bothered Me, or Before I Read Wyrd Sisters And Became A Pratchett Fanatic.

That latter, by the way, is right up there with Before Star Wars, Before I Knew Who Asimov Was, and Before I Knew Where Books Come From.

So, what are your landmarks?

Sleep, interrupted

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Two nights in a row I’ve woken up, wide awake, at about 3am. Night before last, it was a sudden realization of why a scene I had struggled writing the night before wasn’t working. Last night it was a bad dream in which a bunch of my closest friends were upset and crying, and somehow it was my fault.

Neither interruption is being conducive to my recovery from the awful cold. Continue reading Sleep, interrupted →