The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Emily H.:

The thing about fractures is: I expected them to HURT. When my sister, at seven and again at twelve, fractured a bone, she was screaming bloody murder.

So when I fell off my bike and hit my arm hard, I thought, "Well, I'm not screaming bloody murder, but I guess I'd better go to the ER just to be on the safe side" - and it was broken. Just six months later, I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle, but I could still stand and walk on it okay. Couldn't be broken, I thought; just a sprain. That was in the summer, and I wasn't insured -- and even though I was ensured then, the broken arm cost me $2000 --, so I didn't go in until the student clinic opened the next week. That was broken too. The ankle, I mean, not the clinic.

Adrenaline can cover up for a lot.

As far as I can remember from my linguistics classes:

Small children can generally hear the difference between difficult word pairs; their speech problems usually come down to lack of mouth/tongue/lip coordination, and will sometimes correct adults who imitate the incorrect pronunciations.

For adults, on the other hand, it's very hard to hear a distinction that your language doesn't have, and I've heard anecdotal reports of Japanese speakers, very fluent in English, who could nevertheless not hear the l/r distinction even when they had learned how to pronounce it.

It kind of makes me glad to think that right now he's very surprised.

But I have to agree with this livejournal post; the Christian right isn't one person, it's a lot of people, and they'll find other people to tell them to believe odious things.

There are certain books that are all the better because they're long. Lord of the Rings is in that category for some people; for me, it's Ash: A Secret History and Cavalier and Klay. There's something about the expansiveness, the potential for a story that is huge and overarching and swallows your life whole for a month, and seems to encompass all the world--it's something that's worth going after.

It keeps me reading long books in the hope that they will be that kind of book, when all too frequently they're just decent 200-page books padded out to twice their size.

Re #100: even in the world of the SF fan who knows that conventions exist and that they are awesome, there are lots of people who are shy and fearful about introducing themvelves to Real Live Pros or even fans we know online... of course, these are not the people who are likely to be suckered by pitch sessions.

Because "Nnnnnng, aaaaack, eeeeeep" is not much of a pitch.

A couple of years ago, I needed three pain-medication prescriptions within 10 months for wisdom teeth extraction, a broken elbow, and a broken ankle.

It is Really. Freaking. Scary to think that the government could be on my case just 'cause I can't successfully walk in a straight line.

Overton Window tricks that I haaaate:

Whenever a pundit says, "I'm not a liberal or a conservative, I'm for common sense," you know they're even more likely to be partisan--they're just assuming that their partisan views are shared by Everyone With A Brain. And by saying that, they then get away with saying whatever they want to say and having it somehow count as a "moderate" position.

Related to that is this weird assumption that whatever is in the middle must be right and best, and "out of the mainstream" is an automatically bad thing. Racial equality was a radical idea once. What's wrong with the occasional radical idea?

I would be remiss in not mentioning Elizabeth Bear's excellent This Tragic Glass, which takes as its premise a Gender Genie that actually works.

I can understand why people might be loath to subsidize medical care for people who go bungee jumping or rock climbing or whatnot; but really, if you go rock climbing and something goes wrong and you need health care, the pain is punishment enough.

(Two years ago I rode my bike into a curb, smashed my elbow, and had to pay two thousand for it due to an insurance snafu, on a grad student salary; the pain was far, far more disincentive than the money.)

I tried to wrap all of my presents diagonal-Shimojima-style.

All of them look varying degrees of 'interesting,' except for one that almost sort of worked.

I need to find a video or a class or something. I've seen it done so often at department stores and I just want all my presents to look that good.

Radio stations here being what they are, I never listen to anything but NPR; my commute is long, and work starts at 11:00, so I ended up listening to large portions of the Bush speech.

I especially despised the part where he encouraged people to spend their money. No real wage growth, enormous credit card debt, rampant consumerism, a growing divide between rich and poor...and we're supposed to spend more money?
There was the bullying, too; everything else was bad, but it's what I expect from him.

"When Jesus said love your enemies, I'm pretty sure he meant don't kill them."

I just moved from Carrboro six months ago -- the liberal bumper sticker capital of the southeast. There were some good ones.

If a thoughtful, well-considered opinion is "liberal," and a thoughtless one is not, doesn't that make liberals simply the category of people with thoughtful, well-considered opinions?

If we really believe that thoughtful people can come to different conclusions, then what's so bad about labeling some of those conclusions 'liberal' and some 'conservative'?

'Liberals are people who actually think about what they believe' just seems a lot more self-congratulatory than acknowledging that environmentalism, reproductive rights, poverty, etc. are by and large liberal issues--even if not every liberal is going to check off all the liberal boxes.

I've taken that train two or three times (round-trip), and more often than not have faced three-or-four-hour delays.

I don't mind trains as inefficient touristy vehicles, but if they're going to be that, they should do well in that area, and stock some food that isn't bags of chips, or overpriced cold slimy ham between two slices of cold slimy bread; thirteen hours is that much longer when they run out of food.

That said, Montreal is So. So. Worth. It. Even at this time of year, and even when you couldn't possibly scrounge up the money for Au Pied De Cochon.

I do get nearly all my books from the library. (I work there, and also, if I had more books I would need more bookcases, and if I had more bookcases I would need a bigger apartment, and being a librarian doesn't pay well enough for that).

I have borrowed over a hundred library books in the past year. Contents include bookmarks, bills, highly personal correspondance, school assignments, rather personal photos, etc.--We usually manage to catch any really icky stuff before it goes out on the shelves.

I do sort of marvel at people who are willing to read the same copy of an erotic romance that's already been checked out two dozen times. That is where I would draw the "You don't know where that's been" line.

I stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance about six months after moving from Canada, when I thought about it and realized, no, of course I didn't pledge allegiance to a country I didn't even particularly like (Sorry. I was an angsty kid). I never got called on it--but now the NC legislature's made it mandatory to say the pledge in public schools, and it makes me nervous. No particular student is required to say the pledge--it just has to get said--but, well, see what happened in Virginia.

Greg London: the idea of not swearing oaths is to simply do what you say that you are going to do. If you swear an oath to do something, that implies an oath is binding in a way that "Okay, I will" isn't; the idea is that "Okay, I will" should, by itself, be binding.

I boggle at the "Let's keep doing what we're doing because we're not sure that pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to have bad consequences" crowd.

Neither am I sure that leaving my door unlocked will result in my being robbed; or that I shouldn't drink the milk I left out on the counter for an undetermined amount of time; or that I should wear a helmet when I ride my bike. 999 times out of 1000, after all, I ride my bike and don't suffer severe head trauma. But the possibility of severe head trauma is bad enough that, well, why not err on the safe side?

Even if global warming were a total fiction, would it really be such a bad thing to consume a little less energy?

I've had that experience with countless books. Most recently Delany's "Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand," which was so widely-praised that I didn't expect it to be anywhere near as good as it was.

It is possible to live very cheaply in NY; my sister does, by sharing a 4-bedroom in Harlem with 3 roommates, and she wouldn't move for the world. (The alternative is North Raleigh, possibly the most yuppie-suburban-whitebread-sprawl neighborhood in existence, so I can't say I blame her). ...But she did think it was very, very funny that I thought $850 was a ridiculous price to pay for a 1-bedroom here, even if it would get me a very nice apartment in a hipper neighborhood. Anyway, one of the blessings of NYC is not having to buy a car; one could easily spend a month's rent on gas, insurance, and car payments.

And the flipside to that is that the rest of my family are those people who could easily spend $15K a month. Little Sister went to the American School in Paris, and she did the worst thing one can do for their budget: she made rich friends.

The problem with rich friends is that, not only do they make ridiculous expenses seem reasonable, but they always make expensive plans, and it seems churlish to say that no, you can't go on that vacation, or to that club.

I'm broke, currently, (part-time newbie librarian, living with the 'rents) but there's a big difference between being broke and being poor. I have benefits with my job, and I have job security, and parents with money; and that actually means I spend less money than I did as a grad student, where I would go into fits of money anxiety that would inevitably cause me to buy things.

Unfortunately, my fantasies about what I will do when I am finally a little less broke make me glad I won't ever earn enough money to be stupid with it.

I remember learning the Canadian national anthem in English and French in kindergarten.

Later, as my french got better, I pondered the lines:

Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protegera nos foyers et nos droits...

Since I had only ever heard it phonetically, I kept thinking that it was foie trempée, and wondering what wet liver had to do with anything.

ALA in New Orleans? Man, now I'm doubly disappointed that I can't go this year, having become a Real Librarian a month and a half ago...

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