For the record, I am a bit skeptical of the 11:19 timestamp: by then, they'd long stopped letting more people onto the Mall east of 14th Street. I also spent the better part of two hours standing in a human river at 14th and Independence, telling people to keep going past the Washington Monument, there'd be space and Jumbotrons on the other side.
I haven't seen a good picture of the Mall from the Monument back to the Lincoln Memorial yet, though; maybe they all ended up around the Reflecting Pool.
Oh, and one of the guys in my volunteer group was on Olbermann the next day talking about the NSA wiretaps. Weird day. Wonderful, but weird.
I resolved to give up HFCS last New Year's, and the difference has been surprising. After only a few months, food with HFCS in it started tasting weird and over-sweet to me. On the few occasions I've had more than a bite of corn-syrup-heavy food I've felt pretty gross afterwards, which makes me wonder if I'd just gotten used to feeling that way before.
The only trouble is, I have to master from-scratch fruit fillings by this coming Purim, because my mom always made hamentaschen with canned pie filling; I used to do the same, but they taste funny now.
I've always had a rocky relationship with my parents-- they're not the kind of people who deal well with constant questioning, and I was the kind of kid who needed to know the why of everything. Combine that with their stubbornness, which I certainly inherited, and you can get a lot of personality conflicts.
At the low points, I haven't wanted to have anything to do with my parents. But the longest I've ever gone without speaking to them was a few months, after my dad said something really inexcusable and I told him I wouldn't talk to him at all if he was going to treat me like that. It worked for a while, but I get the sense we're slipping again.
When I first moved out of their house-- against their wishes, because they didn't think I knew how to take care of myself-- the friends I was moving in with got a chance to see how they act without company manners. One of my friends turned to me after they left and said "You know, you've always told me your mother is crazy, but I figured you meant it the way everyone does. But oh my god, your mother is crazy." I can't even *express* how much of a relief it was to get that independently confirmed.
The thing is, though, as I get older I start to understand the things that make them act the way they do. It's like I'd been wearing blinkers my whole childhood, and now that they're off I can see how much I was hampered by them-- and how hampered my parents are by the ones they still wear. So it gets easier to not blame myself when we can't get along.
I don't think I'd ever want to cut off contact with them, though. My dad doesn't speak to his parents or his sisters, and it's incredibly rough for everyone involved. I still hope my parents and I can understand each other someday, if I find the right words and they get a little better at listening.
I'm working on a lace shawl and getting back into the swing of drawing on a regular basis. Also, I'm scouring thrift stores for costume pieces-- although I seem to be turning up more in the way of really cute everyday clothes, and am really not inclined to complain about that. Yesterday, I scored two adorable dresses and a bag of old buttons, in addition to the cowboy hat and bandanna I'd actually been looking for.
I've also got a half-filled bobbin of singles staring reproachfully at me from my spinning wheel, and a YA novel I'm plugging away at. The sewing machine and the jewelry-making supplies aren't in rotation at the moment, but I'm sure the spirit will move me sooner or later.
#106 P J Evans: As far as what group turns up where:
The surgeon who did my mother's gall bladder surgery, in West Texas in the mid-90s, was from Turkey. As in, Turkish. He showed up for rounds - she described this - in jeans and cowboy boots.
I was recently in Beirut, and somehow wound up at a Western-themed steakhouse called El Rancho in the mountains north of the city. The owners were a Lebanese couple who had lived in Texas for a number of years, before returning home and starting a restaurant where all the waiters wore cowboy hats and there was a lot of wagon-wheel furniture out front by the cigar store Indian. The menu items were called things like "The Calamity Jane" and "The Buffalo Bill." At one point, "Desperado" came on over the PA and I started to wonder if I'd slipped into a very strange, very kitschy alternate universe.
The highlight, though, came after dinner, when the owner gave us a tour of the on-site farm that produced everything we had eaten. As I said, he was Lebanese; he was also wearing a bolo tie, cowboy boots, a black Stetson, and one of those Australian cattle-rancher's coats. As we headed back to our car, his cell phone rang: doodle deedle dee, doo doo doo.
It was the music from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." I had to go have a quiet sit-down for a few minutes until the giggles subsided.
That said, I'm not sure I've ever eaten a better steak, and if you're ever in Beirut, I recommend the place highly.
(This post has nothing to do with nuclear war. It's one of the most entertaining things that's ever happened to me, though, and I really wanted to share.)
For the last month and change, I've been joining the DC branch of Anonymous in its various anti-Scientology shenanigans. We've enjoyed a surprisingly good relationship with the police. Over the course of three large protests and numerous smaller-scale activities, there have been zero arrests, and the officers at our protests have said repeatedly that we're just about ideal, as protestors go. On March 15, while I was making sure a path through the crowd was clear for pedestrians, a cop who'd been about to do the same thing said I did as good a job as he could have. On April 12, while brandishing FREE HUGS signs and passing out fliers at the Cherry Blossom festival, I hugged a cop. DC cops read our fliers, take an interest in why we're protesting, and seem to enjoy the silliness, in general. The only encounter with a police officer that was not entirely pleasant was an officer who asked us to remove our masks on the Metro. Technically, he was wrong to ask it of us, but we did it anyway to avoid the fight. Overall, I'm very happy with our good relationship with the DC police.
In Atlanta, the riot squad was called out and two anons were arrested. Their protest was exactly as peaceful as ours, and they tried just as hard to establish a friendly relationship with their police. But DeKalb PD decided they needed to be aggressive, so this happened.
The only lesson I can take from this is that cops who've decided to overreact make that decision without reference to the situation they're faced with. The only solution I can think of is not hiring cops like that, and firing them if you do end up with one on the force.
I work at a school that is attended by, among others, a Sojourner, an Evo, and a Bear, none of whom are teased for their names. The weird-name bar is getting raised pretty high these days, and most grade-school kids that don't have unusual names themselves have friends who do.
Actually, the thing that *really* amuses me is that we've got an Ella, a Bella, an Isabella, an Isobel, an Annabelle, and an Anna. Most of whom are friends, and play together, which makes calling them in off the playground a fun challenge.
I'll second Lenny's recommendations of Top Ten and Astro City, and add Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier and Morrison's All-Star Superman.
As for *why* I like them, basically it's this: while I appreciate the importance of books like Watchmen, which take the superhero genre apart, I actually *enjoy* the books that, in recent years, have put superheroes back together again.
Once I learned to spin, I assumed the reason for the spindle in Sleeping Beauty is that the story predates the flyer wheel. Walking wheels and similarly pointy contraptions have coexisted with flyer wheels for a long while, but I was under the impression that they came first by a significant margin.
Now, what I *really* want to know is, what the heck fiber was Arachne spinning, to get it so fine?
Oh, I love internet coincidences. My favorite personal one is the girl who had me on her Livejournal friendslist because of something to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer-- and then I mentioned the name of the college I had recently been accepted to. Thanks to that, I had fannish friends waiting for me the minute I arrived at school.
As for 1985, I'm afraid I only existed for the last twelve days of it. They were pretty eventful for a newborn, though; apparently my doctor had to make me a house call on Christmas Eve in a snowstorm.
Huh. I suspect I'm the wrong person to have an opinion about this, since I've yet to be published (apparently publishing requires actually *finishing* something you've written, which is where I tend to fall down), but I can't imagine being hurt or upset at any fan's differing take on my characters (should I be so lucky as to get fans).
Well, no, wait. I can definitely see myself stumbling across an interpretation that is, to my mind, hideously wrong, and having to clamp down very hard on the urge to correct it. But even that wouldn't affect the versions of my characters that live in my head. And that's what they are: versions. Once I let them out, everyone who reads about them gets their own, and I don't get to decide what they do anymore.
Possibly I've taken the death of authorial intent a little too much to heart. I think I'm okay with that, though.
It seems utterly insane to let kids roll around loose like that.
Oh, absolutely. I suspect the reason I didn't know about the Soccer Mom Arm is that my parents wouldn't let us into the front seat until we were well on the legal side of the weight requirements for sitting there. And, of course, we always buckled up.
I did spend a number of long car rides in the back seat of the minivan, with the middle lap belt on, but stretched out lengthwise on the bench to sleep. Lord only knows what *that* would have done to me in an accident.
Tye (183): Back in the day before seat belts, my aunt used to put her arm out in front of whichever one of us was riding shotgun when she needed to slow down or to stop quickly.
You know, it's funny-- I usually keep my purse on the passenger seat when I'm alone in the car, and my purse is both large and heavy, due to my habit of carrying wallet, phone, camera, spare glasses, knitting, some light reading and three months of old receipts and random bits of paper. So whenever I brake, I have to reach out to stop my purse from thumping over onto the floor and spilling its contents everywhere.
Apparently the habit is so ingrained that I do it with a passenger in the seat, because the other night, on the way to a movie with my friend, she noticed it and cried "You do the soccer-mom arm!" Which, she explained, is what moms do when they've got a kid in the passenger seat. I had no idea it was a common thing, or that it had a name.
My best friend was in the left lane on the Beltway last year when she swerved to avoid debris in the road. Her anti-lock brakes failed. Her (brand-new) car hit the median and spun, causing three-quarters of it to crumple around her. The car was totaled, but she walked away with whiplash and a small burn from the airbag deploying, because she was wearing her seatbelt. I would probably not have a best friend anymore, otherwise. Wear your seatbelt.
Lucy, that #3 is exactly right, and I think sometimes the most important one of all. I've often thought that I was safer, as a 12-year-old, on salon.com's boards than I would have been on a more age-appropriate forum.
A kids' forum would have been full of other kids and the kinds of adults who seek out kids to talk to; by comparison, Table Talk was full of responsible adults who happened to have a 12-year-old in their midst. And I was certainly the kind of lonely, awkward 12-year-old who could benefit a great deal from having smart adults to talk to.
The downside, unfortunately, is that most of my posts from back then are still archived somewhere. Really, no one deserves to have their pre-teen self haunting them across the Internet.
There's also an excellent stop-motion James and the Giant Peach, though it's bookended by live-action. And Henry Selick's working on a stop-motion Coraline at the moment.
Really, stop-motion animation is no less feasible than hand-drawn for feature-length film. Though considering the rate at which hand-drawn's dying out in the face of CGI, that's not terribly encouraging.
Here in Hyattsville, just over the border from DC, the trouble isn't so much snow on the roads, or black ice, as everyone's cars being effectively trapped by the passage of the snowplow. Lord only knows if I'll be able to chip my car free to get to work tomorrow-- I couldn't today, with the snow compacted into ice by the night's rain.
On the bright side, tomorrow we celebrate the year's first observance of Discount Candy Day. My favorite is the Festival of the Half-Price Cadbury Egg, but this one is nice too.
Someone terribly thoughtful has uploaded A Muppet Christmas Carol, in its entirety, to Youtube. If you haven't got it on DVD, or find yourself stuck in transit somewhere on the way home from festivities, it's an awfully pleasant way to pass the time.
There's nothing *inherently* wrong with using the Official Sci-Fi(TM) Brand Mandatory Plots: evil twins, body-swapping, repeating days, inescapable prisons, and the always-popular It's A Wonderful Life-style what-might-have-been episode. Every genre show worth its salt has done them, and some quite well. Buffy's "The Wish" is a *fantastic* what-might-have-been; Stargate's "Window of Opportunity" is one of the funniest takes on the repeating day I've ever seen, and therefore one of like three episodes of Stargate I'm willing to watch to the end.
The trouble is when *every* episode has a Mandatory Plot(TM). Voyager does not do well, by this measure.
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