Rymenhild @ #31
I've always wished that Cooper had actually consulted someone fluent in Welsh for that line -- preferably someone knowledgable about the era the inscription was supposed to have dated from. Even leaving aside the elementary grammatical error, it just ... *clunks*. Unlike the rest of the poetry in that series.
John @ 51
Ah, you're right! (I don't have many syndicated feeds, so this was the first one I noticed.) Never mind, then. I'll poke at the problem at that end. Sorry to have interrupted the pizza!
Not sure where the best thread is to ask this: has something happened to break the Making Light syndication feed to Live Journal? (This is probably a horrible way to describe the problem, but I'm not at all sure what goes on behind the curtain.) None of the posts since 9/11 have been propagated there.
Lee @ 44
Your described reaction isn't all that different from what I was trying to express. On the other hand, I may be less sanguine than you about the desireability of bleaching the word "wife" of its specific reference to a committed romantic/sexual partnership. It might defuse negative reaction to same-sex use, but perhaps at the cost of erasing visibility. I already have to do too much interpretive work when I hear a woman refer to her "girlfriend" (which more often than not is not intended in a romantic sense); I'd rather not have to make the same interpretive effort when she refers to her "wife". I'm recalling all the stories about people in same-sex relationships spending years talking about their "partner" only to find that even their nearest and dearest assumed it was a business relationship.
Keith S. @ 34
That would rather defeat the purpose of my epiphany, wouldn't it? That my emotional reaction to their use of the word is my reaction, based on an irrational sense that my definition and usage is more valid than their definition and usage. I don't somehow have stronger ownership rights over the word "wife" than they do ... just as straight people shouldn't have stronger ownership rights over the word "marriage".
On the other hand, one thing I have discussed with roughly the same set of friends is why I have a bit of a prickly reaction to the same-sex-but-non-romantic flirting that they include me in. But since that topic gets a bit complicated, I'll just point to the LJ post where I've discussed it previously. In the case of overtly pseudo-lesbian flirtation by nominally straight women, I do feel that I have better "ownership rights" over the concept than they do, and a more valid reason for feeling that "my culture" is being co-opted by outsiders for their own entertainment. But I still try to be mindful of the boundaries between my valid feelings about their interactions with me and my less-valid feelings about interactions between other people. (Not invalid, but less valid.)
Fragano @ 16
I had a bit of an epiphany on this question that has given me an annoying margin of sympathy for the reaction (while still disagreeing violently with the conclusion). It happened something like this ...
I have a number of straight (to the best of my knowledge) female friends who are in the habit of casually referring to their closest female friends (also, to the best of my knowledge, straight) using the word "wife". As in, "I had lunch today with my favorite wife so-and-so and blah blah blah." My perception is that it's intended as a light-hearted invocation of a close emotional relationship that does not partake of any romantic or sexual aspects. (The majority of the women I'm thinking of are either married to, or in exclusive romantic relationships with, men. And while some may be in open relationships and/or be theoretically open to romantic relationships with either gender, this does not appear to be what is intended by their use of the word "wife".)
As a lesbian, who feels very strongly about being denied legal access to marriage (leaving aside, for the moment, a lack of a prospective marriage partner), my emotional reaction to hearing this particular usage of the word "wife" is something like: "By using this word in this way, you're making fun of a status that I aspire to sincerely and seriously. It feels like you're demeaning the very concept of two women being married to each other by using the language of marriage to describe a relationship that doesn't conform to my personal conceptualization of that status. And I feel hurt and insulted because it feels like you're making fun of me even though I know you don't intend that at all."
Oh.
*epiphany*
I've been working harder on not being bothered by this particular word usage, but I find epiphanies of this sort to be quite salutory in general.
Bruce @ 246
there were 3 emergency appendectomies performed aboard US submarines during WWII, all by Pharmacists Mates (what were later called corpsmen), all successful.
Alas, none of them was performed on my uncle, who died of his appendicitis while on shipboard in the Pacific during WWII. Not on a submarine, though. And the family story as I heard it was that the ship was under radio silence at the time, so no opportunity for a corpsman to be talked through the procedure. (That is, I don't recall whether family lore indicates that an appendectomy was performed, but there wouldn't have been outside advice if it had been.)
The most tedious spill I have ever had to clean up in my kitchen was concentrated dishwashing detergent. Once you've finished as much physical removal as possible, you're left with and endless cycle of wipe up, rinse cloth until no longer foamy, wipe up, rinse cloth .... This is the sort of detergent that boasts that a few drops will last through all your greasiest pots. And I spilled quite a few drops.
I think the most amusing anomaly in the "walkability" evaluation of my neighborhood (score = 80) is that the closest "drug store" listed is the Novartis manufacturing plant. Mind you, being smack dab in the middle of the East Bay Biopharm Cluster does contribute greatly to the potential walkability of my life (since I work in the industry) but not because I can walk two blocks to get my flu vaccine from the source.
My suggested addition: As much as is practical, do your business face-to-face and/or with human beings.
I may not have control over the fact that my mortgage is held by a soulless mega-bank, but when I have a question or a transaction regarding it, I insist on having a human being look me in the eye while doing so. I have bewildered any number of corporations by preferring to walk in their door and speak to a human being than use the "faster and easier" route of navigating their auto-phone system.
Diatryma @ #202
And then there are a few of us ....
I didn't have an official Word thesis template at the time -- just instructions to use the MLA style handbook. But I wish I'd known one-hundredth what I know now about Word templates, style formats, and auto-updating indexes when I was writing my dissertation. I had just barely begun learning what was possible at that point. Having gotten a taste for the possible, it serves me well at my present job, where I find myself handing in multiple interleavedly-updated versions of investigation reports (with all manner of inserted tables, figures, appendices, and attachments -- all cross-referenced several times in the text).
I am regularly amused at how often my grad school experience is directly applicable to my present employment ... in an entirely unrelated field. (Degree in linguistics; employment in pharmaceutical manufacturing.)
Speaking of which, must get back to work.
It does occur to me, on further consideration, that there was one major butterfly incident that shaped my life.
My parents were still very much newlyweds when my older brother was born, and moreover were busy with my dad's first teaching job and my mother working on her masters degree. They certainly planned on having more children eventually, but not quite yet. When my older brother was about half a year old and their wedding anniversary rolled around my grandparents said, "You haven't had a break since the baby was born. We're taking the kid for the weekend -- go off somewhere just the two of you."
They did. They neglected to pack one key item. Nine months later ....
My life doesn't seem to have many butterfly moments -- the forces that shape my experience are much more in the line of deep ocean currents, continental drift, and the occasional avalanche. Living in Prague the year I was 10 was very influential, but hardly a butterfly. All my immediate family members have been stones in the course of my creekbed, but not butterflies. When I think of butterfly moments, they're ones where I remember seeing a butterfly leaving the other side of the meadow just as I arrived.
Jeff @9
Alas, although the page claimed that downloading Flip4Mac would do the trick, I did so and it only resulted in the message "this video will not play with Flip4Mac". I'm a bit peeved, but I suppose it'll turn up on DVD eventually. (Having quit cable, I was also out that option, but that's my own choice.)
Re: infra-red "fryer"
Hmm, you cook a large chunk of meat by placing it on a rack in a semi-sealed chamber that is heated indirectly via gas combustion ... I think they've reinvented the oven!
There's something awesome (or awful) about walking up to the butcher's counter and requesting a couple hundred dollars worth of beef in a single chunk. Two years ago when I was feeding a dozen relatives dinner on Boxing Day (not that we celebrate Boxing Day in any meaningful way, but it's shorter than saying "the day after Christmas" ... except that after adding all this explanation it isn't shorter at all) ... anyway, I decided to take the plunge and prepare a full-scale, bone-in, slow-roasted prime rib roast. It was an act of faith as much as a major financial commitment, since I'd never used that particular roasting technique before. Fortunately it came out perfectly.
Unfortunately I was unable to do anything creative with the bones because my brothers polished them off for lunch the next day before I could say anything.
I may never prepare a similar chunk of prime rib again in my life, but it was fun to do once.
The first peer-group funeral I went to was for a college friend who was hit by a bus. In an odd way, I think that strengthens my affection for the expression when used as a serious caution (as opposed to a joke). Because people do get hit by buses and vanish from our lives. The concreteness of the reference makes me more likely to take the caution seriously (in those times when I'm not working on being completely in denial about mortality, that is).
David Goldfarb @ 197
Yes, I believe I did eat the PhD lollipop ... after displaying it proudly on my workdesk for a few days. I did the final filing process on an extended lunchbreak from my first post-grad school job, so it was an oddly surreal experience, partaking more of the flavor of "stop by the bank, pick up stamps at the post office, drop off the recycling, and file the dissertation." That's why having the filing office staff make a fuss over me was such a delightful surprise.
David Goldfarb @ 157
I got one of those PhD lollipops too! The office staff in the filing office did a wonderful job of making a routine bureaucratic procedure feel special and celebratory.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 15 |
| 2008 | 33 |
| 2007 | 7 |
| 2006 | 1 |
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