The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by yhl:

I'm glad she's okay now. Y'all are in my prayers.

Ouch. I'm very sorry to hear. May life sling you some good soon.

Guh. Splendid.

Which reminds me, I have a book on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese organic agriculture that I need to read soon...(Farmers of Forty Centuries, from Dover.)

It's bad when my brain goes "Pay-trick," possibly conflating "patriot" and "Patrick." Don't shoot me...

(I did read it. This is not good--I mean, having to have a lament. But I will think about it more intelligently when it is not 3 AM.)

Such nostalgia.

Teresa, I see you are at work suppressing your evil tendencies. Or making us think you are. Or making us think you think you are. Man, I love/hate recursion. =)

I thought I couldn't be any more of a wreck in the past several weeks after reading and reading and reading about Katrina.

Of course, Houston's thereabout too.

I think I'm even more of a wreck now. And I'm not even there; I wasn't in N'awlins and I'm not anywhere near Texas and haven't been for years. And even if it doesn't land there specifically--

I wish I were there and I could DO something. I mean--not about the weather specifically, butterfly effect *sigh for chaos theory in popular media* or no--but...something.

I need to stop reading the news obsessively, except I can't, except that's what obsessively means, isn't it?

I will shut up now.

I am apparently one of the very few people who didn't take a shine to Mal (except a few moments), and I liked his voice-overs.

I can't wait to see this!

If nothing else, River! River!

Jax: I'm sorry you have to deal with idiots. :-( I like some of your come-backs and wish I'd thought of some of them myself.

Mine was an initially unwanted pregnancy (birth control failure) and I had one of the worst nightmares of my life out of worry over the lizard-thing.

I figure humans have been spawning for thousands of years, under sometimes horribly adverse conditions and uncontrollable circumstances and divergent social constraints, and the species is still around (whether or not you think of that as a good thing), and there are lots of decent human beings walking around no doubt raised in very different ways.

I wish you all the best, Jax!

Of course, in the anti-drive-by arena, during the summer job when I was pregnant (but was keeping it quiet to avoid annoying questions), I was hanging out during lunch hour with one of the instructors and a tutor. They were both smokers; they asked if I minded. I appreciated their asking, which they were not obliged to, but I said please don't go out of your way to spread it around, but I'm pregnant and I don't feel comfortable being around cigarette smoke and I may have to go somewherre else. (I also have near-allergic reactions to cigarette smoke, independent of spawning.) They were very kind, apologized although they certainly didn't need to, given that they had been the ones being considerate in the first place, and elected not to smoke at that particular lunchtime. I kind of doubt that fifteen minutes' exposure to cigarette smoke would have done measurable damage compared to, I dunno, the general air pollution.

James Palmer: I believe this utterly. :-(

I have to remind myself that I have some Korean-American friends with decent and loving parents.

James Palmer:
On mother drive-bys, though, Korea and China, where I live now, probably rank first in the world. The Chinese delight in children, but any woman past 40 also takes any opportunity to lecture. Korea has probably the most spectacularly messed-up family dynamics in SE Asia, which is saying something, and the dominance of the mother-in-law figure there is almost unbelievable; I've seen young women reduced to tears in public by the criticism of strangers. (The Koreans take age respect to extremes, though I have to admit that seeing three traffic policemen, all 18-19 year old conscripts, being literally slapped around by a middle-aged taxi driver for having the effontery to give him a ticket was pretty funny.)

I'm Korean-American and I llived there a third of my life, and oh my Lord, YES. Mothers-in-law, but also mothers.

My daughter was originally going to be fostered with my mother. There is a reason my husband and I changed our plans, and at least part of it was due to the increasing psychoticness of my mother--I love her, but she has Issues, and I am not exposing my child to the same corrosive environment that nearly did me in. There is something wrong about a mother who feels the need to call you three times a week or more from *South Korea* for hour-long discussions interspersed with attempted micromanagement of your parenting (she keeps insisting I should show my 15-mo.-old Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood starting Any Time Now and I keep trying to remind her that we don't own a TV and don't want one).

There are so very many reasons I will never live in South Korea if I can help it, and the messed-up family dynamics are among them.

I have had my mother-in-law keep saying that we should have another spawn because "when *I* was a child" (she's an only) "I always wanted someone to play with." To which I always want to retort, "Because, you know, we're going to lock her up in a cage and never let her play with other kids." (She's 15 mos. old, so maybe playing *with* is a ways off. But certainly, getting to play with other kids when she's more socialized!)

I am patently ignoring the woman. My husband agrees that One Is Enough. (Some nights? More than enough. :-p) I keep being reminded of somewhere in the Vorkosigan books where Cordelia remarks on Miles's idealization of having a brother. I have a sister. My mom's one of six. My sister and I get along great, but after watching some of the wacky interactions between my aunts and uncles I am under no illusions that having siblings is a panacea for, well, anything.

Also? I've had my spawn be loud in public places. *Usually* at the mall, which is crowded with many, many, many spawn, so I don't feel so bad, especially now that I can take her to the play-area where the other kids are. There are times I try to get her to be quiet and she isn't having any of it, and I am at a complete loss as to how to communicate with a preverbal being besides removing her from the situation and providing a distraction; and sometimes I don't have enough arms and I can't get her away from the area quickly enough. It also makes me more sympathetic to people who are attempting to deal with their unruly spawn; the older ones especially. It's like having a time-warp lens. I think: that's gonna be ME in a few years, and I'm gonna have to learn how to deal with it, and chances are I'm going to screw it up sometimes. :-/

The other thing that bemuses me is that in brisk but not chilly weather people will drive-by at us for the child missing a sock, or both socks. (She's talented at removing shoes and socks. We've lost three left shoes already. I tell you, it's a curse. I wouldn't mind putting mismatched shoes on her, but she doesn't have two right feet!) At the same time, they found her uncovered head and uncovered hands unremarkable; my husband or I was carrying the child, so letting her walk around barefooted was not an issue. I am still confused. I don't understand humans.

When it gets really bad, I remind myself that almost nothing a stranger has said to me has ever been as bad as the things my mom has said to me about my ability to raise a child.

Or maybe I should just shoot myself now.

Yeeeeek.

I'm about to go on meds myself for something unrelated...cautionary, cautionary. I'm so sorry this happened, and glad it's been caught.

I wonder if our president has watched Dr. Strangelove? I saw it for the first time a few months ago. I couldn't stop laughing. Then I *dared* not stop laughing because otherwise I'd start crying. Or something like that.

Janet Croft: I think this is also quite true of our educational system, and one more reason why we homeschool. It was so obvious in kindergarten that they were training up little automatons -- you WILL lie flat on your back with your eyes closed at naptime, you WILL NOT work ahead in your book no matter how fascinating you find the subject, you will NEVER attempt to take home art supplies because art class was too short, yadda yadda yadda (or "n'at" in Pittsburghese :)).

You mean it wasn't just me? I always got chided for reading ahead in (usually history and English) textbooks! I couldn't see what the fuss was. It wasn't my fault the other students were (a) not interested enough, (b) not fast enough readers, or (c) better at pretending at (a) or (b). If I'd already finished the thing they wanted me to read (usually twice), I couldn't see why I had to sit there doing nothing instead of devouring the rest of the book.

Meanwhile. Despair.com *rocks.* If I am ever, ever allowed to put up posters again, I am so getting some of those. I wonder if I should send the President some...nah, they'd never make it.

First in a projected series of LiveJournal VP VIII posts. My notes are sitting in Boston (whoops), so they may be temporally unstuck. Plus, I have a weird rambling brain anyway. You have been warned. :-)

Randall: Well, I'm a pendulum that way. An aperiodic much-jostled one. I can look at the same piece I wrote and think, Wow, that's pretty dang good. Two weeks later, I can't stand it. And so on, back and forth. Part of the fun of getting critiques and/or rejection slips is some sense of outside feedback. I'm not saying that they're absolute standards (three markets reject a story, the fourth buys it...), but my own self-assessments vary so wildly and frequently, I never take 'em too seriously if I can help it. :-)

Xopher: Much as I hate Piers Anthony, I have to say that Crewel Lye, a Caustic Yarn is the best English-language pun I've ever heard.

I'm not alone! I'm not alone! My sister claims it was her first adult fantasy novel--I was reading Piers Anthony devotedly at the time, while in middle school--and it launched her further into sf/f, muhahahaha.

Randall, if it must be just one--I haven't read the sequels yet (it's a trilogy, I believe?), but John Wright's The Golden Age is fairly recent sf. The characterization is a bit thin in spots, but I adored it for the sheer density of ideas in a, hmm, vividly imagined posthuman? future. It takes Phaethon/Apollo and injects it with skiffy stuff; I hadn't been so dazzled/boggled since Olaf Stapledon. That being said, if the first couple chapters turn you off, you may as well stop there, and try another of the very very good list of suggestions already here. :-)

Not that I have it nearly as bad, but my mom used to complain that clothes-shopping for me in Korea was obnoxious because everything my size had sleeves too short. I also apparently have more-than-usually-narrow shoulders, which is also a pain.

I am reminded of all the reasons I loathe clothes shopping and avoid doing so whenever possible. Unfortunately, I don't have the compensation of knowing how to sew anything but felt pseudo-ki-rin and horses.

I am in fact of Asian descent, and during high school in Korea I was constantly appalled by the prevalence of pale sickly greens and bright oranges that I am convinced almost no native Korean looks good in.

Of course, I went around in 5-year-old t-shirts and just-as-old pants and a black thing vaguely of the trenchcoat genre (it was warm, what can I say?), so I shouldn't speak. But I never wore sickly green. Or bright orange.

I remember one of the Drama Club members, who was half-Caucasian, half-Chinese, also complaining that all the makeup the drama department had on hand went horribly on Asian skin-tones. At an international school where 90% of the students or thereabouts were Asian (and most of those, Korean), she thought this was extremely silly.

And one of these days, I will convince my mom that no, I really, truly hate beige on myself. She knows this. And keeps sending beige clothing. I suppose it's probably better than sickly green, or the other colors that Kate Nepveu mentioned above...

I suppose the net has cut into my book-reading time, but not nearly so much as the baby has; and if it weren't for the net, I would be going rapidly and noisily insane due to insufficient talking to other adult human beings who aren't my husband.

I think I'm still doing 3-5 books a week on average, so I'm okay. Right?

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