rm | sundries

sundries

I left work early yesterday with the worst headache ever. I slept for 3.5 hours, emotionally melted down to Patty when she got home, took care of a couple of things online, ate dinner, went back to bed. Today I feel almost human. It was/is I think a combo of a sinus headache, a tension headache and the obvious barometric pressure drop going on outside. Today I'm going to work as fast as I can and go home to chill as fast as I can, although hopefully in a more chill, enjoyable way.

Also, fuck you, major pharmacy chains that no longer carry Tylenol and only your generic brand of acetemophin, which contains "starch" and it's not labeled what type of starch. When I can barely walk a straight line my head hurts so bad, it's very hard for me to deal with gluten issues you don't even understand.

I won't have the bulk of my Dragon*Con schedule or firm times for anything for probably at least a month, but I found out this morning that I did get accepted to the academic sister-conference with "The Illustrated Dead: Fan Mourning in Response to Character Death in Comics and Manga."

Often frowned upon outside fan communities, audiences sometimes engage
in mourning rituals at the deaths of fictional characters. This
presentation will address fan mourning in response to the demise of
characters in both manga and western comics.

In “Tangible Reality of Absence: Fan Communities and the Mourning of
Fictional Characters,” which addresses book and television narratives,
I argued that through mourning fans “stake claim to otherwise
inaccessible desired bodies while also creating a dialogue that
eroticizes the deceased” and that these acts are a “partial
defictionalization, moving the desired bodies of personal and
narrative fantasy into a tangible reality of absence.”

In the case of comics and manga, however, these mourned bodies are
representations of flesh as opposed to flesh themselves, so mourning
fans not only defictionalize what was lost, but also engage in acts of
self-fictionalization that allow union with the source material.

By looking at fan responses to Asao Takamori and Tetsuya Chiba's
“Tomorrow's Joe,” Wendy and Richard Pini's “Elf Quest” and Ellen Kushner's
illustrated chapbook “The Man With the Knives” I will compare fan
mourning for characters in illustrated stories to those in other media
while also examining narrative features that provoke these acts of
eroticization.

In a moment of hilarity probably only hilarious to me, it turns out Patty and I will be in Chicago for a wedding the same weekend as Chicago ComicCon. I doubt we'll go, but I may need to wander by just to examine logistics re ConSuite (which is set at a multi-fandom con in Chicago, but one that is not intended to be ComicCon, but hey, what do I know).

In case anyone missed the epic fail over in Supernatural fandom: someone used the Haiti earthquake as their setting for AU RPS about two white dudes getting it on, and that's not even the failiest part of the whole thing. No, no, that was the fact that it was seen by multiple people, including betas and artists and no one caught how not only was the general premise really fucking insensitive but the whole thing was laden with hideous racial stereotypes. Since then, there's been some not getting it apologies and the fic has finally been taken down. Meanwhile, this list of quotes from the fic are pretty much a map of how not to write PoC.

coatkneedee is 20 and homeless due to a host of family issues. Details here if you're inclined to help.

The anti-gay policies of the Boy Scouts are about to be in the spotlight again.

Live stream on Prop 8 trial closing arguments. Starts at 8am PST.

Elton John finally has something to say about playing Rush Limbaugh's wedding.

NYC Subway Rats Eternal. Confession: I sorta like watching the little guys run around on the tracks.

American man in no-fly list limbo in Egypt.

The I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER empire. EMPIRE. In my mind's eye I can see the LOLCats in their little spaceships right now.

Come fandom, come pros, participate in this cracky, cracky discussion about a couple of photos of John Barrowman and the mic wiring we can't understand.

I'm always saying New York is a 19th-century city. Here's proof.

Problematic article about the longer road to adulthood. Yes, the lack of clear definitions of adulthood in modern US culture is a problem. But to blame it on students being allowed to stay on their parents' health insurance until 26 (they would otherwise join the ranks of the uninsured in our barbaric system) and women choosing to delay having children in order to have education and careers is just vicious and weird. I do not have children, and I am an adult, thank you for playing.

elainasaunt found Mark Morford's response.

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Did not know that ICanHazCheezburger was based out of Seattle. Maybe I should apply? :P

Re: long road to adulthood: I agree that the article is adhering to a very narrow definition of "adulthood" - and not even an accurate one (that many people don't marry until their mid 20s isn't novel in the broader scope of western history).

One of the main reasons I moved away from my family as soon as possible after college graduation was to create a hard line between childhood and adulthood which I needed. I knew that staying local I'd never quite be viewed as an adult so I needed to do something.

Man, SPN keeps bringing the fail. It's almost impressive. Except, you know...not.

That article about "the longer road to adulthood" seemed seriously half-baked. It's a good idea, and worth journalistic exploration, but uh...that wasn't the right way to do it.

I read through that Haiti fic pullquotes until I hit the phrase "gibbering in Creole" and then I gave up.

My favorite part of the rats article:

In 1976, an academic study concluded that “rats with high blood pressure should not ride the subways too often or too long: the stress of noise, vibration, and crowding may kill some of them before their time.”

It just occurred to me that the only time the Girl Scouts make the news is when there's a new controversy about the cookies. (They've got transfats! Now they're made with palm oil, which means they're killing orangutans! That girl is cheating by taking orders online!)

Yeah, I've looked up the Girl Scouts pretty thoroughly and they're awesome. Several of my well-informed liberal friends and acquaintances went through the system and are now supportive leaders there.

Their curriculum (they have one!) is explicitly filling girls' heads with critical thought on how women are shown in the media, what being female means to you personally, examining religious assumptions and defining personal faith or lack thereof, emotional regulation techniques, caring for the environment, and learning about historical women who kicked ass.

Wish I could've been part of that! (I was in the UK Girl Guides, which did talk about teamwork, and Doing Awesome Stuff, but its curriculum was weaksauce by comparison.)

My mom was our Brownie Troop leader in 3rd grade. Our play was Peter Pan and I was a Lost Boy. I had a small stuffed teddy bear tied to my dungarees. I thought the part was crap at the time, but in retrospect, Girl Scouts was the first time I got to be a boy (lost, indeed), so I sorta dig that now.

I wish that had been the Girl Scouts/Brownies when I was a kid. I got kicked out because I didn't go to church, and didn't fit in with the other girls making pillows and painting sticks.

My sister went winter camping in the Canadian Rockies*, which is something not everyone can do for lack of winter or Rockies, but it's the sort of thing young girls should get to do.

*This lead to unfortunate and inappropriate hilarity when, at the start of the Afghanistan war, a U.S. official patiently explained to assembled press that it was like fighting in the Rockies in winter...

I love subway rats. Cute little guys.
The ones in the parks get way bigger anyway.

I didn't know olive branches cost a million dollars.

Re: the article on adulthood... one of the most common questions I've fielded in foreign countries is, "is it true that in your country, people stop living with their parents when they're 18?" It was regarded as something incredibly daring and impressive, but also sort of cruel and frightening. I always told them that yes, that was the ideal, but it hardly ever worked out that way in practice.

That Supernatural fic... OMGWTF. I went and read a few quotes from it. It's one of those cases where a parody of how to write something atrociously offensive could hardly be more extreme. I've probably read pulp stories from the 1920s that are more nuanced and sensitive about race. The cat... the horror...

Yeah, it's like that in Italy, too -- people don't move out of their parents' house just because they're adults.

I like that, though I liked moving out of my parents' house. :D

The article about the longer road to adulthood is so freaking full of fail.

I don't even know whose families they're looking at. All of the people I know have lived with their folks at some point in their twenties, sometimes with wife and kids in tow. (My folks lived with my grandparents for a couple of months when I was 2 whilst our houses were being built. My husband and I lived with his parents for about 10 weeks after he left grad school. My best friend and her husband lived with his folks for a few months whilst their townhouse was being finished. And the list goes on.)

My thought was that you lived with your folks until you either got married or found a job that could support you. If you never found a job that could support you, then you ended up at home, with your folks, a bit of a laughing stock, but not homeless.

Besides with college getting more expensive and businesses not hiring people who are unemployed and no universal health care what are young people supposed to do? Move out and be homeless?

The barometric pressure has been miserable lately.

There used to be mice all over the Boston T tracks. They have been gone for a few years; I miss them too.

"Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood" kind of boggles my mind. I feel pretty strongly that adulthood should be a prerequisite for marriage or parenthood. This really reminds me of that quote from the red state vs blue state culture article, that in blue states 'adults make families' while in red states 'families make adults'.

I do not have children, and I am an adult, thank you for playing.

This. Although I admit that even though I'm now thirty-one, have not lived with my parents since I finished college, have had a full-time job/dealt with paying bills while unemployed since graduating, and have had a mortgage since I was twenty-five, I don't always feel like I'm an adult. I think this has less to do with the fact that I'm not married and don't have children and more to do with the fact that I've been living with friends from college in too small/dorm-like living quarters, and that after I graduated my college friends and I became friends with a bunch of undergraduates in the science fiction club. So it was sort of like still being in college, except with more bills and fewer classes. Or maybe it's that we occasionally pretend to kick each other in the shins. ~~My roommate and I are each other's bratty little brother, I swear.~~

I saw the Haiti fic and... I have no words. Oh. Dear. Gods.

Elton John building bridges. Don't build a bridge Elton - there are places we don't want to go! Talk about a bridge to nowhere!

I'm not sure that article on adulthood is as much problematic in the get married have kids way as saying that older definitions of adulthood no longer apply (because most of the women they're talking about were working women and they weren't going on about how that was a bad thing), and also -- via the 'lesbian spinster' bit -- that older generations also don't know how to define 'adulthood' for their children. I mean, if the recession means that more people are living with their parents (ie: multigenerational households, which are common place in other countries), or in school because a higher education means better life prospects, and not having kids/getting married because it's no longer a huge financial safety net for women. I wonder what definitons of 'adulthood' are in stable northern european countries where this sort of thing has been happening for awhile.

The thing I found most interesting were things they almost didn't talk about at all -- that many of the systems we've set up in the past for transitioning to 'adulthood' (however its defined) aren't being used today; college dorms, the communtiy corps stuff, etc. I find that interesting because things like the WPA and Americorps and so on could be used, during this recession for *so many* good things and they're being mostly ignored. I guess it's too socialist. :(

I guess it's too socialist. :(

Interesting point about that last; we're keen to join groups that bring us together as members of a particular cohort/class/fandom/whatever, but you don't see so much of organizations intent on bringing people together from many different backgrounds on a secular basis as human beings for doing good.

Mark Morford's column today is the perfect riposte to the article on adulthood. http://bit.ly/b5pMw2

That's awesome. Thank you!

Man, that NY Times article about "adulthood" pissed me off. The conflation of adulthood with parenthood is absurd, of course, but also--college is unaffordable, unemployment is rampant, wages are stagnant, housing is terribly expensive, healthcare is a crapshoot, childcare and parental leave are woefully inadequate... what are young people stuck in these impossible situations supposed to do? We have a broken socio-economic system, and the NY Times would rather blame the victims than acknowledge the bigger structural problems.

I wish my job was approving LOLcats.

My local CVS carries gluten-free generic tylenol which is what I use at home. Do you want me to get you some?

Nah, all good. I have a bottle at home. I just had a problem getting similar from a Duane Reade at work yesterday. Thank you though!

The barometric pressure has been torturing me as well. Hope you're feeling better today.

Re Elton John: Everyone has their price. We now know what Elton's is.

I'd have a lot more respect for him if he said, hey its a gig, I needed the money. Fair enough. But don't try to pass this off as some type of pro-gay activism.

You sang at his wedding; you didn't have a televised debate with him on gay rights. There is a difference.

Re: the Elton John story: I want Limbaugh to lay the first brick in that bridge, plz.

Right. Lay. Not be. Meant that. Did.

I'm so glad I'm not alone in my secret fondness of the subway rats.

Of course New York in a 19th century city. It's too narrow to be modern.

Thank you for the link to the Mark Morford article, it was a brilliant response to that very dubious article.

NYC Subway Rats Eternal. Confession: I sorta like watching the little guys run around on the tracks.

I'm not absolutely certain why, but my first response to reading your comment was to think just how obviously you are a New Yorker.

Hullo Rm!

Sorcyress said you were interesting and I should follow you :)

Ack at not being able to find gluten-free paracetamol D: The last thing you need when you're sick is to have to deal with that too. Doctors gave me gluten containing painkillers before an operation once >_> That was pretty. (In NZ, ambiguous ingredients now have to be labelled starch[wheat] or whatnot. Which is nice, because I used to have to call up the information hotline for each brand of drug/ask the pharmacist to look it up for me) *offers panadol and chocolate*

Hello! I looked at your journal when you friended me and I said "oh, waistcoats, must be all right" -- I hadn't noticed you are celiac too. Welcome!

:D
Thanks!

Actually, I am the waistcoat. I gained sentience one day after my awesome reached critical levels; now I operate the robot you see wearing me so as to be able to move around & fit in with humanity.

Wait wait wait! Haitians are real? I thought they were like leprechauns or pirates...

We can haz Trantor!

If have no idea if Canadian acetaminophen is gluten-free. Or Canadian generic anything!D8

I really have a problem with that "adulthood" article. A lot of it seemed wrapped up in nostalgia for a time before second wave feminism, but that's not all of it. I don't think it's really a problem to not be married if you haven't found the right person, even if it means you're 'too old' to be unmarried. And why is it wrong that having children should be seen as a choice? Should people be having kids because they're feeling pressured by society to do so and then later taking out their resentments on the kids?

I'm an adult. I work full-time, pay my taxes, and take responsibility for myself and my actions. I'm also unmarried with no children. Those aren't strikes against me, and they're not evidence that I've failed at anything, and I resent this article for implying that.

Oh and notice how the article makes a big deal about more women going to college. Because clearly, that means the end times are coming. *eyeroll*

Did you see this article in the NY Times on men's hair-removal habits? Couldn't help but think of "Spa Day," even though the piece focuses on back hair (though there is this choice quote: “'You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a bathroom with a man watching him shave all his body parts,' said Carl Kammer, director of new product development at Remington.”)

Edited 2010-06-17 01:02 (UTC)

I still don't get the Elton John-at-Limbaugh's-Wedding thing. It skeeves me something terrible, makes me angry in ill-directed ways, and otherwise just makes me want to shout a massive WTF?! from the highest mountain I can climb.

I'm sure a bridge with private!Limbaugh is more than possible, because I have faith in individual humans. I'm not sure, though, if I believe media!Limbaugh does anything but benefit from this whole thing, though. It's ridiculous and asymmetric bullshit. Grr. Argh.

More happily, I am quietly cheering for the rats.

That adulthood article is...really angry-making? Yeah, hi. I own a house and work a full-time job. I'm trying to make my writing something that can sustain me. I support my retired mother. I fail to see how being not-married and not having a child, or being interested in continuing education makes me not an adult. And, having gone without insurance, I can honestly say that being incapable of caring for myself adequately on account of working minimum wage shit jobs did not make me more of a grown-up. It just ensured that my lungs will never be the same.

You are right, that is a problematic article. I don't really have anything to say you didn't in your summary, I just sat her kinda squinching up my face, going, "Whaaaaa?" But I liked Mark Morford's response, particularly:

Tradition, after all, has a few perks. It's greatest gift -- OK, its only gift -- lies in how it connects you to the larger storyline, to community and neighborhood, place and time. When you demolish the traditional pillars, you can lose your bearings. There can be regret, resentment, depression. You can wait too long. You can wait forever. As the saying goes, life is what happens while you're busy taking that life-planning seminar... for the third time.

I'm 31, married with two kids. But it's also my third marriage. In many ways I'm really only just now discovering myself- I've got the kids, the husband, the debt- but I'd really barely say I have scratched the surface of "adult". I also have friends who are travelling performers- no kids, no house, just a trailer and some kerosene torches they eat, breathe, etc. They are more "adult" than I am, any day.

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