(no subject)

[rm]

The wonder of sleep, even not enough of it, is that it offers perspective. Last night, everything seemed very big and overwhelming. Today, it just seems big.

Although, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't freaked out about this trip. The part where I'm going to Cardiff to see Patty is grand. The part where I'm going to CH for work is expected. The part where Patty's going to visit me in CH is SuperExtraSpecial bonus. The part where all of this adds up to 5 weeks instead of 2 and change? IS FREAKING ME OUT.

I am, at heart, a homebody in certain ways. I love to travel because it's glamorous and interesting and because travel is hard and it makes you know yourself. So a bazillion weekends going on little adventures with Patty? Awesome. A few two week trips here and there? Fabulous. Big epic journeys? Kinda set off my control-freak buttons, but totally have their place. Yet, this trip has no clearly defined category and there's very little of it I'm in control of, and so I'm a bit weirded out.

This is, of course, compounded right now by being really artistically busy/productive (both in actuality and in the related to particular narrative matters of my existence playing in my head on the repeat loop of late) and the fact that fall, even as we're starting to edge into the cold crappy part of it (as opposed to the glorious October part of it), is my favorite season, not just in general, but in New York. I write about New York so much, but I don't always talk about the love. Not enough. This is my home and this is my lottery ticket. It leaves me more powerful than most people I know, and it too leaves me wanting and bereft. I talk a lot about my innate melancholia and romanticism; blame my city of decay.

Mostly, I am just a big bucket of oh, shit! about leaving here for five weeks. Does anyone remember if I did this before I went to Australia? Does anyone think that's remotely comparable in anything but duration? I think, maybe the biggest part of the problem is that I'm lacking a framework. Patty goes. I stay home.

I keep trying to tell myself it will be fine. It will, in fact, be good. A sort of hermitting stage -- I won't really have a social life in CH beyond the days Patty comes to visit, and I won't have a very excessive work schedule but for a handful of other days. That means I can be holed up with my laptop the rest of the time and sending files back and forth with the folks I'm doing collaborations with. I'll also be working on stuff for that screenplay competition, and I've not shortage of solo projects that need me. I'll also be flogging the hell out of the Kickstarter fundraising.

When I get to Cardiff, I can unplug for the Thanksgiving week where no one gets anything done anyway. Plus, Patty's better than any ol' city.

New York will survive without me; and Patty plus random Americans in Cardiff will survive my putting on an apron and attempting a feast. It'll all be great. Too bad I know there's really no talking me down about this. It's just going to be like this until it happens.

While I'm being neurotic, things are happening in the world:

First, the recue of the Chilean miners is underway. As of this writing the 13th man has just been brought up.

Yesterday, a "permanent injunction" was issued against DADT. The justice department can still appeal, and there's significant debate as to whether this should be handled by the courts or the Congress. Don't get me started about the bullshit our current political climate has been heaping on the Judiciary Branch. Anyway. Good-ish news. Strange times. Long-term outlook: crystal. Short-term outlook: motherfucking hazy.

Anti-gay New York politician Paladino's gay nephew speaks out; after Paladino referenced the guy's existence while trying to argue that he's not homophobic.

Women, equality, and France.

Stress, inflammation, disease, oppression and health.

Holy crap: 20-year-old half-Egyptian US-born citizen finds FBI tracking device in his car (yeah, really, the FBI showed up to get it back) and it turns out he's being tracked because his now-deceased father was an Muslim community activist. Not, cool, FBI. Not cool.

Hey, my friend Mirabai has been interviewed about her steno technology and philosophy at the Geek Feminism Blog. Read it. This is how you do an interview: concise storytelling, cadence-aware, enthused, invitational.

reannon links us to a good post and a lot of funny comments about crap people did (some of it really frigging stupid, some of it really normal) in their 1960s and 70s childhoods that would get parents the fuck arrested today, but wasn't _that_ outrageous then.

Many of you have no doubt heard of the guy running for Congress in Ohio who used to dress up like a Nazi soldier in WWII reenactments. I have a lot to say about this, because the topic is both complicated in general, because I'm a reenactor (in other periods), because I'm Jewish, and because, in this case it's actually really clear cut (and it's not always -- there are places and contexts in which I'd argue it can be a relevant, necessary choice if handled correctly) that this was entirely not the fuck appropriate. I've not found myself motivated yet.

Look, I haven't seen The Social Network yet, which means my opinion is sort of crap, but having worked for dot.com start-ups aplenty, let me tell you, there's basically no amount of misogyny that could be present in this film that would surprise me or that would make me blame the writers/producers/directors for its presence. I may be proved wrong, once I've seen it. But that world was/is ugly.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

It seems like different flavors of misogyny to me. (Speaking as someone who knows nothing of Hollywood but that which comes out of it, and whose experience in the greater tech world has been the better part of a Computer Information Systems degree, interacting with IT as a woman employed in a non-technical job, interacting with the in-house developers of an in-house web-app as a theoretically non-technical end-user, interacting with in-house geeks as the creator of a database using *wince* Access [it was what I had to hand], serving as volunteer tech support on LJ, serving as cat-herder on suggestions, working front line tech support for a registrar with bells whistles email and hosting, and currently serving as volunteer tech support/spamwrangler/cheerleader for Dreamwidth...) Tech world, the good folks don't care if you're an alien blue poodle as long as you can do the job -- but part of doing the job is getting taken seriously, and part of getting taken seriously involves some hazing in very pointedly socially masculine fashions.

I gather from the output that Hollywood doesn't seem to care whether you have a brain or not, or if your personal habits include *sleeping with* alien blue poodles, as long as you have the right look or can be made to have the right look, and can act.

Neither of these strike me as particularly healthy things for humans, and even less so women and other classes vulnerable to exploitation.


The misogyny in the tech world thing came up for me yet again this morning because of something mentioned in IRC, and I went Googling around after something or other, and I ran smack into some big wheel named Randal making an ass of himself in the comments, which I shouldn't have read. The phrase "yelled at for breaking the build" came up, in context of people who can't take the heat and run away, and people who stick around and become better coders through trial by fire. And it's over a year later, and I'm looking at a sudden plethora of wonderful devs, and it strikes me that Mr. S seemingly doesn't know the difference between a code review and verbal abuse, and apparently has linked the two, so that if your code's broken, you get berated for it like a kid who's just smashed the cookie jar in an attempt to snag a few. Why? Because it's always been that way. It builds character. And yet I'm staring at this channelful of strong spirited devs who've never had a harsh word from the leads in their lives, just "That didn't work; see here and here and here; how do you propose to fix it?" and half of them were just babydevs or not even that the same time last year. Open source is not boot camp.

[natf.livejournal.com]

I am left wondering if that was the same Randal S that I would have come across back in the late 90s while programming using Perl…

[azurelunatic]

Middle initial L? Yes.

[natf.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. 'nuff said, say n'mor'.