out and about

Whale Rider girl is pregnant. Somehow, I don't find this odd.

Man, still tired. Tired to the point of being very impatient and going to bed soon so I can enjoy tomorrow which involves any number of thigns that deeply soothe me including fussy sewing, Hornblower, sushi, and my girl and her boy.

Man, I hurt all over. The fair was excellent. I briefly saw sykii and askeladden and hung out with leopard_lady quite a bit and met airspaniel. I communed with dogs -- mostly pugs, because pugs are the bestest and don't freak me out like other dogs do, but also greyhounds because they were dressed like Nazgul horses and that was just the coolest ever. Greyhound rescue. Nazgul rescue. Yay.

I also shouted in public, "I'm sorry, anything that peels paint shouldn't go in my cunt." The origin of that though is someone else's story to tell.

I bought a plain black cloak with a small, dragonish silver clasp. It's the same exact fabric as my Snape coat and so will go with that smashingly as well as be suitable enough (albeit not accurate historically) as outerwear to get to the Regency ball in costume (which is not generally what our group does, but what Kali and I have decided to do). It's totalyl not Snape academic robes, so you'll not be seeing it as inside wear at any con, but I may well swoop into the Draco & the Malfoys gig next week with it over the coat. I am very pleased with this multi-purpose acoutrement.

Then, I had to leave early to go work, which was not deeply annoying but fairly well beyond my capacity by then. Then I came home, ate dinner and did more work. My shoulders hurt. I think I'll book a massage for a few days after the ball. I'll probably well need it.

As I note often, despite my love of the right kind of people, people of any kind exhaust me and it is hard for me to have any sort of expansive social life. I can work myself far past exhaustion with anything I do alone, but with other people it's very hard for me. Some of that is trust issues and shyness and so forth, but some of it is, I know I only have so much energy and a lot of the things that come first for me are either very solitary or very private or both. It is hard, especially this time of year, and especially after six months of things that make me want merely to protect myself, not to become the very dry, ascetic, solitary to the point of invisible creatre I have been at certain points in my life. But I did realize today that here I am with several new acquainceships developing into friendships and a general openness I really didn't think i was capable of. Yes, I'm still cagey as sin, but for me, this is a lot. It's not that I get less tired from it all, it's that I'm learning there are benefits to pushing myself in said arenas as well. One of the things that makes it a little easier for me to be me, and to feel less defensive about my life is that I'm making a real conscious choice lately to call my parents my parents and say that family is something eelse, not because of the generosity of the people I know (although they are) but because of the facts of them.

elephant lost boys

Elephants are raping rhinos and attacking villages and it's because we've destroyed their culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

Freaky intense article.

“I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,” Abe told me. “I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed — no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.”

...

“I remember when I first was working on my doctorate,” she said. “I mentioned that I was doing this parallel once to a prominent scientist in Kenya. He looked amazed. He said, ‘How come nobody has made this connection before?’ I told him because it hadn’t happened this way to anyone else’s tribe before. To me it’s something I see so clearly. Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.”

...

I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past June. As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we’ve arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it.

...

“The city of the dead,” as Lewis Mumford once wrote, “antedates the city of the living.”