Emote

In annoyances, the family refuses to sing the line from Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog that has the word "gay" in it, and shush me when I do so in front of the six-year-old. Because I guess any mention of teh gay that's not followed by "is an abomination unto god" will make him gay. Or maybe they just think that him knowing that queer people exist will leave him irreparably scarred. Either way, I am Not Pleased.

In idiocy, advice about sex is generally terrible. Especially things to the tune of "10/25/50/101 things your chick/hunk of man-meat want you to do/not do in bed". Either it's so general that it's useless, or it's too specific to be at best realistic or at worst completely conforming to every gender stereotype ever. Seriously, if you're on the internet or reading a magazine for advice about your sex life, it's probably not going to be fixed by following ten tips.

In delightfulness, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks was wonderful, with lots of discussion of Foucault and the panopticon, as well as some solid and accessible social theory that played a really interesting role in the story. The main character is likeable and self-aware without being too genre savvy, and the book really captures the process of someone becoming socially aware (perhaps to a point of obsession that's generally only tolerated in absent-minded but very bright sociology professors) and the impact it can have on their life. Here's to hoping a copy shows up at the used bookstore in relatively good condition so that I can snatch it up and make it mine forever.

Why I love Pushing Daisies.

1. Anna Friel as Chuck. Need I say more?

2. The aesthetics of the show. From the architecture to décor to the fifties-inspired outfits Chuck gets to wear, it's all gorgeously whimsical. *drool!*

3. The fact that especially at first, Chuck is the more proactive one in her relationship with Ned, and she's not labelled a slut, and doesn't die a horrible tragic death. (Well, she does kind of die once, but she doesn't stay dead, and it's before she even sees Ned.)

4. Reference to masturbation that's anything other than "you will go blind/rot in hell for all eternity/have an otherwise terrible fate".

5. Chuck and Ned's relationship is far from sexless even though they can't touch each other.
5a. This is seen as good and healthy, rather than a source of comedy.
5b. That they would work around their inability to touch each other if they wanted to have sex was assumed, and the idea that they would just never do anything sexual because of it wasn't seriously raised.
5c. They have an awesomely creative sex life, probably in part because of the fact that they can't touch each other.
5d. While lots of the things they do might appeal to various fetish communities, it's not a point of moralising, nor is it dwelt upon. It's just how they happen to have sex and/or enjoy sex.
5e. Most of this is absolutely not a big deal in the show, which makes it doubly awesome.

Insecurities and Other Things

Today, I worked at the Children's Museum as a desk-staff person. I answered the phone and everything! It was extremely quiet, which was a relief because I actually had absolutely no idea how to do my job. All the other work I'd done there generally had to do with entertaining kids or planning and setting up their special events. Not to mention, until this afternoon, I hadn't used a cash register that was younger than 90 years old. Trust me when I say, there's a huge difference between a modern cash register and a 1920's one.

There might have been some panicking on my part, as well as whining about all the possible worst case scenarios. 

Because it was so quiet, I read most of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. It is, of course, highly recommended. I'm a tremendous Terry Pratchett fan, even if I do go on bizarre tangents about the philosophical implications of some of the things he writes. You should ask me about Nation sometime. =P

The first sentence of Going Postal reads "They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged." Perfectly lovely Pratchett-esque sentence, no?

But what struck me was the implications, as it frames the mind as the user of the body rather than the soul as a user of the mind and body, or the mind and body as one cohesive unit. The former two approaches, I believe, are huge reasons why there's a massive divide between the way that someone who's physically ill or disabled is treated vs someone who is mentally ill. I think a much healthier, practical paradigm would be to see the body and mind as inseparable, or at the least interdependent and each influencing the other. The fact that I can even use "body" to mean "all of the body except the mind" is a disturbing testimony to just how far the gulf between the two is in our culture. And while the reification, separation, and elevation of the mind continues, I think people with mental illnesses will have different experiences with ableism than people who are neurotypical but otherwise subject to our society's stupendous prejudice and callousness, and that these differences should not necessarily exist, and if people were more rational and thoughtful about bodies, life, the universe, and everything, we'd all get to experience the same prejudice! Go us!

Solstice-ish

Happy December 25th, if you attach particular meaning to the date. I woke up to my sister making crepes, and that's about it. We're having a potluck at our house for dinner, for all of the people who don't have anything better to be doing tonight. And that's about the sum of the specialness for today. I don't have any warm fuzzy Christmas memories. I think the last time I celebrated it was at five. No, I wasn't deprived. Well, not because of that.

I just don't get Christmas. It's so stressful, and generic. Not to mention seeped in misconceptions and religiosity. I might not dislike it quite so much if it wasn't assumed that I celebrated, or that deep down in my cold and unfeeling heart I secretly want to, or that I'm a bad American (!) for not, or that it's not religious, or that I should celebrate Christmas to make other people feel good about their beliefs.

So I'm going to go back to contemplating Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and try to ignore the fact that everyone else is pretending to be full of good cheer. I might even clean my room. And if you do observe, please try and have a good Christmas. Try to stay sane in the light of family invasions, and try not to feel pressured by them to conform to their beliefs, or clean the house, or make the pie exactly the way your great-grandmother did. Try not to stress out too much, or take things too seriously. It's just a day, in a long chain of days that make up your life. It doesn't have to be über memorable, or perfect. Sometimes, just making it to the end is fine. But if you have a moment of peace, try to think about what you're celebrating. The meshing of and inclusion of traditions and myths from a variety of cultures? Awesome. The misdirection and blatant lies that lead many Christians to declare this day holy? Not so much.

Pronouns.

I love knowing multiple languages. It gives me a point of reference within which to frame my own culture (mostly American, sometimes Chinese) or subcultures, and it removes the idea of English being the default. I'm not sure that the benefits of knowing two languages other than English are worth what it took for me to learn them and, in the case of Chinese, absorb the culture enough to be truly fluent, but since it's done, I might as well reap the rewards in the form of getting to make further observations/criticisms on society. Right?

Pronouns are generally a big deal in our society. "He", "she", and "it" are quite distinct, and are usually seen as non-overlapping but all-inclusive categories. And English works just fine with just one first person plural pronoun, and one second person singular pronoun.

But let me tell you, things could be very different. As a fun thought exercise, I sometimes wonder what would happen if we all suddenly started using the modern Mandarin set of pronouns, wherein no verbal distinction is made between "he", "she", and "it", and only through Western influence has "he" become the written default. Or where there are three first person plural pronouns, and a set of discrete polite pronouns as well as a distinct set of self-deprecating ones, and pronoun sets are not always mutually exclusive.

And would using different pronouns make us value different information about people, or would we adapt the pronouns to fit our current usages? As a society, are we too entrenched in the current system to adapt to a change in language, or would we be able to adapt?

Now, for some linguistic geekiness, here's a fairly complete list of pronouns used in modern Mandarin, as well as a short list of those noble and interesting pronouns that didn't make it through the transition from traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese. You can skip ahead if you want to, I promise I don't mind. Go ahead, the linguistic anthropology geek in me doesn't hate you for it. *sniff sniffle* 

Format
Person: Chinese simplified character, PinYin, English equivalent


First Person Pronouns
Singular: 我, wo3, I/me
Informal singular: 俺/偶, an3/ou3, some slang version of me that doesn't exist in English
Deprecatory:  本人, ben3ren2, literally "this person"
Exclusive plural: 我们, wo3men, we/us not including the listener
Inclusive plural 1: 咱们, zan3men, you (listener) and I (speaker)
Inclusive plural 2: 俺们, an3men, all of us/you (listener) plus me (speaker) plus at least one other person

Second Person Pronouns
Informal singular: 你, ni3, you referring to one person
Formal singular: 您, nin3, you referring to one person
Informal plural: 你们, nimen3, you referring to two or more people
Formal plural: 您们, ninmen3, you referring to two or more people
Deprecatory: 贵, gui4, used for both singular and plural as well as possessive, literally "noble"

Third Person Pronouns
Feminine singular: 她, ta1, she
Masculine singular: 他, ta1, he
Neuter singular: 它, ta1, it
Feminine plural: 她们, ta1men, more than one she
Masculine plural: 他们, ta1men, more than one he
Neuter plural: 它们, ta1men, more than one it

Pronouns No Longer Used in Modern Mandarin (Many of which don't have English counterparts or categories)
Second person feminine singular: 妳, ni3, feminine you
Second person feminine plural: 妳們, ni3men, more than one feminine you
Third person animal singular: 牠, ta1, one animal
Third person animal plural: 牠們, ta1men, more than one animal
Third person deistic singular: 祂, ta1, one deity
Third person deistic plural: 祂們, ta1men, more than one deity

Now, for some observations.

All of the third person pronouns are pronounced the same way. No, this isn't confusing. It just means that Chinese people aren't as obsessed as we are with knowing definitively everyone's sex. And if you're talking about an object or animal, context should make that pretty clear. I find it interesting though that they do make a distinction in written language, and had their third person pronouns split into even smaller categories than ours, with animals and deities each having their own pronoun. What does it say about us that plants and animals are counted as "things"? And how does this affect the way we treat and think about plants and animals?

The fact that there are three Chinese first person plural pronouns emphasises the need, in that society, for clarity concerning exactly who is being spoken to, about, or represented. And honestly, after using those pronouns, coming back to English with its clumsy bits of "us" and "you" and "you guys" and "all of us" is painful. And while being able to say "us" and not unintentionally include the speaker can be othering, it can also be a useful way of clarifying our language and avoiding generalisations, and might make us all more aware of when and whether we are including or excluding people, for good or bad.

Anyone have a suggestion for a new pronoun or two for English?

EDIT: Blogger, it appears, doesn't the Unicode combining diacritical marks that I've used to denote tone as the closest approximation to handwritten PinYin representations of Chinese. I'm changing all tone marks to the clumsy numbers for now, so that the Chinese bits will actually be legible instead of little blank boxes, and I'm going to register a complaint as soon as I get around to it, i.e. not tonight when I'm tired and grumpy because Blogger seems to have pretty pathetic support for any non-European language.

Shower, 第二段。

Trigger warning: this post contains discussions of body image, eating habits, and eating disorders. Please don't click through if doing so would jeopardise your health or sanity.

I can't help but to feel like this is the thin white girl's version of "but sexism/the patriarchy hurts men too!" and be deeply ashamed that I'm even writing this, much less considering posting it in public, even if it is a traffic-less, anonymous kind of quiet. But for a long time feminism didn't acknowledge that men were hurt by patriarchal systems as well. It was a useful critique, and acknowledging the ways in which a system is damaging to everyone is integral to changing it. I don't think this perspective is expressed much, if at all. I certainly have never seen it done so. It is not meant to deny thin privilege, or have the annoyingly chummy "it's okay, I suffer just like you do" tone to it. This is just another critique of the system, another reason why sizeism is a bad thing for everyone.

Shower.

I was standing in the shower, thinking about my previous blog post (here, for all you lazies that can't be bothered), trying to figure out how to sound un-offended enough for people to still take me seriously while still registering my displeasure and, you know, actually making my point. And somehow, as I was staring at the rack of soaps and whatnot in the shower trying to figure it out, it dawned on me how I didn't own many things (or the variety/amount/number) people deem necessary for people, especially women.

Things in my shower:

• a $1.00 bottle of shampoo, which has thus far lasted me four months and will probably last another month or two
• a $1.00 bottle of conditioner, which has lasted me a month and might last another. I'm trying to use it up as quickly as possible because I inherited it from the downstairs bathroom and it smells nasty
• a $3.50 bottle of body wash, because I like the texture of exfoliating bead thingies and could afford it at the time
• a $4.00 tube of face wash that isn't mine but I use anyway. Will switch back to the body wash when it's gone. 
• a $2.00 tub of cocoa butter

Now, for a little game I play with myself. I expected to come down to three items, maybe two. I was wrong. No moralising needed, kthxbai.

Which of those things could I live without while not effecting my life at all? The face wash, certainly. The body wash as well, since I can use shampoo on my body. The conditioner? Probably. I could not wash my hair as often, be even more careful about only shampooing the hair near my scalp, and rub cocoa butter on the ends when they get dry. 

Now, which things could I live without, but doing so would make my life more difficult? The cocoa butter. My skin is über dry, and unless I slather myself with some sort of lotion or butter after every shower, there's itchiness and flakiness galore. So I probably don't want to live without my cocoa butter.

But really, the only thing in my shower that I really and truly need is the shampoo, if only to feel mentally clean. Would I use more if I were washing my body with it as well? Absolutely. Would it be cheaper and possibly easier than using body/face wash? Probably. I'll try it when my current set of body/face wash runs out.

There are alternatives to shampoo out there, most commonly apple cider vinegar, but the smell makes me gag. If I ever need to do it, I will, but I'm drawing the line there, for this. That's the point at which I'm going to choose comfort over economy, probably for as long as I have a meaningful choice about the matter.

Choice. That's something about this that has been bothering me. Our society says that, given the choice, a woman will buy forty million kinds of soaps and things with which to populate her shower. Kind of how society believes that women will go out shopping for fun (i.e. as a recreational activity/hobby, and not because they actually need groceries), even better if they're spending their husband's well-earned money. And that women will convince themselves that they need a million varieties of [whatever it is they're buying today]. Yes, society also makes fun of men needing every new electronic gadget around, or yard equipment, or you Big Macho Piece of Machinery of the Week, but it's not nearly as prevalent as the "women like shopping, especially unnecessary shopping" stereotype, and hey, at least men are spending their own money, right? *wink wink nudge nudge eye-roll hurl*

But what if we weren't presented with the choices that allow us to buy those things in the first place? What if products weren't so disgustingly minutely specialised? What if everyone just used soap to wash themselves, lotion for moisturising their hair and body, and a towel to dry themselves? Would our stereotypes about consumption be different? Would what we actually consumed be different? And who's to blame about the fact that people are convinced every type of hair needs its own specially-tailored shampoo, conditioner, gel, mousse, hair dryer, and towel?

I guess what I want to know is which came first, companies trying to sell us crap or our desire for the crap?

Crazy?

"Crazy and abusive people shouldn't have children."

I had this said to me yesterday, by someone I live with no less.

"Crazy and abusive people shouldn't have children."

While saying any of this IRL would probably not be useful at all, this is my corner of the internet, and I'm going to use it for whatever the hell I want to, and pray that it's not discovered by the wrong people or at the wrong time.

There are either two ways to parse this sentence. Either the speaker believes that people who are crazy and people who are abusive should not have children, or "crazy and abusive" is lumped together as one qualifier, implying that crazy people are abusive, abusive people are crazy, or both.

Honestly, both interpretations are equally distasteful. I tried explaining this to the speaker, and was told that crazy has been dissociated with actual craziness (i.e. diagnosable mental disorders) enough for it to be unobjectionable, it was just used for hyperbole. While I disagree on the first point, I don't feel like covering that right now. Other people have done so, in other places, probably far more eloquently than I ever could. But even if it was just hyperbole, I, the only "technically" crazy person in the room felt targeted, stigmatised, and was completely unable to do anything about it because anything I said was put off to me "overreacting" and "taking things too personally".

Yes, I may have been overreacting. I'm sure that there are "crazy" people out there who don't mind the other ways in which the word is used. Yes, I did take it personally. Because it was personal. However unintentional, the speaker was making a judgement about me, my ability to parent, and whether or not I would be an abusive parent. And whether they thought so or not, liked it or not, that's how I felt. And that counts for something.

No, I'm not asking for censorship. I'm not saying that no one should ever use the word "crazy" ever. Sometimes I use it. Sometimes I don't mind when other people use it. Context is of the utmost importance. (In a completely non post-modern kind of way.) But my point is, once words leave your mouth, you still have some responsibility over them. How other people react to what you said is not entirely their own deal. What you said actually can directly cause their reaction, despite there being other factors coming into play. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use words that offend people, but it does mean that you have to be aware of their power, their effect, their potential effects, and make choices accordingly. This means that you have the responsibility of educating yourself about words, their meanings, etymologies, and implications, and you have the responsibility to choose words that do not, through your ignorance, perpetuate or give more power to values you don't support.

Stuffed!

My sister came home from college today, which is wonderful. I'm a bit ashamed that her coming home completely sneaked up on me. In my defense, when I'm not going to school, days just all blend together.

She gave me my belated birthday present, an adorable amigurumi baby blue alien. It's pretty stinkin' cute.

The baby blue alien's name is Repent. Modifier to alien is baby. Blue is the species or subspecies of alien to which she belongs. I'm still not sure if blue aliens can mate with other kinds of aliens or not. According to official blue alien lore, which may or may not have been concocted during a conversation with my sister and Middle Brother, Repent got her name because it was the codename of the experiment that involved genetically engineering her to be as cute and adorable as possible, and the evil overlords of the blue aliens holding her captive to torture if their other slaves tried to rebel.

But then I decided it would be a good idea to insert her into my so far hypothetical Dollhouse/Warcraft crossover fanfiction (in which Blizzard is owned by the Rossum Corporation, and World of Warcraft is yet another experiment into mind control--it's all good fun), and have Echo rescue Repent from her alien overlords. ????? So then Echo brings Repent to me, and she's adopted by my other amigurumi possession, Spike and Will Shakespeare. Now there's an idea...

She also gets to frolic on the shelf with some of my other stuffed animals. Left to right: Ophelia, Repent, Kazul, Belthka, Sniffer, Decimal, and Grace.

One Friday in 1282, at Builth Wells...

Today is the 728th anniversary of Llewellyn ap Gruffydd's death, marking the betrayal of Edmund Mortimer and Gruffud ap Gwenwynwyn, as well as the kidnapping of his daughter, Princess Gwenllian.

...I'm quite annoyed with King Edward I for killing her father and uncle, and then kidnapping one of my favourite historical figures and imprisoning her in a convent for life. Gwenllian's uncle, Dafydd, was the first man of prominence to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. And thus ended the independence of Wales. Did I mention that Llewellyn's head was displayed on a pike in London for over 20 years? The English are so civilised.

It's no wonder that Mum keeps writing fantasy books in which Llewellyn is saved and the independence goes on indefinitely.

Preeeeeetty...

I feel the need to gush about how much I love the aesthetics in the Worgen zones, as well as the models themselves. Tophats? Corsets? Cobwebs and roses? Victorian inspired architecture? <3

And I don't even like roses.

However, their mining animation is super goofy, and they look like they're pouncing on a bug every time they jump. It's all in good fun though.

I haven't played through the Goblin areas yet, but I'm sure they'll be full of loot and explosions. Just how I like my games. And women. And life in general. Yay loot!

P.S. Seriously though, enough of the lame Twilight and/or dog puns for Worgen names.

Lacuna

There needs to be a word for the feeling of peace and sadness and quiet reflection that happens after you finish a book that was good because of how real it was.

And there needs to be a word for brothers who will give you a huge hug during moments like that, just because "you looked like you needed one".

Book in question: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

Beloved

Loved, by Alexander Ocias, is my absolute favourite flash game ever, when I'm in [something] mood. But I've yet to figure out what should go in those brackets. Introspective, cynical, submissive, adoring, emotional, pensive...some combination of the above.

Go play through it, and make observations on life, love, and relationships.