Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I got to thinking, in an idle moment,* about what I could write for today. Mostly it's been pretty easy and indeed natural to come up with something to blog about. But nothing obvious was coming to mind.

Ah well, I thought to myself. It's the fifteenth today, so after this you'll be about half done!

It actually took a second before I realized no, wait, I didn't say I'd do this for a month. I said I'd do it for the year! Haha. We'll see how that goes.


* No, that doesn't mean I was on the toilet! I was...walking to the toilet.

(with a little license for where the first line was a meme or an item in a list or otherwise a thing that wasn't really a sentence on its own)

January
I didn't think I had any New Year's resolutions, but it turns out I'd really like to write every day (in hope of getting my book done, but writing here also counts), and read every day (especially paper books, because I have such a backlog of ones I want to read, going back at least to last Christmas).

February
Urgh, I feel like I lost the first two weeks of this semester to a fog of coughing, exhaustion and snot.

March
I am going to see Hamilton in a month.

April
Andrew was feeling really ill last night, which is sad (especially because I was away and it's nice to have someone to offer cuddles and fussing when you're sick).

May
Social media can be really terrible, of course, but it also brought me this this morning, and made me laugh:

Do ghosts speak with a different accent than what they spoke while living? I would think that being in the community of a bunch of ghosts from different eras would have an impact on the specific accent of their language.

June
I've been revising for my last exam (which is tomorrow, which I'm in no way procrastinating on studying for by writing this) on a loaner laptop because mine is away supposedly having one of the bits of assistive tech fixed on it (but Andrew says the problem it was having is just a Windows update breaking for a lot of people and I reckon it'll be fine by the next update but oh well, it's gone now).

July
I saw Hamilton yesterday afternoon!

August
Sessions attended: Just one! Queering Shakespeare, which I loved. I've been before and it's always my favorite.

September
Safely at my parents'.

October
On Tuesday night, Andrew and I went to the Royal Northern College of Music for "Goldberg City Variations."

November
When I told Andrew I was going to a spoken-word night with Stuart, he expressed sympathy

December
When I asked for suggestions of things to write about, marjorie_bark said she looked up the UN's International action days in December, which I think is a fantastic way of looking for topics!

I forgot about this! Well, that's not actually true: I forgot that it's nearly December actually. I don't know how when it feels like it's been November for approximately forty-seven years, but there you go.

December Days is a meme where people ask for a person (here, me) to write about a particular topic. They can request either a certain day in December for it (I like to suggest my birthday since that's in December and then it's like I get little presents if people can do it) and if they don't, I'll just go through them one at a time.

I probably won't be able to write something every single day (I'll be spending two of those days flying, if nothing else!), also I have an essay due on the first of the days I'm supposed to be flying and another one due early in January, but I actually thought giving myself non-academic writing prompts might help keep me in the right frame of mind when I need breaks from the essays.

When I saw this week's Friday Five questions. I was excited because they seemed so relevant and interesting to me for once.

Then I noticed they were written by jesse_the_k, so I really shouldn't have been surprised that I thought they were great!

1. Do you like to reply to every comment in your journal?
I like to reply generally, but not to every single comment. They don't all need or even suit a reply.

2. What type of post gets the most/least responses in your journal?
Big stuff gets the most: depression, disability stuff, asking for help... that bra/gender post amazed and delighted me with the quality and breadth of its comments on everything from dysphoria to laundry. Love you guys.

As for what gets the least? Boring day-to-day stuff, and things where even I'm not sure what I'm talking about! In the old days of LJ, an entry with no comments seemed the height of pointlessness, but I don't mind now.

3. What do you do when a new person first comments in your journal?
Usually panic that I've probably written a bunch of silly or boring things lately and what must they think of me. Ha. (Actually, that's more for when someone subscribes to my journal, but that's usually when they start commenting too.)

4. When you're reading someone else's journal, do you read every comment before adding your own?
Sometimes. If I think someone might've said what I was gonna say, I check for that. (Unless I was gonna say "<3" or "hugs" or something because I don't think repetition there is a bad thing.)

5. When is "too late" to reply to an entry?
Never! You can reply to stuff I wrote years ago if you want.

I do still have comments on the aforementioned bras/genders entry that I want to reply to but haven't gotten around to yet and now I feel a little stressed or sad that it's "too late" so I guess I am inconsistent here.

If I didn't write down all the boring things I do, all the little accomplishments that feel big, I wouldn't have had to hand all the dates I need for the complaint about my laptop.

(Which, yes, I wanted done almost two weeks ago but oh well, it's nearly done now.)

Here's a cool thing I didn't know: if you commented on DW with OpenID (a LiveJournal account or somesuch) and now you have a Dreamwidth account, you can connect the comments that you made with OpenID so that they will look like you left them with your Dreamwidth account.

On another note, last night I read this from solarbird and laughed because it was so familiar.

It is freakish to be on an LJ-style site and see stuff just… happening everywhere. Do you know how long it’s been since I said “jfc my friendslist is busy”? DO YOU? Okay, about two hours, but I mean before that.

I went and played a short round of Overwatch at 11:30pm. When I came back there were like five new posts. And a bunch of comments. And two friends requests. From strangers. Which were not bots.

I wrote a Fascist Watch newsletter starting around midnight. More new posts. Another friends request. Comments.

It’s not 2004 anymore, but it sure as hell isn’t 2015 either.

Yeah, I thought I'd outgrown that tendency I had in the mid-2000s to bounce up to strangers on LJ and go "hi! Wanna be friends?" I thought I wasn't in college any more, I wasn't new to a new country, people Just Don't Do This Sort of Thing any more...

Nah. Turns out I'm exactly the same as I was ten or fifteen years ago if I'm given opportunity to be.

I've been friending a lot of people from 2017revival, it seems impossible not to. There are a lot of queer people, a lot of women, a lot of poly people, disabled people, people in their 30s and 40s... people like me and my Real Life friends. I always associated DW with fandom which I've never been any good at and while that's still well-represented, it's hardly mandatory or making me feel excluded (and it's super-easy for me to feel excluded, something else I thought I'd outgrown and am recently learning to my dismay I have not).

A friend, when sad and grumpy about the demise of LJ, said they'd never have the same affection for Dreamwidth. I'm lucky enough, having moved over here first in 2009 after I-don't-even-remember-which affront to LJkind, that my affection for this place is long established. A lot of people from demographics that suffer on most of the Internet are thriving here; I love that.

An ominous foreign-language repressive-regine change to the terms and conditions might finally be the end that Dreamwidth was prepared for back when LJ was first sold to a Russian company.

I'm very grateful DW is here, and to the people who've spent years both keeping the code running and providing good content. Most of all, I'm grateful for the guiding principles that make this as valuable a community as it is.

I'll have more to say about Dreamwidth, I hope, when I am less tired. In the meantime, any of my LJ friends who don't know and want to follow me, I'm there as cosmolinguist.

This is something I wrote a while ago and never posted, for reasons I no longer remember. It's not a resolution, but it seems as good a manifesto to start off this new year as any.

I started on LJ with a very annoying style, that of the cute precocious kid who was too old for that twee stuff now but hadn't yet learned what to replace the too-clever, artfully structured, neatly-tied-up-with-a-moral-at-the-end kind of writing that'd made my high school English teachers love me.

I like to think I've improved a bit since then, but I do still tend to write only when I've got something that will amuse or interest what I imagine my readership to be. So vehemently did I resist the everyday updateishness kind of journaling that my LJ wasn't a very good way to find out what was going on in my life: I'd happily write all about having Chipotle for breakfast but never mentioned that I had a girlfriend, or failed a class, or moved, or the kind of basic stuff that people usually tell each other when they catch up after some time apart.

It's a bit hypocritical of me, because I love to read that kind of thing from other people: I love reading about your dreams and how you got caught in the rain on your way to the bus stop and what you're making for dinner and what you drank last night and how work went and everything. Absolutely love it. But I've never been very good at telling that stuff for its own sake myself.

So it was kind of interesting for me to read this article on how writing about the ordinary experiences of your life can be even more cheering to you when you go back and read them than the extraordinary ones.

It turns out, people are bad at predicting how much they'll enjoy reading back what they've wrriten about their lives.

Which, actually, doesn't surprise me because I had to read Our Town in high school and it fucked up my brain, it appears, permanently. It's a play about ordinary boring small-town early-20th-C. Americans who do ordinary things like be born and deliver the milk and get married and all that.

The part that's always stuck with me is Emily, at the end. She's a young wife who's died in childbirth, and we see her among the dead, people she recognizes from her little town where nothing ever changes much. Those who've been dead any length of time don't feel any great connection to the living world or the things that mattered to them while they were in it, but Emily is new and still attached to what she loves. She wants to re-live her life. The old dead folks tell her that it's possible but advise her against it. She insists, though, and sees her twelfth birthday: her mother is up early nagging the children to get ready for school, her father comes home with a present for her. Small talk is made about the cold.

Emily starts out very excited -- "Oh,that's the town I knew as a little girl. And, look, there's the old white fence that used to be around our house. Oh, I'd forgotten that! Oh, I love it so!" "Oh! how young Mama looks! I didn't know Mama was ever that young" -- but as she watches the conversation unfold, she starts to get agitated: "I can't bear it. They're so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I'm here. I'm grown up. I love you all, everything. I can't look at everything hard enough."

Finally she says, "I can't. I can't go on....I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed."

Well, ever since then, I've fucking noticed. Reading that play made me cry, not in class but after, and I think quite a few of my tears since have been shed thanks to this, in some way. Because I too grew up in a small town where nothing ever seems to change much, and while of course I didn't die I did move away, and that has had a similar effect to me: I'm still here, I can see it all in my memory, but they can't see me and they don't know how much I treasure these images, these people, their ordinary lives.

So I'm trying to practice writing about the everyday stuff that I have so long been so bad at. Let's see if it gets me anywhere.

Today I met new people off of LiveJournal! One of them recognized me as A Person From LiveJournal and everything!

It's such a delightfully old-school thing to do.

So hello to biascut and glitzfrau! And their amazing baby, who recognized my rainbow-colored plastic bracelet for the baby toy/teething aid it clearly was destined to be.

Paul Magrs, the writer of many of my favorite Doctor Who stories, asked me how I was doing as Andrew went to the counter to order our coffees. "Oh, all right," I lied.

And then this nice-seeming man I'd just met, who I wished would like me because I already liked him based on the evidence of his writing, said some of the most bone-chilling words in the English language: "You've got a LiveJournal, don't you?"

A fine start! Any hope I had of impressing him obviously had to die right there. But I was mystified: Andrew never mentions my writing because he's much more cautious than me about sharing his private life (such as it is!) on the internet, and obviously I talk about him all the time here. So how did he know? Andrew and Paul Magrs are friendly acquaintances at best, and hadn't really spent much time together. I had to introduce myself at POD because Andrew hadn't thought to mention he'd be bringing me along.

I'm left to conclude that I just...look like someone who has a LiveJournal. Heh.