See the Egress
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "See the Egress" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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03:02 pm
[Link] | Hey, is this thing still on? Cool.
I wrote this post a couple weeks ago for a different forum (Knife Fight), since they had a late July theme of writing about things you collect. Ted pointed out that I should post it to LJ, too.
( My Stuffed Animals Are Still Smarter Than Me )
Tags: grieving, pregnancy, stuffed animals
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03:28 pm
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Self-Excavation Tour 2007: The elephant in the room
If you're in my family, I'm very curious whether this assessment seems right to you, but don't go forwarding it to anyone else without talking to me first.
Three years ago, I couldn't talk about my religious life. I mean, literally, I couldn't. I'd try to open my mouth, and a lot of times I wouldn't even be able to get words out.
We didn't really talk about religion in the first person when I was a kid. What I knew was that my dad was a flaming atheist. He left home at fifteen or sixteen, heading off to college without graduating from high school in order to get away from his father, who was a Methodist minister. Mom said he didn't like the role of preacher's kid, but the older I got, the more I suspected that it was more complicated than that. So while I was in Detroit in July, I screwed up my pluck and asked my dad's sister what religion was like in their house growing up.
Aunt Joyce's answer told me something more about what makes religion complicated in our family, but just as interestingly, it turns out to be part of another puzzle that I hadn't realized I was still missing pieces for, the one about why I have trouble talking comfortably about religion.
( I. This is the story of my family )
( II. And my father's )
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02:28 pm
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Curry Recipe
For ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) renaissancegame: Here's my current version of the quasi-Bengali curry.
For the rest of you, I'll say that the combination of goat cheese and coconut is neat and not something I've consciously run into anywhere else. If you monkey with the spice proportions before you start cooking the curry, you can actually feel how each of them makes you taste the chevre and coconut differently in different parts of your mouth. It's completely intriguing, but also adds half an hour to the cooking time.
( Recipe )
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09:29 pm
[Link] | I'm home in Detroit for the week. Mom and I seem to be talking non-stop about cooking and Top Chef. She wants to know what she can make for me that Ted wouldn't like, but the only things I can think of are soups. My brother Si and I are mocking each other, which has been our favorite pastime since forever. But the highlight so far is that my sister -- still a serious Buddhist, no longer a crazy ascetic -- is back from Vietnam, where she spent a couple months traveling as part of Thich Nhat Hanh's delegation doing requiem services for the Vietnam War dead. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jerrell are here from New Orleans -- if you've ever heard me talk about how my aunt and uncle spent most of their careers as medical missionaries in Nigeria and thus consistently outclass me on Boggle words, it's the same people. But Uncle Jerrell was also a doctor in the Army during the Vietnam War. So I've been listening to my sister tell stories about Vietnam, and then my uncle'll break in and tell a story about how things were there during the sixties, and I'm sipping stupid-weak coffee and just trying to come up with the best questions I can. This is completely awesome. I just wish Ted got to be here, too.
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11:26 pm
[Link] | It was late February and early March when I wrote most of this entry. Perhaps I should actually post it before it becomes either thoroughly irrelevant or even longer. [Edited to note: It's long and probably boring unless you're interested in the social dynamics of roleplaying groups and how they relate to play style and creative agenda. If you want to know more concretely what I get out of roleplaying, go look at the previous entry instead.]
I think most of you who I've talked to in person in the last six months know that roleplaying's been a really good part of my life lately -- but it struck me while I was writing the previous entry that I wouldn't have enjoyed My Life With Master a year ago. That's even more true of the game of Mountain Witch that followed it. Changing gaming styles, like developing a taste for sushi, started out bad-uncomfortable. Eventually it shifted to good-uncomfortable – this tastes strong and weird, so why do I want more? – and from there to awesome with bouts of discomfort and the determination to conquer chopsticks. Things started clicking for me last summer in ptevis' post-Roman / pre-Arthurian Britain campaign, "A Land Rich in Tyrants" (which first used Riddle of Steel and then Burning Wheel mechanics). But this entry is mostly about the uncomfortable part of that transition.
( Help, I'm being protagonized! )
( A game about trust and disclosure )
( It was all so Durkheimian... (on playing too much Call of Cthulhu in college) )
( Effervescence? )
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01:04 pm
[Link] | I have trouble writing self-contained journal entries. Since last fall, I've been journaling prolifically and managing to post – shit – virtually none of it. When I started this entry almost a month ago, I wanted to write something to figure out why the character I played in ptevis' game of My Life With Master seemed so compelling to me even as she ultimately turned out to be irredeemably evil. But for the entry to be intelligible to people who aren't me, I realized that I'd have to introduce parts of the game, Taussig's theory of defacement, and some stuff about the nature of decisions that was preoccupying me last quarter. Oh bother. I fear that like Gay Arturo, I'm not adept at summarizing anything, but I'm confident in my readers' ability to skim anything that isn't interesting.
( Cosette's story: A lengthy summary that nevertheless leaves much unsaid )
( Why It Worked: Lit Crit or Something Like It )
( Pleasures Frightening and Perverse )
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11:14 am
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Who had these lips sealed anyway?
I've been reminded in the last few weeks just how much better I think in writing than out loud, especially when I'm tired.
This isn't a novel revelation. I knew it in high school, when I found that I could answer German exercises in writing without stopping to think but had trouble answering the same questions orally three seconds later. I knew it in college when one night I accidentally injured my hand doing math homework. I was working on an unusually long problem set using an unusually rough pencil, and since when I'm thinking I'm writing, at some point my hand began to hurt. Every once in a while, I'd say "huh, my hand hurts," and then go right back into math trance, writin' and thinkin'. By the time I wanted to go to bed at 4 AM, my hand hurt too much to fall asleep – oops.
The place where my tendency to think in writing has been frustrating me lately is in the Mountain Witch game, especially the first two sessions. I was worn out and having trouble thinking despite all the caffeine I'd been drinking – until I put pencil to paper at the end of the game or afterwards and immediately found that I couldn't write fast enough to get out everything I was thinking about my character.
I've put a lot of effort into trying to talk in academic contexts and gotten marginally better at it in the last four or five years. That's in no small part due to TAing, though I still find running and participating in genuine discussions pretty tiring. Since I've been reading for exams and discussing books with my professors, I've been doing a lot of oral thinking there, too – when I can think of something new in the process of a conversation, I come home totally high and jazzed about reading more stuff for next week. But opening my mouth still seems thoroughly hit-or-miss in a way that writing isn't, and I'm amazed every time I say something interesting that I hadn't thought of before I started saying it.
(paradoxdruid, this isn't the entry that I was talking about yesterday. That one just keeps getting longer, though I'm getting close to the point where I post it unfinished so that it stops distracting me.)
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08:58 pm
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Not yet
I'm proud of my little sister. She's stayed in Detroit all fall helping my mom deal with the latest round of chemo and now this week she's in charge of keeping everyone updated on my mom's situation in the hospital. ( Read more... )
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09:53 pm
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Mental Masturbation
(since I've been reminded today that I haven't posted much lately and now's no time for a real update...)
Every morning, unless we're too sleepy, fengshui and I shower together and talk about what we're going to do that day. This morning I was telling him about the books I've been reading this week on how late Victorian New Thought authors constructed femininity—-I'd been up since 4 AM writing about it-—and of course about not being sure how I could possibly get all my write ups done by tonight. This is what I say every Wednesday morning, and I have exciting plans to start saying it every Thursday as well.
His advice? "I think you should masturbate furiously."
"Would that help? Most of the New Thought authors were all about sublimating their sexuality into-–though hey, some female New Thought authors did use their sexuality as a model of divine influx--"
"If you masturbate furiously enough, by the magic of the female reproductive system, you can create a homunculus to do all your work for you."
( Read more... )
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09:10 pm
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What's up with those fundamentalists? More than you wanted to know.
An embarrassingly long time ago, mollpeartree asked (here and here), "Does anybody know of a good book about the rise of fundamentalist/evangelical/charismatic Christianity in the U.S., and the concurrent dwindling of membership in 'mainline' Protestant churches?"
( Read more... )
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09:10 pm
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Through the Veil
I wrote this entry last Wednesday with an hour before bed and nothing pressing to do, but I didn't post it then because I kept distracting myself. Then I went to bed and couldn't fall asleep for another hour, which isn't like me at all, because this was the only thing I could think about.
Sometimes you see the world crack open in front of someone you love--not anyone most of you know--and those solid things you only questioned idly and the sparkly futures that you could almost touch turned out to be mylar helium balloons, not really solid at all and ready to float off as soon as you let go the string. There's no way that what happened should have been surprising, but it was surprising anyway, especially because it happened so quickly. By the time we found out, everything had been over for weeks. And then the way you imagine that part of your world suddenly shifts, and for a moment you can see through everything, right through the cracks. I'm pretty sure that should be encouraging on some level, that things can change. But despite the familiar witchy emphasis on the positive potential of the space between the worlds, it took me several days to remember a time when this sense of unreality meant anything good in the short run.
I have other concepts for interpreting this kind of thing. There's a point that I'm going to misinterpret and misattribute to Luther, that God is terrible to the people he reveals himself to, that he embarrasses them and isolates them and wrecks everything they'd cared about in their lives, because people are so wrapped up in their own worlds, so mired in sin and idolatry that they don't even know where to look for God. His touch has to come painfully or not at all. In my head, it's mixed up with a recurring theme in Greek mythology that it's best not to receive too much attention from the gods, and also the idea that behind the facade of the world we know lurks the Creeping Chaos and the unspeakable horror whose terror is its very unspeakability. And if any of these things are for good, it's not good in any normal human sense.
But of course that's melodramatic. It has to be, right? The world has already shifted back into phase and the road opened up ahead.
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02:04 am
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Diver Down
Tonight we tried to go diving. Even though we went to Refugio, where we've never had any problems, the waves were bigger than they looked and the place where we walked in was slipperier. ( Read more... )
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11:00 pm
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Usul no longer needs the weirding module!
I've noticed this year that taking the sort of tests undergrads take is no longer a particularly useful part of my learning process. During my first couple years in grad school, I used to think that maybe I wasn't learning the informational side of things as well as I would if I had to study for exams. Now in Spanish when some of the other people in my class start freaking out about tests, I find myself thinking things like: What, you haven't been learning those verbs anyway? And why's the test covering so little? I used to need to cram for tests.
Secondly, on the midterm for the class I was TAing last quarter, there turned out to be a quotation ID section that I'd neither written nor taught toward nor crammed for myself nor made any effort to learn, as I expect the students did. It mostly measured memory for quotations the professor read in lecture; I swear we read a lot of passages in section, but probably not many that actually showed up on the exam. But somehow I and the other TAs knew all the answers while unfortunately students across the sections mostly bombed it. I have no doubt that I'm more skilled at analyzing things than the kids are, but I think that on straight factual knowledge, my advantage at learning what I hear in lecture really should be small enough for them to make up for it by studying. It's not, and people tell me none of this should surprise me.
But it's weird when you've spent so many years taking studying for granted to realize that you've actually gotten better at it. That, and last quarter surprised me with how quickly I can read a book when I need to. It's encouraging, because I might eventually get really good at it like professors are.
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12:32 am
[Link] | You know why I didn't take Spanish in high school? Because it was the favored language of jocks. It had a reputation for being easy, and I had no desire to get stuck in a slow class with the sort of people who think that's a good thing. I decided against French for similarly social reasons: it was the favored language for class president types and people whose parents had too much money. So when I wanted to learn a spoken language on top of my Latin, I went for German. Man, I thought like a high-schooler back then. But now I hear Spanish on a daily basis and then I'd never met a Latino, so I can see how Spanish's usefulness might've seemed less obvious. But now that I'm taking Spanish, I'm starting to think that learning languages as a form of identity practice is also deeply embedded in the way that the languages are taught. Maybe it's good pedagogy. ( But just who does my Spanish textbook think I am, anyway? )
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12:11 am
[Link] | What did we learn from making five pizzas in the last two days? Probably nothing that we shouldn't already have known. Using enough flour and brushing herbed oil on the crust ahead of time is important (ed.--because I only eat white pizzas. Ted didn't do this on his red pizzas, and I'm sure they didn't turn out very well). Thawing out roasted garlic from the freezer is a good idea, and rehydrating the more expensive porcinis to supplement the creminis is a great idea. Not sure what we're going to think of eating five pizzas in the next week, but at least they're all pretty much different. (btw, queen_of_wands, one of them's vegetarian, if you want to come over) And why did we make that many pizzas in the last few days? Because that's how we roll. Uh, I buy too many ingredients and I'm fond of excessive tinkering. Like biting off more than I can chew, except that I realize that before making the bite, and view it as an opportunity to chew shit.
So I've been thinking that I should write in this journal more often. ( St. Jerome's recent comments not withstanding--I don't think that line of argument was meant to apply to those of us who post every six months.) The main obstacles to posting more often, are, of course, obsessive editing and my tendency to get bored with an entry before writing the final paragraph that I think would make it post-able. That, plus when you haven't posted for a while, everything that's easy to say seems overly trivial. I figure I can improve on both problems by resolving to make five posts in the next seven days and seeing what happens. I have no ambition to post that regularly in general. Any of you other infrequent posters want to join me?
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11:59 pm
[Link] | Last Saturday was our anniversary! What you need to know: Ted's the best. Plus, I feel a restaurant review coming on. ( All this and more, behind the cut. )
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05:54 pm
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Mucus-Oozing Zombie Sophist
Every time a cold knocks me out for a couple days when I have stuff to get done, I promise myself that someday I'll have a job where I can take actual sick days. That's instead of the situation I'm in now, where things happen on the same deadline whether I'm sick or not. Insofar as I have a life plan and insofar as life is plannable, I'm going to be a professor and a mother, and so my promise is a LIE. But being sick means life is unpredictable, and so sickness itself, as a principle of unpredictability, revalidates my sick-time promise. Or at least it makes the promise less ridicolossally false. If everything else goes to pot and I get a dull mindless job, at least it might give me sick days (probably unpaid! how exciting!). Of course, one might note that sickness as unpredictability invalidates the practice of making future promises in the first place. But being sick also means that we might as well be compassionate with ourselves when we don't meet our unrealistic expectations, so I'll let the counter-argument against such promises slide, in the spirit of being nice to sick people like me. I'm feeling better already.
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08:48 pm
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Pseudo-Benjamin
I took a class on Walter Benjamin this quarter and now that I'm on break, I couldn't resist writing (bad) imitations of him. Because Benjamin's the only one who understands me!
( Read more... )
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12:46 pm
[Link] | Here's the aforementioned entry about diving written last summer and never posted: ( More Naval Gazing. )
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10:47 pm
[Link] | What makes diving so great? The scenery? The photography? The hypothermia? The altered state of consciousness? ( The chance to navel gaze about all of it? )
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