Caveat Lector

Helping spiff up the house before the Chicago Tribune photographer gets here (Professor Tolkien will be eleventy-one shortly, and the Trib decided to call David), so not much time to blog—but wishing everybody a safe and joyful new year.

Drink and drive, and I will personally come kick your butt, assuming your butt survives such moronic behavior at all. Don’t do it.

Update: Nearly two hours later, and the photographer’s only now packing up his stuff to go. A lot of work for what will probably be one picture if that! I may have managed to get Dream into the Trib, which would be cool although I doubt Dream appreciates the honor. But every newspaper needs some Goth-cattitude.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born January 3, 1892, so one presumes that the Trib will publish the article this Friday.

Popped out to the comic shop today to pick up Dork Tower’s Lord of the Rings special and a few other random goodies such as the latest Nodwick collection (find out how all those monsters really get into dungeons!).

Got home feeling a mite peckish, so I hauled some leftovers out of the fridge and dumped them unceremoniously in the microwave.

*SLAM*

*boop beep beep beep boop*

*boop*

*whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr*

*ROOOOOOAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR—ghkrk!*

Silence.

Er. Guess some of that raise is going to buy us a new microwave. I suppose eight years and three moves isn’t too bad a lifespan.

With all of the personality and identity stuff that floats around in the blogsphere, I think this article should reward perusal. (wood s lot found it first.)

I like this idea of contingent identity. It does capture my lived experience. I haven’t finished the article yet, but I hope Levinson or someone else has written about the extent to which freedom to alter or assert chosen aspects of identity is a function of belonging to privileged classes.

I, for instance, can play all kinds of games with my racial identity that someone less obviously Caucasian can’t. Moreover, when I was a little girl, getting deeply tanned each summer, I had a couple of opportunities to pass as African-American; other children were confused enough by my skin color and my tight single braid of dark hair to have to ask me what race I claimed for myself.

Claiming a race for myself. I’ve never openly done so—but I cannot but be aware that I can only sidestep that process because my physical self places me in the default race. I don’t generally have to deal with being Other in this context, having my race be inescapably salient. The children asking me about my race were African-American, not Hispanic or Latino or white. They had to care in a way that I didn’t.

Levinson hints that this contingent identity thing is very much the hot topic in identity circles. I shall have to see what I can dig up to read.

Since I’d read less than half of the top 100 sci-fi books circulating the blogsphere a while back, I put a few of ’em on hold at the library.

The library had to dig Dragon’s Egg up from the storage room. They can put it back now. I just plain could not get through it.

I am just really, really, really tired of the “she’s gorgeous—and she’s got a brain!” routine. So tired that I can’t read books in which it features prominently any more.

I pitched Babel-17 at a wall for this reason. (Well, that and the ludicrously snarled linguistics.) Dragon’s Egg ought to have gotten pitched at a wall, but it was a library book so I didn’t.

Okay, so we start out the book with this nuclear physics grad student. Cool. And she’s female. Cool. So why exactly do we have to mention how cute she is in the second paragraph mentioning her? And why exactly can we not stop mentioning how cute she is after that paragraph? And why exactly do we have to introduce this loser boyfriend character whose main purpose is to marvel at how awesomely cute she is, given that she’s A Brain and all that?

But she only figures in the first hundred pages or so. We move onto her son then, and his love interest. Who only happens to be A Cute Brain too.

Argh. I am just too old for this tripe, and much too old to see people praising it. I can’t suspend my irritation any more.

Yeah, yeah, product of its times. I know that. I still find it hard to believe that science fiction can’t find better exempla than this.

I get to keep that refunded application fee after all. Seems there’s no fee for re-application within five years of leaving. I just squeaked in under the wire.

Yay me again, I guess. I must be having a good-karma day.

Sometimes patience is rewarded.

I just got a call from my boss’s boss to say that starting January 6th I am only a half-time data entry grunt—the rest of the time I will be programming!

The Survey Center has got a gigantic survey in that is swamping their current programming staff, and apparently my nonexistent Visual Basic expertise was enough to convince them that I could learn fast enough to take some of the load off. (They don’t do all their work in Access and VB, thankfully. Some gizmo called the CASES system that I’ve never heard of. Reading up on it now, if the page decides to load.)

Means a bit of a raise (don’t know how much yet), a less embarrassing résumé entry, and obviously a much more interesting job. Woo-hoo!

And looking into the future—I ought to be just plain set as far as library school tuition goes, assuming I am admitted. If I’m a Real Programmer by then, and I see no reason I won’t be, they’ll jump to keep me at graduate-assistant prices. Real Programmers, even part-time, cost a lot more than that.

Means I won’t have to suck up to the Department from Hell to get a teaching position. I can live with that. Quite comfortably.

When we moved into our house, there were two hardware stores within walking distance. I can assure you, we took advantage of their proximity—and right now every homeowner reader I have is laughing and nodding.

In a few months, there won’t be a single hardware store I can walk to. This is a bad thing, as I don’t drive.

The first one went away when the development across the street from Hilldale Mall got ripped down and rebuilt. I think it went south, near the Beltline. I could walk there, I suppose, any day I have three or four free hours. Wouldn’t be a safe walk; the sidewalkage near the Beltline is atrocious.

And now Hilldale is kicking out Wolff Kubly Hardware, apparently over a lease dispute. I rather suspect that the snooty upscale mall decided it didn’t want anything so plebeian as a hardware store any longer.

Their loss. Wolff Kubly was the only thing that got me inside Hilldale’s doors; the grocery store doesn’t count. Practically all the money I’ve ever spent at Hilldale went to Wolff Kubly. And I’m not exactly well-disposed toward Hilldale management at the moment—catch me shopping there now, in other words.

I just wish their loss didn’t have to be mine. There isn’t even really anywhere convenient on the buslines, short of downtown and its inflated prices owing to inflated real estate values.

I don’t plan to move over this (as if I could!), but it does annoy me. This neighborhood contains quite a few non-drivers, mostly seniors. What are we supposed to do when our houses need a bit of immediate attention? Call a professional for hundreds of times the cost? Leave the situation for who knows how long in order to take a bus or cab? Great.

Brickbats to Hilldale management. You screwed up, guys and gals. Bring back our hardware store!

Well, I don’t quite know what I did to deserve this, but I simply must set the record straight about a few things.

The Goth-kitties were very poorly behaved (Didi spent most of Tom and Jill’s visit behind the couch, and Dream wouldn’t shut his yappy mouth), the house has been better, and you can meet my level of intellect any day serving FriesWithThat.

I can’t deny that for some inadequately explored reason I give off smart vibes. A couple years back David and I visited Allen Renear and (what was then) his Scholarly Technology Group at Brown. Just so happens I have a cousin at Brown; she must be a junior or senior by now. (Yes, all right, there are brains in the family. They just skipped me.) Both her parents and mine insisted that while I was there we had to go out to dinner.

She was all of 18 or 19 at the time. Very pretty, very unsure of herself, very much in the middle of figuring out what to do with her life, very embarrassed at not knowing. (If I have any readership in that demographic, here’s my advice: Don’t bother. Honestly. Chances are you’ll end up doing something you never imagined, so why feel you have to lock yourself in now?)

Good taste in boyfriends, though; she dragged hers along, and he turned out to be a sharp Shakespeare student. So we talked about Lear and Henry IV, Part I and a couple other plays…

…and when I told my mom about it later she said, “You know, you intimidated the poor girl terribly.”

I did? Oh. Oops. Entirely unintentional. I didn’t leave her out of the conversation. I didn’t maunder on endlessly about tech stuff, even though I was giving a techie talk the next day. I was good. I really was. Intimidating?

It’s physical presence. It really is. I couldn’t intimidate a mouse over the phone, but I can see how it’s difficult to argue with a woman five-foot-nine in her stocking feet possessing a voice like a bullhorn. Just an artifact of pure physicality. Shame it should give such a false impression, though.

One day on, three off; one more on, two off, and then it’s back to the usual grind.

I was a little worried about taking my hand back to work today, but the rest does seem to have done it good.

I have to remember to call the library school tomorrow about the Case of the Refunded Application Fee. I knew a bureaucratic error in my favor was much too good to last.

And Santa dropped a nice little freelance gig in my lap right before Christmas. Something to salt away toward tuition money. I’m not complaining.

We’re going to have a quiet day at home. Videos, books, hot chocolate, my first attempt at tyropitta, Goth-kitties curled behind knees, and all that.

Hope your day is the same.