Besides providing much-needed exercise, biking is therapy. It’s taking my mind off the Bad Things happening in the warp core.
Category Archives: Life
School’s out for summer!
Now that I’ve got time on my hands, I’m having fun upgrading the design on Teresa Edgerton’s website. I love sinking into a new project, spending twelve hours straight messing with layout and content and creating art in Photoshop. The only problem is, when I go to bed at night, my brain won’t turn off; it keeps churning out ideas.
But I’ll take that over a pile of papers to grade!
Posted in Life
Anon
Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve been blogging daily elsewhere, anonymously. Like in ST:TNG, I’ve separated the saucer section to escape impending warp core breach.
Posted in Life
Norma Henley: In Her Chair
The following homage to one of my former students was originally five pages long. I’ve boiled it down to two hundred and two words.
Norma Henley: In Her Chair
Her wheelchair was old; the metal clanked. Limbs twisted, her clenched hand batted the controls as she maneuvered the chair into my office.
An attendant interpreted the punctuated moans coming from Norma’s slack lips. Norma would be taking my composition course. Norma had things to say.
For three semesters, she labored on her article condemning airlines’ mistreatment of disabled passengers. She wrote on an old-fashioned computer, her crooked index finger wavering in the air above keys separated by a metal plate punched with holes. Her finger hovered and plunged, jabbing at keys, one precious letter appearing every few seconds.
Institutionalized, released, rendered sterile, frustrated yet laughing like a raucous crow, hoarse and shrieking, Norma insisted, “Sex is great.”
Christmas vacation: Norma in the hospital. I squatted at her bedside.
She spoke. She repeated herself five times before I understood: “They give me two weeks to live.”
Two days later, she died.
Publisher after publisher rejected her article. Excuses.
Listen to Norma, and imagine yourself in her chair:
“Imagine that you are going on vacation, bags packed and ticket to sunny Southern California in hand, when the flight attendant at the gate takes one look at you and refuses to let you board.”
Longing for the space age, part 1: Anousheh Ansari
When I was little, back in the 1960s, I believed that people would be colonizing the moon and Mars by the time 2000 rolled around. I believed in the promise, believed in the dream. But nowadays, I am disappointed—no, I am bitter about the fact that we’ve turned our attentions and energy to war rather than to space exploration. Belief is hard to come by.
But every so often, something happens to revive my hopes. Yesterday, I was watching videos on YouTube, and I ran across the clip of Anousheh Ansari being welcomed aboard the International Space Station. My old feelings of excitement returned. Sure, cynics may say that Ansari’s just deadweight, someone who bought her way to space. But she’s there. And if other tourists like her are willing to pay for the trip, then people who want to make money will find a way to keep the dream alive.
Posted in Cool stuff, Life
Science fiction characters I would like to be
Time to embarrass myself. I’ve a list of science fiction characters I’d like to be.
I’d want to be Sara in Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree: rescue (and marry) a hero after being mysteriously plucked from Earth by aliens in a traumatizing experience that everyone I care about would admire me for overcoming. Plus I’d get a new nose. What’s not to like?
Somewhat more ambitiously, I’d get a kick out of blowing everyone away as Aeryn Sun in Farscape. I wouldn’t want to have a baby like she does, although doing the will-we-won’t-we ballet with drool-worthy John Crichton would be delicious.
If I switched genders, I’d want to be Rustum “Bat” Battachariya in Charles Sheffield’s Dark as Day and Cold as Ice: a food-loving, extremely antisocial, relic-collecting hacker-genius.
Or Miles Vorkosigan in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novels: a physically challenged and psychologically damaged yet pedigreed person who comes into his own.
Most of these are tortured characters who have physical or mental problems that I wouldn’t want to have in real life, but I relate to their angst, and I respect the way they succeed despite their problems. I don’t have it in me to do as they do; I’d just curl up in a corner and whine, or stand around with my hands on my hips and complain.
So, one more for the list, someone less angst-ridden. Let me be Kaylee in Firefly: good with engines, always cheerful, surrounded by a loving group of capable and loyal friends, and possessed of (ahem) healthy appetites.
Magical books of childhood
I have fond memories of various books that seemed magical when I was a child. But a few hold pride of place, and several have shaped the person I am today.
Alexander Key’s The Forgotten Door is the first science fiction book that took me away to a magical place. Its anti-establishment, pro-alien, longing-for-home message has stuck with me and no doubt led to many of my liberal attitudes today.
A wonderful third-grade teacher read Charlotte’s Web and The Secret Garden to our class, and I reread both for myself soon after. Those two books called forth deep emotions, teaching me about death and disability and the solace of gardens and friends. Today, I’m an avid gardener, I try not to kill spiders, I deal with disability in my family, and I value my friends.
I sucked down one after the other of Andrew Lang’s fairytale books in various colors (The Pink Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, and so on), fascinated that people around the world have so many different ways of telling the same basic stories. That comparativist reading experience surely marked me, because when I grew up I wrote a dissertation on Lang’s fellow comparative anthropologist James Frazer. When I was young, the beauty-and-the-beast variants were my favorite, and I still deeply love that romantic motif in all its guises.
In kindergarten and first grade, my father read to me the Jungle Books and a talking-animal book whose name I can’t recall. It may have been part of a series of books: lots of forest creatures, owls that hunted mice, no humans. Rabbits featured prominently. (Not Watership Down—something earlier, aimed at a younger audience. Perhaps one of Thornton Burgess’s books, but certainly not Peter Rabbit.) These books seemed magical because he read them to me.
There are more books, many more, but these are the most special: magical doors, not forgotten, between the secrets of childhood and the webs I weave today.
Prophetic dream
I had a prophetic dream—one that came true the very next day—once and only once. And it was rather significant.
To understand the dream, you first need to know that I was looking for professors who would serve on my doctoral dissertation committee, and that several years before as an undergraduate I had taken a course in folklore from the internationally acknowledged expert Alan Dundes, but I had never talked to him in person (there were several hundred people in the class, and he just stood in front of us and lectured), I hadn’t seen him since then, and I hadn’t thought of him as a possible committee member.
The dream: I was in the stacks in UC Berkeley’s huge, multistoried, cavernous Doe Library, and I saw Professor Dundes. I went up to him and asked if he would serve on my dissertation committee. He said yes.
Reality, the next day: I was in the stacks in Berkeley’s huge, multistoried, cavernous Doe Library, and I saw Alan Dundes. I thought, “Weird.” But I was too chicken to go up and talk to him, so I walked away. About half an hour later, as I was leaving, I saw him preparing to exit the stacks. I went up to him, babbled about the dream that I’d had the night before, and asked him if he would serve on my dissertation committee. He said yes.
Mind you, this was back in the days before Doe Library was remodeled. At that time, the stacks were a fairly dark warren of metal caging approximately nine stories tall—or, rather, deep, because they descended underground. Cramped stairwells led from one story to another, and overburdened shelving ran in all directions, leaving little room to navigate. The flooring was made of clanky metal and disconcerting greenish glass. The overall effect was otherworldly and dungeonous—an atmosphere enhanced by the relative absence of other living souls, because in those days the stacks were accessible only to a limited number of people.
Which is to say that encountering anyone in the stacks, let alone Professor Dundes, was neither a frequent nor predictable occurrence.
Strange, then, that I was writing my dissertation on Sir James Frazer’s twelve-volume encyclopedia about magic, when I had a dream that magically came true about a man so steeped in folklore.
Posted in Life