Dr. J. passed it along to me and I’ll pass it along to you. My only quibble is that I can’t recommend we adopt Moby Dick as our foundational text because I don’t want to dress up in a foreskin, even if it’s not a real foreskin. I don’t even want to wear a symbolic foreskin around. I will, however, gladly spend the afternoon squeezing sperm with muscular sailors.
Ha ha ha. I stand by my contention that no one has actually read to the end of Moby Dick or they’d never let high schoolers read it.
I am having to take a little break from Chapter Two in which we learn about a massacre of a whole family a hundred and fifty years ago and the little Amish girl who wants a dress in “Daddy’s color” which is orange for the prison jumpsuit he wears. That’s actually kind of funny in a heartbreaking way, what’s depressing is that her aunt has left the Amish community to marry a guy who thinks he’s a dog and, when asked about it, about whether it’s weird, she’s all “Hey, I wouldn’t have married this dude, but literally every guy my age in my community is in prison for meth, including all of my brothers, so if I didn’t stick around here, there’d be no one to look after my parents, and my niece wants to wear a prison-orange dress, and I had to give up a religion I love, so really, a little bit of thinking he’s a dog? Not as weird as what I’ve been through. And that our girls do, too? Well, at least it’s something they can do together. At least it’s not terrible.”
And that’s the short version, but that “At least it’s not terrible.” just… whew. I feel you, character in my book.
This is actually a part of writing the book I had not anticipated. I’m rolling with it, though, just to see how it goes. But, when I was outlining, I expected the main character to spend a lot of time freaking the fuck out and being all “no, no, no, this can’t be happening. I must be insane.” But, instead, she’s a little worried that she’s not more freaked out.
And every character who can transform? They all think it’s not the worst thing. Just something that happens that they live with. Or that it’s awesome.
And I think this is right.
The girl who hosts Lurancy will not be this way, at least not initially, so that will be a good counter-balance.
But I think it’s right so far. It’s just funny. In the outline, there’s a lot of room for angst and terror, but in the story, there’s more sadness about other things. It does make me wonder if I think we just find ways to cope with what we can’t do anything about, but fret over the things we wish had gone differently.
I mean, I guess that’s exactly what I think. It’s just funny to see how it plays out narratively without me realizing it.
Bank? Gone to.
Groceries? Bought.
Drain? Unclogged.
Park? Walked around.
Park review? Written.
Second chapter? Felt better about.
Laundry? Done.
Well, except that I need to go rescue it from the dryer. We went to the Goodlettsville Kroger instead of our own, because I needed to go to the bank and that’s the easiest to get to US Bank near us.
Holy shit.
That Kroger is so nice I walked around it with my mouth gaping open.
“Why doesn’t our Kroger have this?” I asked the Butcher about a bunch of stuff.
“Racism,” he said, every time.
Oh, well, now we see why Ron Ramsey wants to pressure our state into joining this nonsense. I give you Maine’s new governor:
The governor-elect said his major concerns are overreaching policies — LePage identified education and health care as areas he thinks the federal government goes too far — and how much, and in what way, the federal government distributes funds.
“I am going to be sitting with our attorney general and ask him to join the (health care reform) lawsuit against the federal government,” he said, adding he just learned that if 35 states join the suit, the law “dies, automatically.” Twenty states so far have joined the suit, filed in federal court in Florida, to repeal the provision in health care reform law that requires individuals to purchase health insurance. [bold is mine]
Please tell me our legislators do not believe this as well.
Gail Kerr: “Make no mistake about it: This is a turning point for Belmont. Is it really the progressive university Fisher has strived to create? Or a campus where adults are treated like children and lies are official administration policy?”
A commenter at Jezebel says discrimination against gay people is just standard Belmont practice. It happened to her partner. Again, I ask, Entertainment Community, now that you know this is their policy, how are you going to help students and faculty change it?
Speaking of students, the folks over at Belmont Vision continue to do excellent work reporting what’s going on inside the campus–protests, petitions, student unrest. And the faculty outrage is interesting–“Several faculty have expressed concern over this case, and that it may imply either a deviation in practice from Belmont’s posted policies, or that those policies have an interpretation among members of the administration that is not known to the faculty, or that those policies have been revised without appropriate notice or involvement of the faculty or staff.”
Tiny Cat Pants 