A2K's Wonderful World Of Reinvention

Sotheby's is auctioning off a 700 year old Sefer Torah.
Info and a link to further information here
http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2009/11/13th-century-spanish-torah-for-sale.html

I haven't had time to sit down with the camera yet, so no pictures. The baptism went off far better than we deserved, given that I had to wake Alec up ten minutes into a nap to change him into his gown during the sermon. He was good as gold and smiled beatifically at everyone. He really is the most extraordinarily social child. Well, extraordinarily social for a child of mine.

I joined the church as well. I'm glad to finally get my membership transferred from a church in Indiana that I haven't attended in three years, and I really feel connected to this church. In most of the churches I've attended, I've done all right the first couple weeks when we're new, but once people get used to us and stop paying attention, I never quite know how to make that further connection. But here, I manage to find people to talk to every week and feel like it won't take much time at all to actually make real friends. We made a great connection with the minister last week when she came to our house to discuss the baptism. We talked about that for 15 minutes and about everything else for an hour and a half (with periodic "Okay, now we should really talk about the baptism now..."). It was a good sign when she looked at our book shelves and asked "So who's the Dorothy Sayers fan?" That would be both of us, although I came to her earlier thanks to my mother (and I discovered looking at the shelves that I have three copies of Gaudy Night for no reason I can think of. I mean, I love the book, but not so much that I feel the need to have three copies open at once for serial reading). As it turns out, we have a lot of authors in common.

My uncle came out from Connecticut and my mother and her aide got here Thursday night and are leaving tomorrow morning. I wish my mother could stay longer, but she has to consider her aide's schedule as well. It was good to see them, and I'm looking forward to seeing them at Christmas. After some initial panic, it's starting to look like it will work to go home for Christmas, which makes me very glad.

To finish off my degree I had to take one more paper alongside my major project (speaking of which, that will be posted soon! It's really large and hard to present all at once, and I want to present it just right), so I did a second year marketing class. Quite interesting, if a little tedious at times. Anyway, the second project was to create a brand of iceblocks to compete in New Zealand with FruJu (the country's giant in that product category). Here are the results! From first concepts through to final result.

(I should stress that this project was a collaboration with the aforementioned Josh Barr, and he did a lot of the work)

(I should also stress that we were both working on our major projects at the same time as this, so this project was a bit of an after-thought and doesn't represent our best graphic design efforts)



( see the rest behind the cut! )

My friend Josh Barr suggested that I center the text, to play into that Jason Munn vibe. I think it looks a lot better! Unfortunately they've already printed off a run of the first version at A3, but they're doing a more extensive print run at larger sizes closer to the time, so they'll use the final version then. I'm pretty pleased!

All in Hebrew with English subs... click "view clip" link at bottom of page.

"melancholic morbid sketch show"

[Ending has Holocaust imagery]

http://www.matarproductions.tv/content_in.asp?id=171&title=The%20Saddest%20Sketch%20show%20In%20The%20World&cat=comedy#

It's been a long, long day with lots of family, so this is it for the day. Baptism tomorrow, and hopefully pictures.

We're watching The Opposite of Sex for the first time in several years. I had forgotten just how incredibly eeeevil Dedee is.

I <3 Lev Grossman. In an interview by Zack Smith for Newsarama, he said, of his new book The Magicians, I’m only putting in formally-published form the oldest, most basic tropes of fan fiction.

In Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield called the album Them Crooked Vultures fan fiction with a classic-rock heart.

On New York Magazine's Vulture blog, Nick Catucci referred to a recent episode of 30 Rock as pure fan fiction, minus the part where he tells her to take off everything but her glasses.

On Examiner, Anthony Strain wrote that a plot element of the 11/09 episode of Gossip Girl has totally been done before, if you count certain kinds of fan fiction.

The (Lewis County, Washington) Chronicle's Carrina Stanton reviewed a Centralia College production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, a [Peanuts] fan fiction by Bert V. Royal.

Neely Tucker's piece on recent pro fanfic continues to bounce around the world.

( In Twilight news… )

Finally, in the Weekly World News, Reginald Cunningham III reported that Joseph Cao, the only Republican to vote for the health care bill, in a particularly embarrassing incident […] accidentally distributed to Congress a copy of his Twilight fan fiction.

(Cross-posted to http://as-others-see-us.dreamwidth.org/7761.html.)

I'm officially not feeling well. All over body aches, low-grade fever, no appetite to speak of, and tired. It's not even 8 PM and I'm ready to go to bed. Garg.

( Cut for rambling. Believe it or not, this apparently actually works )

Are there any popular, general interest Jewish forums in English online? There must be, but I can't for the life of me find any. I'm looking for something like www.lds.net/forums or forums.catholic.com, with Jews of varying levels of observation and interested outsiders discussing doctrine, social issues, politics, etc., but all I can find are forums for Jewish singles in greater Indianapolis or forums that get one post every two weeks. Although the Mormon and Catholic forums are, what I'm looking for needn't be sponsored or hosted by any particular branch of Judaism, of course. Thanks!

So, UAers - intrepid folk that ye are - let's say 1:30pm Sunday?

Usual place, arr...

"Grammie can't walk."

"No, she can't. That's why she uses a wheelchair."

"Oh. Really?"

"Yes. And her hands don't work very well either, which is why she has Lisa to take care of her."

"Oh." Pause for thought. "Lisa made me eggs."

***

I've been wondering for a long time how old K would be when she would start to see that my mother is different from her other grandmother, and different from most people. I guess the answer is four. We had the above conversation yesterday when I was telling her that my mother and her aide were arriving today. Several months ago, she drew a picture of my mother and included her wheelchair, but I wasn't sure if she realized what the wheelchair meant or if it was just something she saw as part of my mother.

We haven't gotten to why Grammie can't walk yet, and I'm not inclined to offer the information until she asks, hopefully not for a couple years. I'm not eager to introduce the idea that driving in a car can be very dangerous and leave you permanently injured. At her age, it could completely roll across her back, like when she asked what a building was today and I said, "It's a funeral home," which she shrugged off without a thought. Or it could result in terror of the car until she's old enough to be able to put fears and dangers in more perspective.

Was I ready for the conversation about what a funeral home is for? Kind of. I've actually been trying to introduce death a little bit, though I'm not going to push it until she starts asking questions on her own. But another thing I've been waiting for is when she starts asking why she has one grandfather she can spend time with and another that she only sees in pictures. When we look at pictures, I always point my father out to her and tell her who he is, but while she knows him, she hasn't asked yet about where he is.

I know a lot of parents get nervous about the idea of the sex talk, but it never bothered me. I brought a couple books home when I got pregnant, and have used diaper changes as an opportunity for basic anatomy lessons. Right now, it's just anatomy. It's definitely nothing compared to some of the conversations I know we'll be having over the next few years about some of the other facts of life, and death.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

I was actually off today, as opposed to Wednesday when I was sick.  It's been fairly low-key.  I had a parent-teacher conference this morning, then drove into town for a brief shopping expedition (Supernatural RPG acquired), a #1 Plate at El Paraiso, and about 600 more words.

And that's pretty much it.  The original plan (lunch with my Saturday gamers) got killed due to schedule failures (to the guy suggesting a late lunch, that meant 4 PM, to me it means 1), but I hope they enjoyed themselves without me.

Not as productive on the writing front today, as I'm stuck in a scene where I know what's happening but am struggling with the description.  Tonight, the plan is sushi at Little Tokyo (or, as we call it, Lotsarolls) with Jane and/or The Boy (depending on whether or not he wants to spend the night at his grandmother's), then take another crack at writing, then the Dynamo-Galaxy game at 10 PM.

From Yid With Lid, Friday, November 13, 2009:

Napolitano Announces Obama Plans to Give Amnesty to Illegal Aliens

This afternoon Department of Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano announced that President Obama Plans push for “immigration reform” by giving the estimated 14 million people who are in the United States illegally “fair pathway to earned legal status.” ...

“A tough and fair pathway to earned legal status will mandate that illegal immigrants meet a number of requirements—including registering, paying a fine, passing a criminal background check, fully paying all taxes and learning English,” Napolitano said Friday at a panel discussion at the liberal Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

“These are substantial requirements that will make sure this population gets right with the law,” Napolitano said. “It will help fix our broken system.”

Napolitano said the Obama administration is working to end the recession and put Americans back to work but said giving legal status to illegal aliens will “strengthen our economy.”

Hey, Obama voters, when one of these guys shoots you, robs you, or takes your job, just remember: you asked for it.

ENDE

...when I really chafe under my self-imposed exile from Tangency and from giblet-topics at RPGnet. Like today, when the DC/Catholic Church/Gay Marriage thread has posters who are just begging for me to pop in and verbally disintegrate them.

I hope everyone appreciates my awesome and manly self-control.

Because damn.

This started out as a comment on Fairoriana's post on boys and gender issues, but it's getting long enough that I'm making it a post instead.

I've found the gender issues for both of my children have been remarkably interrelated, which shouldn't be surprising since gender politics are interrelated. With Alec, I've confronted new issues that I haven't before with K, because it's more accepted for girls to transcend gender barriers. This, of course, is because boy stuff = good and girl stuff = bad, so it's more accepted for girls to do boy stuff than it is for boys to do girl stuff.

At the tender age of four months, the biggest area this has come up for with Alec is with clothing. When I was pregnant, K wanted to buy Baby Brother an outfit every time we passed baby clothes, and I was often happy to oblige. But I found myself steering her away from the frilly dresses she was attracted to, once biting down the words "Boys don't wear dresses" right before they came out of my mouth. Part of my motivation with this was that we already had plenty of baby girl clothes, so if I was going to spend money, I'd rather do it on more boy-oriented stuff. But the other part was the same thing that made me initially set aside the hand-me-down baby clothes from K that were pink or had flowers. It wasn't even so much my not wanting to see my son in pink as I was afraid of having to defend putting him in pink when we were out in public.

However, one night I was looking at a pink flowered nightgown that was of the type I liked best (snaps up the front), and decided that 1) it was stupid not to use perfectly good clothes because society has arbitrarily decided they're not for girls, 2) why do I care what random strangers think about how I dress my children, and 3), if I'm willing to buy dinosaurs for K, I should be willing to put Alec in pink. So now I do. I haven't put him in any dresses and I don't think I will, but so far the adorable pink sleeper with the bunny on it has failed to cause his penis to fall off. I'm still a little shy of putting him in anything too girly to go out, mostly because I'm pathologically conflict-averse and just don't want to deal with nose old ladies with rigid gender expectations.

This Sunday, Alec will be wearing the christening gown my grandfather wore in 1906. In fact, he wore dresses until he was three years old. I suspect he also wore pink since it was considered a boy's color in those days. He was still manly enough to father two children.

As Alec gets older, there will certainly be more clothes issues - would I let him wear a dress in public? Will I let him have long hair (given that his father has long hair, almost certainly). The issue again will not be as much what I'm comfortable with as trying to negotiate his desires with what the rest of the world thinks. The nosy old ladies will turn into his peers, and I'll have to decide how to help him balance expressing his true self with peer acceptance. But that will be true whether he wants to wear a dress or not.

But I'll also butt up against things that are more my issues, that I'm already dealing with K - as a feminist, what sort of toys do I allow my children to play with? And as usual, it's the girl toys that come up suspect. Out of the entire world of boy toys, military toys are the only ones that give me pause, and I haven't come to a real decision about that. But with girl toys, there are tons of things that bother me. Cooking and housework toys are fine, since I don't even considered those gendered toys as every adult needs to know how to feed themselves and keep up basic household hygiene. Baby doll play is about nurturing, which again I consider applicable to both sexes. Dollhouses are a miniature version of household play. All fine for both of my children.

But then we get to princesses, which I've already discussed. And Barbie. I'm more leery but consider both of those more or less inocuous if we approach them the right way. But then there's hair dressing toys, or play makeup kits, or fashion design software.

There are age issues with those things as well, but I don't want to get into that here. Let's say right now they're being considered for a hypothetical ten-year-old, and the makeup won't be worn in public.

When I ask myself, why is it okay for my child to pretend to cook or take care of babies the way she will when she's an adult, but not pretend to style hair or put together pretty outfits the way she will when she's an adult, the only answer I can come up with is that unlike housework or child care, those are things women do that haven't become acceptable for heteresexual men to do as well. Women are judged by how they look in a way that men just aren't, and knowing how to put yourself together well is an important skill for a woman who wants to be professionally successful. I often wish I had had more opportuntities to learn that sort of thing when I was younger. But because this is something that only women do, it's of course seen as superficial and worthless. But just try climbing the corporate ladder with no makeup on. So I wouldn't buy any of those things for my preschool daughter, but when she's older, well, why not? Do they truly have inherently less social worth than playing paintball? And if my son shows interest in these things, I can't in fairness deny then to him any more than I would refuse to buy my daughter a skateboard.

It's astonishing how far down the internalized sexism goes when you start interrogating it. And no wonder this got too long for just a comment. I just keep trying to remind myself the conclusion I came to when I started wondering why I didn't want to buy K pink: the only thing wrong with the color pink (besides not especially complimenting her complexion) is that it's the code color for girl that everything meant for girls is required to be coated in. There's nothing wrong with being a girl, therefore there's nothing wrong with pink as long as it's balanced with all of the other colors.

20,282

For the Cuba Street Night Market, a new initiative for the coolest street in Wellington. The fountain is the Cuba Street Bucket Fountain, an iconic landmark of the street. This is a response to a call for free posters, which I'm usually opposed to, but the market is a cool idea and I'd be thrilled to be a part of it. No idea if it will be used.

So, UA folk...

...Sunday any good this week?