A good time was had with the family; I'm sorry I didn't make it outside that bubble to hang out with friends.

Made it out of The Bead Shop for under $100 for the first time since discovering it. Mom was shocked. We also managed to get elliesaur some new clothes, which is actually a pretty major accomplishment. (Also, flannel shirts: why so hard to find?)

Celebration in the Oaks was nice, even if they do need to improve their event management. (The usual parking lot was closed, the new parking lot was a zoo, and the line was less organized and self-aware than any concert line I've stood in.) After stopping for dinner and spending forever looking for parking, we actually walked away the first night - we looked at the length of the line we were standing in and decided there was no way we would get inside City Park and get to do anything before they shut down for the night. We tried again the next night with pre-purchased tickets and showing up before they even opened, which worked perfectly. One train ride, one roller coaster ride, a walk through the botanical gardens, and then we got dinner.

The weather was great. I can't believe I used to complain about how cold I was during the winter. (Although I guess New Orleans was the coldest weather I'd ever known...)

So that's three times now I've received spam with variations on "Big penis like a girl!" as the subject. Okay then.

Geek Feminism: “Why don’t you just hit him?”

Warning: this post and links from it discuss both harassment and violence, imagined and real.

Am I against hitting a harasser in all situations? No. Am I advocating against it in all situations? No.

However, here’s a lengthy and incomplete list of reasons why victims may not be able or may choose not to hit a harasser and why it is definitely not a general solution for the problem of harassment. I even have a special buzzer on hand that will sound when the reasons are related to gender discrimination. Listen for it, it goes like this: BZZZT! Got it? BZZZT!

The Pervocracy: Beyond body acceptance.

It's good to like your body, but you know, your body isn't the biggest deal about you. (Or rather, your beauty isn't the biggest deal, since few people insulting your body can be dissuaded by hearing how many pounds you can lift or how quickly you recover from injuries.) It's a heartbreaking waste to take a human being, a person rich in history and abilities and relationships and ideas, and judge them on how nice a decoration they make. Maybe that's inevitable when it comes to strangers, but you damn well know better when it comes to yourself. When you're judging your appearance, you're only judging one tiny part of your self.

glass_icarus: announcing: Potluck!

Potluck is intended to be a carnival for multicultural and intersectional discussions of food. There are no real limits on theme; however, the focus of the carnival is on thoughts and experiences around food through various topics that you might see around the social justice blogosphere, including but not limited to food discussions intersecting with disability, gender, sexuality, fat, animal rights and of course cultural and racial issues. We welcome you to share your recipes as well as your thoughts and experiences, but we ask that you do not submit posts with recipes only.

Anna J. Cook: Queen Everett

Then I came to a small yellowed clipping that featured a photograph of the five young women nominated in 1971 ... and the young man, Everett Nau, who had been crowned the Winter Carnival Queen of 1970. The brief caption to the photograph read (in part)

NAU GOOD LUCK GIRLS ... Everett Nau, last year's Winter Carnival Queen, bestows his best wishes upon this year's recently selected finalists (all girls if you'll notice). ... In this year's campaign, the judges ruled it mandatory that the contestants be of the female gender.

I will be in New Orleans from December 19th to December 28th. Who wants to hang out?

(I will also be in the D.C. area from December 28th to January 2nd, but hanging out is pretty unlikely, alas.)

Step One

Make a post to your journal containing your list of 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything that you truly want. Include some kind of contact information and some version of these guidelines.

Step Two

Look around your circle/network/holiday_wishes/random journals/Latest Things for other people's wishlists. If you see a wish you want to and are able to grant, do it.

( Read more... )

I think I have been doing pretty well with spotting other people's wishlists, but if you think I might have missed yours, link me!

So I mentioned a little while back that I am visiting Cory's parents after Christmas.

I am totally sending them a card, whenever he gets around to giving me an address. I am also going to send a card to his brother Chris and Chris's girlfriend Kajsa (who was one of Ellie's friends in high school, actually).

But I also want to get them gifts! Because I do that! !!!! And this is where I turn to you, oh lazyweb...

Kajsa crochets; I can get her some yarn, y? Or am I projecting my own desire to be gifted with craft supplies? Other people who crochet: what is a reasonable quantity of yarn?

As for the other three, I am completely lost and I doubt Cory will be any kind of help. What kinds of things are reasonable, non-weird (well, non-excessively-weird) gifts for the parents and siblings of one's partner?

I get that this is probably a weird and excessive thing to be doing, but. *hands* I had a Thing about the holiday season as a kid - I tried to get stuff for all my cousins, even the ones I wouldn't be seeing (not make my mom get stuff and put my name in the From: field. Pick it out myself, even if she did give me the money to pay for it). It faded for a while, and then a few years ago, the holiday wishlist meme and the people offering to send out cards brought it out again.

First things first: wow was that presale a total clusterfuck. I was kind of shaking after.

On the bright side, I did get tickets for 3 of the 5 shows I wanted: Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. (The D.C. presale sold out before I even made it over to that tab following the Ticketmaster/Live Nation failures. Better luck Saturday, especially since I've been appointed head of a ticket-buying cabal. And I was iffy on NJ but it looks like enough people are going that I can find a ride.)

Now I shall sum up my vacation! Only about two weeks late, ooops. Halloween was Rocky Horror, and then I spent Monday and Tuesday morning catching up on the internet while Cory was at work. Starting on Wednesday, I called Ellen to pick me up for hanging out, thrift shopping, visiting Adam Kemp's studio/gallery, etc. We had dinner with Ellen and Greg on Wednesday. On Thursday, we went to a lecture given by one of Greg's colleagues, then to a gallery opening where we met up with Ellen's friends Brian and Jerry, and then pizza.

( On the subject of Grand Forks: I'm considering an extended visit this summer. )

( work stuff )

So my Saturday totally sucked!

Remember how I was really worried about making my connection at JFK? It turned out not to be an issue at all, but for all the wrong reasons.

( Read more... )

But I did finally make it to Grand Forks, four hours after I should have. And then I slept for 16 hours.

Subject refers to icon.

Day of Epic Personal Responsibility! Got shit done at work. More importantly, wrote emails I'd been putting off to history advisor and my closest contact in the honors department. Haven't sent them yet; I am going to read over them one more time after dinner.

Tomorrow's Epic Personal Responsibility! Print off paperwork and spend part of lunch break chasing down people in order to declare my minor in women's studies. Because I took all the courses, dammit. (This may be a multi-day project...)

Other things I need to do: senior clearance, apply to graduate, register for classes (while I'm in North Dakota, hence the urgency of the emails: if something goes wrong, I don't want to be trying to fix it over email with no advance warning to whoever has to deal with it/me).

Senior pictures are next week, apparently. I feel kind of meh about it, but then I am pretty meh about most things like that. I mean, I tried to skip my high school graduation (and while I don't have any strong feelings now that it's over, I still think it was a waste of an afternoon). It's kind of telling that the main thing encouraging me to bother with it is the fact that my hair will be super-purple (since this weekend is my last chance to do that before I need to have very bright hair for Halloween). I might even be willing to order prints, for the sheer awesome of being able to give them to my stodgier relatives.

• Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today

  Today I don’t have to think about still not being equal.
  Today I don’t have to think about what it takes to keep going.
  Today I don’t have to think about how much I still have to hide.
  Today I don’t have to think about how much prejudice keeps hold.
  Today I don’t have to think about how I’m meant to be grateful that people tolerate my kind.
  
  Today I don’t have to think about all the things I don’t have to think about.
  But today I will.

• The Slutcracker
  Boston/Camberville-area people! We should make plans for this. I quite enjoyed it last year.


• NaNoCraftMo
  I don't think I'll be officially participating, but I could certainly do with some effort in the craft arena. (I'm still undecided about NaNoWriMo, too.)

Recently

I have finagled my inbox all the way down to four things in Priority Inbox (one of which is my flight info and one of which relates to the practice GRE I'm taking tomorrow), and eleven things in the regular inbox, none of which requires an actual reply (they're all emails containing coupon codes I stand a decent chance of using - I keep them in my inbox so they don't get lost, and so they can be easily deleted once they expire).

Anyway, yeah. Practice GRE tomorrow (free, and it's been a while since I've taken a test like that). I should just register for the next convenient real GRE,* since it's not like I am going to study. And I went to an hour-long thingy about grad school, in which I had a lot of things I sort of knew confirmed, and had to suffer through a lot of stupid questions. Not sure it was entirely worth not getting paid for that hour, but eh.

In other "did $thing like a motherfucking adult" news, I have successfully paid the internet bill (which we just didn't receive last month, wtf. Verizon has the absolute worst billing system in the world, I swear), and requested an absentee ballot (since, oops, out of town for the election).

* Or maybe not, since it looks like I don't actually need it. IDK if I should take it anyway, though. So, uh, I turn to my dreamroll! For your information, I am seriously considering the Archives/History dual degree program at Simmons** but also seriously considering just the M.S. and going back for a history degree later. So y'all should give me advice on that, too.

** xkcd really nailed it.

Links

• Disabled Feminists: Let’s Bust Some Myths: Depressed People Are Always Sad or They’re Faking!

  Mix up a few details, and Blanchard’s story is a pretty common one. Whenever I talk to people who are currently living with long- or short-term depression, or have lived with it in the past, they tell me the same story: Friends thought they were faking because they managed to get out and have a good time. They laughed at a joke once and everyone decided they were “over” their “funk”. They didn’t act like stereotypes of depressed people, so they must not actually be depressed.

• britpop


• Browse Dreamwidth styles by color group and color characteristics.


• And there was going to be a link to a really cute picture I found while doing my actual job today, but it's on the test server, which A) I don't remember its IP address and therefore can't get to it from here and B) I probably shouldn't be linking the test server around anyway. But old photos of serious-looking small children, woo.