fragments

I am realizing that i have not posted a lot of the livejournal entries I had in my head, of late. This is sad, because I like to have a record of things that have happened to me, and if I don't write them down here, I don't have them. My memory is such a strange and nebulous thing.

So I present a couple of random and disconnected things.

( in which z is cute and sort of typical )

In other news, my ankle has been whimpering at me for the last couple of days. My feet get sore during the week, and are often quite painful when I arise in the morning, This week the pain has been sort of focusing on one foot, and while it goes away during the day with use, and I usually take ibuprofin or something, it's been persistent, and has finally crystallized itself into a disturbance in my right ankle. Which is a problem, as I've sprained both ankles many a time, and while I think the left one is the last one I sprained seriously, I do recall that in favoring the left one, I hurt the right one, and I wound up with ankle bandages on both.
Of course I can find none of my three or four bandages, now, even after ransacking my room, so obviously they're hidden someplace that made sense to me at the time. Great. (Not the medicine cabinet.)
I would take more ibuprofin but I don't want to medicate the pain away and then proceed to hurt myself worse, so instead I'm taking it easy on the foot today. Perhaps tomorrow I'll go on bike rides or hikes to the post office or grocery store or zoo, or do all the other errands I have to do, but for today I'm going to putter. I hope i have time to do some writing.

In the mail today, we got the check with Z's tax refund. Four digits, and a larger four digits than I had thought. (Halfway to being five digits, dude.) Which I think I mentioned would be high, but I hadn't quite appreciated. He asked me what I wanted to do with it, and I answered facetiously-- I know he already has earmarked it for his scooter next spring. Which he confirmed. So I'm not sure why he was asking me. But maybe I can get one good dinner out of it?

Which puts me in mind that I haven't got my tax refund yet-- but I checked 'direct deposit', and should go check my balance before I say that. And my bank's homepage has been redesigned with a "Katrina's Aftermath" headline and I must admit it's a much more attractive design than USAA.com has ever had before. And yet of course, it's an unpleasant thought. I here pour out upon the ground half my glass of iced tea for my homies that have to file insurance claims, as well do I know that's a huge pain in the ass quite apart from the destruction that must have precipitated the necessity in the first place. Well, I suppose one usually makes a libation to the dead, so I suppose that was for those on whose behalf survivors are going to have to make claims-- which is an even more unpleasant thought, and if not for my resolution not to medicate myself, would be enough to make me go add vodka to this iced tea.

Hmm, no, I have not received my tax refund. I am a bit nervous, given that I didn't have the proper forms to fill out. it's not my fault that the fucking New York State Department of Labor is impossible to get information out of. If they even say I don't get my money I'll... well, not get my money, and that's that.

In entirely other news, having nothing to do with anything, I really want to learn to sew. i want to alter the work vest I wear so that it fits and possibly flatters me. But I don't know where to start.

In other other news, I had a lot of other things to say here, and can remember none of them, except my mildly bewildered observation of Friday (the 2nd) that there were no less than six State Troopers along the margins of the 33, having pulled motorists over-- and I've no idea why, as i've never seen anyone pulled over on the 33 before, but I watched one tag me with his radar gun and not react, even though the posted speed limit is 50 and I had the cruise set at 65. I had the decency to slow down when I saw him, but not dramatically, and I sailed by him at 60 with a sense of detached wonderment-- there are never staties on the 33.

an assortment of things i had meant to say

1) Sometimes when I drive home from work it is just sunset and I get to look at a lovely sunset all the way home. The other night (a few weeks ago) there was a crescent moon with the evening star right next to it, in a pink-and-bluish sky, all the way home. (I drive west to get home.) It was lovely.

2) I am growing to love the laptop, which despite having been given a name which I don't remember on the network, I think of as "Pilgrim". The battery lasts long enough that I haven't yet had to use the recharger they gave me, which has a frayed power cord. (I use Z's. His laptop has almost no battery, but there are enough times when I am home and he is not that I can get a charge daily.)
However, various of the keyboard keys insist on falling off at really odd times.

3) I love the bra I got from Bravissimo that fits. I am wearing it now. I am a slender and perky creature with a sublime cleavage. Wow. I feel like a D cup.

4) I have just planted peas, sugar snap peas, lettuce, and second-generation sweetpeas (from the seeds I harvested from the flowers of mine that have now died). They are all nestled snugly in the basement under a gro-light on a timer, although the fluorescent lights we ordered have not yet arrived: I'm getting a head start with my single "full spectrum" incandescent bulb. It's nothing like strong enough, but I'm easily amused and have more seeds. So the basement is pretending it's early spring. I already planted some dill seeds in a cup to see what happened, and I have a few thready little sprouts. No, I have not planted any pot; I still don't have a supplier for seeds, and am secretly rather doubtful of whether I ever will. But it's an excuse for striking up such an otherwise-pointless hobby as indoor gardening: I maybe someday will use it for illegal purposes. Ooooooo. Spoooooky. I'm such a rebel.

5) I want to write about Puritans. This is ridiculous.

6) Carless today, and with a bum ankle (it feels ok, but fragile), i am unlikely to get to the post office. I do still have addresses to send postcards to, and I will do so. They're more of a surprise this way.

And finally, and most amusingly,
7) Z's mom wrote a letter to the editor about the magazine's latest cover. (I mentioned it earlier: it's a photo of a little girl crying as a man wrestles her lollipop away from her.) She found it upsetting to depict an incident of child abuse on the cover of a magazine, for the sake of a story about a company trying to rip off the city. Many of her friends found it upsetting as well, to the point that several either wouldn't look at the cover, or refused to read the magazine. She posed the question of whether that served the purposes of the magazine. The publisher, not noticing that her name was the same as Z's (or perhaps simply not making an issue of it) answered her with a condescending diatribe that concluded by saying it was letters like hers that made him want to give up and leave this city. She was amused, and considered herself the victor: he hadn't been able to deny that no, it didn't serve the purposes of the magazine, and indeed was rather at cross-purposes with it, and so he resorted to insulting the people that found it objectionable. Hardly useful.
Well, Z's aunt also wrote a letter to the editor about the cover, because she too found it upsetting and distasteful.
Z has asked the editor not to pass the letter on to the publisher.

Suffice to say, if the publisher has any sense, his wife will prevail and their little daughter will no longer be featured on the cover. However, there's no guarantee that the publisher has sense.

I'm kind of with him on wanting to put a really powerful, perhaps shocking image on the cover, because the issue is drawing to a close, soon it will be too late to do anything about it, and nobody's really listening. But on the other hand, the image was largely irrelevant, and it's probably just offended a bunch of people who might have listened to something more reasoned. (Not that they can do anything.)

Which brings me to a point I've been thinking about a lot lately. I have a lot of friends who care deeply about something on one side or the other. But in today's political environment it's simply not done to actually acknowledge that other people have a right to their own opinions. Lest any of you seek to stridently agree with me, nobody is innocent in this: I have been soundly attacked by people from all sides on a variety of issues. And I confess it likely that I have professed intolerance for someone else's views. I don't know what it is, but people nowadays aren't being allowed to, or allowing others to, simply express their own opinions, and conversely, people aren't at all able to express their own opinions without being off-puttingly strident about them. I don't know what happened to the persuasive argument: of late, the persuasion consists of a louder volume and a stronger insistence that any who don't listen are evil, idiots, or both.
OK, I do sort of understand why. But I won't get into why, as I was actually trying to wrap this up.
But I wanted to make a point:
Speak softer. A lot of people would have my support if they didn't have to be quite so sharp in their own rhetoric. I want to hear your logical, persuasive arguments, spoken in a reasonable and perhaps even gentle tone, and I don't want you to attack the other side quite so much, because I haven't made my mind up yet. Have a little faith in me; if your argument is as good as you believe it is, I am sure to be persuaded by it, if you don't drive me away with your shrill aggressiveness first.
In other words, I'm not telling you to care less, I'm telling you to chill out.

The above isn't addressed to anyone, it's just that I seem to write best in the first and second person in these situations. I don't mean this about anyone in particular; really it's everyone, who are all shrieking about the things that are going on in the world and how they understand them. This has been happening at my bar a lot, and I tend to nod sympathetically and find an excuse to go and do something instead of talking. Because I'm emotionally fragile enough, and don't need to listen to one side of an argument. (Nobody ever has these arguments between two people. It's always one person talking shrilly, and others listening. People can't discuss their differences in that tone, not in person, and not on the Internet. But if we don't discuss our differences, they tend to get unnecessarily worse.)

another saturday night... on a tuesday

Z has tomorrow off, as a reward for working on the server all day Sunday. I have tomorrow off as well. So it's a Saturday night and I got a hot date. Where should we go?

At the moment my heart is full of contentment and also despair.

Contentment: Am sitting outside in a comfy lawn chair with my feet up in the sun, typing on my iBook with my straw hat keeping my eyes shaded so I can see the monitor.

Despair: I hate the Vikings Novel again and am at a bit of a loss as to how to salvage it this go-round. I hate it!! Augh!

fwd: disaster update

More from Katy's mother-in-law, Mary Bryant, in Baton Rouge.

( I think we are more pulled together than FEMA. )

Batavia

I think it was one of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin books that taught me that Batavia is an antiquated name for Holland, and was most recently applied to one of those Pacific islands the Dutch colonized.
Other than that, it's also a city in Western NY.
With a really good restaurant called Red Osier that specializes in doing wonderful things to beef.

( Look who's suddenly writing restaurant reviews. )

In other news, the process of deciding what to put onto the Work Laptop is giving me reason to paw through my old writings, and I'm going to post a few bits over on treigylgweith for the purpose of reminding myself what else I've written, besides this damned vikings thing that's just refusing to give me love. So keep an eye out for some amusing late-90s relics, if you're curious about My Early Work.