dragonlady7 | Sep. 8th, 2016

Sep. 8th, 2016

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belovedbright:

bomberqueen17:

Ha I really did make myself cry over the fact that I Will Never Understand Science. I have a suspicion that a particular Uterine Situation must be nigh. So to comfort myself and also reward myself for getting my car looked at like a Big Girl (the brakes were making grinding noises, and it turns out they’re under warranty and totally covered– for one more month. Go me!) i am currently demolishing the last remnant of the half gallon of Stewarts’ Philly Vanilla ice cream I smuggled back with me from Troy last trip.

Stewarts, y’all, is the best. But they’re privately owned (partially by employees) and have said that a key to their business model is proximity to their warehouse/manufacturing facility, so they will not be expanding any further than they currently have.

There was sort of more than one serving left of ice cream but god damn it I deserved it.

You totally deserved it. Did you get to try the summer flavors at all? The Sweet & Salty Maple was FUCKING TO DIE FOR, but it seems like not enough people have good taste, so they’re not bringing it back. :(
I love living in the land of Stewarts.

I got one of the sweet + salty flavors last time I was in town. I rarely stop for a cone– one time I was running errands with my sister and Farm Baby and she stopped and bought half a gallon and a box of cones, so we could give everybody on the crew a cone instead of teasing them with ours. (The store’s like two miles from home, so we surely wouldn’t be done eating.)

IT WAS. It WAS sweet and salty maple! It was SUPER GOOD. And I managed to drive with it. That trip was a twofer, I managed to eat an Ice Cream Man waffle cone while driving earlier in the visit, too! I made it without making a horrible mess, I figured I deserved some kind of medal. I mean, it was its own reward. But. (Ice Cream Man, in Greenwich, is worth the trip, but for bonus points, the drive is really really windy and twisty, it’s Rte 40, which is some of the most gorgeous scenery you could ask for, looks like a damn Ben & Jerry’s carton with the green hills and the blue skies and the black and white cows– not easy driving, I tell you what.)

But I did have Sweet & Salty Maple.

And I discovered that they still make Crumbs Along The Mohawk, which is notable because it debuted the summer I worked there, and I was the ONLY employee who got the reference.

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galadhir replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”

We are seriously brain twins. I had all of those problems too. I was ace at physics until it started being expressed with maths, but maths has always been impenetrable to me. As has music theory. OTOH, I also sew by eye and play/learn music by ear. I get very angry when people expect me to do it ‘correctly’ because if I try that I can’t do it at all. But if I do it my own way, I’m fine. And I’m resigned now to the fact that I’ll never be an astronaut.

Yes! I can play/sing nearly any music by ear having heard it only once or twice, which actually has hindered me a lot in Srs Music– I can read music but I basically have zero practice doing so once I’ve heard the whole piece played through, and it’s really hard for me to sight-read because of that. I would go through whole concerts without opening the folder on my music stand because I didn’t have to. (In the woodwind quintet I played bass clarinet in, there was notably one Mozart piece where I played C in quarter notes, four to a measure, for the entire piece, so that was understandable, but normally I didn’t have *quite* such monotonous parts. I didn’t mind, though!)

And actually I blew pretty much the only cool audition I ever had, because I couldn’t sightread for shit. The deck was stacked against me; I was a River Campus student and I didn’t know the Eastman School people hated the River dilettantes, as they thought of us; strike two was that I didn’t understand the bus schedule and had to reschedule my audition at the last minute, and strike three was that my previous singing teacher had taught me a mispronounced word in the aria I performed. I knew right away that I hadn’t gotten it; my attempts at small talk before the audition were rebuffed, and the only feedback they gave me was to correct the word I’d mispronounced. (I don’t remember which word. I know it was that I pronounced it like Spanish instead of Italian. I also know my small-town teacher taught it to me that way.) (Interestingly, in that youtube video, which is a Russian teenage girl, there are commenters critiquing her pronunciation. COME ON PEOPLE.)

I haven’t actually performed since, now that I think of it! Except a few folk sessions, but those aren’t– performances, per se. Oh, except the time I sang the national anthem in front of 1200 people, they started playing music after I started so I had to stop and ask them to cut it and start over on way too high a note flustered as hell, and didn’t know a woman dressed as a dominatrix was pretending to conduct the whole thing behind me with a riding crop. (I do remember the experience fondly, mostly? but the video exists on youtube and i sound like a dying cow.)

(It was after that that I decided to learn the Canadian anthem and do that one instead because it’s much, much kinder and meant for humans to sing.)

I can’t do cross-stitch because you have to count, but I can do free embroidery about as easily as painting, with or without a hoop. And I’m quite good, despite my relative lack of physical coordination, at things like pool, or baseball, or bocce, where you have to apply force and mentally calculate angles and stuff, because I can see how it will work out. Sometimes I don’t have the coordination, but I’m very good at knowing which direction something will move when hit.

But I wouldn’t ever be able to do any of the math underlying it.

torrilin replied to your post“danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”

Ok, so you have your rectangle of fabric for a tunic sleeve or whatever. And it’s a thing, so it can be measured and it will be fairly consistent. An algebraic function is A math way of talking about one of your rectangle’s edges. There’s other math ways to talk about your rectangle, thus A way and not the way. There’s in fact a whole shitload of ways. But at its core, algebra functions are about lines and different ways to describe them. which sounds stupidly abstract.

Like. I get that it’s lines. But. Why is it lines and why are they over there? And, what really gets me, why do we have to calculate this line if we know how it’s shaped and know the two points it’s connecting? Can’t we just draw it and then measure? NO of course not, there has to be numbers or it’s not real, only numbers are real, shapes aren’t real. I get so grouchy about this. Geometry made sense because it was describing real things. Algebra never connected to anything that actually existed anywhere observable in any shape that could be described– which I guess is why we had to graph it, because it wasn’t real and couldn’t be otherwise described, but seriously. It’s a line that comes in from the top, jogs, and goes off the bottom. There’s your function. Why is it like that? No one could ever explain. It just is. I can’t relate to this and I can’t figure out how to connect it to any of the neural pathways I actually have. So. As @galadhir said, I’ll never be an astronaut. At least I can write about them if I want.

danceswchopstck replied to your post“danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”

Owwwww. My sympathies. The miserable part of school for me was team sports. I’m guessing I should extrapolate to a much higher level of horribleness for math.

The thing about team sports is that it’s just People + Physical Coordination, which weren’t my strong suit but at least were in a language I understood. Kind of like if today’s instruction booklet contained the line “hit yourself in the face”, and I look around and everyone else is hitting themselves in the face. Welp. Fuck it. I mean, I’m not psyched about this, but if that’s what’s today’s agenda and we’re getting marks for this, I guess. *slaps self* Unpleasant, but survivable.

Later in life I got better at team sports.

awisekraken replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your post “kayleigh-janes replied to your…”

<3

<3 <3 <3 <3 !!!

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So the grinding noise was indeed my rear brakes, which are now replaced, free of charge, covered under warranty, just in time. Go me!

I was feeling sort of low because I Finally Updated The Epic and got a few comments and then… crickets… and like… some of the regulars hadn’t been by, the ones who leave long great comments on every chapter, you know the ones, and i was feeling real sad, like, I blew my update schedule and now no one will ever love me kind of shit, you know the type… and then I got a comment notification and went and looked and there’s a giant yellow banner that AO3 emails aren’t going out, so. That’s a little cheering. I’m not letting myself go look to see if there are comments there, I’d rather leave it as a kind of Schrodinger’s Sad Sack kind of situation. I am so pathetically Dependent on Validation, you know? but I don’t get a lot of it in my daily life, I’m just putting that out there. Most things I try to do, I fail at, so. Maybe it’s not reasonable but it’s a little bit understandable that I’m kind of Thirsty about this sort of thing.

God it is so fucking hard to just fucking believe in yourself, you know? Ugh. I seriously cried about being a goddamn retail clerk who can’t add, today. Like, ugly sobbing. it’s really good nobody was around.

[deleted thousand-word aside about buying incense at the indian grocery store??? what??? i need to chill.]

I’m on such a tear tonight. I need to chill. It’s definitely A Time of Month or something, for reals. Ugh.

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1550261.html

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darktenshi17 replied to your post:miscellany

I will be reading soon! I have been away and need to catch up on writing, my reward for doing so will be reading the new chapter! I promise it taunts me so much from my inbox.

Aw! Aw, I’m not– you know, I say things like this, and it never crosses my mind that they sound like passive-aggressive Reminders etc.! I don’t mean that! Oh gosh. I know, I really did blow my update schedule and it is perfectly understandable that people used to a regular schedule are not going to instantly adjust to a deviation from that, and it doesn’t mean Nobody Loves Me Ever, I know that! I do appreciate anyone who does comment, I also understand that many people can’t, and I’m definitely not intending to whine At anyone.

It’s brainweasels, not actual Verifiable Emotions. Oh gosh, I’m not trying to guilt anybody.

I’m just going to tell myself, just for tonight, that it’s just an email server issue and tomorrow it will all be better. :)

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I love it and would prob pay real human money for that holo.

If I could draw, my friend… if I could draw.

ALAS.

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regurgitation-imminent:

So in case you’re not following the Dakota situation too carefully, the companies drove the dozers about 20 miles away from their stated planned construction to specifically doze over areas of interest (burial sites, prayer sites, etc.), covered in the survey submitted to the court the day before.
Their course exactly followed the identification of the sacred sites on the survey sent to the court, and did not follow the plans for the pipeline.

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So the Dakota Access Pipeline thing.

I know everyone’s seen posts about it. (If you haven’t, holy fuck. Look it up.) I’ve been watching it go by in increasing disbelief.

It’s– it’s like, the very worst overdramatic fucking terrible things I was making up for pretend to happen to the planet Kes’s family is from in the Lost Kings series, but all of it is real and is happening now and it’s just– being allowed to happen. What the fuck.

I thought I was being cartoonish and overwrought. I thought, man, nobody’s going to buy that this could really have gone down like that. it would’ve been while the Republic was still in power, too. It’s just too far-out. Dogs and guns and earth-moving equipment and people chaining themselves to things and corporately-owned armed enforcers and

Oh my god.

I could have linked to direct examples of every single thing in that sentence that I thought was too far-out. And oh yeah, inappropriate use of power saws. Like, they were willing to cut a dude’s arm off if the handcuffs wouldn’t go. For real.

So. I kind of backed off referring to the folks in my story as Vanished Nations. Because not only are they still here, the stories that inspired them are still ongoing.

I just. I thought I was being unrealistic.

I was wrong.

This is the United States of America. It is 2016. Everything you grew up believing to be true was wrong.

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cherryseltzer:

alibuttons:

hardrocksandsofterbodies:

drinking-tea-at-midnight:

lizzies-looks:

3rd grade I was told I need to lose weight.

i remember being knocked down by a bully in kindergarten and him saying this wouldn’t happen if i just lost weight.

2nd grade, yo. Summer I got fat, and the summer my parents first tried to put me on a diet.

Two girls started bullying me in 7th grade. They’d send me notes that said if I ate, I’d explode. I dropped 40 pounds and was very thin…. in 9th grade one of them asked me for dieting tips.

when i was 5 i wished that i could cut off my stomach because it stuck out. when i was 7 and observed my mom’s friend dying of ovarian cancer, i would wish i got cancer so i could lose weight.

i’m 34 now and love being fat and will never look back, but mental torture surrounding my weight started for me BEFORE kindergarten and took almost 25 years of damage to my body and constant work to escape.

via http://ift.tt/2cEzBDK:magickedteacup replied to your post “miscellany”

:C /pat pats

Thank you, dear. I just reread that post and it comes across very sad! I wasn’t that sad by the end of it, I was more bemused at my own vagaries.

I have had to momentarily shelve the rest of the story about Rey learning about decorative undergarments, because I had to start an aside about Kes Dameron: Furious Revolutionary. Think of him, whose people were destroyed largely under the auspices of the Republic; he knows the Empire is worse, and will die to bring them down, but he has no nostalgia or love for the Republic either. And so, near the end of the Rebellion, someone is waxing all rhapsodic about the new Republic they’ll build like the old one, and Kes goes to diplomatically leave the room and Leia’s like no what this is cool and doesn’t want to let him go, and he treats the assembled to a magnificent diatribe on just how fucked the Republic was. And they take it as a mandate to Do Better, because they’re revolutionaries.
But they don’t, because. Well. That’s always what happens.

Anyway. Also, I’ve been writing the scene where Kes meets Bolt. I know Leia told him about him, but it’ll be different to see him in person.

Also my work computer is refusing to connect properly to the Internet so I am also considering lying on the floor at work and giving over to The Despair, but that’s an unrelated problem.

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It took Kes a moment to parse what he was seeing. “Who are you,” he demanded urgently, interrupting the pilot’s hesitant recitation of whatever he was talking about.

“Uh,” the pilot said. He was Oaxctli, there was no doubting it; in his nose and the spacing of his eyes he was a dead ringer for Kes’s long-dead cousin. “What?” He spoke in Basic, blank and uncomprehending.

Leia had mentioned this. This was what she’d been talking about. Fuck. “Who the fuck are you,” Kes said, switching to Basic.

“I uh,” the pilot said. “JN-4002, sir.”

It was an alphanumeric designation like a Stormtrooper. “Xacristo,” Kes said, staring at him. “I figured she was lying.”

“Bolt,” Finn said. “Call him Bolt. We have to assume he’s on our side.”

“Forgiveness is easier than permission,” the pilot said, biting his lip with just a glimmer of hopeful mischief coming through his nervous fear as he cut his eyes sidelong to look at Finn, and it was exactly the expression Tito would have worn, except Tito had died thirty-two years ago, younger then than this man was now.